Podcasts

A New Type of Heart Disease is on the Rise

Tanya Lewis: Hi, this is Your Health, Quickly, a Scientific American podcast series!

Josh Fischman: We bring you the latest vital health news: Discoveries that affect your body and your mind.  

 

Lewis: And we break down the medical research to help you stay healthy. I’m Tanya Lewis.

Fischman: I’m Josh Fischman.

Lewis: We’re Scientific American’s senior health editors. 

Today, we’re talking about a newly recognized form of heart disease—CKM syndrome, which is when you have overlapping cardiovascular disease, kidney disease, and metabolic diseases like type 2 diabetes and obesity.

[Clip: Show theme music]

Fischman: We’ve got a highly specialized medical system. Sometimes it seems like each doctor has their own organ. 

Lewis: Right. Like if I had a heart problem, I’d go see a cardiologist.

Fischman: And if my kidneys weren’t healthy, I’d check in with a nephrologist.

Lewis: Or if I had diabetes or some other hormone-related problem, I’d see an endocrinologist.

 

Fischman: But it turns out that these organs, or health problems, have a lot to do with one another. In particular kidney problems and metabolic problems raise the risk for cardiovascular disease, which means everything from a heart attack to clogged arteries.

Lewis: So all this medical specialization might keep a doctor from seeing the big-picture risk.

Fischman: Exactly. And that’s been worrying cardiologists like Sadiya Khan of Northwestern University.

Khan: People who write diabetes guidelines write about that, people who write kidney guidelines write about that, people who write about heart guidelines write about that. But really, one patient isn’t going to go to three different guidelines and clinicians aren’t going to go to three different guidelines.

Fischman: That’s why Khan helped write a new set of guidelines from the American Heart Association, in collaboration with kidney and endocrine specialists. The guidelines, which were just released a few months ago, define a new form of heart disease called cardiovascular-kidney-metabolic syndrome. 

Lewis: That’s a mouthful. There’s gotta be a shorter way to say it.

Fischman: There is. This is science and, after all, they love their abbreviations. So this is called CKM syndrome.

Lewis: Much easier. How common is CKM?

Fischman: The heart association says that one third of U.S. adults have at least 3 risk factors for the syndrome. There are many risk factors, and they include obesity, high blood pressure, high blood sugar. And from the kidneys, the rate they remove contaminants from the blood.

 

Kahn: When these are present, and when more than one is present, they synergistically increase the risk of developing heart disease or dying prematurely from heart disease.

Lewis: But how do problems in one organ drive problems in another?

Fischman: I wondered the same thing. So I asked Khan, whose specialty is preventing heart and blood vessel disease. She spends a lot of time looking at the interplay between different organs.

Khan: Oftentimes, people talk about how the kidneys and heart are like an old married couple. We’ve known for some time that having kidney disease increases your risk of developing heart disease. So there’s this connection that exists. And the reverse is also true. Having heart disease makes you more at risk for having kidney disease.

Lewis: I love the old married couple analogy. But what’s the biology behind this shared risk?

 

Khan: Yeah, there’s lots of different mechanisms or crosstalk between the two different organs.

Fischman: Basically, it starts with obesity. Excess fat cells secrete chemicals that cause inflammation. And that can harm blood vessels and damage both heart and kidney tissue. Inflammation also reduces cells’ sensitivity to insulin, the hormone that moves sugar out of the blood and into those cells. More blood sugar, and less of it in cells, is the hallmark of diabetes, of course.

Lewis: So in the old married couple analogy, if one spouse gets upset about something, it upsets their partner too? And the whole marriage fails? 

Fischman: Or they go in for counseling and work it out. In this case, I guess the counselor is a cardiologist.

 

Lewis: Not to belabor the metaphor too much, but Kahn did say that cardiologists have known about this couple for a long time. So why are they just getting around to treating them now?

Fischman: I asked Kahn that ‘why now’ question and this is what she said.

Kahn: Yeah. I think one of the key drivers was the awareness that there’s a growing burden of these risk factors or conditions, and they’re often clustering together. So we know that the rate of obesity, diabetes, kidney disease and heart disease have increased in the past several decades.

Fischman: So everyone is more at risk for CKM today. But Kahn also mentioned something else.

Khan: This recognition has also been complemented by the availability of therapies that aren’t just treating someone’s diabetes, but they also have cardioprotective benefits, as well as kidney protective benefits. And so the availability of therapies that allow us to more holistically manage our patients was a key piece of this. 

 

Lewis: Is she saying there are new medications that could target these overlapping diseases?

Fischman: That’s exactly what she’s talking about. 

Khan: Therapies that have really emerged in the last several years include SGLT2 inhibitors and GLP1 receptor agonists, specific classes of medications that have cardiovascular benefits, but also have been demonstrated to have benefit in people with kidney disease and people with diabetes and people with obesity or overweight. 

Lewis: I’ve heard of GLP1 drugs—those are things like Ozempic and Wegovy, which have been used to treat diabetes and weight loss and might also protect against heart disease and kidney disease. And SGLT2 inhibitors work on the kidneys, helping them filter out extra glucose in the blood, so they were originally developed as diabetes drugs. But then some big clinical trials showed they reduced the rates of heart disease as well.

 

Kahn: Even though they were developed as drugs for diabetes, we found that they’re not really diabetes drugs. You could call them a heart disease drug or a kidney drug. And I think that’s again where this construct is very helpful, because we’re not really just treating someone’s diabetes. We’re trying to treat the patient in front of us.

Fischman: Now — Kahn is quick to point out that these drugs shouldn’t be used by themselves, but should go along with lifestyle changes – diet, exercise, the usual stuff–if a person has several risk factors. Because of these advances, the heart association has also rolled out a new risk calculator for doctors to use, one that incorporates kidney disease and diabetes indicators along with heart risks. It’s a complex formula but it ends up giving doctors a good picture of a person’s likelihood of developing CKM, or some more specific form of heart disease, like heart failure.

Lewis: One important difference is this tool lets doctors start evaluating risk at age 30. The previous assessment tools were only applicable for age 40 and up.

 

Fischman: Yeah. Khan points out that if someone is going to get heart disease, the very first signs show up in that 30-to-40 decade. And at that early stage, the symptoms can be rolled back with the right treatments.

Lewis: As someone in my thirties, that’s good news for me! Recognizing CKM could mean more people will be diagnosed and treated sooner, and stay healthy for a greater part of their lives.

[CLIP: Show music]

Fischman: Your Health, Quickly is produced by Tulika Bose, Jeff DelViscio, Kelso Harper, Carin Leong, and by us. It’s edited by Elah Feder and Alexa Lim. Our music is composed by Dominic Smith.

Lewis: Our show is a part of Scientific American’s podcast, Science, Quickly. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. If you like the show, give us a rating or review! And if you have a topic you want us to cover, you can email us at Yourhealthquickly@sciam.com. That’s your health quickly at S-C-I-A-M dot com.

 

For Your Health Quickly, I’m Tanya Lewis.

Fischman:  And I’m Josh Fischman.

 

Lewis: See you next time.

 

Researchers Just Created the World’s First Permafrost Atlas of the Entire Arctic

Emily Schwing: Imagine the entire Earth. Now think about the places where all the ground is frozen solid. Do you know where they are?

What if I told you that permafrost isn’t only found at the poles and that it exists under the sea, on the Tibetan Plateau and on top of North America’s Rocky Mountains?

 

For Science, Quickly, I’m Emily Schwing.

[CLIP: Show music]

For more than six years, researchers have been working to account for all of the planet’s frozen ground as part of the NUNATARYUK permafrost research project. They’re also going one step further to document who lives on permafrost, makes use of it and what its cultural significance is.

What’s come of their effort is the world’s first and only permafrost atlas of the entire Arctic.

Levi Westerveld: So, it’s a coffee-table atlas that you can open anywhere and start reading and learning about permafrost.

Levi Westerveld is a geographer and cartographer. He worked as an editor on the Arctic Permafrost Atlas.

 

Westerveld: I think one of the first questions we ask ourselves is: What was the ultimate goal of the atlas, and what was the audience we were trying to reach? And quite fast, I think it became clear that we wanted to create something that was very accessible for policy makers who might not have heard of permafrost before to children and schools that are interested to learn more on the topic.

Schwing: What came of the project is a nearly 160-page document loaded with dozens of maps, high-resolution images, and charts and graphs that explain what permafrost is, how it behaves in the Far North, how it’s changing and who those changes impact.

Paul Overduin is a geoscientist at Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research. He also worked on the project.

Paul Overduin: We were looking at natural sciences and social sciences. So, we really had to kind of take a step back and get kind of a big picture of who works in the areas where there are permafrost, who works with people who live on permafrost. And then we started to look at “Well, what are the- what’s the output going to be?”

Schwing: It’s a document Paul hasn’t grown tired of looking at, despite years of work.

Overduin: I just remember being a kid and just loving atlases. Like, just these big pages, and you turn them over … finding out about some part of the world you hadn’t even imagined. That’s what the atlas should do. I think it should also kind of open up your imagination a little bit.

Westerveld: I think as somebody that started on this project, knowing very little about permafrost, revealing a lot of it is visible, especially the changes that we’re seeing in the natural landscape due to climate change.

 

Schwing: Permafrost is ground that remains permanently frozen for at least two years. And in many of Earth’s coldest regions, including the Arctic, it’s warming and melting and shifting rapidly. That means infrastructure is less stable, ecosystems are changing and cultures tied to life on frozen ground are shifting.

Permafrost underlies up to 16 million square kilometers of Earth’s surface. In the Northern Hemisphere, 15 percent of exposed land includes permafrost.

Taken alone, these statistics might not mean much. But the foreword to the Arctic Permafrost Atlas notes that in the past two decades, “the number of web searches for the term ‘permafrost’ has nearly doubled in proportion to the total amount of searches.”

In other words, people are interested in frozen ground. And now they have an atlas that can  answer some of their questions. They can also learn directly from people who live on permafrost and interact with it every day.

Levi says work on the project not only piqued his own imagination, but also revealed what would otherwise be invisible.

 

Westerveld: But a lot of it is also, is not visible where it’s happening under the surface if you look at the maps, for example, showing the carbon concentration in terrestrial and subsea permafrost. So these kind of—making the invisible visible through these maps, I think, has been extremely interesting.

Schwing: Beyond the permafrost, Paul says, there are other elements to the project that are also seemingly invisible.

Overduin: What you don’t really see when you look at the atlas is the whole process that went into making it. And one part of that is definitely community involvement, community consultations. So, for example, there’s a foldout on risks and hazards in the atlas, which is the product of consultations that took place in communities on Svalbard [Norway], in Greenland and in the Northwest Territories [of Canada] at numerous times through the project. That was made a little bit difficult by COVID, but it happened nonetheless right up until the end of the project.

 

Schwing: As part of that process, the team also incorporated Indigenous knowledge and experience into the project. And Levi says what’s unique to the final version are the written portraits of people who live and work with permafrost every day.

Westerveld: What we’re trying to do through the portraits is bring a different perspective and a different scale to the story of permafrost. So as the reader navigates between the spreads they might encounter, for example, a map or a graphic that shows the settlements and their sizes and the type of permafrost they’re located on and in which country, and that gives kind of one dimension to the story. 

And then you turn the page, and you get the personal story of an Indigenous person that lives somewhere in northern Russia that talks about their relationship with permafrost. So this allows the reader to connect to the story of permafrost at different scales through this graphic, so it may be more regional, and then [there are] these personal stories.”

 

Schwing: The world’s permafrost is changing rapidly—and the atlas is filled with pages of beautiful, colorful and highly informative maps that tell its story from various angles. But this may not be the final product. The permfrost atlas may very well be a living document, according to Paul.

Overduin: One of the dangers of a map is always once you’ve made it, it becomes a kind of a truth. But of course, many things are changing, especially now and especially in the Arctic. They’re changing very rapidly. So, will be a living document …  this will need to be a living document, yes.

Schwing: The permafrost atlas is available for free as an online download. For Science, Quickly, I’m Emily Schwing.

Scientific American’s Science, Quickly is produced and edited by Tulika Bose, Jeff DelViscio, Kelso Harper and Carin Leong. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith.

Subscribe to Science, Quickly wherever you get your podcasts. And if you’re a subscriber already, thanks! And please drop us a review on Apple or Spotify. For more up-to-date and in-depth science news, head to ScientificAmerican.com. Thanks and see you next time.

 

Turns Out Undersea Kelp Forests Are Crucial to Salmon

[CLIP: Walking on pebbles]

Starre Vartan: I love a short cold-water swim in Puget Sound in Washington State. I start from a rocky shore near my home.

 

[CLIP: Walking, splashing farther into water and diving]

Vartan: If I kept swimming just another 100 feet out, I could dive a few feet down through these clear waters into an underwater forest where animals such as shrimp, crabs and small fish like lingcod, rockfish—and maybe even salmon—like to live.

[CLIP: Diving sounds]

Vartan: This is Scientific American’s Science, Quickly. I’m Starre Vartan.

Kelp forests are made up of thick, undulating ribbons of brown algae that hang on to rocks at the seafloor and grow toward the light above.

Kelp is found in dense groups, like trees on land, hence the name “forests.”

But just like forests on land, lately these underwater forests have come under threat from climate change.

 

The kelp forests off California’s coasts have largely disappeared in recent years. It all started in 2013 with a mysterious “blob.”

That’s what scientists called this blobbish patch of warmer-than-normal ocean water, which was created by changes in the atmosphere above the Pacific.

The blob brought drastic changes to the California kelp forests. Elevated ocean temperatures led to a die-off of sea stars.

Sea stars typically control the population of sea urchins. Sea urchins eat kelp.

And so the coming of the blob created an explosion of urchins. The creatures went on an eating spree that, by some estimates, cleared 96 percent of the kelp from beneath the California coast.

Up north, Canadian Pacific kelp forests have also been stressed and shrinking.

For now, the forests in Puget Sound, where I live, are intact in some regions but not in others. That means there’s both time to research kelp’s importance and to try to save it.

[CLIP: Kelp forests underwater]

Vartan: A healthy kelp forest, which you just heard, is typically a quiet safe haven. They provide complex habitat to hundreds of species, including benthic invertebrates, small fish and animals all the way up the food chain to gray whales. Sea otters twist their bodies into the kelp. That way they can sleep without drifting and wake to breakfast a forepaw’s swipe away.

 

Forests of kelp dampen wave energy and create a physical refuge for marine life. They also store so much carbon that scientists call them the “sequoias of the sea.”

Like terrestrial forests, they also bolster oxygen via photosynthesis and absorb carbon dioxide. In the sea, that reduces acidification that kills more vulnerable marine animals.

There are so many benefits—and recently a newly verified one: salmon, those Pacific Northwest icons, also use kelp. Fishers had previously said this was the case, and so did Anne Shaffer, a marine biologist with the Coastal Watershed Institute in Washington State. She’s studied kelp forests for more than three decades.

She remembers from a few years ago …

Shaffer: A biologist with the state who blurted out, “Well, salmon don’t use kelp forests.” And, you know, my immediate retort was “Except when they do.”

 

Vartan: So she set out to prove it.

I met with her about 10 miles up the coast from her HQ in Port Angeles, Washington, on the coast of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. We hiked out to the mouth of the Elwha River, where Anne does some of her research into kelp forests.

A little more than 10 years ago the Elwha had two dams that prevented salmon migration. But now the river flows free, and it has created acres of new beach habitats and enriched the underwater ecosystems, too.

[CLIP: Elwha River flowing into the Strait of Juan de Fuca]

Shaffer: This is the mouth of the Elwha. And what happens is the water comes out of the Elwha river, comes into Freshwater Bay, and then there’s a big gyre that forms right here. And so basically what happens is this plume of Elwha water will circle around right into that kelp bed where surveys are.

 

[CLIP: Walking along the sandy and rocky shore]

Vartan: Anne and her team, including undergraduate students, have spent more than seven years taking snorkeling surveys of who uses the kelp forest here.

[CLIP: Young kelp researchers audio]

She’s found that it varies seasonally. Her research, published this year, showed that several types of endangered salmon, including Chinook, coho, chum and pink salmon, definitely use kelp—in multiple ways.

Shaffer: So juvenile salmon, juvenile forage fish, as they’re migrating along the shoreline, they’re their areas of refuge. And they also provide a nursery ground so these animals can rest and feed because they have the richer zooplankton communities and grow and then get ready for these bigger transitions to offshore and different habitats.

 

Vartan: Specifically the type of zooplankton the salmon found in kelp was different.

Shaffer: There were these few key species of what are called vitally associated invertebrates, and those are the ones that are associated with kelp, and those are also the ones that are very highly selected for by juvenile salmon and forage fish.

Vartan: But as they grow, the salmon can also use the kelp to prey on smaller fish, too.

Shaffer: Salmon will actually herd their prey. These little guys, little juvenile salmon, will herd their prey up into a ball and then just slam them, and they’re able to make them ball up like that because of the kelp. It acts as, basically, like a barrier or a net.

 

Vartan: Salmon are incredibly important in the Pacific Northwest. Northwest tribes have had a practical and spiritual relationship with them for thousands of years. They feed people and the critically endangered southern resident orca population. This is a genetically distinct group of around 75 killer whales that only eat fish. These orcas often struggle to find enough to eat in local waters.

If you live in the Pacific Northwest, you know that when orcas and salmon are involved, lawmakers, government agencies, tribes and many others take notice.

And this is why it was so important for Anne to prove that salmon were using the kelp forests.

There was already some dedicated interest in protecting kelp habitats for the many other ways they are important, but now that salmon are involved, even more people will be paying attention to their conservation.

Shaffer: The forage fish and salmon story is bigger than just the kelp forest, and the kelp forest component to it is a really complex one.

Vartan: Anne believes there is a lot more research that needs doing.

 

Shaffer: When I first came back to Washington, I was just confounded at the fact [that] nobody was looking at the kelp forests. People were looking at eelgrass really heavily at that time, and kelp was an afterthought.

And so that was really what was driving my compulsion to study this for so long. Now people have really shifted and are really starting to look at it, so now is really the time.

Vartan: A number of studies are ongoing. The Puget Sound Restoration Fund is currently running what is the most in-depth monitoring program of kelp forests in the world. Understanding what specific factors are causing the variability in kelp forest health here will hopefully prevent what happened in California.

Back at the rocky shore of Puget Sound in late autumn, the sun cheers me into plunging into 50-degree-Fahrenheit waters. As I skim along the surface of the sound, I imagine the forests below, sun glinting off their waving brown-green blades, and the fish and almost-microscopic creatures snug in their ebb-and-flow home. I hope they stay healthy for all our sakes.

 

Science, Quickly is produced by Jeff DelViscio, Tulika Bose, Kelso Harper and Carin Leong. Follow Scientific American for updated and in-depth science news.

For Scientific American’s Science, Quickly, I’m Starre Vartan.

[CLIP: Show music]

 

Are Orcas Friends or Foes?

Carin Leong: Orcas have been all over the news recently.

[CLIP: News montage]

 

Leong: Earlier this year the story of orcas ramming into yachts off the Spanish coast kind of took off.

[CLIP: News montage]

Leong: People on the Internet were calling them allies, hoping that they would sink billionaires and making other jokes about orcas being behind the Titan submersible tragedy.

Then there are stories of orcas ripping great white sharks to pieces and antagonizing all sorts of sea creatures from minke whales to porpoises.

I found it fascinating that these hero and villain narratives exist at the same time—that these charming, silly, sympathetic animals could just as easily be cast as mean bullies. So to answer my question, I thought I’d ask some killer whale scientists to humor me in a game show I’m calling …

[CLIP: Game show music]

 

Leong: [deep, echoey voice] Orcas: Friends or Foes?

I’m Carin Leong, and you’re listening to Science, Quickly.

[CLIP: Audience clapping]

Leong: Ladies and gentlemen, sea enthusiasts and skeptics alike, welcome to this one-time and one-time-only game show! I’m your host, Carin, and today we dive into an exhilarating journey that will challenge your perceptions of one of the ocean’s most iconic inhabitants. Are they allies or total assholes? Welcome to Orcas: Friends or Foes?

For years we’ve been fascinated by these magnificent creatures. But today we’re delving deeper. We’ll be speaking with scientists who have spent years studying orcas and know them inside and out. Are orcas truly the ocean’s heroes, or do they deserve the less flattering reputation of being aquatic troublemakers?

On one side, we have Team Friends.

[CLIP: Audience clapping]

They argue that these cetaceans exhibit complex social structures, possess remarkable communication skills and live in tight-knit families that enable knowledge to be passed down through generations. On the other side, we have Team Foes …

[CLIP: Audience clapping]

Who point to instances of orcas displaying tyrannical behavior in their hunting and often fatal play. They argue that the ruthless nature of these apex predators has earned them a darker reputation.

 

The game is simple: while our scientists won’t be taking sides, they’ll help us untangle the orcas’ behavioral track record to evaluate the true nature of these creatures and how we relate to them. Representing them, we have Robert Pitman of the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University …

Robert Pitman: My name is Bob Pitman.

Leong: … and Michael Weiss of the Center for Whale Research.

Michael Weiss: Yeah, they’re just the coolest. 

Leong: Up first …

Leong: Team Friends!

[CLIP: Bell dinging three times]

[CLIP: Orca calls]

Leong: We’ll start with a story from Bob. While surveying some whales out in Antarctica …

Pitman: I was wondering, “Gosh, I wonder if these killer whales even know we’re here.” So I made a snowball and threw it at one because they’re swimming by, right in front of us, you know, six feet away in some cases.

 

Leong: The snow, he says, was so hard and dry that he could barely make a snowball out of it. So he threw it, and when it hit, it just kind of turned to powder.

Pitman: And I didn’t think this adult female even knew what happened. But she stopped instantly and kind of gave a little shudder and then sank, and I thought that was going to be it. 

But a piece of ice about the size of a basketball started moving through the still ice and came out into the middle of the channel.

And then the same killer whale came up right next to it, and she bent her head down and flicked this piece of ice into the air. And she did this for about 10 minutes.

And, you know, to this day, I have to believe I taught a killer whale how to throw a snowball.

 

Leong: Orcas are a lot like us. They’re ridiculously smart and have an incredible capacity for social learning. They have a similar life span and reproductive life and social structures. Interestingly, they also have social trends, just like us, that can be seen as the equivalent of pickleball or cold brew.

Weiss: I think the biggest parallel is they are a cosmopolitan top predator …

Leong: That’s Michael.

Weiss: … that uses culture and social information to adapt to a huge variety of ecosystems, which is exactly what we’ve done in our evolutionary history.

Leong: In the late 1980s, for example, an orca in Puget Sound was seen swimming around with dead salmon on its head. Then other teen orcas started doing the same thing, and it became known to scientists as the “salmon hat” fad, a fashionable summer trend that lasted all of six weeks.

The fad this summer in British Columbia was playing with crab traps. Off the Iberian Peninsula, though, the trend of sinking boats seems to be sticking around with enduring popularity. Just this month another boat succumbed to a similar fate after being attacked.

 

Weiss: I think they are like teenagers looking for something to do with their day off.

Leong: Killer whales also live in highly complex social groups where mothers teach their kids everything they need to know. Moms who go off hunting will drop their babies off to roll around in patches of kelp like they’re at an orca day care—which is just adorable. Both male and female calves stay with their mom their whole life.

And it’s hard to overstate how strong these bonds are.

Weiss: J35 is, I think, is special to all of us. She had a, a few years ago, she had a calf that died really soon after being born. We got a report that there was a new calf with her, and that was about an hour before we actually got on scene, and by the time we got there, the calf was gone. 

 

And she then carried that calf around for 17 days. She kind of switched between carrying it around on her rostrum, so having it kind of draped over her rostrum, and also, you know, having a pectoral flipper or the fluke, kind of gently, gingerly held in her mouth.

[CLIP: Music]

Weiss: I try to avoid using the human, um, terms. I think she had lost something. Uh, you know, she had experienced a loss and for whatever internal reason was not ready to let go of the thing, like, literally let go of the thing she had lost.

Leong: Wow, yeah. Their intricate social structures and their deep relationships with their family members—their ability to learn and play and experience, well, not joy and loss exactly, or we’ll never know, but something akin to it—that’s really beautiful.

But now we’re going to get into the awful stuff that might be harder to get behind. It’s time for Team Foes.

 

[CLIP: Bell dinging three times]

[CLIP: Orca call]

Leong: We’ll start with a story from Robert again, but we’re rewinding the clock all the way to when he was a young biologist in the early 1990s,, long before he saw an orca throw a snowball in Antarctica. This is the first encounter that got him interested in studying orcas to begin with.

So it was early one morning off the Californian coast, and Pitman was conducting a marine survey.

Pitman: We hadn’t quite started ’cause it was a little dark outside.

Leong: But then people on the bridge called down and said that there was a group of about 35 killer whales attacking a small pod of sperm whales.

 

Pitman: So we put down our coffees, ran upstairs and, uh …

Leong: What he saw was this: the sperm whales formed a sort of wagon wheel with each of their heads pointed inward while each of their tails slapped at the killer whales encircling them. 

Pitman: The sperm whales would form a defensive rosette. And this was pretty effective for quite a while, but eventually the killer whales started dragging members out. Then they would all attack that one individual.

Leong: So basically they’d corner one, pull it out of formation and literally gang up on it like school bullies.

Pitman: And then other sperm whales would come out and surround the one that was pulled out and take it back into the formation.

 

Leong: You probably feel bad for the sperm whales right about now. But sperm whales are far from the only victims here. 

Weiss: Occasionally they’ll just find a harbor porpoise and chase it down and play with it until it’s dead.

Leong: That’s Michael again.

Weiss: These marine mammals they’re harassing don’t even eat the same thing they do, so it’s not like it’s a competition thing. They’re just kind of being dicks.

Leong: In the Salish Sea in Washington State and British Columbia, orcas play a deadly game of throwing and catching live porpoises like a ball with each other for up to five hours—injuring, traumatizing and often killing the animal. But there’s zero record of them ever eating it. Pitman has seen stuff like this, too.

 

Pitman: In Antarctica, [they’ll attack] penguins—they’ll chase them around for a while and knock them out of the water a few times and then just swim off. 

Leong (tape): And then don’t even eat the penguin?

Pitman: Oh yeah. Quite often, they will kill stuff and not eat it.

Leong: Other times Pitman has found penguin carcasses with just the breast meat ripped off. Killer whales are picky eaters with preferred cuts of meat. They’ve also developed a horrifying liking for whale tongue.

Pitman: And that’s all that they’ll eat and just let the rest of the carcass drift ashore.

Leong: And when hunting large sharks, they’ve learned to bonk them on the head to confuse them and then flip them over, causing something called tonic immobility to happen where the shark can’t move. Then …

 

Pitman: Somehow slit them open and suck the livers out of them.

Leong: Ugh! And there’s more. In Western Australia killer whales are known to intercept pods of migrating humpback whales. Humpback whales are much larger—about eight times larger—and so they target specifically the baby humpbacks.

Pitman: If they have inexperienced mothers, the killer whales can come in and take a calf in less than a minute. One killer whale will zoom in front of the mother and distract her for a second, and one will come from behind and grab the calf, and off they go.

Leong: The big male killer whale will hold the baby humpback by its tail and herd it away from its mom.

Pitman: And they want to get away from the mother because, uh, she gets a little distraught.

 

Leong: And then this is when they ram it from below.

Pitman: And that will kill it.

Leong: And after all of that, they’ll eat its tongue and leave the rest to the ocean.

Leong (tape): By the way, do you call them orcas or killer whales? Or are they kind of interchangeable?

Pitman: Yeah, they are. Weekend whale watchers tend to prefer the term “orca” because it seems less negative. But as it turns out, orca means roughly, “whale from hell” anyway. So it’s not a whole lot of difference, just sounds different.

Leong: So that’s where we are with Team Foes. I think, for me, what really solidifies the orcas’ bad rap in these stories is how they go for the underdog. Like, they gang up on these weaker animals often just for the thrill of it.

 

Pitman: You know, we’re biologists and not supposed to be taking sides on any of this stuff, but it was an emotional whipsaw because we were pulling for the attackers, but we were also pulling for the prey.

Leong: But here, I think, we get into the tricky question of whether animals are only sympathetic and lovable when we see parts of ourselves in them—or only when we see the best, most virtuous parts of humanity in them.

Weiss: There’s the whole issue of measuring intelligence and the fact that we’re naturally biased towards measuring types of intelligence that line up with our type of intelligence …

Leong: Or our ideas of culture and social hierarchy. Like, wow, it’s so beautiful that orcas live in these matrilineal societies where moms make personal sacrifices to protect their young—that’s heroic and admirable because it maps onto values that we, at least in Western society, hold. And on the flip side, do we see these animals as bullies because we’re projecting our value systems on them again, and something in our brain just so naturally wants us to sympathize with the underdog and loathe the predator?

 

Pitman: In fact, I’ve worked with a number of natural history film crews and stuff and, you know, they’re not happy when the killer whales are successful. They like the ones where the prey escapes. They like a good tussel but they like the ones where the calf gets away. You know, it’s giving people what they want, I guess. 

Leong: I think the more you think about it, the more the two camps start to blur a little. The dichotomy is anthropocentric. It’s not orcas’ fault that they’re apex predators and are very good at it.

Pitman: Yes, you know, there’s very few predators in the world that hunt prey larger than they are. And for the most part, those are pack hunters. Killer whales can do this because they hunt cooperatively, and the reason that they can hunt cooperatively is because they’re all related. They’re helping their kid.

Leong: They hunt the way they do because they’re so communal and social. For example, there are whales in Antarctica that have developed a method for working together as a team to generate a wave to push seals off ice flows and then eat them. That’s not something a whale could’ve learned individually. One whale probably figured out they could make a wave, they recruited other whales to help, and then they’ve passed on this technique. What might seem like gang behavior to us might actually just represent these whales being smart about their hunting techniques.

 

Weiss: I have all these feelings about these whales. And all these thoughts about them. And I try to remind myself that it’s essentially a parasocial relationship, that I am essentially watching their lives, and the way I feel about their lives is largely about me.

They’re not, they’re not us. They’re not people. They’ve got layers. They’ve got depth to them. That kind of goes with the territory of being intelligent, cultural animals.

Leong: So there you have it, folks! We’ve reached the end of our one-time and one-time-only game show Orcas: Friends or Foes?

 

Catch us next time for our regular programming on Science, Quickly, produced by Jeff DelViscio, Tulika Bose, Kelso Harper and me, Carin Leong. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith.

What Better Gift for the Holidays Than a Monstrous Mystery?

 

Jeff DelViscio: Hi, Science, Quickly listeners. This is Jeff DelViscio, executive producer of the show.

 

Well, it’s the end of the year, and the whole team is taking a moment to look back at some of our favorite shows from 2023. 

My pick has all the elements of perfect podcast–it’s got monsters the size of small airplanes, a discovery hiding (for three decades) in plain site, and the words: “passerine peep show.” 

It comes from host Flora Lichtman and it’s also the start of an epic 4-part mini-series filled with creatures built like tanks and axe murderers. 

Basically a little thrill to add to your holiday chill. 

Enjoy, and see you next year! And happy holidays everybody. 

—

This Episode originally aired on May 31, 2023. You can listen to the entire 4-part series on “monster birds” here.

Flora Lichtman: You are listening to Scientific American’s Science, Quickly, and I’m Flora Lichtman.

 

This week I want to take you bird-watching. But I’m not talking about an ordinary passerine peep show. We’re skipping the songbirds.

[CLIP: North American Cardinal sound]

Lichtman: It’s a no fly zone for hawks and raptors.

[CLIP: Red-shouldered Hawk sound]

Lichtman: Waterfowl? Throw in the towel. 

[CLIP: Duck sound]

[Music]

The birds we’re gonna meet, they’re not like anything you’ve ever peeped.

Federico Degrange: They used the beak as an axe to kill prey.

Lichtman (tape): Oh, my God. 

Daniel Ksepka: So just imagine the largest thing you’ve ever seen alive flying.

James Hansford: They are colossal. Around 1,900 pounds. 

Alicia Grealy: The eggs would have been about 150 times the size of chicken egg.

Ksepka: So we’re maybe talking like almost two feet for feathers, which is—that’s a big feather.

Anusuya Chinsamy-Turan: Most people, you know, think ostrich— and they think that’s big. But actually they were real giants around at one time.

Lichtman: We are talking about birds that weighed as much as a sports car, birds who were the top predators of their day—prowling the jungle and devouring animals the size of small horses—birds so gargantuan that you could mistake them for an airplane. 

 

And yet these birds have kinda flown under the radar of paleontology—at least compared with many dinosaurs. These winged whoppers are mysterious, and scientists are learning more about them every day.

For the next four episodes of Science, Quickly, I’m going to introduce you to them. We’re hunting for the most extreme birds to ever live. Welcome to part one of a four-part Fascination on the real big birds.

I want you to meet one of our guides.

Ksepka: My name is Daniel Ksepka.

Lichtman: Dan is an avian paleontologist. 

Ksepka: And I am the curator of science at the Bruce Museum.

Lichtman (tape): What’s your relationship to big extinct birds?

Ksepka: I love them, and they love me.

[CLIP: Ocean shore sounds] 

Lichtman: Okay, I want you to just close your eyes. Dan is going to set the scene for the first monster we’re going to meet.

 

Ksepka: Imagine you’re standing in South Carolina 27 million years ago. You’re looking out over the—over the sea.

[CLIP: Wind sound]

Ksepka: It’s rough waves.

[CLIP: Wave sound]

Ksepka: And then, just hanging in the air, you know, blocking out the sun…, the largest thing you’ve ever seen alive flying, like a double albatross—like this wingspan of 20 feet. So that is pretty magnificent. It flies over you. It’s probably like the moment of your whole lifetime, you know—the wonder of seeing that.

Lichtman: This bird is called Pelagornis sandersi. It doesn’t have a common name.

Ksepka: Oh, I just call it Pelagornis. I don’t call it, like, Bobby or anything.

 

Lichtman: Dan was the first to scientifically describe the fossil. And we’ll get to why he named it P. sandersi in a minute. That story starts when this fossil flew into his life, out of the blue.

Ksepka: Pelagornis was totally an accident of, like, luck and fortune. 

Lichtman: Dan didn’t find the fossil. It had been excavated in South Carolina back in the 1980s—long before Dan ever laid eyes on it.

Ksepka: They were doing excavations at, like, Charleston Airport, and someone hit some bones with, you know, some kind of digging equipment. And they stopped the work. 

Lichtman: And called in some backup: the late Al Sanders, a paleontologist at the local Charleston Museum.

Ksepka: And he came down there with a team, and they collected it. And then, you know, I would have thought that anyone who found this would stop dead in their tracks and make it their priority because it was, like, you know, the largest flying bird ever. 

 

Lichtman: At least that’s what an avian paleontologist would have done. But Al Sanders was more of a whale fossil guy. So he brought the fossil back to the museum and tucked it away.

Ksepka: And Al just had it in a drawer in the bottom of this, like, cabinet in the museum.

Lichtman: And it sat there for about 30 years. Then one day Al told Dan about the bones. And Dan wasn’t expecting much.

Ksepka: And, yeah, I wasn’t expecting to see, like, the largest bird ever in a drawer when I went down there. I would have been happy with, like, a duck or something. 

[Music]

Lichtman: Sitting in that drawer collecting dust was a roughly 27-million-year-old fossil that didn’t look like anything Dan had ever seen before.

Ksepka: I just took the wing bone out and put it on the floor and laid down next to it and took a picture with my cell phone because it was longer than my whole arm—one of the three bones. 

 

Lichtman: Dan named it Pelagornis sandersi in honor of Al Sanders, the unknowing keeper of this truly massive discovery. Dan set out to understand all he could about this bird. And he found the bird’s 20-foot wingspan wasn’t the only astonishing thing about it. The bird wasn’t just big. It was bizarre.

Ksepka: I couldn’t believe the skull. It doesn’t look anything like a bird. It just almost looks like a small alligator.

Lichtman: Its foot-and-a-half-long beak was packed with chompers.

Ksepka: They have these, these false teeth.

Lichtman: Not dentures. They’re false in that they’re not made of what our teeth are made of: dentin and enamel. But they still have bite. 

Ksepka: They’re actually projections of bone. So they’re little spikes of bone, and they alternate in size. So there’s, like, a small and a medium and a large in sequence, and they undulate in that pattern.

Lichtman: And they were probably great for piercing and holding slippery stuff …

 

Ksepka: So, like, something like a fish or a squid that would be very good to grasp onto. 

Lichtman: Beside the fishy fake teeth, the bird’s shoulder bones were also strange. The bird’s shoulder blades were teeny tiny. And the shoulder joint and the bone that attaches to it had an unusual shape.

Ksepka: It just doesn’t look like it could really rotate in the same way a normal bird can. 

And so this bird may not have really been able to lift its wing, like, above, you know, the level of its back. And so it’s not flapping like a gull. It’s not flapping like a songbird.

Lichtman: Picture a cardinal getting off the ground, pushing its wings up and down, fast and hard. This behemoth likely just spread its 20-foot wings and let the wind do the work.

 

Ksepka: It’s like a giant kite. And so it probably got into the air, either from facing into the wind, maybe giving a little awkward running start, maybe using elevation to its advantage …

Lichtman: And once this bird was aloft, Dan said it could probably soar for great distances.

Ksepka: I wouldn’t be surprised if, you know, Pelagornis could just cross the Atlantic and, you know, stop over in Africa or Europe and then come back as part of its seasonal migration.  

Lichtman: This species, Pelagornis sandersi, has only been found in Charleston, but its relatives—others birds in this fake tooth flock—show up all over. 

Ksepka: They are everywhere throughout the world. We found fossils in Antarctica, New Zealand and Washington and Oregon, in Europe, in Africa, in South America. They’re literally known from every continent.

 

[Music]

Lichtman: Between the huge size and the take teeth, Pelagornis might be one of the weirdest birds in Earth’s history. And the thought that flies into my head is: How did this bird come to be? Dan thinks the appearance of this group – the pelagornithids – may have to do with the disappearance of other strange, giant flying creatures. 

Ksepka: So in the case of pelagornithids, this particular role would be filled by flying reptiles in the Cretaceous period. Some of those species would be far larger even than Pelagornis, and they die out in the same extinction event that kills off the nonavian dinosaurs, and that allows a new group to maybe explore the very large flying animal role. And pelagornithids are the first group that seizes that. 

 

Lichtman: They swooped into an open niche. And I heard the same thing from many of the big bird researchers I talked to for this series—that these giant birds trundled onto the scene in part because the mass extinction cleared the competition. And that didn’t just mean dinosaurs; other reptiles and early birds went extinct, too. So the survivors had access to resources and ecosystems that weren’t available before.

I’ve heard a lot about the mammalian radiation over the years—that mammals had their heyday when dinos disappeared. But in a post-dinosaur world, birds also spread their wings and speciated.

Ksepka: There is a spectacular radiation of birds happening in the first few million years after that mass extinction. So the modern birds’ ancestors have the chance to explore arboreal habitats or predatory habitats or aquatic habitats kind of for the first time. And they really—they go a little bit wild. 

Lichtman: Pelagornis is just the beginning. We’ve got more wild birds to meet in the next few episodes: birds that rose like a phoenix after the dinosaurs went extinct and became unlike any birds still alive today.

 

Ksepka: So, like, elephant birds, may have been the largest bird that ever lived.

Alicia Grealy: Yeah, so some could have been up to 1,000 kilos, which is a ton. I mean that’s why they’re called elephant birds, right? 

Lichtman: That’s on the next episode of this four-part Science, Quickly Fascination on really big birds.

Our show is produced by Jeff DelViscio, Tulika Bose and Kelso Harper. The theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. 

Don’t forget to subscribe to Science, Quickly wherever you get your podcasts. Head over to ScientificAmerican.com for in-depth science news.

For Science, Quickly—I’m Flora Lichtman.

How to Avoid Holiday Hangovers

Tanya Lewis: Hi, this is Your Health, Quickly, a Scientific American podcast series!

Josh Fischman: We bring you the latest vital health news: Discoveries that affect your body and your mind.  

 

Lewis: And we break down the medical research to help you stay healthy. I’m Tanya Lewis.

Fischman: And I’m Josh Fischman.

Lewis: We’re Scientific American’s senior health editors. 

[music]

Fischman: On today’s show, we’re doing a special holiday edition on drinking. The holidays are filled with alcoholic delights, but too much of a good thing can lead to regret. We are here to share some science-backed tips for imbibing more safely.

[Clip: Show theme music]

[Glass clinking]

Lewis: Cheers! 

Fischman: Chun! That’s what all the cool kids in Korea are doing now. Chun. That is the sound of a lovely Josh cabernet, one of my go-to drinks. Not just cause it’s my name. It’s actually really good. Not a product endorsement. 

 

[glass clinking]

Lewis: That was a clink of my gin and tonic, which is my — one of my go-to drinks. 

Fischman: What is your gin of choice? 

Lewis: It’s British gin. I didn’t want to open a whole bottle of wine for myself, so I decided to make myself a gin and tonic. 

Fischman: People think of gin and tonics as Summer drinks — but they’re pretty good, December-ish, too! 

Lewis: Yeah! Good year-round.

Fischman: I enjoy a raising a glass for the holidays! For me, much as I enjoy these things, lately I’ve been noticing that the levels in my bottles are going down faster than they used to — and honestly that’s a bit unsettling. Actually I’m trying to cut back — I’m planning on this coming year to have a dry January. 

Lewis: That’s a good idea. I’ve actually been cutting back myself, often substituting a non-alcoholic beer or “mocktail” for a glass of wine with dinner. But I still enjoy a real drink from time to time, especially on special occasions like holiday dinners or parties.

Fischman: That seems reasonable—we all need to celebrate sometimes! We just want to do that safely.

Lewis: Exactly. And the holidays really can be a risky time for drinking.

Meghan Bartels: Some research has shown that people drink as much as twice as much as their usual amount between Thanksgiving and New Year’s.

Lewis: That’s our colleague Meghan Bartels, a news reporter at Scientific American. She’s writing a story about the science behind holiday drinking, and how to avoid the worst effects. One question I had for her was, do some kinds of alcohol get you drunker than others?

 

Bartels: Afraid not—not really beyond, like, more alcohol in the drink means you’ll get drunker. But really, it’s not nearly as simple as like, “oh, tequila gets me drunk so fast,” or something like that. It’s really all about the amount of alcohol that you consume, and how quickly, and then other factors like how much water you’ve had, how much food you’ve had, that sort of effect how quickly your body processes it.

Fischman: So, the amount of alcohol in an Old Fashioned isn’t more likely to get me drunk than the equivalent amount of alcohol in beer or wine?

Lewis: Right—it’s really more about the amount and speed you drink. But there are some other factors that could make you get drunk more quickly.

Bartels: There’s a little bit of evidence that, like, maybe carbonation speeds up alcohol absorption and sugar slows it down. But that evidence is really weak. 

Fischman: But is there something about the environment where you’re drinking that could make you want to indulge more? Like, at an office holiday party, for example?

Lewis: Yeah that’s a great point. And Meghan did mention that the context in which you drink could affect your likelihood of being drunk – or hammered, smashed, three sheets to the wind.

 

Fischman: I have seen people three sheets to the wind and at that point they’re usually leaning over the rail, pretty uncomfortable. 

Bartels: Maybe if you only have champagne at New Year’s, it feels like a special thing to you and you don’t drink it as quickly, and then it won’t make you very drunk. Or if, for example, you’re drinking a really sweet cocktail, the sweetness masks the taste of alcohol, you might drink it really fast and get really drunk.

Lewis: Well speaking from personal experience, champagne makes me tipsy a lot faster than other drinks—maybe because it tastes so light and bubbly and you almost forget you’re drinking alcohol!

Fischman: Personally, I get no kick from champagne. Song reference there. But what about the consequences of drinking too much—do we know what causes hangovers?

 

Bartels: A headache is definitely a big component of a hangover. And that’s really tied with dehydration. When it comes to alcohol, alcohol really dries you out fast. That’s a big piece of it. But the exact components, the exact mechanisms, that’s all pretty hazy, actually.

Lewis: Apparently there’s a small percentage of the population—about 10 percent—that never gets headaches from drinking.

Fischman: You’re kidding. That must be nice.

Lewis: Yeah, right? But in general, there’s not a ton of research on hangovers in part because they’re just not as big of a problem for society as intoxication itself is. And it’s not like it’s easy to get funding and recruit people for a study where you make them drink to the point that they’ll get a hangover.

Bartels: I don’t think I would sign up for that study. And the other thing is like when someone comes into an emergency room or something after drinking, you can measure their blood alcohol content. But when someone’s hungover, you can ask them how much they drank, but you don’t know if that’s accurate. So it’s trickier methodologically

 

Fischman: Given that hangovers are a reality, is there a way to cure them? I’ve heard of all kinds of strange things like “hair of the dog”—whatever that is—

Lewis: …basically drinking more alcohol.

Fischman: …or eating greasy food. That’s another one I’ve heard. Do any of those help?

Lewis: Unfortunately hangover cures don’t really work, so your best bet is to try to prevent them from happening in the first place.

Bartels: The best things to do are to eat beforehand, and then to stay hydrated throughout the night. So some people will talk about like having an alcoholic drink and then having a glass of water and alternating back and forth and that can reduce your odds of the hangover, for sure.

Lewis: Eating before drinking is definitely the best. But even after drinking, I often find myself craving salty, greasy food. That may be because it replenishes electrolytes, since alcohol makes you pee them out. As for “hair of the dog,” well…

 

Bartels: I mean, I guess maybe in the short run, it’ll help a little bit because the problem with a hangover is that it’s basically withdrawal from alcohol. So if you’re drinking, then you’re sort of reversing that withdrawal, but you’re just postponing the inevitable—you’re still gonna feel bad, it’ll just be later.

Fischman: So, no quick fixes, then.

Lewis: No, unfortunately not.

Fischman: Okay, so, drinking too much alcohol will give you a hangover. But also even moderate drinking can be bad for you, as our Science of Health columnist Lydia Denworth has written.

Lewis: That’s right. There’s been a growing recognition in recent years that moderate drinking—often defined as two drinks a day for men and one drink a day for women—can increase your risk of serious health problems down the road.

Bartels: ​​Now there’s a much higher appreciation for just how dangerous alcohol is—how much it increases your risk of cancers, how much it can take off your life expectancy. And so now doctors and scientists are really shifting to this idea of, like, each drink can have this negative impact even if you’re not experiencing a hangover, even if you’re not experiencing intoxication. 

 

Fischman: And on that note, folks, enjoy the holidays!

Lewis: Haha. I mean it is a downer—much like alcohol itself. But drinking is just one of many risks people take every day. So we all have to find our own comfort level around how much risk is acceptable.

Fischman: Personally, I’m planning to enjoy a little bit of holiday spirit this year. But just a little.

Lewis: Well, glad you’re going to give moderation a shot.

[Clink] 

[CLIP: Show music]

Fischman: Your Health, Quickly is produced by Tulika Bose, Jeff DelViscio, Kelso Harper, Carin Leong, and by us. It’s edited by Elah Feder and Alexa Lim. Our music is composed by Dominic Smith.

 

Lewis: Our show is a part of Scientific American’s podcast, Science, Quickly. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. If you like the show, give us a rating or review! And if you have a topic you want us to cover, you can email us at Yourhealthquickly@sciam.com. That’s your health quickly at S-C-I-A-M dot com.

For Your Health Quickly, I’m Tanya Lewis.

Fischman:  And I’m Josh Fischman.

Lewis: See you in dry January!

[The above has been a transcript of this podcast.]

 

Podcasts of the Year: Talking to Animals with Artificial Intelligence

Kelso Harper: Hey, science nerds! This is Kelso Harper, one of the producers of Science, Quickly.

This week we’re looking back at some of our favorite episodes of the year. I chose one that features Sophie Bushwick, our beloved and recently departed technology editor. Don’t worry, she’s fine; she’s just going to be a senior news editor at New Scientist, which is awesome, but we’re really gonna miss her.

 

I had so much fun recording this episode with Sophie. She told me all about how scientists are actually beginning to decode animal communication using artificial intelligence—like, what? Our conversation genuinely blew my mind, and I hope you enjoy it, too. 

You’re listening to Science, Quickly.

[CLIP: Bird songs]

Kelso Harper: Have you ever wondered what songbirds are actually saying to each other with all of their chirping? 

Sophie Bushwick: Or what your cat could possibly be yowling about so early in the morning?

[CLIP: Cat meowing]

Harper: Well, powerful new technologies are helping researchers decode animal communication. And even begin to talk back to nonhumans.

Bushwick: Advanced sensors and artificial intelligence might have us at the brink of interspecies communication.

[CLIP: Show theme music]

Harper: Today, we’re talking about how scientists are starting to communicate with creatures like bats and honeybees and how these conversations are forcing us to rethink our relationship with other species. I’m Kelso Harper, multimedia editor at Scientific American.

 

Bushwick: And I’m Sophie Bushwick, tech editor.

Harper: You’re listening to Science, Quickly. Hey, Sophie.

Bushwick: Hi, Kelso.

Harper: So you recently chatted with the author of a new book called, “The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology is Bringing us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants.”

Bushwick: Yeah, I had a great conversation with Karen Bakker, a professor at the University of British Columbia and a fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Her book explores how researchers are leveraging new tech to understand animal communication even in the burgeoning field of digital bioacoustics.

Harper: Digital bioacoustics. Huh. So what does that actually look like? Are we trying to make animals talk like humans using translation collars like in the movie Up?

[CLIP: From Walt Disney’s Up]

Doug the Dog: My name is Doug. My master made me this caller so that I may talk squirrel.

Bushwick: Not quite, but that is similar to how researchers first started trying to communicate with animals in the seventies and eighties, which is to say they attempted to teach the animals human language. But many scientists today have moved away from this human centric approach, and instead they want to understand animal communication on its own terms.

 

Harper: So instead of trying to teach birds to speak English, we’re deciphering what they’re already saying to each other in birdish or birdese.

Bushwick: Right, exactly. This new field of digital bioacoustics uses portable field recorders that are like mini microphones you can put pretty much anywhere–in trees, on mountaintops, even on the backs of whales and birds.

They record sound 24/7 and create oodles of data, which is where artificial intelligence comes in. Researchers can apply natural language processing algorithms like the ones used by Google translate to detect patterns in these recordings and begin to decode what animals might be saying to each other.

Harper: Wow, that is wild. So what have scientists learned from this so far?

Bushwick: One of the examples Karen gives in her book is about Egyptian fruit bats. A researcher named Yossi Yovel recorded audio and video of nearly two dozen bats for two and a half months. His team adapted a voice recognition program to analyze 15,000 of the sounds, and then the algorithm correlated specific sounds to certain social interactions in the videos, like fighting over food or jockeying for sleeping positions.

 

So this research, combined with some other related studies, has revealed that bats are capable of complex communication.

Harper: All I remember being taught was that bats make high-pitched sounds to echolocate as they fly around, but it sounds like there’s a lot more to it than that.

Bushwick: Yes, definitely. We’ve learned that bats have what are known as signature calls which act like individual names.

Harper: Whoa.

Bushwick: And they distinguish between sexes when they communicate with each other.

Harper: What?

Bushwick: They have dialects. They argue over food and sleeping positions. They socially distance when they’re ill.

Harper: Are you serious?

 

Bushwick: Yeah. They’re better at it in some ways than we are. So one of the coolest things is that bat mothers use their own version of motherese with their young.

So when humans talk to cute little babies, we use motherese. We raise our pitch, you know, like, oh, what a cute little sweet potato. And bats also use a special tone to talk to their young, but they lower their pitch instead…oh, what a cute little sweet potato.

This makes the bat babies babble back, and it might help them learn specific words or referential sounds the same way that motherese helps human babies acquire language.

Harper: That is bonkers. Or I don’t know. Is it? Do I just think it is because I’ve been cotton the trap of thinking that humans are somehow completely different from other animals and we have a, I don’t know, uniquely sophisticated way of communicating. Are we learning that we might not be quite as special as we thought?

 

Bushwick: Kind of, yeah. This work is raising a lot of important philosophical questions and ethical ones, too. For a long time, philosophers said we would never be able to determine if animals can be said to have language, let alone be able to decipher or speak it. But these new technologies have really changed the game.

One thing that Karen said during our interview is that we can’t talk to bats, but our computers can.

You and I can’t hear, let alone keep up with the fast, high-pitched communication between bats. And we certainly can’t speak it ourselves, but electronic sensors and speakers can.

And with artificial intelligence, we can begin to trace patterns in animal communication that we never could before.

People still debate the question of if we can call it animal language, but it’s becoming clear that animals have much more complex ways of communicating than we thought before.

Harper: Apparently. What other examples of this can you find in the book?

 

Bushwick: Karen also told me the story of a bee researcher named Tim Landgraf. So honeybee communication—very different from our own. They use not just sounds but also the movements of their bodies to speak. So have you heard of the famed waggle dance?

Harper: Yeah. Is that the one where the bees shake their fuzzy little butts in different directions? Or explain where to find nectar?

Bushwick: That’s the one. But the waggle dance is just one form of honeybee communication. Landgraf and his team used a combination of natural language processing. Like in the bat study and computer vision, which analyzes imagery, to decipher both the sounds and the wiggles of bee chatter. They’re now able to track individual bees and predict the impact of what one bee says to another.

Harper: That is so cool.

Bushwick: Yeah, they have all sorts of specific signals that the researchers have given these funny names. So bees toot [CLIP: Bee toot sound] and quack [CLIP: Bee quack sound] for they have a whooping sound for danger [CLIP: Bee whooping sound]. Piping signals related to swarming [CLIP: Bee piping sound], and they use a hush or stop signal to get the hive to quiet down [CLIP: Bee hush sound].

 

Harper: Wow. I love the image of a quacking bee.

Bushwick: Landgraf’s next step was to encode what they learned into a robotic bee, which he called—drum roll, please—Robobee.

Harper: Classic.

Bushwick: After seven or eight prototypes, they had a robobee that could actually go into a hive, and then it would emit commands like the stop signal and the bees would obey.

Harper: That is bananas. Just one step closer to the very science based world of B-movie.

Bushwick: The height of cinematic achievement.

[CLIP: From DreamWorks Animation’s Bee Movie] 

Bee: I gotta say something. You like jazz?

Harper: Oh, well, before we wrap up, is there anything else from your conversation with Karen that you’d like to add?

 

Bushwick: I’d love to end on one quote from her. She said, The invention of digital bioacoustics is analogous to the invention of the microscope.

Harper: Wow.

Bushwick: The microscope opened up an entire new world to us and laid the foundation for countless scientific breakthroughs visually. And that’s what digital bioacoustics is doing with audio for the study of animal communication. Karen says it’s like a, “planetary scale hearing aid that enables us to listen anew with both our prosthetically enhanced ears and our imagination.”

Harper: What a great analogy.

Bushwick: Yeah, it’ll be really interesting to see where the research goes from here and how it might change the way we think about the so-called divide between humans and non-humans.

 

Harper: Yeah, I’m already questioning everything I thought I knew. Well, Sophie, thank you so much for sharing all of this with us.

Bushwick: Squeak, squeak, buzz, buzz, my friends.

Harper: And the buzz, buzz, right back to you.

If you’re still curious, you can read more about this on our site and Sophie’s Q&A with Karen Bakker. And of course, in Karen’s new book, The Sounds of Life. Thanks for tuning in to Science, Quickly. This podcast is produced by Jeff DelViscio, Tulika Bose, and me, Kelso Harper. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith.

Special thanks today to Martin Bencsik of Nottingham Trent University and James Nieh at the University of California, San Diego, for providing excellent examples of honeybee toots and quacks and woops.

Bushwick: Don’t forget to subscribe. And for more in-depth science news features, podcasts and videos, head to ScientificAmerican.com. For Scientific American‘s Science, Quickly. I’m Sophie Bushwick.

 

Harper: And I’m Kelso Harper. See you next time.

Harper: I’m so excited. Also, I will be turning your “boo-boo ba-ba sweet potato” into [lowers pitch] “boo-boo ba-ba sweet potato.”

Bushwick: Yes. That’s all I wanted.

 

Podcasts of the Year: Cleo, the Mysterious Math Menace

Bose: Hello fellow math nerds! This is Tulika Bose, Senior Multimedia Editor at Scientific American. If you miss that famous Scientific American Martin Gardner column from the 1950’s — never fear, we have some great mathematical content coming your way in the New Year. 

But for now, I’d like to leave you with one of my favorite stories from this last year, hosted and edited by the incredibly talented Allison Parshall. It tracks the story of Cleo, a mysterious user on a Math stack exchange known for unleashing a series of rapid fire drive-by- answers on the forum without showing any of her work. Between 2013 and 2015 — the user named Cleo did this about 37 times, driving everyone with STEM degrees a little, well wild. But who was Cleo? 

 

Anthony Bonato: It’s a bit of an urban legend in mathematics. There’s a sort of a romance to the story, in a way.

Allison Parshall: I’m Allison Parshall, and you’re listening to Science, Quickly. Today we’ve got an episode about a mysterious figure in the online math world. They disappeared years ago but are still sparking debate and speculation.

[CLIP: Show theme music]

Parshall: We all love a good puzzle. Some people have their crosswords. Some people play Sudoku. Other people are still doing Wordle.

But Ron Gordon, a patent agent and former physicist in Massachusetts, does hardcore calculus. Back in 2013, when our story takes place, he spent enough time on this online forum called Math Stack Exchange that it could have qualified as a full-time job.

 

Gordon: I was working my full- time job, and then I was on Stack Exchange. Plus, I had a family, too. I was having so much fun with it that I just didn’t even keep track of how many hours I was dedicating to it.

Parshall: The Mathematics Stack Exchange website is like Yahoo Answers, if the people on Yahoo Answers had graduate-level STEM degrees.

Now Ron has solved 2,954 math problems in his decade on Stack Exchange, but he’s most famous for his answer to one integral in particular. On November 11, 2013, a Stack Exchange user asked a question:

“I need help with this integral: the integral from negative one to one of one over x times the square root of one plus x over one minus x times the natural log of 2x squared plus 2x plus one, all divided by 2x squared minus 2x plus one, dx.”

Jay Cummings: Okay, that’s a crazy integral. And there are so many parts to it that, you know, one thing changes, any one of these one thing changes, and the answer is completely different. 

Parshall: That’s Jay Cummings. He’s an associate professor of math at California State University, Sacramento. I’ve enlisted his help to figure out what the heck I’m looking at.

As much as solving integrals has haunted my nightmares since Calc II, the idea of an integral is actually pretty simple. Picture a line on a graph. Now imagine taking a colored pencil and shading in the area beneath that line, down to the bottom axis of the graph.

What we’re trying to find is the area of this colored region. For a straight line, this is super easy—it’s basic geometry. But the more complicated and curvy and weird your line gets, the more difficult it is to figure out the area underneath it. Now the integral in the November 11, 2013, post—that was difficult. The line on the graph looks like the spine of a long-necked dinosaur.

 

The original poster tried using a few computer programs, but none of them could give what’s called the “closed form” of the answer—that’s a precise and concise solution. Five minutes after it was posted, someone commented:

“Do you have any reason to believe there is a closed form for that horrid-looking thing?”

Gordon: And that was a very good question … because it would save everybody a lot of time if someone said, “This thing is impossible. Forget it. There’s no way.”

Parshall: Then, four and a half hours after the original post, there’s an answer:

“I equals 4 pi times the arccotangent of the square root of the golden ratio.”

The answer came from a user named Cleo. It was a new account with only one previous answer. Cleo provided no notes, no proof, no explanation—just a single hyperlink over the symbol for the golden ratio, which takes you to a definition of the golden ratio. Oof.

 

Cummings: Which is such a ridiculous answer. It’s like you get this sense of “Am I dealing with a supercomputer here, a theorem-prover that has not been released yet? Did ChatGPT start back in 2012 with integral solving?”

Parshall: The Stack Exchange community, which always showed their work, erupted in arguments in the comments section. Here’s one:

“I defer to Hamming: ‘The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.’ Unless the result itself is particularly illuminating, I do not agree that it is an answer.”

Parshall: That last comment came from Ron Gordon, the patent agent and former physicist, who didn’t see a whole lot of value in Cleo’s bare-bones answer.

Gordon: I think at the end of the day, the value of a website like Stack Exchange lies in what knowledge you can impart to people. And I think just the bare answer to the question, by itself, doesn’t have that much value.    

 

But it affected my determination to come up with a final solution for sure. And I spent the better part of a weekend doing it, writing it up. Took me about half a legal pad to work through it.

Parshall: It turns out Cleo had been right. Ron posted the full answer, which immediately started collecting upvotes from community members. A lot of them were in awe of the techniques he’d used to solve the problem. It was eventually posted to the subreddit r/Math under the title “Master of Integration.”

Gordon: It’s insane. This is one thing I did 10 years ago. I think I have better answers in the Stack Exchange world than that one, believe it or not. But yeah, Cleo also, you know, I think hits a nerve, too, obviously.

Parshall: Cleo’s drive-by answer had unleashed madness on Math Stack Exchange. Between 2013 and 2015, she’d go on to do this 37  more times, often popping in unreasonably quickly to solve incredibly complex integration problems with fully formed answers. She did not show even an iota of her work. Then she’d disappear again into the ether.

 

Anthony Bonato Experts really are divided about Cleo. You know, it’s clearly someone who has a real mastery of integration techniques…. Like, she mentions these strange functions, like, I’ve never heard of.

Parshall: That’s Anthony Bonato. He’s a mathematician at Toronto Metropolitan University.

Bonato: Some people have speculated that maybe Cleo is Stephen Hawking—or was Stephen Hawking—or, you know, the late Maryam Mirzakhani, the Fields Medalist.

Parshall: Food for thought, I guess.

Cummings: Or is this, I don’t know, Terence Tao, you know, just relaxing in the evening?

Parshall: For the record, Terence Tao, sometimes described as one of the greatest living mathematicians, confirmed via e-mail that he was not, in fact, Cleo.

Cummings: Or is this a Ramanujan…? Is Cleo another math genius from southern India who just is doing this in their spare time?

 

Parshall: That genius he’s talking about, that’s Srinivasa Ramanujan, one of the most enigmatic figures in mathematics history. You might have heard of him—Dev Patel played him in a 2016 biopic called The Man Who Knew Infinity.

[CLIP: Dev Patel in The Man Who Knew Infinity: “We need proofs of your work.” “But they are right, sir.” “I hadn’t completed that proof; how do you know?” “I just do.”]

Parshall: He was born in Tamil Nadu in 1887, but he comes up a lot when you talk about Cleo.

Cummings: He had this intuitive feel for math that was … frankly awe-inspiring…. He had no advanced math education. And yet, somehow, he came up with these incredible theorems.

Parshall: They seem to have struck the same nerve 100-some years apart.

Cummings: Because he didn’t include proofs. And that was sort of Ramanujan’s gift and curse. I mean, he was so, so talented, but he was never put into the educational box that says, “Here’s how you prove things; this is the path to take in order to do mathematics.” 

 

Gordon: I think a lot of people who just hated being told, “Show your work, show your work, show your work…,” here’s someone flaunting not showing their work, and people are cheering behind that.

Parshall: But for Ron and for so many on Math Stack Exchange, all of the fun of their shared hobby is in showing your work. It’s not a dry explanation—it’s an adventure. Take Ron’s answer to that infamous 2013 integral.

Gordon: By the time I got to where I wanted it, it had like an eighth-degree polynomial in the denominator, which, under normal circumstances, would mean “No, you’re not going to be able to do this.” But it turned out that the polynomial had a lot of symmetry and I could then exploit that symmetry to deduce all the roots. I was able to reduce what I had to find from an eighth-degree polynomial to a quadratic, and from the quadratic, the golden ratio fell out.

 

Parshall: It turned out that Ron’s methods for solving the problem were compelling to a lot of people. His answer has earned almost 1,000 upvotes and is still shared around today.

Gordon: Do you ever watch The Big Bang Theory? There’s a scene where Sheldon has this big formula on his whiteboard and he goes, “Look at it. I feel like I just made a baby.” And I have to say, when he said that, I laughed so hard. Because there’s a lot of truth in that. When you come up with something that’s 4 pi arccotangent square root of phi, and you’ve derived it, you do feel like you created something.

Parshall: And Cleo created something, too, in her own way. But who she was, why she did it—nobody seems to know.

Parshall (tape): Do you have any personal thoughts on who Cleo is, what she does, why she does what she does?

 

Gordon: Absolutely not. I have no idea who Cleo is. In fact, a lot of the people I corresponded with and interacted with on the site, I know very little… I know very little of.

Parshall: Recently speculation has sparked back up again, thanks to a viral TikTok video about Cleo. Since then a user on Twitter has claimed to be Cleo but hasn’t offered any proof, and while some people are buying it, a lot of people aren’t. Whoever Cleo was, it seems that she was just very, very good at math—though some, like Bonato, suspect a computer might have been involved at some point.

Still, that doesn’t mean she was a bot, either. Computing ability for this kind of integration is still limited and would have been even more so in 2013.

Gordon: Given that the software couldn’t do these integrals, I doubt it. I’d be real curious to find out what she’s got her hands on.

 

Parshall: Cleo’s profile itself, which hasn’t been updated in seven years, tragically does not provide any clues. Today her bio reads:

“My real name is Cleo, I’m female. I have a medical condition that makes it very difficult for me to engage in conversations, or post long answers, sorry for that. I like math and do my best to be useful at this site, although I realize my answers might be not useful for everyone.”

But—but—I did wonder, “Has that always been her bio?” I thought I’d double-check so I went on the Internet Archive, pasted in her URL and clicked a snapshot that was taken in 2013 because, remember, kids, nothing on the internet is ever truly gone. And her bio was different back then. And guess who she quotes?

“‘While asleep, I had an unusual experience. There was a red screen formed by flowing blood, as it were. I was observing it. Suddenly a hand began to write on the screen. I became all attention. That hand wrote a number of elliptic integrals. They stuck to my mind. As soon as I woke up, I committed them to writing.’ —Srinivasa Ramanujan”

 

Then Cleo wrote:

“Remember, you are not locked into a single axiom system. You may invent your own, whenever you wish—just use your intuition and imagination.”

[CLIP: Theme music]

Parshall: Science, Quickly is produced by Jeff DelViscio, Tulika Bose, Kelso Harper, and Carin Leong. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith.

Don’t forget to subscribe to Science, Quickly wherever you get your podcasts. For more in-depth science news and features, go to ScientificAmerican.com. And if you like the show, give us a rating or review!

 

For Scientific American’s Science, Quickly, I’m Allison Parshall.

The Surprising Health Benefits of Dog Ownership

 Andrea Thompson: Ever since I was a kid, I wanted a dog. But it wasn’t until I was an adult–newly laid off and missing a beloved cat that had passed more than a year earlier–that my husband and I adopted a 1-year-old mutt named Jack. 

[CLIP] Thompson: Hi bud!

 

Thompson: Jack is a classic shade of brown, but a cartoonish mixture of a pitbull’s head and muscly chest and some unknown breed’s short little legs (our best guess is corgi). Sometimes when he sneezes, his head loudly–and hilariously–knocks against the floor. In the six years we’ve had him, Jack has come with his share of challenges. He is an incorrigible stealer of tissues and loses his mind when the doorbell rings.

[Barking]  

Thompson: But he is an expert cuddler and loves every single person he has ever met. He is silly and playful. Having Jack has helped us meet so many more of our neighbors, get much more regular exercise walking rain or shine, and helped us teach our toddler about respecting the space and bodies of other beings. But it’s also meant that I’ve wanted to learn more about Jack and the relationship we have with our dogs.

This is Science, Quickly. I’m Andrea Thompson, Scientific American’s news editor for earth and environment – and sometimes fun animal science.  Today, we’re speaking with University of Maryland computer scientist and famed internet “dog mom” of a pack of golden retrievers Jen Golbeck about her new book, The Purest Bond: Understanding the Human-Canine Connection, written with science writer Stacey Colino. It delves into the science of how we humans relate to our puppy pals and the many ways they improve our lives.

 

[Music]

Thompson: Hi Jen, thanks for speaking with us.

Jen Golbeck: So glad to be here! 

Thompson: One of my favorite moments in the book is when you describe how you cope with tough days and stress by laying on the floor and being enveloped “in a cloud of golden retrievers” licking and lying on top of you. It sounds like heaven. Jumping off from there, since your book is all about the bond people dogs, can you talk a little about some of the bonds you’ve had with your own pups throughout your life and what those have meant to you?

Golbeck: So we open the book with middle school. I had a really hard time in middle school. I mean, I was bullied. Everything in life sucked. And my parents bought me a golden retriever puppy whose name was Major. And he was everything I needed at that point, you know, non-judgmental. I didn’t feel awkward around him. And I loved dogs before that. But he, I think, was the first one who kind of opened my eyes to like the real power that that relationship can have. And so fast forward a bunch of time. Right now we have five dogs. We rescue special needs golden retrievers, seniors, hospice cases, like really complicated medical ones. And we get so much out of it, I can just lay on the floor and they all just like, come and envelop me. And I’m sure we’ll get into this with the science. It just makes you more relaxed and mindful. And in the moment.

Thompson: I did want to get to the science because I think that’s a lot of what’s really interesting in the book is that you get into all of these studies and really delve into the science of how we relate to our dogs and the impact they can have on us and vice versa. I don’t think people always know the nitty gritty of that, and I wondered if you could particularly get into some of the physiological impacts that dogs have on us and talk about the science there.

 

Golbeck: Yeah, if you look at any part of your life, whether it’s your physical health, your mental, your psychological, your social health, your dogs are going to make all of that better. So if we look, let’s just say at [the] physical health side, which is actually like how I got into the science of this. There is a great study that I saw maybe 15 years ago that talks about if you have a heart attack, for example, and you own a dog, you will live longer, then if you don’t have a dog and you could be like, well, yeah, if your dog, you’re like, walk more.So of course that would be why. But even if you controlled for the amount of walking, people who have dogs still live longer. 

Thompson: Hmm. 

Golbeck: And so this was a real question, right? Why? If it isn’t the physical activity, why is it that you live longer? And in fact, if you look across all of these different studies of the way that our physical health is improved by having dogs, one of the themes that emerges is something that we actually already knew from psychology, which is if you have a really robust system of social support, all of your health markers tend to be better like that. Social support is actually really critical for your physical health, not just your psychological health. And it turns out dogs are able to serve as those social support systems in our lives as well. So if we look at, say, older adults who, you know, maybe they’ve lost their spouse and their social circles are just smaller, dealing with loneliness. If they have dogs, they see these really dramatic increases in benefits from the dogs where people who have lots of people around them, really strong social systems, those benefits are still there, but they’re smaller.  So it’s really clear that the dogs serve as social supports for us and give us that benefit on top of the fact that they do in fact get us out and walking more. They get us out spending time outside, which we know is really good for us. So there’s all these ways they kind of boost all of this stuff that we know is good for us and be like, Hey, you’ve got to come do this thing. Like we’re going to have a good time. And also it’s going to make you better.

 

Thompson: We’ve talked a lot about some of the specific areas of the science of dogs and humans and their bond. But of the dozens of studies that you guys mention in the book and you know, all of the research you guys did, were there any sort of favorite bits that stood out to you or anything that really surprised you?

Golbeck: Yeah. So one one favorite really stood out to me and I will say that when I was in middle school, I had a science teacher who told us that dogs didn’t really love us back and that like if they liked us, it’s because we were salty and they just wanted the salt then. 

Thompson: Huh! 

Golbeck: And I remember being so mad, but I also was 12, right? So I had like no capacity to argue back with the science teacher. But now I do. Now I have written a book to avenge that memory of probably sixth grade or whatever. The science is so clear that dogs love us back. Like I think anybody who has a dog knows that’s true. But my favorite result that we came across when we were doing the book is on that point. So we know from psychology about this thing called attachment bonds and the attachment bonds that we form with our parents, especially our moms, will go on to influence all of our relationships for the rest of our lives. They get set really early in our first couple of years. So if you’ve got a parent who is, you know, responsive and gentle and kind, you’re going to have secure attachment. If your needs are neglected, you might get a kind of anxious attachment. You know, you can sometimes change it, but it’s really important. So there’s a ton of research on attachment bonds. And one of the ways we’ve studied that is that they will put babies in  fMRI machines, which are the things that show the part of your brain that light up when you’re thinking about different stuff. And then they’ll let them see their moms and a certain part of their brain lights up. That doesn’t light up for friends, you know, people who are they’re used to seeing or acquaintances. So we know that part of the brain is responsible for the attachment bond. That’s where it manifests neurologically. So researchers have done this study with dogs. They train dogs to lay really still in an MRI, which is kind of amazing by itself. And then they would have the dogs, humans come up so they could see and smell the person. And the same part of the dog’s brain lit up when they saw their human as happened in babies, when they saw their mother. So what we know is like on a neurological level, dogs have that same kind of love response when they see us as babies have when they see their moms. And that’s that. The only study that shows we have this real like biological evidence that our dogs love us back. We can measure it in hormone levels, like when we pet and interact with our dog, we all get that surge of oxytocin, this really good cuddle love hormone, but the dogs get it, too. So yeah, that was my favorite evidence that we found. And I just love how it’s this really classic science of love and connection that shows up perfectly with dogs.

 

Thompson: So you got this a little bit in your answer, but are there any other misconceptions that maybe people have about dogs or how we relate to our dogs that any of the research you cite in your book got into or that you particularly want to dispel?

Golbeck: Yeah. One thing that I think is really important is a lot of people still have this idea of the alpha dog that there’s like this hierarchy. And people will ask me this all the time and I’m like, I have five golden retrievers, and they’re like, Which one is the Alpha? If I’m feeling kind, I will say I am.

Thompson: Right. 

Golbeck: And the side effect of that environment was that they ended up establishing this hierarchy to survive these kind of torturous situations. Dogs are very social creatures. They live in families. So if you think of a family, you know, so you’ve got maybe some parents, you’ve got some kids, like is there an alpha there? I mean, there’s maybe somebody who’s a little more in charge and they’ve got a different personalities, but you’re all kind of coexisting together. And that’s really what dogs want to do. So if you try to adopt this kind of aggressive, like I am the alpha, you will do what I say, whatever, pin them down, do all of that stuff. Sure. I mean, dogs are smart and they’ll respond to that, but it’s not their natural way of doing it. They want to have a, you know, respectful, gentle, caring relationship. You know, you got to keep your dog in line sometimes, right? Sometimes we kill our dogs. No, you have to yell at them. It’s not like, oh, don’t ever say anything bad to them, but you don’t need to be this really dominating force. And I think a lot of people have that Alpha idea left over. And the science is really clear that that’s not the way that it works. Yeah, I think that’s great to get across to people.

 

Thompson: So to kind of wrap, I wanted to ask, what do you want people who maybe already have a dog or thinking about getting a dog to really take away from the book?

Golbeck: We talked about making a PowerPoint to go with the book for people who are trying to convince their family members to get a dog and just be like, Here is all the ways, right? Like presentation time. So if you are thinking about getting the dog, then you need evidence. That’s all this book is, is like evidence that the dogs have been good and like pretty much any aspect you care about. But you know, I think probably our main audiences, people who have dogs already on one hand, I don’t think there’s anything in there that’s going to be earth shattering for them. I think what it’s really going to be is recognizing a lot of your own experience. And then what you’re going to find is here is all this really rigorous science that backs up your own experience. One of the takeaways that I’ve heard a lot of people say is that I just felt so validated because sometimes people treat us like we’re little crazy or loving dogs as much as we do right? And this is going to give you all the scientific evidence that, like, you’re not making it up. All of this is real. It’s really profound. It has a great impact on you and you’re going to feel validated and you hopefully find out some new things about just how deep that relationship goes. I could have used that PowerPoint when I was a kid trying to convince my parents together. Maybe I’ll still make it. I’ll take some time for kids.

Thompson: Science quickly is produced by Jeff DelViscio and Tulika Bose. Our show was edited by Ella Feder and Alexa Lim. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Don’t forget to subscribe to science quickly wherever you get your podcasts. For science quickly, I’m Andrea Thompson.

[The above is a transcript of this podcast.]

 

The Strange and Beautiful Science of Our Lives

Brianne Kane: Have you ever thought about how strange everything is? Ha, no—but really, something happens in January, when it still feels like last year, but it’s suddenly this year, and it always makes me ask: What are we transitioning into? What have we transitioned from? 

I’m Bri Kane, a member of Scientific American’s editorial team and resident reader. Today I’m sharing a conversation with Nell Greenfieldboyce, author of Transient and Strange. I asked her about this new intimate collection of essays she’s written about the science that helps contextualize her life—and all our lives, for that matter. The essays range from why fleas have sexy poems written about them to how Mecca inspired touchable moonstones oceans away to even how all of this is tiny but still meaningful when you remember just how big time and space really are. 

 

You’re listening to Science, Quickly.

[CLIP: Show theme music]

You might recognize Nell’s voice. She’s been an NPR science correspondent for a while. You may also recognize the title of her new book from a Walt Whitman poem called “Year of Meteors.” For those of you who are poetry aficionados or fans of Meter, our poetry column, “Year of Meteors” ends with Whitman talking to time and space itself about the new year he finds himself in and how strange it is to see your own self in the brief and beautiful years coming and going.

He’s asking a similar question to what Nell asks herself and asks the readers of her book: What are we doing here? What am I transitioning to or out of? What have I learned along the way?

 

Although my conversation with Nell took place a few weeks ago, I’m still thinking about it. This one is not for the faint of heart, but it is for those looking around, wondering what strange new year, and life, is on the horizon.

[CLIP: Music cue] 

Kane: Thank you so much for joining me today, Nell.

When I first read the book, I was struck by how much I learned from a short collection of essays. I wanted to ask you about the touchable space rock and your connection to it. I’d never heard of this before.

Nell Greenfieldboyce: So, it’s here in the city where I live, Washington, D. C. The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum has this touchable moon rock.

It’s one of the rocks that the Apollo astronauts brought home. And it’s just—it’s on display, and people can touch it. And that was the idea of a scientist who had worked on the Apollo program and then went to work at the museum, uh, when it was first starting. Editor’s Note: The touchable moon rock exhibit debuted in 1976 and was the idea of Farouk El-Baz, then director of the museum’s Center for Earth and Planetary Studies.

And his idea was, you know, one of the things we should do is, like, let people touch a moon rock. And, um, it was because of this experience he had on pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia, where he saw, like, the black stone that’s in Mecca that pilgrims try to touch or point to; it’s associated with Muhammad.

And so he had this idea that this would be a really powerful emotional experience for people to touch a moon rock, and I think that it took a while to convince NASA that this would be a good thing to do, given that they had just spent a lot of money and a lot of time getting these precious rocks, and then you were just going to put one in the museum for, like, any random person to just, like, you know, put their hands all over it.

 

Kane: It’s so interesting to even think about the idea of touching a moon rock, but I loved your connection to this rock and how you connected it to a necklace that you wear yourself.

Greenfieldboyce: Yeah, I wear a meteorite necklace most days. I don’t—I’m not a big jewelry person, but I do like wearing a meteorite because I feel like it’s just a good thing to have to remind you that space is big, the universe is big, and whatever’s going on in your day, you know, there’s just kind of this visceral reminder that there’s a lot out there and that your little concerns are rather puny.

Kane: That’s such a good point—a daily reminder of just how big everything is and how small we are. I was really interested in the chapter about the Rothschild family and the queen of fleas. Can you tell me about that? 

Greenfieldboyce: Yeah. So who knew that the Rothschilds were really into fleas, but, you know, being a scientist, being a naturalist, was a very, like, sort of, like, learned, you know, high-society thing to do.

 

You have collections of things, you know, these sort of cabinets of curiosities. And so in the Rothschilds family, it was apparently fleas, like, you know, Miriam Rothschild’s father had amassed what was probably the world’s most important collection of fleas. And she grew up in this household where, you know, she didn’t go to like a traditional school, but she would go around with her father and, you know, sample fleas.

And she herself devoted her life to studying fleas. And she learned that one flea sort of syncs up its reproductive system with the reproductive system of its hosts. So there’s this flea or rabbit flea that has to feed on pregnant rabbits to be able to mature its own offspring. And the fleas are so interesting because they’re so little and small, and yet so much of the history of science and thinking about the universe and sort of poetry and metaphor can all be encapsulated in fleas, which—and you know, Herman Melville didn’t think that was possible.

He thought you needed a big whale or something like that. But obviously a flea is just as potent a source of symbolic power, as far as I can tell. 

 

Kane: Yeah, I was surprised by another example of just how big everything is, the entire field of science, the entire history of science, and then how small but important some of these examples are, like a flea. And the poems about fleas – how did you find those?

Greenfieldboyce: So there was this whole tradition of literary soft porn that involved fleas, because, you know, the fleas used to be more of an everyday thing.

And so people would search their bodies for fleas at night. And so, you know, you could have a painter who would paint, you know, a beautiful half naked woman, like, searching her body for fleas. It was an excuse to show, like, you know, half naked women next to their beds. And then, you know, the whole notion that the fleas could, like, crawl under people’s clothes and, like, you know, suck their blood and, like, just go anywhere on a woman’s body that they wanted was like very alluring.

 

You know, so there is a lot of, like, love poems and, like, you know, poetry that involves fleas. It’s very strange. I think that people in their minds maybe keep science and poetry pretty separate, but to me, they are closely linked because I think that both poets and, um, scientists are trying to understand the universe, and they’re often experimenting, um, and they’re working within a kind of, um, confined space, a kind of constraints of certain kinds that often generates a lot of creativity.

Kane: But I think what you just said about the connection between literary works and science is really interesting. That they share a lens, and they share a goal of understanding. The work overall, your book, is fairly literary. I have to admit, I myself was surprised to see a Melville chapter and references to Walt Whitman.

The title itself is a literary reference. Can you tell me how you came to that title?

Greenfieldboyce: My editor at Norton, Matt Weiland, [who] suggested it. Um, it was from an essay on meteorites and the, the quote is from a Walt Whitman poem where he was writing a poem about this great meteor procession and, you know, um, of course he said it much more elegantly, but, you know, he’s like, you know, you’re transient and strange and, like, look, here I am, too. I’m also transient and strange. And so Matt, my editor, thought that that really encapsulated what a lot of this collection of essays is about.

 

It’s about, you know, exploring things that are transient and strange, whether they’re things, um, in the universe or things in your own life that happened, um, and everybody’s trying to investigate them and understand them, and scientists do it one way, and artists do it a different way. Children do it another way, but it’s fundamentally all the same exercise and investigation.

Kane: Yeah, as I was reading it, I was thinking the same thing about the times we’re living in, right? People are calling them unprecedented times, but things do feel very transitory and they feel very strange. I wanted to ask you if the act of writing this book was you embracing that transitory state, that strangeness that we’re all wading around in right now.

Greenfieldboyce: Yeah. I mean, honestly, you know, um, I wrote these essays, um, not really knowing what I was going to do with them. And the act of writing is itself a sort of transient and strange, um, phenomenon.

A lot of people [who] have said that among writing forms, in some ways, the essay is the most kind of experimental form because it’s not so prescribed about how it should look or what should go in it or where it should go.

 

Kane: I couldn’t agree more. I think the essay is a really free-flowing form for writers to kind of find the format that they need for this story or for this stream of thought. Your publisher is calling this book [a collection of] intimate essays about everyday life, and it felt very intimate reading this book. It’s about 200 pages, but it packs a few punches in there.

I wanted to ask you which essay felt the most intimate for you to share with us.

Greenfieldboyce: I think the essay about, um, about the final essay in the book, um, “My Eugenics Project,” about, um, the issues that my husband and I talked about as we, uh, contemplated whether or not to, to try to prevent a hereditary disease in our kids. I, I feel like that was pretty darn intimate, and, um, at the time it was really quite, um, quite emotionally, um, exhausting for me.

I mean, like, that’s one, that’s one thing about—another thing about personal essays is there’s, there’s often a very revealing quality to them. And, you know, you just sort of, like, just try to be honest and try to say what happened and what you thought then and what you think now, and, like, you don’t know. Yeah, you just sort of put it out there without really any knowledge about how other people will respond. Among all the things that are in the book, that’s the one, that’s one of the few things that I thought, wow, like, maybe I really ought not to be so open. But I did; I did it. Too late now.

 

Kane: Well, I have to say, I am so glad that you were so open with that essay.

I found it to stop me in my tracks. I thought it was a very beautiful exploration of a very serious conversation that does happen in marital beds, in doctors’ offices, and we cannot pretend like it’s not. We have to acknowledge it and be able to discuss it openly. I wanted to ask you how you were able to approach that chapter as a writer and a mother yourself.

Greenfieldboyce: I don’t know to what extent, um, people know the history of eugenics, but I learned it in college and have been reading about it since then. And it’s amazing to me how little it’s talked about or discussed. I do think that, you know, there’s this tendency now to throw around the word eugenics, and people often don’t even know what they—what it means exactly.

 

They know it was bad. They know it was associated with Nazis. Um, but I didn’t know a lot about, um, the role of people who espoused eugenic ideals in the sort of, um, genetic counseling, um, birth of that as a field. And I thought that was really interesting. And so when I started to think about my own experiences, um, I was often looking to try to understand what I went through, not just personally but, like, in a sort of like historical sense.

So for me, it’s really important to treat the history of science as not something that happened a long time ago and that just isn’t relevant to us but as something that is, is something that is very much still, like, playing out in various ways and having different echoes today. And that’s what I really wanted to try to convey as a writer—is that this stuff isn’t just, like, past history. It’s still kind of resonating. It’s, like, it’s, like, you hit a tuning fork or whatever, and there’s resonance that keeps on going.

Kane: That’s a really beautiful answer. I was struck by your relationship to motherhood in the book, and it felt very intimate how you pulled the curtain back to allow us into those conversations with your husband and with your doctors. But also the book starts with a really interesting conversation with your son and explaining just kind of the entropy of life through tornadoes. Can you tell me about that?

 

Greenfieldboyce: Yeah, so when my son was very young, he developed this really, um, big fear of tornadoes, which—you know, we live in Washington, D. C.; it’s not a particularly tornado-prone part of the country. Um, but he was quite scared of them, and it was an issue in our lives dealing with this. And, you know, as a parent, you’re supposed to try to, like, reassure your child. You’re supposed to, like, you know, help them with their fears. But I often found it difficult to do that because I don’t want to lie to my children. And so, you know, how do you tell your child it’s not going to happen?

Because I don’t know what’s going to happen. You know what I mean? Like, how do you teach your children about the possibility of just, like, random obliteration?

And, like, you know, you’re supposed to be a parent; you’re supposed to know. But obviously you don’t know; you don’t have any idea. And you’re just sort of trying to muddle through as best you can. Um, and so I found my children then and now to be quite challenging in asking the big questions and forcing confrontations with stuff that maybe it would be easier just not to think about.

Kane: I loved that you started the book with that conversation with your son because it seemed like—in preparing your son for the entropy of life and how to be prepared but not scared—you know, it felt like you were preparing the reader as well about what you are about to get into, what this book is going to probe you to think about, uh, to bring us to an end today.

 

I wanted to ask you: What do you hope readers will be thinking about as they conclude reading your book?

Greenfieldboyce: For me, what I hope people would come away with is just a sense that, um, the enterprise of science is not so far removed from your everyday life.

It’s not removed from the way you think about things and the way that you and your children interact in the world. And it’s not removed from events that you experience as a person. And so, um, to me, it’s all just one continuous thread. And, like, we’re part of it. You know, we are, we are [a] transient, beautiful, brief part of it.

Um, but we’re, we’re right there in the mix. It’s, like, right up close to us. And that’s, that’s what I hope people would take away, a sense of that closeness. 

 

[Clip: Theme music]

Kane: Thank you so much, Nell Greenfieldboyce. This was a wonderful conversation to have with you about a really incredible book, Transient and Strange. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Greenfieldboyce: Thanks for having me on the show.

Kane: For Science, Quickly, I’m Bri Kane. 

Science, Quickly is produced by Tulika Bose, Jeff DelViscio, Kelso Harper and Carin Leong. Our music is composed by Dominic Smith.

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See you next time! Happy reading!