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Scientist Politicians, Microbiome, Wildlife Car Accidents. June 1, 2018, Part 1 Jun 01, 2018

Show notes

This year’s midterm elections have seen an upswing in the number of scientists running for office. There are approximately 60 candidates with STEM backgrounds in the races for federal offices, and 200 for state positions, according to 314 Action, an advocacy organization that helps scientists run for office. But why would a scientist want to leave the lab for the Hill? According to volcanologist and Congressional candidate Jess Phoenix, “Science by definition is political because the biggest funder of scientific research in our country is the government.” And Aruna Miller, who is a Maryland State Delegate for District 15 and a former civil engineer for the Department of Transportation, says that “Your job as an engineer isn’t only your profession. It is to be a citizen of your country…. You have to be engaged in our community.”

By now, we all know about the microbes that live in our gut and digestive tract—different species of bacteria living together in the same environment. Now researchers are trying to learn more about what keeps these bacteria living together in harmony. Scientists suspect the secret “microbe whisperer” is actually a member of the immune system—a molecule called immunoglobulin A. That molecule keeps the gastrointestinal system free of pathogens and, researchers hope, might one day be used to combat diseases of the digestive tract.

States like Wyoming and Montana are high risk for wildlife-vehicle collisions. These accidents result in expensive damages and sometimes even death for both wildlife and drivers. One group of scientists found an unlikely solution. You’ve probably driven by one before and not noticed it, but wildlife reflectors are poles on the side of the road. There have been a lot of studies on reflectors, but Riginos said the results are mixed and not very impressive. So Riginos and her team developed an experiment. They’d cover up some reflectors, leave others uncovered, and then compare the results. “We covered them with this cheap, easily available and durable material, which just happened to be white canvas bags,” Riginos said. And to their surprise—the bags turned out to be more effective than the reflectors. “We could actually see that in the white bags situation, that the deer were more likely to stop and wait for cars to pass before crossing the road, instead of just running headlong into the road,” said Riginos.

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AI Conversation, Robot Trust, AI Music. May 18, 2018, Part 2 May 25, 2018

Show notes

Should autonomy be the holy grail of artificial intelligence? Computer scientist Justine Cassell has been working for decades on interdependence instead—AI that can hold conversations with us, teach us, and otherwise develop good rapport with us. She joined Ira live on stage at the Carnegie Library of Homestead Music Hall in Pittsburgh to introduce us to SARA, a virtual assistant that helped world leaders navigate the World Economic Forum last year. Cassell discusses the value of studying relationships in building a new generation of more trustworthy AI.

Robot assistants talk to us from our phones. Home robots have faces and facial expressions. But many of the robots that might enter our lives will have no such analogs to help us trust and understand them. What’s a roboticist to do? Madeline Gannon, a Carnegie Mellon research fellow, artist, and roboticist for NVIDIA, trains industrial robots to use body language to communicate, while Henny Admoni, psychologist and assistant professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, teaches assistive technology to anticipate the needs of its users.

The pop hits of the future might be written not by human musicians, but by machine-learning algorithms that have learned the rules of catchy music, and apply them to create never-before-heard melodies. Those tunes may not even require human hands to be heard, because a growing army of musical robots, from bagpipes to xylophones, can already play themselves—even improvise too. We talk with computer scientist Roger Dannenberg and artist-roboticist Eric Singer about the implications of computerized composition, and unveil a song created by AI. (We’ll let you judge whether it’s worthy of the top 40.)

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Sleep Questions, Portable Museums, Digital Health Records. May 25, 2018, Part 1 May 25, 2018

Show notes

What’s the difference between being fatigued and sleepy? Do melatonin and other sleeping aids work? And what can you do if you just can’t sleep?Neurologist and sleep specialist W. Chris Winter, author of the book The Sleep Solution: Why Your Sleep is Broken and How to Fix It, talks about how the brain and body regulate sleep. He also gives ideas for controlling your behavior to improve your “sleep hygiene.”

Science museums can be a fun and educational way to spend a day—but what if you don’t have a day? What if there’s no museum near you? Or what if you don’t think you like science enough to spend money on an entry fee? All of these are reasons one nonprofit is working to shrink the museum, and bring it to you—starting with the Smallest Mollusk Museum. It’s a vending machine-sized exhibit on the slimy tricks, strange brains, and ecological importance of snails, squids, octopuses, and their chitinous cousins. Amanda Schochet, co-founder of the project and a former computational biologist, explains what goes into making a small museum that can still share big ideas.

In recent years, medical providers have largely moved away from scrawled paper charts to electronic health records. But a team of researchers argues that the transformation of medical records hasn’t gone far enough. While there has been widespread adoption of electronic health records, most are just static, flat translations of the format of the old fashioned paper file. If we can subscribe to specific categories of news online, the researchers say, why shouldn’t medical specialists be able to subscribe to a given patient’s medical records to get updates and alerts of specific interest to them? Why shouldn’t medical teams be able to get notifications and share information when patients needing special care plans arrive at the hospital?

Plus, a satellite launched this week would aid in planned Chinese lunar exploration.

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Psychedelics With Michael Pollan And Intel Student Science Fair. May 18, 2018, Part 2 May 18, 2018

Show notes

In his latest book, How to Change Your Mind, Michael Pollan writes of his own consciousness-expanding experiments with psychedelic drugs like LSD and psilocybin, and he makes the case for why shaking up the brain’s old habits could be therapeutic for people facing addiction, depression, or death. Pollan and psychedelics researcher Robin Carhart-Harris discuss the neuroscience of consciousness, and how psychedelic drugs may alter the algorithms and habits our brains use to make sense of the world.

This week, science students gathered in Pittsburgh for the finals of the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, a competition founded by the Society for Science and the Public. Nearly 2,000 students from 75 countries came to present their projects. Two of the finalists share their projects: Everett Kroll discusses how he created and tested an affordable 3D-printed prosthetic foot, while Alyssa Rawinski explains how she studied the feasibility of using mealworms to recycle plastics.

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Consciousness In 'Westworld,' Heart Cells On Graphene, Bike Safety App. May 18, 2018, Part 1 May 18, 2018

Show notes

In HBO’s series Westworld, human-like robots populate a theme park where human guests can have violent, gory adventures in the Wild West without the repercussions. The robots are so lifelike that they fool the visitors and themselves. They bleed, die, grieve, and love—thinking themselves human. But as Westworld’s robots grow increasingly independent of their repetitive, programmed loops, the show incites viewers to question whether AI can truly be autonomous or conscious—and who in this story deserves empathy. Roboticist Robin Murphy and neuroscientist Steve Ramirez discuss the show’s science and social commentary.

The jury is still out on whether graphene—the carbon-based substance people have called "wonder material"—will be part of every gadget in the future, but scientists are finding it to be an extremely powerful tool in the biomedical laboratory. In a study out this week in the journal Science Advances, scientists used graphene’s electrical properties to stimulate lab grown heart cells that could be used in patients after they’ve had a heart attack.

Plus, a Pittsburgh cyclist designed a crowdsourcing navigation app to help other city bikers find the safest roads to travel.

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Does Time Exist, Elephant Seismology, Produce Safety. May 11, 2018, Part 2 May 11, 2018

Show notes

How do you think about time? Most people experience it as Newton described it—as something that passes independent of other events, that’s the same for everyone, and moves in a straight line. Still, others have come to embrace Einstein’s view that time instead forms a matrix with space and acts like as a substance in which we are submerged. But physicist and author Carlo Rovelli has an even different approach to time. He’s working on a way to quantify gravity in which time doesn’t exist.

An adult African elephant can weigh as much as two tons. Their activities—walking, playing, even bellowing—might shake the ground beneath them. But new research finds that the signals from an elephant’s walk are capable of traveling as far as three kilometers, while a male elephant might be detectable a full six kilometers away with just seismological monitoring tools. This new research could protect endangered elephants from poaching.

The E. coli outbreak linked to romaine lettuce has now spread to 29 states, and it’s claiming more victims. The CDC now reports that 149 people have been infected, more than a dozen have developed kidney failure, and one victim has died. In this segment, Ira talks with Rachel Noble, a molecular biologist at the University of North Carolina, about current methods of testing farm fields for pathogens like E. coli, which can take 24 to 48 hours to show results, and a DNA test Noble has developed that could cut that to less than an hour.

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Hawaii Eruption, Antibiotic Resistance, Florida Sea Rise. May 11, 2018, Part 1 May 11, 2018

Show notes

Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano—located on the Big Island—has been continuously erupting for the past 30 years. But on May 3, magma began spewing through fissures in the Puna district, forcing nearly 2,000 residents to flee. Reporter Ku`uwehi Hiraishi of Hawaii Public Radio spoke to residents in the area of these 15 fissures and describes what type of evacuation efforts have been happening on the ground.

Ten years ago, Dr. Gautam Dantas had one of those rare moments you hear about in science—a serendipitous discovery. He and his colleagues were trying to kill some bacteria they had collected from soil. So, naturally, they tried knocking them out with some antibiotics. They were unsuccessful. The soil bacteria were resistant to the drugs—but the bacteria ate the very antibiotics that were meant to kill them. The discovery came as a shock to Gautam and he says it changed the course of his career.

According to middle-of-the-road predictions, seas will rise by as much as two feet by 2060 in South Florida. Residents of Miami and surrounding counties have already seen that rise in action. Citing a lack of action at the state and federal level to help the region adapt and plan, the editorial boards of three major newspapers, The Miami Herald, The Sun Sentinel, and The Palm Beach Post, are teaming up. The papers say the new The Invading Sea project will prioritize sea level rise as an issue in this year’s midterm elections.

And Sophie Bushwick of Popular Science tells Ira about how the Leaning Tower of Pisa has managed to withstand weather, wars, and earthquakes, among other science headlines in this week's News Round-up.

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DNA Privacy, Dog Cognition. May 4, 2018, Part 2 May 04, 2018

Show notes

Genetic testing sites are nothing new. They’ve grown enough in popularity over the past decade that the idea of spitting into a tube and sending it in the mail to a website to find out more about your family tree—or even your risk of certain inherited diseases—doesn’t seem all that strange to most people. But the case of the Golden State Killer has brought to light many questions about the direct-to-consumer genetic testing market that still need answering. Dr. Amy McGuire, professor of biomedical ethics at Baylor College of Medicine discusses the risks we take when we share genetic information online. Plus, Natalie Ram, assistant professor of law at the University of Baltimore School of Law discusses how this new era of genetic research is butting up against the criminal justice system.

Sit. Come. Stay. Your dog knows how to do it all, and she even seems to understand what you’re saying. But every dog owner has probably wondered what exactly is going inside the mind of their prized pooch. Does Spot really understand what you’re saying, or is he just trained by the treat bag? Does Fluffy have a concept of time? And how do our furry companions make sense of the world? Neuroscientist Gregory Berns has trained dogs to sit inside fMRI scans to see what happens inside their brains.

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Chasing Pluto, Space Warps. May 4, 2018, Part 1 May 04, 2018

Show notes

In July of 2015, the world was stunned to learn that Pluto, a tiny, distant dot that some didn’t even consider a planet, was a dynamic, complex, and beautiful world. But for scientists in pursuit of Pluto’s secrets since the late 1980s, it was a long wait. The mission faced political hurdles, budget battles, technical challenges, and near-disaster even as it was days away from speeding past Pluto. Alan Stern, the mission’s dogged principal investigator, and astrobiologist David Grinspoon have written a new book about the decades-long effort to visit Pluto.

Last week we asked you to help us spot galaxies magnified by other galaxies—a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. Over a million galactic glimpses later, we're ready to reveal what we found, including a galaxy more than seven billion light years away, and what appears to be a rare triple galactic lens. In this wrap-up segment, Space Warps co-founder Aprajita Verma and Zooniverse co-lead Laura Trouille share their favorite finds, and suggest a few other projects for armchair astronomers to dig into next.

Plus, the end of net neutrality seemingly benefits corporations and harms consumers. But for small towns with slow internet speeds, this may not be the case. What does it mean for slow internet in rural Kansas?

And Rachel Feltman of Popular Science tells Ira about coral reefs and other science headlines in this week's News Round-up.

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Frozen Frogs, Yeast, Paleobotany. April 27, 2018, Part 2 Apr 27, 2018

Show notes

When winter comes, animals have several options for survival. They can leave their habitats entirely for warmer environments, search for a cozy cave, or even find insulation under a toasty snowbank. And if you’re a wood frog in chilly Ohio or Alaska, or the larvae of a certain wingless midge in Antarctica, you might also just stay put, and freeze solid until the sun returns. But to survive such extreme low temperatures, the bodies of these animals have made some special adaptations: sugars that act like antifreeze, and processes for keeping ice outside their cells to protect their tissues.

Yeast helps your bread to rise and beer to brew, but did you know that there’s yeast in the guts of insects? Or that your body is covered—and filled—with yeast cells? In this segment, recorded live in Miami University’s Hall Auditorium in Oxford, Ohio, mycologist Nicholas Money helps Ira uncover the hidden world of the humble fungus. His new book “The Rise Of Yeast” details some of the ways that the ubiquitous microorganism has helped shape civilization, from baking to biotechnology.

Paleontologists and anthropologists might look to the fossilized bones of early hominins to help fill in the evolutionary story of our species. But paleoecologists like Denise Su, curator and head of paleobotany and paleoecology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, are more interested in what type of environments these early human ancestors were living in millions of years ago.

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