The Pulse

Health disparities between Black and white Americans run deep in the U.S. Black people are more likely to suffer from chronic conditions like diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, or asthma, and their life expectancy is shorter than that of their white peers. The causes for these inequities are far-reaching and include bias and systemic racism in health care and medical treatments, lack of access to care, and economic differences. Advocates, researchers, and health systems have been looking for ways to address these issues — chipping away at different aspects of the problem. On this episode, we'll look at several different solutions — and meet the people who are pushing for more equitable health care for all.

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Finding the right therapist — or, sometimes, any therapist — can be a grueling process. Someone with the right expertise, who is still taking new clients, lives in your area, who accepts your insurance, or whose services you can afford. Over the past few years, online therapy platforms like BetterHelp and Talkspace have seen an explosion in popularity. They promise easy access — anytime you need it — and affordability. Major changes are happening in the field of mental health, as more people turn to online services — not just for counseling, but for diagnosis and prescriptions. How good are these platforms really — for clients and for therapists? And what are the larger issues they raise about the field as a whole? On this episode, we look at the rise of online mental health services. We hear stories about working for one of these apps, what clients like or dislike about them, and the unregulated world of online ADHD diagnosis.

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When you hear the word fungi, chances are mushrooms come to mind: button mushrooms, maybe portobellos, or chanterelles. But so much of the fungi kingdom is invisible — underground — and many say underappreciated. Fungi are vital to life on the planet, but scientists are just beginning to understand their many functions and possibilities. On this episode, we explore the role of fungi in nature, in medicine, and in our lives. We’ll talk about sustainable design that utilizes mycelium, discuss how fungi form networks that communicate information, and look at an experimental and unapproved fungi-based treatment people are using to regain their sense of smell.

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Humans have long been fascinated by the idea of communicating with other species — not just teaching animals to mimic human words, but truly understanding their calls or cries, and interpreting their meaning. In recent years, new technologies and research are getting us closer to that point. So what are scientists learning about the way animals’ minds work — what they think about, care about, and want us to understand?

On this episode, we explore animal communication — from their ability to speak our language, to our ability to understand theirs. We hear stories about what viral videos of “talking” dogs and cats are teaching scientists, the hidden meanings behind whale songs and dolphin whistles, and how machine learning is decoding the oinks and squeals of pigs.

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It's the goosebumps you get at the crescendo of your favorite song; the stupefying wonder that comes with witnessing a birth or a death; the astonishing mystery we feel when gazing at the vast night sky. This is awe — a complex, often overwhelming emotion that can elicit everything from pleasure and connectedness to a crawling sense of uncertainty. Moments of awe can create unforgettable memories — and they can have a lasting impact on our minds and the way we interact with others. One of the leading scientists studying awe is Dacher Keltner, a University of California, Berkeley psychologist, who's dedicated the past 15 years to investigating the origins and effects of this emotion. On this episode, we talk with Keltner about his new book "Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life." He discusses his own, very personal experience of awe amid profound grief, the ability of awe to transform our experience of the world, and how we can cultivate awe on a daily basis. We also hear from listeners about their experiences of awe, and listen back to a story about how voyages to space change the way astronauts perceive life, their relationships, and Earth as a whole.

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It’s the start of a new year — a time when lots of people are thinking about how they can improve their lives … and themselves. We make plans to get to the gym, eat healthier, sleep more, and have a better work-life balance. But despite our best intentions, these resolutions are usually short-lived, and often fizzle out by February.

It’s a recipe for disappointment. Not only that — chasing the elusive, future version of ourselves can mean that we’re failing to deal with our current reality. So instead of change, we’re focusing on acceptance on this first episode of 2023 — specifically, how do we find acceptance under challenging circumstances? How do we adapt when life throws us a curveball in the form of a life-changing diagnosis?

We’ll dig into those questions — ditching the New Year’s resolutions in favor of tales about making peace with where we are now. We’ll hear stories about an actor struggling with cystic fibrosis, making your life and schedule work with ADHD, living with a rare and inescapable allergy, and how one family navigated their son’s diagnosis with autism.

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On a technical level, noise and sound are the same thing: vibrating molecules that travel in waves straight to our ears. But when sound is annoying, we tend to call it noise. From garbage trucks to car alarms, shrieking babies to nails on a chalkboard, noise can be really grating and irritating. In fact, some noises are so annoying, so loud, so obnoxious that they can take a toll on our well-being and health.

On this episode — part two of our exploration of sound — we take a look at noise, how it affects us, and what we can do to reduce it. We listen to stories about a phantom beep in Brooklyn that had everybody on edge, the quest to quiet hospital alarms, and a day in the life of a noise detective.

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Science journalist Ed Yong is a must-read — with his in-depth reporting, his beautifully told stories, and spot-on analysis. He is one of the go-to-journalists for the most up-to-date and accurate information on the pandemic.

On top of his reporting, he also published a book in 2022, called “An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us,” about how animals experience the world, outside the confines of human senses.

“Each creature really is only able to sense a small amount of the fullness of reality,” he said. “I find this idea to be one of the most beautiful in biology. At the same time, it is humbling and also very expansive … because it tells us how much we’re missing, how much there is to understand and know about.”

The Pulse invited Yong to come to Philadelphia for a conversation at the Academy of Natural Sciences. He talked about what he learned while writing the book, and he also reflected on what it was like to work on the book during the pandemic, and why he thinks we will be stuck in an era of epidemics and pandemics yet to come.

On a “scallop TV” experiment:

There’s a guy called Daniel Speiser. He’s done some great work on scallop vision, and … he did an experiment that he calls scallop TV where you put little scallops on, on small chairs and showed them movies, of flecks of food drifting past in the water. And sure enough, the scallops would open the shells and extend little sensory tentacles out to explore … hell of a thing watching a scallop be curious about the world.

On empathy:

I really, really tried to understand how animals use their senses, and a really cool part of the book was this idea that … “An Immense World” is not a book about superiority, but about diversity. So often one common way of engaging with animals’ sense is to prize them only when they exceed our own. So … an eagle’s vision or a shark’s sense of smell — the super sensers. But my argument here is that … the really interesting thing here … is the variation: it’s how disparate the experiences of other animals can be, so that even when you have something like a scallop, which has much poorer vision than ours, there is something truly fascinating about how it uses its eyes and what it gets from the world.

On reading a bat’s mind through echolocation:

It’s almost like one of the easiest to study because unlike, say, vision or smell, echolocation doesn’t work unless the bat is doing something. It needs to put out energy in the world. The bat says Marco, and it makes its surroundings say Polo back. Because of that, by recording the bats calls, you can kind of gauge its intent. So an echolocating bat will change the types of sounds it produces to get different kinds of information back from the environment. … You can record that with a microphone and it basically gives you an insight into exactly what the bat, what it’s trying to do at that moment. It’s sort of like reading the creature’s mind, and yet you can’t really read the creature’s mind. Despite … the technological sophistication that makes echolocation such an understandable sense, I still don’t know what it’s like to be a bat.

On the mystery of magnetoreception

Magnetoreception is the least understood of all the senses because it is by far the hardest to study. It is the only one, for example, we still don’t know where or what the sense organ is. … And partly that’s because magnetic fields are a very weird stimulus. They penetrate living tissue and are unimpeded by it. So while a lot of sense organs need to be on the surface, usually connected to some kind of hole in a shell or a skeleton, a magnetic receptor, an organ that senses magnetic fields could be anywhere, could be in my knee, it could be in my elbow, could be buried deep in my body. It could be spread out all across my body … we don’t know. Someone who studies this has described this to me as like maybe trying to find a needle in a needle stack.

On science as a social endeavor:

One of the biggest lies that is told about science and how it works is that it is a purely objective, like very clinical, very cold procession of facts. … Instead, it is just a very gradual and erratic stumble towards slightly less uncertainty. And it is profoundly a social endeavor, like, a scientist’s interpretation of the world depends on the results from her work, and the results from her work depend on the kinds of experiments that she decides to run. The kind of experiments she decides to run depend on the kinds of questions she thinks about asking in the first place. And the questions she asked in the first place are dependent on her values, her culture, the dogma within her field at a time, all of these like deeply social forces.

Why we are in an “era of pandemics”:

As the climate warms, animals are being forced to relocate to track their preferred environmental conditions. And that means that species are changing their ranges all the time. And that means that animal species that never previously co-existed will suddenly find themselves living in the same place because they will have moved and that will give opportunities for their viruses, which were unique and special to them to jump into new hosts and then eventually into us. There was a very good paper that came out this year showing exactly this process that is well underway and that we are living through probably like the golden age of that process of what I have termed the ‘pandemicene’ in my reporting where, and the horrible thing about that is that a lot of the spillovers will be concentrated in areas with high human habitation and that process is now effectively runaway, like, even if we halted all greenhouse gas emissions today, the momentum of climate change will mean that those that increased spillover dynamic will continue happening.

On hope as a discipline:

A lot of the problems that we’ve experienced in the pandemic boil down to a catastrophic failure of empathy. And while I’m not naive enough to think that learning about scallop eyes is suddenly going to make people take actions that protect their fellow humans, I do think that empathy is a muscle that you can flex and build and strengthen. And I hope that this is part of it. I also know that despair is lethal. Right now, we have a huge number of global, massive problems that need constant attention and persistence …The abolitionist Mariame Kaba talks about how hope is a discipline. And it’s not a nebulous, fluffy thing. It is something that requires effortful work, constant effortful work. And I think to sustain in the face of all the challenges and the tragedies that we see around us, we need to embrace things that bring joy, and that bring hope, and that bring wonder.

The soundscape of our lives changes depending on where we are — the murmuring of voices, birdsong in trees, the beeps and dings of technology, and the cacophony of traffic.

Our worlds are dense with sound. Often, it all blends together to the point that we barely notice it. But every sound has its own distinct profile — providing information, bringing joy or irritation, causing us to snap to attention or zone out.

In this episode, we explore the world of sound, how we interact with it, and the people who compose the sounds that define our lives.

We hear stories about the teams designing the hum of electric cars, how the sounds of a rainforest inspired the pings and dings coming from your computer, and a disorder that makes ordinary noises almost unbearable.

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Whether we’re in a forest, a park, or in the middle of a city, wildlife is always close by. Birds flying overhead, deer peeking through the branches, rabbits hopping through our yards, or rats and raccoons rummaging through our garbage. Sharing space with wild animals means our paths often cross — which can have less than desirable outcomes for either. On this episode, we’ll explore human-wildlife interactions — and the challenges that arise from living in the same space. We’ll hear about efforts to reduce bird strikes, which are frequent and dangerous for low-flying planes, and find out how scientists are keeping a rabies outbreak among raccoons at bay. We’ll also hear about a disease that’s being spread by kissing bugs, and meet volunteers dedicated to rescuing injured wildlife.

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