Science Friday Folgen

How Past Extinctions At The La Brea Tar Pit Can Teach Us About Our Climate Future If you drive through Los Angeles, you’ll pass by some of California’s most iconic sites—the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Universal Studios, the Santa Monica Pier. But if you don’t look for it, you may miss the La Brea tar pits—a place where Ice Age life from around 50 thousand years ago got trapped and preserved in sticky black ooze. Visitors can see megafauna, including skeletons of saber tooth cats and dire wolves, along with a vast collection of specimens, including things as small as beetle wings and rodent dung. La Brea was recently named as one of the world’s most important geological heritage sites by the International Union of Geological Sciences. The museum is currently planning an extensive redesign that will seek to connect visitors to research, offering lessons about climate, extinction, and survival. Dr. Lori Bettison-Varga, president and director of the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History, joins Ira to explain the significance of the site, and how a trove of Ice Age specimens can serve as a modern-day climate laboratory.   Across The Country, RSV Is Overwhelming Medical Systems If you have a child—or interact with children on a regular basis—odds are you’ve heard about a very contagious virus: RSV, or respiratory syncytial virus. This isn’t a new illness, but it has been surging across the country. This has left parents and caretakers stressed about how to keep their kids safe. Hospitals across the country are having trouble coping with this year’s surge, which has come earlier and stronger than normal. This week, Science Friday is spotlighting two regions affected by the wave: Wisconsin and Washington, D.C. The two regions have their own challenges when it comes to the RSV surge. In Wisconsin, care deserts and a large elderly population make containing this virus important to avoid dangerous consequences. In Washington, D.C., hospitals are feeling the effects of years of shutting down pediatric units to make room for adult beds. Joining Ira to talk about RSV in Wisconsin and Washington D.C. are two journalists who have been following this: Jenny Peek, news editor for Wisconsin Public Radio and Aja Drain, reporter at WAMU public radio.   What You Should Know About This RSV Surge Respiratory syncytial virus, known as RSV, is the number one cause of infant hospitalizations in the United States, and cases are soaring this year. Because young children have spent part—if not most—of their childhoods isolated, masking, or staying home due to the pandemic, many of their immune systems haven’t been exposed to RSV until now. It’s caused a huge surge in cases, and placed a heavy burden on pediatric clinics and hospitals. What do you need to know about the spike in infections? Ira talks with Dr. Carol Kao, a pediatrician and assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, who has treated RSV for years. They dig into why this surge is happening now, the basics of the virus, how RSV is treated, and where we stand with an RSV vaccine.   Mapping Brain Connections Reinforces Theories On Human Cognition Brain regions are associated with different functions—the hippocampus is responsible for long-term memory, for example, and the frontal lobe for personality, behavior, and emotions. After decades of research using sophisticated brain imaging, there’s a growing consensus among neuroscientists that understanding the connections between brain regions may be even more important than the functions of the regions themselves. When it comes to understanding human cognition, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Ira speaks with Dr. Stephanie Forkel, assistant professor at the Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging at Radboud University in Nijmegen in the Netherlands, who wrote a review article in the journal Science about the importance of brain connectivity, and what it means for the future of neuroscience. 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.

Why Contraceptive Failure Rates Matter In A Post-Roe America Birth control options have improved over the decades. Oral contraceptives are now safer, with fewer side effects. Intrauterine devices can prevent pregnancy 99.6% of the time. But no prescription drug or medical device works flawlessly, and people’s use of contraception is inexact. “No one walks into my office and says, ‘I plan on missing a pill,’” said obstetrician-gynecologist Dr. Mitchell Creinin. “There is no such thing as perfect use, we are all real-life users,” said Creinin, a professor at the University of California-Davis who wrote a widely used textbook that details contraceptive failure rates. Even when the odds of contraception failure are small, the number of incidents can add up quickly. More than 47 million women of reproductive age in the United States use contraception and, depending on the birth control method, hundreds of thousands of unplanned pregnancies can occur each year. With most abortions outlawed in at least 13 states and legal battles underway in others, contraceptive failures now carry bigger stakes for tens of millions of Americans. Read the rest at sciencefriday.com. The Quest For New COVID-19 Solutions As we head towards our third pandemic winter, the nation still is facing about 2,500 weekly deaths from COVID, and over 3,000 people a day entering the hospital due to the virus. Dr. William Haseltine is chair and president of ACCESS Health International, a former professor at Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health, and the founder of several biotechnology companies, including Human Genome Sciences. “This thing knows everything about our immune systems,” Haseltine says. “We have to find new drugs that it has never seen before, and new combinations of those. That’s what’s worked for HIV. That’s what we have to do now—and we’re doing a very poor job of that.” Haseltine joins Ira to help explore the viral landscape, and where he sees viral research headed—from new vaccines to antiviral drugs and antibody cocktails.   Can Animals Evolve To Survive The Anthropocene? When you think of evolution, you might imagine a slow process that takes millions of years. Take Tiktaalik, for example: The ancient fish, an important human ancestor, took 375 million years from climbing out of water to get to the humans you see now.Now that we’re here, we’re changing the world at an unprecedented rate. Threats like climate change, deforestation, and pollution are wiping out entire animal species in just one generation. Can evolution punch back? Or are some species fighting a losing battle? Dr. Shane Campbell-Staton joins Ira to discuss rapid evolution in the anthropocene, and whether that’s enough to keep these species afloat.   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.

Using Family Photos Of Fall Foliage To Track Climate Change Leaf-peeping, or tourism based on observing the colors of fall foliage, is a big industry in parts of the Northeast. So as leaves continue to change across the northern United States with the turning of the seasons, researchers are working to better understand how climate change may be affecting fall colors—changes that may affect the bottom line for those tourism-rich areas. But to tease out the factors involved with the timing of peak leaf color, the researchers need data on when leaves started to change color, when they arrive at their peak color, and when the leaf-peeping season ends. Unfortunately, satellite imagery showing leaf color is only available dating back to the year 2000—and so Stephanie Spera of the University of Richmond is trying to get data in some unconventional ways. Spera and colleagues are engaging in a massive citizen-science project, asking for tourist snapshots of Acadia National Park that show the colors of fall. While they’ll accept your cellphone selfies, they’re especially interested in older, pre-digital images—the sort of vacation pictures that might be in your family albums, or in shoe boxes in an elderly relative’s attic. Adding those images to their data set, she says, will both help them to validate the satellite data and to extend the boundaries of their data set outwards. Heather Goldstone, host and executive producer of Living Lab Radio on WCAI, joins Ira to talk about the project and how listeners can participate.   The ‘Grandfather’ Of The Voyager Mission Retires 45 years ago, the Voyagers 1 and 2 spacecraft were launched into the cosmos from Cape Canaveral in Florida. Since then, they’ve traveled over 14 billion miles from Earth, on a grand tour of our solar system, and beyond. The mission is still running, making Voyager 1 the farthest human-built artifact from Earth. Even before launch, scientists and engineers were hard at work planning and designing the mission. Last week, NASA announced the retirement of Dr. Ed Stone, who some called the ‘grandfather’ of the mission. Dr. Stone shepherded the Voyager program as its project scientist for 50 full years. In this conversation from 2013, just after Voyager 1 had entered interstellar space, Ira spoke with Dr. Stone for a status update on the mission.   A Flaw in Human Judgment: How Making Decisions Isn’t As Objective As You Think If two people are presented with the same set of facts, they will often draw different conclusions. For example, judges often dole out different sentences for the same case, which can lead to an unjust system. This unwanted variability in judgments in which we expect uniformity is what psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls “noise.” The importance of thoughtful decision-making has come in stark relief during the pandemic and in the events leading up to the January 6th insurrection. Ira talks with Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman about the role of ‘noise’ in human judgment, his long career studying cognitive biases, and how systematic decision-making can result in fewer errors. Kahneman is the co-author of “Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment,” along with Oliver Sibony and Cass R. Sunstein, now available in paperback.   Frenemies, Lovers, And The Fate Of The Cosmos: Our Galaxy Tells All Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is 13.6 billion years old, all-knowing, and a little sassy. It has a rich social life of friends, frenemies, and even love interests—all other galaxies in the local group, including the stunning Andromeda. And the Milky Way is a little disappointed that we’ve stopped telling as many stories about it. Or at least, that’s how folklorist and astronomer Dr. Moiya McTier imagines the galaxy’s personality when writing her new book, The Milky Way: An Autobiography of Our Galaxy. The book stretches from the beginning of the universe to the birth of our planet, and then on to the eventual theoretical end of the cosmos. Along the way, we learn both the science of how stars form and galaxies collide, and the many stories and myths humans have told about these bodies throughout our relatively brief lives. McTier joins Ira to tell all (on behalf of the Milky Way), and explain the importance of story in scientific knowledge and discovery.   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.