Science Friday Folgen

According to CDC data, more than 13,000 people die from gun homicides every year—and most of them are people of color who live in urban areas. Many of them are children. But as scientists seek to understand the causes and solutions for gun deaths, can we also learn to predict them…and even intervene before they happen? One researcher may have the answer: social media analysis.  Friendly neighbors. Olympic divers. Little horses with wings. No matter what you call the commonly misunderstood bat, they’re far more than simple nocturnal blood-drinkers. Bats have an impressive repertoire of noteworthy abilities—from super echolocation to agile, muscular wings. It’s a subject that has both inspired and lured scientists, like Sharon Swartz, a biologist who researches bat flight at Brown University. In this segment, she discusses how she takes a close look at the aerodynamics and wing morphology of these creatures to pin down the evolutionary origins of bat flight. Scientists have discovered a new piece of human anatomy we never knew we had—a layer of connective tissue that exists all over the body. It sits below the skin’s surface, lining the digestive tract, the lungs, and even our blood vessels. Researchers say it could be the missing link the medical community needs to move forward in a number of areas of research, including cancer and autoimmune disease.     Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Planting tomatoes in the garden this year? Better hope you have bumblebees too, because tomato flowers need a good shaking to get the pollen out. “What the bumblebee does is grab a tomato flower, curve its abdomen around the bottom of the tomato flower, and then shiver its wing muscles at a specific frequency, shaking pollen out of the holes like a salt shaker,” says Paige Embry, author of Our Native Bees: North America’s Endangered Pollinators and the Fight to Save Them. This week, a panel of peer reviewers met for three days to discuss a draft report on two long-running studies on the potential health effects of cell phone radiation. In their conclusions, and voted to increase the level of confidence in the findings, saying that there was a clear link between the radiofrequency radiation exposure and the male rat heart tissue tumors. The National Toxicology Program now has to decide whether to accept the panel’s recommendation before the final report is released.    In this week's State of Science, a judge requested a climate science tutorial in a federal lawsuit where two California cities are suing the oil company Chevron. In an unprecedented courtroom tutorial on climate science, Chevron went on record agreeing with the scientific consensus that people are causing global warming. But the company also deflected any responsibility for it under federal law and played up uncertainties in projections for both the volume and future consequences of greenhouse gas emissions. The tack signals a potential legal defense against financial liability for climate change impacts such as rising sea levels.       Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Guns kill more people in the United States than alcohol—from homicides and suicides, to mass shootings like the one that left dead 17 high school students in Parkland, Florida last month. But public health researchers will tell you that studying alcohol-related deaths is much easier. Gun research is so fraught politically that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention doesn’t fund it (though the National Institutes of Health did for three years during the Obama presidency), and a pair of Congressional amendments continue to throw red tape on funding and access to certain kinds of data. Could private foundations, universities, and state governments fill the gap? Most zoo visitors go to see the animals. U.C. Santa Barbara chemical engineer Michelle O'Malley visits for their poop. That's because the dung of grazers like sheep, giraffes, and elephants is rich in cellulose-chomping fungi and bacteria. She joins Ira to talk about the bacterial and fungal communities within poop. When you fly on an airplane, you’re trapped inside a metal tube for a few hours with hundreds of other passengers, sharing the overhead compartments, lavatories, and air. It feels like there’s a good chance for disease to spread in flight—but just how likely is it? New research maps out the risks. Plus, NASA launched the Kepler space telescope in 2009, with plans for it to operate for about three and a half years. Now, nine years later, the telescope is close to running out of fuel.     Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.