Science Friday Folgen

20,000 Viruses Under The Sea: Mapping The Ocean’s Viral Ecosystem The ocean is the largest region of the planet and remains a source of newly discovered species. But what do you do with a treasure trove of new viruses? A research team wrote in Science last month about finding thousands of new RNA viruses, and five new taxonomic phyla, in water samples from around the globe. The new species more than doubles the known number of RNA viruses on the planet, painting a clearer picture of the vast abundance and diversity of viruses in ocean ecosystems. Though they may be small, research on DNA viruses in the ocean has previously suggested tiny viruses may have a role in something as large as the global carbon cycle. Producer Christie Taylor interviews microbiologist and study co-author Ahmed Zayed about the importance of the ocean virome.   How Recreational Weed Transformed A Small California Town From the outside, Jose Rivas’s gray, one-story office building seems just as unassuming as Woodlake, the small Tulare County City where it’s located. But once you’ve been escorted inside the wrought iron gate and checked in at the security desk, you’ll see a chemistry lab of so many potheads’ dreams: bubbling evaporators, storage tanks of liquid nitrogen, and trays and trays of drying marijuana buds. But Rivas isn’t a pothead – he’s the CEO of a cannabis company known as Premium Extracts that squeezes, distills and steams everything it can from the flower. “Essentially what we’ve developed here is a methodology to isolate the components and molecules of the cannabis plant, which are responsible for its taste, its flavor, and all the nuanced aroma that comes from each individual cannabis strain,” Rivas said.   Read more at sciencefriday.com.   Meet The Doctor Trying To Bring Medical Marijuana Into The Mainstream An increasing number of states in the U.S. are legalizing medical cannabis, which means millions of people have access to medical marijuana cards. These can be used to buy cannabis to manage pain, treat mental health conditions, and help sleep issues. But a majority of U.S. medical schools offer no education about medical marijuana and its effects on the body. As a result, many physicians and medical professionals do not feel knowledgeable enough about cannabis to make recommendations to patients about what their options are: With so many methods of taking marijuana, and an endless combination of dosages and strains, many patients and doctors feel at a loss. Dr. Mikhail Kogan is trying to change that. As the medical director for the George Washington University Center for Integrative Medicine in Washington, D.C., Dr. Kogan is one of the foremost experts on using medical cannabis to treat a variety of conditions. A majority of his patients are geriatric and suffer from conditions as wide-ranging as cancer and Alzheimer’s. Dr. Kogan traces his experience using marijuana as an alternative medicine in his book, Medical Marijuana: Dr. Kogan’s Evidence-Based Guide to the Health Benefits of Cannabis and CBD. Ira chats with Dr. Kogan about why marijuana is successful as a treatment for so many medical conditions, and how interested patients should approach their physicians if they feel it could be right for them.   The World According to Sound: Listening to WiFi When you walk down a city street, you may not know it, but you’re being bombarded with WiFi data streaming from people’s home routers, phones, and businesses. Frank Swain and Daniel Jones recorded the WiFi signals while walking down a few streets in London. They used smartphones to capture the data and turn it into sounds. It’s like a geiger counter, but for WiFi instead of radiation. Faster clicks mean higher wifi signal strength, robotic beeps are the router ID numbers. They call this project “Phantom Terrains.” They want us to consider how much of our urban world is saturated by invisible streams of data.   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.

Scientists Found The Biggest Known Plant On Earth This week, an underwater seagrass meadow claimed the title for the world’s largest plant. This organism sprawls across 77 square miles of shallow ocean and has survived 4,500 years. To accomplish this, it kept cloning itself and created identical offshoots to spread along the sand. The ocean has changed wildly over the last 4,500 years, yet this plant has survived. Researchers believe that cloning itself may have helped the plant adapt to a changing ocean, offering hope that seagrass meadows may be more resilient than expected in the face of climate change. Sophie Bushwick, a technology editor at Scientific American, joins Ira to talk about how this mighty meadow persisted for millennia and what it tells scientists about climate change. Sophie and Ira also discuss other stories from this week in science, including what countries are most responsible for fueling the extinction of wildlife, what a well-preserved fossil tell us about the sex lives of ancient trilobites, why male mice are terrified of bananas, the creation of a flea-sized robot that walks like a crab, and how scientists developed an algorithm to pinpoint the whereabouts of unknown asteroids.   Building A Better Battery… Using Plastic? The lithium-ion battery in your cell phone, laptop, or electric car is a crucial component of the modern world. These batteries can charge quickly, and pack a lot of power into a small space. But they’re also expensive, require mining scarce lithium, and need to be handled carefully. Other battery technologies have issues as well. For example, the heavy lead-acid battery that starts your car is quite reliable—but lead has its own environmental and health costs. That’s why PolyJoule, a startup company based near Boston, is trying to create a new kind of battery, somewhere on the performance curve between those old lead-acid batteries and lithium-ion cells. Their technology relies not on a metal, but on polymer plastics. Read more at sciencefriday.com.   Bug Off: Why Mosquitoes Have An Annoyingly Amazing Sense Of Smell Mosquitoes use their sense of smell to find their next meal: us. So what would happen if you tweaked their smell so that humans smell really gross to them? That’s what Dr. Chris Potter and his lab recently tried to do—they changed the neurons responsible for the insect’s smell detection, so that in the presence of animal odors, their olfactory systems would be overwhelmed. Instead of smelling like a nice meal, mosquitoes would be repelled by the scent of humans, like if you were stuck in a small room with someone wearing too much cologne. This method worked in Drosophila, the common fruit fly, so Potter and his team were hopeful that would also be the case for mosquitoes. Instead, the experiment didn’t go as planned. Because finding a blood meal is so important for mosquitoes, those little buggers evolved backups for their backup receptors. When Potter turned one pathway off, another one kicked in. Ira talks with Dr. Chris Potter, an associate professor of neuroscience in the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, based in Baltimore, Maryland, about his findings, and why we can never quite get mosquitoes to bug off.   So You Think You Know About Sex When it comes to sex, there’s really no such thing as normal. What was once considered taboo, sometimes goes mainstream. And some things considered new have been around as long as sex itself, like birth control, abortion, and sexually transmitted infections. All that and more is contained in the new book, Been There, Done That: A Rousing History of Sex, by Rachel Feltman, executive editor of Popular Science, based in New York City. Radio producer Shoshannah Buxbaum talks with author Rachel Feltman about queer animals, crocodile dung contraception, ancient STIs, what led to the United States’ original abortion ban, and more.   Processing Postpartum With AI And Synthetic Breast Milk Art One of Ani Liu’s strengths as an artist is her ability to process emotion through different scientific mediums: machine learning, chemistry, 3D-printing. The result is often visceral: she’s used organic chemistry to concoct perfumes that smell like people emotionally close to her and engineered a device that enables the wearer to control the direction of swimming sperm with their mind. And at her new exhibition—next to a 3D-printed sculpture of a pig’s uterus—lies 328 feet of clear tubing with a milky-white substance pumped through it, a commentary on pumping breast milk as a new parent. “I wanted to use my own breast milk, but it wouldn’t be stable for the duration of the show,” she said. Liu became a parent shortly before the pandemic, and she channeled that experience into a new show called “Ecologies of Care,” to process her postpartum period and the communities in her life that helped her through that time. “I hope that this can allow new parents to bond and maybe feel less lonely,” she said. “In making it, I was questioning how do we create better communities of care? I made all of this work before the formula shortage, before our reproductive rights were even more under threat. When I look at this, I’m hoping that you see this particular slice of love and labor.”   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.

‘Breakthrough’ In Sudden Infant Death Syndrome Research Is Misleading Last week, headlines made the rounds in online publications and social media that there was a massive breakthrough in research about SIDS: Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. A study out of Australia concluded that babies who died of SIDS had significantly lower levels of an enzyme called BChE. This study was met with cheers by people desperate to understand why SIDS happens. But many experts say we need to pump the brakes on the celebration. While the study may be promising, it was based on a very limited sample—just 26 babies who had died of SIDS. A variety of factors could explain their different levels of BChE, says Dr. Rachel Moon, a professor of pediatrics and SIDS research at the University of Virginia. Moon explains that there are two major hurdles for researchers trying to investigate the causes of SIDS. First, as grieving parents are very unlikely to consent to their deceased child’s use in medical studies, the sample pool for genetic testing of SIDS death is incredibly small. Secondly, there are just very few people who specialize in the syndrome; Dr. Moon suspects there are one hundred or fewer researchers of SIDS in the entire world. She joins guest host John Dankosky to discuss how these factors make it hard for researchers to study why some babies continue to die prematurely.   Period Tracking Apps And Digital Privacy In A Post-Roe World After the leak of the Supreme Court’s pending decision on Roe v. Wade law, digital privacy experts have been raising an alarm about digital privacy. Millions of people use apps to track their menstrual cycles—the popular app Flo has 43 million active users. And Clue, a similar company, says they have 12 million monthly active users. But in recent weeks, many on social media have been urging others to delete their period tracking apps, saying that the data you share on them could be potentially be used against you if abortion becomes criminalized in states across the country. Guest host John Dankosky talks with Laura Lazaro Cabrera, legal officer at Privacy International, about what kinds of data period tracking apps collect, how personal health data can be used in court, and how to protect your digital privacy.   How Can We Inspire The Next Generation Of Female Scientists? The work of pioneering female scientists like Marie Curie and Jane Gooddall have served as an inspiration to many aspiring scientists. But less well-known are the early and mid-career female scientists who are working to answer some of today’s biggest scientific questions. A new book from National Geographic offers kids and tweens a look into the day-to-day lives of women working in the fields of volcanology, biology, anthropology, astronomy, and more. A central theme among the profiles is persistence in the face of obstacles. Producer Shoshannah Buxbaum talks with Clare Fiesler, conservation biologist, National Geographic explorer, and co-author of No Boundaries: 25 Women Explorers and Scientists Share Adventures, Inspiration, and Advice.   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.