Science Friday Folgen

There’s a thriving black market to buy and sell endangered plants, and the Department of Agriculture and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service monitor endangered species that are brought into the United States illegally. When they are discovered, the plants’ home country has 30 days to accept them. If they aren’t claimed, they get rescued. Then where do they go? To one of 62 plant rescue centers across the country at botanic gardens, zoos, and arboretums, operating according to an agreement through the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Flora and Fauna (CITES).Ira talks with Dr. Susan Pell, executive director of the U.S. Botanic Garden, and Amy Highland, plant curator at the U.S. Botanic Garden in Washington, DC, about the garden’s plant rescue program.Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

The World Meteorological Organization’s report confirms last year had the highest temperatures on record and predicts an even hotter 2024. Also, NASA’s new PACE satellite will study how these tiny creatures could affect Earth’s climate, and how aerosols influence air quality.UN Report Confirms 2023 Was Hottest Year On RecordA new report from the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization shows that last year had the hottest average global temperatures since recording began 174 years ago. Ocean temperatures also reached a 65-year high last year, and 2024 is on track to be even hotter.Ira talks with Jason Dinh, climate editor at Atmos Magazine about that and other top science news of the week including cannibal birds, fighting Dengue fever with bacteria-infected mosquitos and the evolutionary benefit of whale menopause.Why This NASA Satellite Is Studying PlanktonDid you know you can see plankton … from space? Earlier this year, NASA launched a satellite to do exactly that. It’s called PACE, which stands for Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, and ocean Ecosystem, and NASA hopes that the satellite can tell us more about how these tiny creatures interact with Earth’s atmosphere and influence our climate.Some species of plankton, called phytoplankton, are microscopic plants that absorb carbon dioxide and produce oxygen. PACE has equipment that can identify different species of phytoplankton by the kind of light they give off, giving NASA real-time information about their location and population size, which can also aid fisheries and coastal communities when algal blooms occur.PACE will also study how aerosols affect air quality on Earth. Additional instruments on the satellite can differentiate between different kinds of aerosols by studying how they reflect light back into space, which will help scientists refine their climate models so that more accurate forecasts can be made.Ira Flatow talks to Dr. Ivona Cetinic, PACE’s science lead for ocean biogeochemistry, about the satellite, her favorite species of plankton, and how the public can benefit from the data that the mission will provide.Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

The term “living fossil” has been applied to any number of animals, from sharks to turtles to the coelacanth. It’s the idea that those animals look very much the same way their species may have looked millions of years ago, with limited evolutionary change over that time.After analyzing the genomes of many different species on that “living fossil” list, researchers report they may have found an animal that evolves more slowly than all the others—a group of fish called gar. The rate of molecular change in gar genomes is the slowest of any jawed vertebrate, the researchers say. In fact, gar genomes change so slowly that two gar species that diverged from each other over 105 million years ago can still interbreed and produce fertile offspring. In evolutionary time, that’s comparable to the distance between humans and elephants. The researchers believe that the slow rate of change in gars may be due to an exceptional ability to repair mutations and other errors in their genes.Dr. Solomon David, assistant professor of aquatic ecology at the University of Minnesota, and Chase Brownstein, a graduate student in Yale’s department of ecology and evolutionary biology, join Ira to discuss the findings, recently reported in the journal Evolution.Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.