Sciencentric

One of the most polarizing political issues of the day is President Trump’s proposed border wall. An Executive Order he signed in 2017 calls for a “contiguous, physical wall or other...impassable...barrier” along the entire U.S. Mexico border. The idea being that an unbroken, impassable wall would help deter illegal immigration and drug trafficking.

According to a visual survey by USA Today, only about 650 miles of the nearly 2000-mile border is fenced. About half of that fencing can stop people on foot. The other half only prevents vehicles from crossing.

Trump’s supporters see the wall as a necessary step to secure our borders and protect our national sovereignty. Critics see it as ineffective, xenophobic and even racist.

What we hear less about is how such a wall would impact the creatures whose range crisscrosses the border. A 2017 study by professors at the National Autonomous University of Mexico found 841 species would be affected by a large impassable barrier. What's more, Trump’s wall would cut through several important ecosystems and centers of biodiversity like the Sonoran desert and the National Butterfly Center.

In this episode, I spoke with John Platt, editor of the environmental news website The Revelator. John and other writers for the site have covered this issue extensively since the Revelator launched in 2017. We talked about which species would be affected by The Wall, if there are other ways to protect our border that would be less intrusive and how likely it is for Trump’s magnus opus to ever see completion.

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Links:

Video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sg3HxJxrow0

The Revelator's coverage of the border wall

https://therevelator.org/tag/border-wall/

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Border wall image courtesy of Wonderlane via Flickr

Who can forget the classic 1993 movie Jurassic Park? In that film, scientists extracted dino DNA from mosquitoes trapped in amber fossils and used it to bring back all kinds terrifying creatures--from the mighty T-rex to overgrown velociraptors.

Fast forward to 2019 and we’ve yet to create dinosaurs, or any other creatures, by extracting ancient DNA. It turns out DNA molecules degrade pretty quickly, leaving us without the necessary blueprints to reconstruct extinct animals.

But that doesn’t mean scientists have given up on de-extinction. There are a number of projects underway to bring back the woolly mammoth, the passenger pigeon, the auroch (an ancestor of modern cows), and, yes, even dinosaurs. And there are other projects trying to resuscitate more recently extinct animals like the Pyrenean Ibex and animals teetering on the edge of extinction such as the Northern White Rhino.

These pioneering experiments are the subject of the book “The Re-Origin of Species” by Swedish journalist Torill Kornfeldt. I spoke to Torill about what motivates the scientists behind de-extinction, how cutting edge genetic techniques are being used to mold living species into extinct ones and why many conservationists are critical of the whole enterprise.

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Check out our reading room for great science books: http://sciencentric.com/reading

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The Re-Origin of Species: a second chance for extinct animals

https://www.amazon.com/Re-Origin-Species-second-extinct-animals/dp/194753436X/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1552596437&sr=8-1-spell

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About six years ago, a wildlife biologist noticed a pack of mysterious creatures living on Galveston Island, a barrier island off the Gulf Coast of Texas. The creatures looked an awful lot like coyotes, but also red wolves, an ancient coyote-wolf hybrid that had been extinct in the wild for nearly 40 years.

Eventually, scientists collected DNA samples from the mystery creatures, tested and analyzed them. The results showed they were coyotes harboring genes from the red wolf. This meant that even though the red wolf disappeared from the area long ago--at least in dog years--its genes lived on through coyotes.

Our guest today is Elizbeth Heppenheimer, a Princeton biologist who studied the DNA samples from Galveston’s mystery canids. Her work was published late last year in the science journal Genes. Elizabeth and I spoke about the study, what it means for conservation of the red wolf and why canid species seem to have trouble keeping their genes to themselves.

Read the full study here: https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4425/9/12/618

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Watch the video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wow4qgMRMsM

As adults, our odds of dying doubles about every eight years. However, a high-profile paper published in Science this summer seems to tell a different story; past age 80 those increasing odds slow down and almost completely level off past 100, In this episode, we speak with Saul Newman, a biologist at the Australia National University in Canberra, who says this "mortality plateau" probably isn't real and can be chalked up to both sloppy science and problems with how the data was collected.

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Links:

Human mortality 'plateau' may be statistical error, not hint of immortality

https://eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-12/p-hm121118.php

Errors as a primary cause of late-life mortality deceleration and plateaus

https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.2006776

Is the broiler chicken an icon of the anthropocene--an era when humans are are radically altering the biology and geology of the planet? A new paper out of the UK says so and we take a look at the authors' argument.

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Links:

How chickens became the ultimate symbol of the Anthropocene

https://theconversation.com/how-chickens-became-the-ultimate-symbol-of-the-anthropocene-108559

The broiler chicken as a signal of a human reconfigured biosphere

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.180325

We explore the latest news out of China that a scientist has created genetically-modified babies using the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing system.

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Check our list of recommended science books: https://bit.ly/2zOIiYU

Links:

The He Lab YouTube Channel:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0MrOF3n_8ZrklRxAm4zoA_zBiG7mvMU4

Why Are Scientists So Upset About the First Crispr Babies? https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/05/health/crispr-gene-editing-embryos.html

First CRISPR Babies: 6 Questions That Remain https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/first-crispr-babies-6-questions-that-remain/

What are genome editing and CRISPR-Cas9? https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/primer/genomicresearch/genomeediting

The Infamous CRISPR Baby Scientist Is Missing

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/a25383837/crispr-baby-scientist-he-missing/

How to respond to CRISPR babies

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07634-0