Science Friday

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.

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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.

A 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.

Did 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.

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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.

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Four years ago this week, the world as we know it changed. Schools shut down, offices shuttered, and we hunkered down at home with our Purell and canned foods, trying to stay safe from a novel, deadly coronavirus. Back then most of us couldn’t fathom just how long the pandemic would stretch on.

And now four years later, some 1.2 million people have died in the U.S alone and nearly 7 million have been hospitalized as a result of a COVID-19 infection, according to the CDC.

So, what have we learned about how COVID-19 attacks the body? What can be done for long COVID sufferers? And what can we expect in the future?

Ira analyzes this era of the pandemic with Hannah Davis, co-founder of the Patient-Led Research Collaborative in New York City, and Dr. Akiko Iwasaki, immunobiologist at Yale Medical School in New Haven, Connecticut.

Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com

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Think about the best meal you’ve ever eaten: Maybe it was in a restaurant in a far-off city, or perhaps it was a home-cooked meal made by someone you love. No matter where or what it was, odds are what made it so memorable was the flavor.

Flavor is arguably the most important part of a meal. If the flavor of something is off, or undetectable, it can jeopardize your enjoyment. There’s a lot of chemistry and biological science behind how and what we taste.

Flavorama: A Guide to Unlocking the Art and Science of Flavor is a new book that breaks down the mechanisms that go into these processes. Ira is joined by author Arielle Johnson, who holds a PhD in chemistry and co-founded the fermentation lab at the world-famous Copenhagen restaurant Noma.

Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com

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Roe v. Wade was overturned almost two years ago, and a lot has changed in terms of abortion choices in the United States. Some states have effectively banned abortion, while others have such confusing laws that it’s difficult for the people who live there to know what their reproductive rights are.

The post-Dobbs landscape hasn’t just affected the care people can receive: It’s also changed where physicians choose to work, especially if they’re in states where they can be criminally prosecuted for performing abortions.

Last month, the Idaho Coalition for Safe Healthcare published a report that found that 22% of ob-gyns have left the state since June of 2022 — a massive amount for a state that already has the fewest physicians per capita in the country. Ongoing research in Wisconsin has found that the Dobbs decision has affected where medical students choose to study, and has even dissuaded some from choosing obstetrics as a specialty.

Joining Ira to talk about this are two ob-gyns from states with abortion restrictions: Dr. Sara Thomson, based in Boise, Idaho, and Dr. Abby Cutler, assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.

Transcript for this segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com

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A recent study looked into life-threatening Acanthamoeba infections, and a few deaths, linked to the use of tap water with devices like neti pots. And, in ‘The Balanced Brain,’ Dr. Camilla Nord explores the neuroscience behind mental health, and how our brains deal with life’s challenges.

Researchers at the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention published a study Wednesday that examined 10 cases of life-threatening Acanthamoeba infections that occurred after people cleaned their sinuses with neti pots, squeeze bottles, or other nasal rinsing devices. In most of these cases, which occurred in immunocompromised individuals over the span of a few decades, individuals had used tap water for nasal rinsing.

Tap water, while generally safe to drink, is not sterile. Microorganisms and germs live in distribution systems and pipes that the water travels through, and Acanthamoeba amebae was the main link between the 10 cases, three of which resulted in death.

Although contracting the Acanthamoeba pathogen is extremely rare, many people are unaware of the unsterile nature of tap water and use it for their sinuses, according to a survey study published last year. A third of participants incorrectly believed U.S. tap water is sterile, and almost two-thirds assumed it was safe to rinse your sinuses with it.

The CDC and FDA recommend using distilled or sterile water for nasal rinsing. If you want to use tap water, they recommend boiling it for three to five minutes and allowing it to cool. While slightly more time consuming, it is an effective way to get sterile water.

Rachel Feltman, host of “The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week,” joins Ira to talk about this story and other news in science this week, including a new study that links microplastics in the human body to increased risk of heart disease and death, why the U.S. maternal mortality rate might be inflated, and why cicadas produce high-speed jets of urine.

If you’ve ever struggled with a mental health issue like anxiety or depression, or know someone who has, it’s pretty clear that what works for one person might not work for another. Antidepressants only work in about 50-60% of patients. Meditation or yoga may be a gamechanger for some people, but ineffective for others.

Over the past few decades, neuroscientists have made huge advances in our understanding of the human brain. How can we use the latest neuroscience research to help improve our mental well-being? And what is the relationship between physical and mental health?

To answer those questions and more, SciFri producer Shoshannah Buxbaum talks with Dr. Camilla Nord, director of the Mental Health Neuroscience Lab at the University of Cambridge and author of the new book The Balanced Brain: The Science of Mental Health.

Read an excerpt of The Balanced Brain at sciencefriday.com.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

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It’s a common refrain from elementary school to adulthood: “I’m bad at math.” It’s a hard subject for a lot of people, and it has a reputation for being—let’s face it—boring. Math isn’t taught in a flashy way in schools, and its emphasis on memorization for key concepts like multiplication tables and equations can discourage students.

It’s not hard to understand why: Math has long been seen as a boy’s club, and a straight, cis boy’s club at that. But Kyne Santos, a drag queen based in Kitchener, Ontario, wants to change that.

Kyne is on a mission to make math fun and accessible to people who have felt like math isn’t for them. Her new book, “Math in Drag,” is one part history lesson, one part math guidebook, and one part memoir. Kyne speaks with Ira about “celebrity numbers,” Möbius strips, and why math and drag are more similar than you may think.

Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

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Humans need sufficient sleep to function. The conventional wisdom is that we need around 8 hours each night to be at peak performance.

But for people with idiopathic hypersomnia, or IH, no amount of sleep can shake a profound feeling of sleepiness. Some can sleep for over 24 hours, despite using stimulants and multiple alarm clocks. Others fall asleep while driving or doing other daily activities.

IH is rare. It affects just a small fraction of 1% of people, and the underlying cause is unknown. Now, scientists are doing more research into the condition, thanks in large part to patients organizing and advocating for better treatment options. Unlocking what causes this excessive sleepiness may be key to understanding the bigger picture of how the body enters and wakes from sleep.

Ira discusses the science of sleepiness with Dr. Quinn Eastman, science writer and author of The Woman Who Couldn’t Wake Up: Hypersomnia and the Science of Sleepiness, and Diana Kimmel, co-founder of the Hypersomnia Alliance, and board member of the Hypersomnia Foundation.

Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

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This week, the election season shifted into full gear with the Super Tuesday slate of primaries. But as the ballot options become more cemented, it’s not just pollsters and campaign operatives who are preparing for the elections—scientists are too.

The Union of Concerned Scientists has established what it calls an election science task force, looking at everything from ballot design to disinformation to voting security. Dr. Jennifer Jones, program director for the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, joins Ira to describe the goals of the effort in the weeks and months ahead.

Antibiotic resistance—when pathogens no longer respond to the conventional antibiotic medications—is a serious medical problem. According to the CDC, over 2.8 million antibiotic-resistant infections occur in the U.S. each year, causing some 35,000 deaths. It’s in part due to overprescription of antibiotics in medicine, and the widespread use of antibiotics in animal agriculture. But the problem isn’t entirely of humans’ making. The roots of antibiotic resistance go back millions of years.

A recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences collected hundreds of soil and poop samples from around the world, to try to trace back the genetics of how resistance arose in Enterococcus, a genus of bacteria that live in the guts of pretty much every land animal. In the course of their analysis, the researchers identified 18 entirely new species in the genus Enterococcus, with over 1,000 genes that had never been seen before.

Dr. Michael Gilmore, the Chief Scientific Officer at Mass Eye and Ear, joins Ira to talk about the study and what the team hopes to learn about the causes of antibiotic resistance.

Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

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