Category: ScienceNews

In a world bursting with colour, what’s the advantage of standing out in stark contrast?

Listener Jude in Canada wants to know why some animals are black and white. Why do zebras risk being so stripy? Why do pandas have such distinct marking? And do they have something in common? Presenter Caroline visits Pairi Daiza, a zoo in Belgium. Together with her guide for the day, Johan Vreys, she looks at these weird and wonderful animals up close. First, she visits three zebras having breakfast. Ecologist Martin How from the University of Bristol explains his ingenious experiment involving horses with zebra blankets. Next on the tour is the giant panda which, according to Prof Tim Caro from the University of Bristol, looks the way it does to camouflage in snowy forests in China. But there are many more animals to see, and many more reasons to be monochrome, including the penguin and its tuxedo-like colouration. Hannah Rowland, senior lecturer at the University of Liverpool explains that it might have more than just a single function. It turns out, scientific answers aren’t always black and white.

Presenter: Caroline Steel

Producer: Florian Bohr

Editor: Ben Motley

(Photo: The zebra was running gracefully running in the green water - stock photo Credit: Surasak Suwanmake via Getty Images)

The launch of Taylor Swift’s much-anticipated 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl, has inspired this week’s episode of Unexpected Elements.

First up, we hear how a Brazilian songbird courts its mate as part of a boyband. We then find out about the microbes that dance to survive in their extreme habitat.

Next up, Professor Troy Magney, a forest ecophysiologist at the University of Montana, tells us about his TSWIFT machine and how it can assess the health of the planet’s forests.

Also in the programme, we find out why migratory birds trick weather data, how fish sing, and how hackers used SWIFT bank payments to nearly pull off a billion-dollar heist.

All that, plus many more Unexpected Elements.

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton, with Camilla Mota and Godfred Boafo Producers: Imaan Moin and Alice Lipscombe-Southwell, with Robbie Wojciechowski and Lucy Davies

In the North Sea — between the United Kingdom, Norway and Denmark — thousands of flies swarmed an oil rig. Engineer Craig Hannah noticed they’d stay still on the rig for hours, suddenly taking off all at once. He was seeing hoverflies. Often confused with bees, they’re unsung pollinators. And they migrate, often hundreds of miles – including, it seems, to the middle of the ocean.


Today on the show: The mystery of why these insects are landing in the open ocean. Plus, a surprising finding in the Amazon rainforest and the sounds of life in a coral reef. 


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Scientists detect for the first time an unknown source of GPS interference coming from space. Also, as AI begins to design more and more DNA sequences being manufactured synthetically, how can those manufacturers be sure that what their customers are asking for will not produce toxic proteins or lethal weapons? And… how camera traps in polish forests reveal that the big bad wolf is more scared of humans than anything else.

For that last few years instances of deliberate jamming and interference of GNSS signals has become an expected feature of the wars the world is suffering. Yet this disruption of the signals that all of us use to navigate and tell the time nearly always emanate from devices on the ground, or maybe in the air. But in ongoing research reported recently by Todd Humphreys of University of Texas at Austin and colleagues around the world is beginning to reveal that since 2019 an intermittent yet powerful signal has been causing GPS failures across Europe and the North Atlantic. The episodes have been thankfully brief so far, but all the signs suggest it comes not from soldiers or aeroplanes, but from a distantly orbiting satellite somewhere over the Baltic Sea. It may not be malevolent, it could be a fault, but the net of suspicion is tightening.

A team of scientists including some from Microsoft report today in a paper in the journal Science an investigation to try to strengthen the vetting of synthetic DNA requests around the world. As AI-designed sequencies increase in number and application, the factories that produce the bespoke DNA are in danger of making and supplying potentially dangerous sequences to customers with malicious intents. But how do you spot the bad proteins out of the almost infinite possible DNA recipes? Tessa Alexanian of the International Biosecurity and Biosafety Initiative for Science, and one of the authors explains some of the thinking.

Finally, Liana Zanette of Western University in Ontario and colleagues have been hanging around in Polish forests scaring wolves. Why? Because as wolf numbers rise in protected reserves, more and more human-wolf interactions occur. And a suspicion has arisen that the legal protection they enjoy has led to them losing their fear of humans in a dangerous way. Not so, says Liana’s team, blowing away the straw arguments and setting fire to the political motivation to reduce their protection status. Wolves are still terrified of Nature’s apex predator – us.

Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield Production Coordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth

(Image: Simulation screen showing various flights for transportation and passengers. Credit: Oundum via Getty Images).

One of the world’s most beloved and influential primatologists and conservationists has died. Jane Goodall spent more than half a century studying chimpanzees and advocating for animal rights and environmental protection. As Jeffrey Brown reports, Goodall helped change the way we look at animals and their behavior. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy

Having been raised in Los Angeles, a place with vast swathes of single-family homes connected by freeways, arriving in Costa Rica was an eye opener for the young cultural anthropologist Setha Low. “I thought it was so cool that everybody was there together,” she tells interview David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast. “… Everybody was talking. Everybody knew their place. It was like a complete little world, a microcosm of Costa Rican society, and I hadn't seen anything like that in suburban Los Angeles.”

That epiphany set Low, now a distinguished professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, onto a journey filled with the exploration of public spaces and a desire to explain them to the rest of the world. This trek has resulted in more than a hundred scholarly articles and a number of books, most recently Why Public Space Matters but including 2006’s Politics of Public Space with Neil Smith; 2005’s Rethinking Urban Parks: Public Space and Cultural Diversity with S. Scheld and D. Taplin; 2004’s Behind the Gates: Life, Security and the Pursuit of Happiness in Fortress America; 2003’s The Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture with D. Lawrence-Zuniga; and 2000’s On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture.

Low is also director of the Graduate Center’s Public Space Research Group, and has received a Getty Fellowship, a fellow in the Center for Place, Culture and Politics, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a Fulbright Senior Fellowship, and a Guggenheim for her ethnographic research on public space in Latin America and the United States.

She was president of the American Anthropological Association (from 2007 to 2009) and has worked on public space research in projects for the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and was cochair of the Max Planck Institute for Religious and Ethnic Diversity’s Public Space and Diversity Network.

 

Worldwide, populations of scavenging animals that feed on rotting carcasses are declining. Scientists are finding that this can seriously hurt human health. NPR science reporter Jonathan Lambert has been looking into how human health is intertwined with scavenging animals and why these animals’ decline could lead to more human disease. Today, he brings all he learned, including how conservation could help, to your earholes.


Check out more of Jon’s reporting on scavengers and human health.

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How high will the ocean rise under climate change? By 2050, scientists have a pretty good idea. But why does it matter where you live? And what can humans do to slow it down? 
This episode is part of Nature Quest, our monthly segment that brings you a question from a Short Waver who is noticing a change in the world around them. Our question comes from Peter Lansdale in Santa Cruz, Calif. 

To see what future sea levels will look like where you live, check out NOAA’s Sea Level Rise Viewer here.

Noticed any changes in *your* local environment that you want us to investigate? Send a voice memo to shortwave@npr.org telling us your name, your location, and the change you’ve noticed – it could be our next Nature Quest episode!

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You’ve probably heard of PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. But what about its counterpart, post-traumatic growth?
The term was coined in the 90s to describe the positive psychological growth that researchers documented in people who had been through traumatic or highly stressful life events. Psychologists and sociologists conducting long-range studies on survivors of Hurricane Katrina – which hit 20 years ago and remains one of the most devastating natural disasters to hit the US – are continuing to learn more about it. 

So how do you measure post-traumatic growth? Can it co-exist with PTSD? NPR mental health correspondent Rhitu Chatterjee explains what scientists have found so far … and how it could help shape disaster relief efforts in the future.

Interested in more psychology and social science stories? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org.

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Sometimes in science, when you try to answer one question it sparks even more questions.

The CrowdScience inbox is a bulging example of that. We get tons of new questions every week and many of those are following up on episodes we’ve made. Sometimes you want us to go deeper into part of the answer, or sometimes a subject intrigues you so much that it inspires further questions about it.

In this episode presenter Caroline Steel is on a mission to answer some of those questions.

The CrowdScience episode How do fish survive in the deep ocean? led listener Ivor to wonder what sort of vision deep sea fish might have. On hand to answer that is Professor Lars Schmitz, Kravis Professor of Integrated Sciences: Biology, at Claremont McKenna College in the USA

Sticking with vision, we also tackle a question inspired by the CrowdScience episode Do we all see the same colour? For years listener Catarina has wondered why her eyes appear to change colour. Professor Pirro Hysi, ophthalmologist at the University of Pittsburgh, sheds some light on that subject.

In India, Rakesh listened to the CrowdScience episode Will the Earth ever lose its moon? and wondered about Jupiter’s many moons. The European Space Agency’s Ines Belgacem is working on a new mission to study Jupiter’s moons. She explains which of the giant planet’s ninety seven moons are ones for Rakesh to watch.

We also hear how the episode Why can’t my dog live as long as me? caught the attention of listener Lisa... and her cat. She had us falling in love with the long history of falling cats and the scientists who study them. Caroline is joined by Professor Greg Gbur, physicist at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte in the USA and author of Falling Felines and Fundamental Physics.

Could this episode of follow up questions lead to an episode investigating the follow up questions to these follow up questions? Have a listen and, who knows, maybe you’ll find yourself inspired to email crowdscience@bbc.co.uk

Presenter: Caroline Steel

Producer: Tom Bonnett

Editor: Ben Motley

(Photo: Innovation and new ideas lightbulb concept with Question Mark - stock photo Credit: Olemedia via Getty Images)