Perpetual Notion Machine

WORT 89.9FM Madison · Icelandic Volcanology with Thor Thordarson

 

Why is Iceland so volcanically active? Will the recent earthquakes and eruptions be another possible cataclysmic tear in the earth’s crust, a forewarning of an explosive blowout like Eyjafjallajökull in 2010, or a spectator-friendly event like Kilauea in Hawaii?

In this edition of Perpetual Notion Machine, host Patrick Sajbel speaks with Thorvaldur Thordarson, Professor in Petrology and Volcanology at the University of Iceland. He joins us from his home in Reykjavik during a busy time at the nearby active Fagradalsfjall volcano.

Tonight the Perpetual Notion Machine welcomes professor and climate scientist Kimberly Nicholas, author of the book Under the Sky We Make: How to Be Human in a Warming World. Professor Nicholas discusses her book and how to make changes in daily life that will positively affect your personal climate budgets and environment.

Plus PNM host Emily Morris reports on recent climate news and goes on a tour around the house to see where you can save energy, save birds, and save yourself from your in-laws.

Find a ton of climate news on the NYTimes Climate and Environment page, and sign up for the Climate Fwd newsletter here.

Image courtesy: Penguin Random House

In general, everybody probably believes that life exists somewhere else on another planet. Our telescopes keep getting better and better at finding exoplanets orbiting other star systems. And a few fall within the range of orbit as Earth does around our sun. But what kinds of life will there be on those other planets, if life forms at all? And what will it look like, especially the intelligent ones that have the capability to come to Earth? Most science fiction believes that those alien beings will be very much like us human beings, in form and substance.

Tonight, the Perpetual Notion Machine’s Dennis Shaffer has the pleasure of talking with Arik Kershenbaum, the author of the book The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy: What Animals on Earth Reveal About Aliens – and Ourselves. Arik is a zoologist and Fellow at Girton College on the campus of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. Arik describes some of the processes that took place for life to begin and develop on Earth and suggests that these processes might also occur on other planets. The most important are the processes of evolution or natural selection, which without it we wouldn’t have the diversity and complexity of life that we have on Earth.

Also highlighted in his book, Arik talks about some of the amazing qualities of life on Earth, such as intelligence, communication, language, sociality, cooperation, and humanity, that is not just reserved for human beings. And if evolution proceeds in a similar course, depending on the environment of that particular planet, there is no reason why alien life shouldn’t have these same qualities.

Besides this audio discussion with Arik, another more comprehensive media article appears in Quanta Magazine.

More information about Arik’s book can be found at the publisher Penguin Press.

And if interested in ordering the book, here’s a link to Amazon.com.

Feature image courtesy of Ariane Moore and Penguin Random House

 



WORT 89.9FM Madison · The Sleeper Population of Spiny Water Flea in Lake Mendota

 

A new report in the journal BioScience finds that it’s not uncommon for “sleeper populations” of invasive species to lie low in new environments for years or even decades. These small, self-sustaining populations of nonnative species can exist like this until a environmental trigger is tripped, and causes their numbers to explode.

 

Such is the case of the spiny water flea, discovered in Lake Mendota in 2009 by a group of undergraduates at the UW-Madison Center for Limnology.  When researchers dug into samples from Lake Mendota and through old samples in the UW-Madison Zoological Museum, they discovered that the spiny water fleas had existed in the lake for a decade before their sudden population increase.

 

Understanding the environmental triggers that set a species on the path to invasion is crucial, says Mike Spear, lead author of the recently-published paper “The Invasion Ecology of Sleeper Populations: Prevalence, Persistence, and Abrupt Shifts,”  now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Illinois and Illinois Natural History Survey.

 

In this edition of the Perpetual Notion Machine, host Robert Monthey chatted with Spear about sleeper populations of nonnative species, trigger events, the spiny water flea, and what this all teaches us in a wider context of climate change.

 

Feature image: modification of Bythotrephes longimanus, courtesy J. Liebig, NOAA GLERL, 2001, via USGS. 

With everything that has happened in the past year, what are the chances Wisconsin will suffer the devastation of an earthquake? Not very likely. Tonight, the Perpetual Notion Machine looks into this possibility by rebroadcasting an old show that originally aired on February 4, 2010. Our guest on that show was Chuck DeMets, a geophysicist in the Department of Geoscience at UW-Madison and an expert in plate tectonics. Madison and Wisconsin lie in the middle of the northern plate of the continent. However, Madison isn’t immune to minor earthquake shakes. The biggest earthquake potential lies along the New Madrid fault line, the center of which lies near St. Louis, Missouri. An earthquake in 1812 measured an estimated 8.3, and caused the Mississippi River to reverse and flow the opposite direction.

Image courtesy: Marcello Migliosi from Pixabay

This week, Perpetual Notion Machine explores systemic racism.

In light of Black History Month, host Anita Nsubuga discusses the effects of racism, specifically systemic racism on people of color (with emphasis on black Americans) with guest Tiffany Green.

Joined by Dr. Tiffany Green, Ph.D, assistant professor from the University of Wisconsin, Population Health Sciences, they distill the ways racism appears in the structural frameworks of our society. They look at the current state of policies and their effect on people of color. There is a broad look at wealth and the history.

Tying back to the present, COVID-era effects and policing are broadly addressed. With the change in administration, there is hope – albeit hesitant.

Can structural racism truly end?  Or, will it remain insidious and unchanged?

Stay tuned. Only time will tell.

Image courtesy of Clay Banks on Unsplash

Tonight, the Perpetual Notion Machine changes direction, at least a little bit, from our typical science-related topics. But it does relate to the coronavirus. Why were nursing homes hit so hard by COVID-19? Our guest is Barbara Bowers, professor and associate dean for research in the School of Nursing at UW-Madison. With some background and commentary from host Dennis Shaffer, Barbara describes the essence of nursing homes, what services they provide, why they didn’t anticipate and have contingencies for infectious outbreaks, and why nursing homes were so vulnerable when COVID first hit. Barbara explains the strain and lack of support nurses and CNAs, certified nursing assistants, have to go through at their job. The staff are too few, overworked, and underpaid. Many staff work double shifts at different locations, which creates inconsistent care from recognized staff members. But perhaps the biggest problem of all is the nursing home system itself. About 70% operate as for-profit, like a business, where they exploit Medicaid, where most of their funding comes from, Medicare, lucrative in just a few cases, and residents without health insurance. Barbara also describes the regulation and inspections of nursing homes, and the unreliability of vaccine distribution. Over the course of last summer and fall that had the highest impact of COVID-19, nursing homes had the highest number of deaths. By the end of November, over 100,000 deaths were recorded, 40% of all deaths.

To get some detail on this nursing home tragedy, you must read the story from the December issue of AARP Bulletin. This is the primary source of the topic for this show.

To see nursing homes and COVID-19 by the numbers, check out the AARP Nursing Home Dashboard.

On their COVID-19 website, the Wisconsin Department of Health Services (DHS) has a webpage devoted to nursing homes.

And finally, DHS also has extensive regulations and regular inspections of nursing homes. To see where, the number of investigations, and the results, please go to the Facility-Wide Public Health Investigations page.

Image courtesy: Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Tonight, the Perpetual Notion Machine digs into our archive of shows to rebroadcast an edited version that originally aired on January 17, 2008. Our guest was John Hawks, anthropologist and evolutionist at UW-Madison. With his research into various genetic sequences of the human genome and at times, the use of some convenient mummified DNA, he has identified the rate of human evolution, at least for a few specific genetic traits. John described several ways the rate of evolution can be measured. One way is to determine about when a new trait or genetic mutation occurs, how often it occurs, and when the mutation becomes common throughout the population. This is the essence of natural selection. One example that John described is the lactase gene, which enables a human to digest lactose, or the sugar in milk. This gene seems to have suddenly appeared about 8,000 years ago, coinciding with the agricultural practice of raising dairy animals like cows, sheep, and goats. This ability to digest the sugar in milk gives the human body a boost in energy for a longer survival pattern in the population, but only these isolated populations. Today, about 20% of the total population have this ability. But in terms of geologic time, this specific genetic evolution is pretty fast!

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Tonight, the Perpetual Notion Machine looks into the link between science and sports. If you are a Green Bay Packers fan, I’m sure you are wondering about the decision on “the play” late in the championship game with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. The Packers were on Tampa Bay’s 8 yard line. It was 4th down with just over 2 minutes left in the game. The Packers were behind by a score of 31 to 23. Should the Packers kick a field goal, which they did, or go for a touchdown on 4th down? Our guest Laura Albert crunched the numbers on both possibilities. Laura is a professor of industrial and systems engineering at UW-Madison. She designs an analytical methodologies to address many types of public sector situations. She admits the numbers may be a bit favorable, but going for it on 4th down would give the Packers a 10.4% chance of winning. Kicking a field goal, which they did make, only gave the Packers a 7.6% chance of winning.

For more information with a link to her spreadsheet with all the numbers, check out her blog and podcast at Punk Rock Operations Research.

Tonight, the Perpetual Notion Machine rebroadcasts a show that originally aired on January 19, 2006. Every January, the Sauk Prairie area, that includes the towns of Sauk City and Prairie du Sak, invites people to watch and learn about Bald eagles that come to winter along that part of the Wisconsin River. Bald Eagle Watching Days has always been quite a hit, but this year will be different. Everything will be virtual. In the show 15 years ago, we talked with Jeb Barzen, wildlife biologist with the Ferry Bluff Eagle Council. He explained why eagles like it here, their biology, their feeding and mating habits and other behaviors, and his ongoing research in radio tracking a number of eagles.

To learn about this year’s Bald Eagle Watching Days, check out the website of the Ferry Bluff Eagle Council.