When CrowdScience listener Eric spotted a few gnats flying around on a milder day in mid-winter it really surprised him - Eric had assumed they just died out with the colder weather. It got him wondering where the insects had come from, how they had survived the previous cold snap and what the implications of climate change might be for insect over-wintering behaviour? So he asked CrowdScience to do some bug investigation.
CrowdScience presenter Marnie Chesterton takes up the challenge and heads out into the British countryside – currently teeming with buzzes and eight legged tiny beasties - to learn about the quite amazing array of tactics these small creatures use to survive the arduous days of cold.
She hears how some insects change their chemical structure to enhance their frost resistance whist others hanker down in warmer microclimates or rely on their community and food stocks to keep them warm.
But cold isn’t the only climatic change insects have to endure, in the tropics the seasons tend to fluctuate more around wet and dry so what happens then? Marnie talks with a Kenyan aquatic insect expert who describes how mosquitoes utilise the rains and shares his worry climate change could have a big impact on insect populations.
Contributors:
Dr Erica McAlister – Entomologist and Senior Curator, Natural History Museum,
Dr Adam Hart – Entomologist and Professor of Science Communication - University of Gloucestershire
Fran Haidon – Beekeeper
Laban Njoroge – Entomologist, head of the Invertebrate Zoology – Museum of Kenya
Dr Natalia Li – Biochemist
Presenter: Marnie Chesterton
Producer: Melanie Brown
[Image: Butterfly in winter resting on snow covered branch. Credit: Getty Images]
In the toxic waters of Sulphur Cave in Steamboat Springs, Colo. lives blood-red worm blobs that have attracted scientific interest from around the world. We don special breathing gear and go into the cave with David Steinmann, the spelunking scientist who first documented the worms, along with a trio of science students from Georgia Tech, to collect worms and marvel at the unique crystals and cave formations (ever heard of snottites??) that earned Sulphur Cave a designation as a National Natural Landmark in 2021. Then we learn about how extremophiles like these worms are helping scientists search for new antibiotics, medicines, or in the case of the Georgia Tech team, models for worm blob robots that can explore uneven, dangerous terrain, like caves on other planets.
In the West we routinely witness instances of intergenerational sniping – Boomers taking potshots at over-privileged and under-motivated Millennials, and Millennials responding with a curt, “OK, Boomer.” What do we make of this, and is it anything new?
These are questions Bobby Duffy, professor of public policy and director of the Policy Institute at Kings College London, addresses in his latest book, Generations – Does when you’re born shape who you are? (published as The Generation Myth in the United States). In this Social Science Bites podcast, Duffy offers some key takeaways from the book and his research into the myths and stereotypes that have anchored themselves on generational trends.
“My one-sentence overview of the book,” Duffy tells interviewer David Edmonds, “is that generational thinking is a really big idea throughout the history of sociology and philosophy, but it’s been horribly corrupted by a whole slew of terrible stereotypes, myths and cliches that we get fed from media and social media about these various differences between generations. My task is not to say whether it’s all nonsense or it’s all true; it’s really to separate the myth from reality so we don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater.”
One thing he’s learned is that the template for generational conflict is fairly standard over time, even if the specifics of what’s being contested are not.
“The issues change,” he explains, “but the gap between young and old at any one point in time is actually pretty constant. … We’re not living through a time of particularly ‘snowflake,’ ‘social justice warrior’ young people vs. a very reactionary older group – it’s just the issues have changed. The pattern is the same, but the issues have changed.”
Taking a look at climate change, for example, he notes that there’s a narrative that caring young people are fighting a careless cadre of oldsters unwilling to sacrifice for the future good. Not so fast, Duffy says: “The myth that only young people care about climate is a myth. We are unthinkingly encouraging an ageism within climate campaigning that is not only incorrect, but it is self-destructive.” That example, he notes, adds evidence to his contention that “the fake generational battles we have set up between the generations are just that – they are fake.”
In the podcast, Duffy outlines the breakdowns his book (and in general larger society) uses to identify cohorts of living generations:
Pre-war generation, those born before the end of World War II in 1945. Duffy says this could be broken down further – the so-called Silent Generation or the Greatest Generation, for example – but for 2022 purposes the larger grouping serves well.
Baby Boomers, born from 1945 to 1965
Generation X, 1966 to 1979 (This is Duffy’s own generation, and so, with tongue in cheek, he calls it “the best generation”!)
Millennials, 1980 to around 1995
And Gen Z, ending around 2012
He notes that people are already talking about Generation Alpha, but given that generation’s youth it’s hard to make good generalizations about them.
These generation-based groupings are identity groups that only some people freely adopt. “We’re not as clearly defined by these types of groupings as we are by, say, our age or educational status or our gender or our ethnicity.” His research finds between a third and half of people do identify with their generation, and the only one with “a real demographic reality” (as opposed to a solely cultural one) is the Baby Boomers, who in two blasts really did create a demographic bulge.
Duffy, in addition to his work at King’s College London, is currently the chair of the Campaign for Social Science, the advocacy arm of Britain’s Academy of Social Sciences. Over a 30-year career in policy research and evaluation, he has worked across most public policy areas, including being seconded to the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit. Before joining KCL he was global director of the Ipsos Social Research Institute.
Hot on the tail of China’s heatwave comes the other side of the extreme coin – tragic flooding. Also, a coming global shortage of sulfur, while scientists produce useful oxygen on Mars in the MOXIE experiment.
Prof Chunzai Wang is the Director of the State Key Laboratory of Tropical Oceanography in Guangzhou, China. He tells Roland about the surprising nature of the extreme temperatures and droughts much of China has been experiencing, and how they are connected to so many of the record-breaking weather events around the northern hemisphere this summer, including the tragic flooding in Pakistan.
Some people of course saw this coming. Richard Betts of the UK Met Office talks of a paper by one of his predecessors published 50 years ago exactly that pretty much predicted the greenhouse gas-induced climate change more or less exactly.
Clearly, the world needs to cut carbon emissions, and oil and coal would be sensible places to start. But as Prof Mark Maslin points out, this will come with its own consequences in terms of pressure on the industrial supply of sulfur and sulfuric acid, essential to so many other devices and processes. Can a shortage be averted?
And scientists working on Nasa’s Mars Perseverance team report more results this week. Alongside all the sensitive instrumentation aboard, an experiment known as MOXIE was somehow squeezed in to demonstrate the principle of electrolyzing Martian carbon dioxide to produce usable oxygen gas. As Michael Hecht explains, the tech is scalable and would be more or less essential to any viable human trip to Mars in the future.
(Image: The Jialing River bed at the confluence with the Yangtze River is exposed due to drought in August 2022 in Chongqing, China. The water level of the Jialing River, one of the tributaries of the Yangtze River, has dropped due to high temperature and drought. Credit: Zhong Guilin/VCG via Getty Images)
Presenter: Roland Pease
Assistant Producer: Robbie Wojciechowski
Producer: Alex Mansfield
It may seem obvious now that other galaxies lie beyond the Milky Way, but less than 100 years ago, some astronomers held a view of our universe that was a little more ... self-centered. In the 1920s, astronomers were locked in the "Great Debate" — whether Earth was center of the universe and if the universe was just the Milky Way. Today, Scientist in Residence Regina G. Barber talks to Dr. Vicky Scowcroft about the stars that ended astronomy's Great Debate.
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Do worms feel pain? How do otters experience the world? What are those pink appendages on the face of the star-nosed mole? We answer all these questions and more in this quiz show episode of Short Wave. Scientist in Residence Regina G. Barber and producer Margaret Cirino go head-to-head answering questions based on science writer Ed Yong's new book, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us.
Are you reading a new fascinating science-themed book? Let us know which one at shortwave@npr.org.
NASA's Artemis Moon mission was supposed to launch Monday. But it was delayed due to a problem one of the rocket engines. When it launches, it will be a giant step towards sending humans back to the moon. We're eager to know: What leaps in scientific knowledge will be gained?
It's a question planted in our minds by the scientist Hal Walker, who led an experiment during the first lunar landing half a century ago. The goal: Beam a laser at the moon. This encore episode, Scientist in Residence Regina G. Barber talks to host Aaron Scott about the Lunar Laser Ranging experiment — and how shooting that laser helped us better understand one of Einstein's theories.
People experiencing a mental health crisis have a new way to reach out for help in the U.S. — calling or texting the numbers 9-8-8. Today, health correspondent Rhitu Chatterjee joins Scientist in Residence Regina G. Barber to talk about how the hotline works, the U.S. mental health system and what this alternative to 911 means for people in crisis.
Below is a non-comprehensive list of other hotlines and resources from our colleague Aneri Pattani at Kaiser Health News. Some resources may geographically limit services. - BlackLine is a hotline geared toward the Black, Black LGBTQ+, brown, Native, and Muslim communities - Kiva Centers offers daily online peer support groups - M.H. First Oakland and M.H. First Sacramento operate during select weekend hours in the California cities of Oakland and Sacramento - Peer Support Space hosts virtual peer support groups twice a day Monday through Saturday - Project LETS provides support by text for urgent issues that involve involuntary hospitalization - Samaritans of New York is a hotline based in New York City - Trans Lifeline is a hotline for trans and questioning individuals - Wildflower Alliance has a peer support line and online support groups focused on suicide prevention
The Jezero Crater on Mars was targeted by Nasa’s Perseverence rover because from orbit, there was strong evidence it had at some point contained a lake. When the Mars 2020 mission landed, it didn’t take long to spot rocks protruding from the bottom that looked for all the world like sedimentary rocks – implying they were laid down from the liquid water and maybe perhaps even contain signs of past life. This week, the science team have published some of their analysis from the first 9 months of the mission. And, as Principal Scientist Kenneth Farley of Caltech tells Science In Action, the geology is clearly more complex, as it turns out they are igneous, perhaps resulting from subsequent volcanic activity.
Back on earth, Shane Cronin of the University of Auckland has been digging into the legend of the Kuwea volcano in Vanuatu. Folk tales have long talked of an inhabited island that once disappeared beneath the sea. Over the years some have linked these and the submarine caldera with an eruption that occurred in 1452, yet the evidence has been debated. But the Hunga-Tonga eruption earlier this year has shifted Shane’s perception of the evidence. As he describes, he now suspects the 1452 eruption was as much as 5-7 times bigger in magnitude, and likely preceded by smaller eruptions that could fit with some of the legends surrounding the story.
This type of evidence, interpreted from the testimony of those who live there, is increasingly being employed in conservation studies. Heidi Ma of ZSL in London and colleagues this week declared in Royal Society Open Science, the Dugong – a relative of the manatee - is now functionally extinct in Chinese waters, but they reached this conclusion from interviewing hundreds of individuals in fishing communities along that coast. And very few of them had ever seen one.
When CrowdScience listener Eric spotted a few gnats flying around on a milder day in mid-winter, he was really surprised - as surely insects die off in the cold? It got him wondering where the gnats had come from and how they'd survived the previous cold snap. So he asked CrowdScience to do some bug investigation.
Presenter Marnie Chesterton takes up the challenge and heads out into the British countryside – currently teeming with buzzes and tiny beasties - to learn about the quite amazing array of tactics these small creatures use to survive the arduous days of cold.
She hears how some insects change their chemical structure to enhance their frost resistance whist others hunker down in warmer microclimates or rely on their community and food stocks to keep them warm. Marnie also asks how climate change might be affecting insect over-wintering behaviour - and its implications for the lives of these crucially important organisms.
In a crater at the top of a dormant volcano lies a place so quiet, the ambient sound is right near the threshold of human hearing. Visitors to the crater say they can hear their own heartbeats. This spot, in Haleakalā National Park, has been nicknamed the "quietest place on Earth."
Getting there is no small feat--the ascent involves hiking upward through five different climate zones. But the reward is an experience of natural silence that is increasingly difficult to find.
Conservationists, park scientists, and communities all over the United States are working to conserve their pristine soundscapes while noise pollution from planes, vehicles, and other human sources increases. Today, Regina G Barber talks with producer Margaret Cirino about the history, culture, and sound of the Haleakalā crater, and why it should matter to all of us.
