Transcript

10.30.25 · Science Show KY

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Speaker 1: Hello, this is Linda Rice, your host for Radio Eye's
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Diary of Science and Nature. I will be reading from
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a variety of articles selected for the greatest interest to
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our listeners. As a reminder, RADIOI is a reading service
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intended for people who are blind or have other disabilities
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that make it difficult to read. For their material today,
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we will start with Scientific American dated October twenty ninth,
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twenty twenty five. The first articles entitled this overlooked bird
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flu strain might be the next pandemic risk, written by
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Rachel Fieldhouse and Nature Magazine. A bird flu virus that
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has often been ignored because it mostly causes minor disease
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and birds, has the potential to cause a human pandemic,
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says a team that has tracked how the HN and
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two virus has become better adapted to infect people. The
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reachures say more surveillance of the virus is needed. In
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the past few years, surveillance has been focused on the
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av and influenza virus H five and one, which has
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spread across most continents and can cause severe disease and
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death in people. Since twenty twenty, h five and one
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has killed about twenty one people in North America. The
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virus is also spreading among dairy cows. Less attention is
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being paid ton H nine and two, says Calvin To,
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a clinical microbiologist at the University of Hong Kong, despite
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the virus being the second most common strain of bird
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flu that infects people h N I'm sorry. H nine
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and two has caused one hundred and seventy three infections
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in people since nineteen ninety eight, mostly in China, says Toe,
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who presented his team's research at the Pandemic Research Alliance
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International Symposium in Melbourne, Australia, on October twenty seven. H
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nine and two might be more prevalent than we realize,
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says the shell While, who studies bird flu at the
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Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity in Melbourne. Infections
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are probably being missed because they do not result in
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severe infection or hospitalization in people, or because people are
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more commonly tested for the H five and one instead,
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she adds, geneic changes. Scientists are yet to find evidence
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of person to person transmission of the H nine and two,
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which would be needed for it if lead to a pandemic,
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but Toe and his team have found that H nine
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and two underwent genetic changes that began around twenty fifteen
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that have made the virus more infectious. In cell based experiments,
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a version of the H nine and two virus collected
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in twenty twenty four infected more human cells than did
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a historical sample collected in nineteen ninety nine. The modern
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version also showed improved binding to various receptors on human cells.
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This means the virus has adapted to spread among people,
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reported Toe and his colleagues in Emerging Microbes and Infections
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earlier this month. The virus would have to undergo several
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more changes before it could cause sustained transmission between people,
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says Well. The virus has to change preferentially bind to
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human receptors instead of receptors found in bird cells, and
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has to adapt how well it grows at temperatures and
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pH levels of humans, which are different from birds. Increased
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surveillance and communication about the risks of avian fluenza is needed,
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says Well. Part of the issue is that countries are
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not required to report infections caused by strains that are
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considered to be of low pathogenicity, such as the H
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nine and two Toe says greater virus surveillance among mammals
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in close contact with wild birds or poultry would help
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scientists understand whether the virus has been adapted to mammals
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or other human other than humans. He is concerned that
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when animals are infected with multiple viruses, genetic material gets
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mixed and matched when the viruses replicate inside the cell,
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and could create new viruses that can infect humans. Scientists
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are concerned that this reassortment could also happen in people too,
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TOAs has other researches found genetic material from the H
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nine and among the viruses that have caused previous bird
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flu outbreaks in people. This article is reproduced with permission
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and was first published on October twenty seventh, twenty twenty five.
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The next article is entitled Hurricane Melissa Images reveal a
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monster storm for the record books. The images of Hurricane
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Melissa show the Category five storm and all of its power,
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written by Andrea Thompson and Gina Breyner, with maximums distained
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winds of one hundred and eighty five miles per hour
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as it batters the Caribbean island of Jamaica on Tuesday.
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Hurricane Melissa is a beast of a storm. Satellite and
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other images starkly illustrate Melissa's monstrosity, from its rapid intensification
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to the sheer power of the convection at its core.
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Here's an inside look at this, one of the storm's
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strongest storms to ever make landfall in the Atlantic since
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record keeping began. Melissa's cold cloud tops underscore the storm's strength.
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The engine at the heart of any tropical cyclone is
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the convection powered by the temperature difference between the warm
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sea surface and the cold atmosphere at the top of
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the storm, where air flows out. On October twenty seventh,
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a crew from the Air Force's Hurricane Hunters or fifty
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third Weather Reconnaissance Squadron, flies through Hurricane Melissa to collect
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information for the National Hurricane Center. The calm, clear eye
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of Melissa appears with a stadium effect of the clouds
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in the eyewall where the strongest winds are, as seen
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from the Hurricane Hunter's aircraft. Another view shows Melissa's central eye,
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which looks like a textbook eye for a strong hurricane.
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Lightning flashes in the eye wall of Category five Melissa
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are a marker of how strong the storm is. It
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reached a central pressure of eight hundred and ninety two millibars,
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among the lowest ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean. It
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is tied to the third most intense Atlantic storm with
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the devastating nineteen thirty five Labor Day hurricane. Hurricane Melissa
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swirls above the Caribbean Sea in fitting sunlight on October
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twenty sixth and now we will switch to the journal
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entitled Science News. The first article, Our relationship with alcohol
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is fraught. Ancient customs might inspire a reset. Drinking in
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the past was social and ritualized, with less potent bruise,
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written by Sujanagupta on October seventeenth, twenty twenty five. Sober
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October is upon us. The month provides an opportunity to
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drink less or not at all. But for people evaluating
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their long term relationship with alcohol, what happens whence the
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month is over. Back in the heady nineteen nineties and
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two thousands, word on the street was that a drinker
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to a day, especially red wine, was good for health.
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Everyone loved that story, says Anya Topowala, a psychiatric researcher
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at the University of Oxford. Now the pendulum has swung.
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Drinking even a few times a week has been linked
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with numerous health problems, particularly cancer. Some public health agencies,
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the World Health Organization included, now say no amount of
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drinking is safe. Current US guidelines suggest a maximum of
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two drinks a day for men and one drink a
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day for women. Those guidelines are due for an update
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this fall, so US health officials will have a choice
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stick with the status quo, follow the World Health Organization's lead,
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or chart a different course. It's complicated. Even researchers who
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believe drinking can cause health problems or shrink lifespans aren't
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necessarily advocating for teetotaling. Tapa Walla's September study in the
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VMJ Evidence Based Medicine showed, for instance, that even light
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drinking increases a person's risk of developing dementia, with that
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risk rising alongside the quantity of alcohol consumed. Tapa Wallace
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simply wants people to be aware of that drinking dementia link.
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Many people still don't realize that the narrative around drinking
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and health has changed. She says, I'm not telling people
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not to drink, but to make an informed choice, you
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have to know the evidence, and maybe history can be
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informative too. After all, humans have been drinking for millennia.
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While less core to human progress, as say fire or
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the emergence of agriculture, drinking likely bolstered co operation, creativity,
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and social bonding. Historic and anthropo anthropological account suggests. Yet
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ancient drinking practices bear little resemblance to drinking practices to day,
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says philosopher and psychologist Edward Slingerland of the University of
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British Columbia and Vancouver. Perhaps, he says, those who drink
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to day should take their cue from the ancients booze, creativity,
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and co operation. Scholars have long debated why people drink.
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A prevailing theory is that the ethanol and alcohol hijacked
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a reward system in the brain that evowed to enhance
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certain behaviors, such as those related to motivation and learning.
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Given the social and health related harms associated with alcohol,
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drinking was, in that view, a painful evolutionary accident or mistake,
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says Thing Berlin, author of the twenty twenty one book Drunk,
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How We Sipped, danced and stumbled our way to Civilization. Slingerland,
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whose work tends to sit outside of the mainstream rejects
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that idea. Some evolutionary mistakes, such as seeking sexual pleasure
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through masturbation instead of intercourse, persists because they cost very
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little in terms of survival. He says, humans have both
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masturbated and reproduced without issue across the ages. Costly mistakes, meanwhile,
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tend to die out. Humans taste for alcohol had an
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opportunity to do just that. The alcohol flushing response is
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a genetic mutation thought to have evolved some nine thousand
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years ago in southern China alongside rice domestication. Researchers reported
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in the twenty ten BMC Evolutionary Biology. The response, which
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affects over a third of East Asian people, includes a
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flushed face, nausea, rapid heart rate, and headache. Researchers suspect
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the mutation protected people from consuming too much fermented rice
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or rice wine. If our taste for alcohol was an
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evolutionary mistake, then that mutation should spread everywhere, Slingerland says.
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He suspects the cost of drinking, including violence, addiction, and disease,
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were offset by the benefits. Consider the human brain. Slingerland says,
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the prefrontal cortex, which doesn't fully develop until the mid
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twenties or so. Gives people the cognitive control to do
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adult things like pay their bills and get to work
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on time, but that same control can impede creativity. Research
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shows by dolling prefrontal activity, booze can free people to
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write poetry and make art. Slangerland says, more than a
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creativity amplifier. Slingerland posts that drinking and loss of executive
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control may also have helped humans get a lung. Other
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primates don't tend to cooperate with those they are related
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to and strangers. He says, how do humans trust each other?
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I argue one way is alcohol. Nowadays that cooperation could
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look like a business deal between strangers. Slinger Lynn says,
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if I sit down with you and we have a
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few drinks, I'm voluntarily cognitively disarming ancient drinking patterns. While tantalizing,
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slinger Lynn's drunk hypothesis is hard to test. Researchers, though,
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are trying. One team recently dug into literature on one
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hundred and eighty six pre industrial societies from around the
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world to see if the presence of alcohol correlated with
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more complex societies. Societal complexity was measured on a scale
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from one for no formal leaders to five for centralized
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hierarch hierarchical governments. About half of the society's in the
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sample drink, the team reported in July. In Humanities and
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Social Sciences, communications and drinking correlated with about a third
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of a point increase in societal complexity. There is an
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association between the presence of alcohol and higher political complexity,
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but the effect is rather small, says evolutionary anthropologist of
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the klav Hanukcher of Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
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in Leipzig, Germany. His team suspects that alcohol is just
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one factor that facilitated the evolution of complex societies, alongside
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other bonding activities such as music, dance, ritual and shared
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religious beliefs. Identifying precise patterns in ancient data sets is challenging,
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Henussir says, historical accounts tend to be spotty, and those
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data do exist indicate that drinking practices varied widely across groups. Nonetheless,
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case studies hint at some striking cross cultural similarities. First off,
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the drinking story isn't all wine and roses. When her
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Haranosur and his team zoomed in on individual societies, they
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discovered that feast centered on drinking among the Brazilian Kangnank
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Gang people often involved as much fighting as friendliness. Similarly,
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they learned that drinking parties among the Colombian Quibio were
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intended to find siblings but often ended in quarrels. Yet
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in the past, tight social and logistical constraints around drinking
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seemed to have protected people from booz's worst effects. Her
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Renister says in ancient summer, for instance, elites offered beer
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to the gods in exchange for prosperity, and to construction
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workers as a form of payment. They also poured beer
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at feast and other celebrations to bolster camaraderie and reinforce
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social ranks, including their own. Among the best studied ancient
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studies in Greece, Slingerland says those masters of a good
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time through wild parties known as symposia, featuring acrobats, musicians,
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poetry readings, lude jokes, and sex. Overseeing all that creative
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debauchery was the party's patriarch or simphostiarch. As routiness increased,
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the symposiarch would dilute the wine with water drinking room alone.
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Drinking over the past few centuries, though, has undergone dramatic changes.
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For one, if symposiarchs were around today, they would need
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a lot more water. Booze has gotten stronger. Historically, people
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drank naturally fermented beers and fruit wines with alcohol contents
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from roughly two to six percent by volume. Slingerland says,
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after generations of breeding, hardier yeast wines and even some
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beers today contained double or even triple the amount alcohol
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by volume, and hard liquors such as rum gin and
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vodka with alcohol contents ranging from thirty five to ninety
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five percent by volume have become increasingly popular. The shift
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from drinking low proof to high proof alcohol mirrors the
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shift from chewing coca leaves to snorting cocaine. Slingerland says.
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When alcohol is in that concentration, it completely overwhelms our
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body's machinery for detoxifying it. How we drink has also changed.
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Once inseparable from its social milieu, drinking has turned to
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increase increasingly solitary. For instance, young adults in the United
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States are drinking less than previous generations, but many experts
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aren't ready to declare that a public health win. That's
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in part because the percentage of youth and young adults
16:46
who report drinking alone had been declining since nineteen seventies,
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but began ticking upward again over the past few decades,
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researchers reported in a forty six year longitudinal study of
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all amost thirteen thousand people published in August in Alcohol
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Clinical and Experimental Research. For instance, when the team zoomed
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in on nineteen twenty year olds in the United States,
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they found that forty percent of men and almost twenty
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percent of women reported drinking alone in nineteen seventy seven.
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By twenty ten, those numbers had dropped to about twenty
17:22
percent of men and fifteen percent of women, but then
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began steadily rising, so that by twenty twenty two, almost
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twenty five percent of men and twenty percent of women
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reported drinking alone. The timing coincides with the uptick in
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mental health problems among teens and young adults that some
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researchers have linked to the emergence of smartphones and social media.
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Young adults who drink alone typically do so to cope
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with negative emotions, and are considerably more likely than social
17:53
drinkers to struggle with problematic drinking by the age of
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thirty five. The same team reported in September twenty twenty
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two in Drug and Alcohol Dependence Relief Versus Reward Drinking.
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Unlike in the past, drinking today has been untethered from
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its social fabric. Herronster says, now people have unlimited access
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to alcohol with no elite gatekeeper, and they can drink
18:19
any type and quality of alcohol they desire, with anyone
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or no one left to sort out for themselves. If
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drinking does more harm than good, many people have become
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interested in trialing sobriety. Dry January and Sober October, which
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had been around for about a decade, encourage followers to
18:38
quit drinking for a month to improve health and well being. Meanwhile,
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the sober Curious movement arose out of author Ruby Warrington's
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epononymous twenty eighteen book Sober Curious. Abstinence from alcohol while
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encouraged is less important than drinking more mindfully. One way
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to evaluate one's drinking mindset is to reflect on the pandemic,
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says Keith Humphries, a psychiatric and addiction researcher at Stanford University.
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Drinking went down around the world from January twenty twenty
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to December twenty twenty three, researchers reported in a March
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review of one hundred studies in human psychopharmacology, clinical and experimental,
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but this shifting behavior wasn't universal. In fact, fewer than
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a quarter of the people drove that decline by drinking less.
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Half of the respondents did not change their drinking patterns,
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while just over a quarter drank more. Those who drank
19:36
more included people with declining mental health and individuals with
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children at home. For Humphreys, who was not involved in
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that With that study, those contradictory drinking patterns highlight two
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types of drinkers, relief drinkers like those Harry caregivers, and
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reward drinkers. Those who drink for reward, such as to
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celebrate special occasions with friends, are less mos likely than
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those drinking for relief from stress to develop alcohol problems,
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Humphrey says. Consider his own experience, He adds, at the
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pandemic start, Humphrey's had six bottles of wine at home.
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Half a year later, five bottles remained unopened. I drink
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for reward. I have a friend come over. It's fun,
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he says, when all that stuff was taken on my
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life from the pandemic, I went half a year without
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much drink. Perhaps given mounting evidence that drinking harms help,
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keeping that relief reward framing in mind can help people
20:35
reset their relationship to alcohol long after sober October ends,
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and designating a sympathiarch or friend to manage the revelie
20:45
can't hurt. The next article is entitled A conference just
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tested AI agent's ability to do science. You have to
20:55
be really careful when working with AI, says one participant,
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written by Katherine Hoolich October twenty fourth, twenty twenty five.
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In a first scientific conference, welcome paper submissions from any
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area of science, but with one catch, AI had to
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do most of the work. Called Agents for Science twenty
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twenty five, the October twenty second virtual event focused on
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the work of artificial intelligence agents, systems that pair large
21:24
language models with other tools or databases to perform multi
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step tasks, from formulating hypotheses to analyzing data and providing
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the first round of peer reviews. AI agents took the lead.
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Human reviewers then stepped in to assess the top submissions.
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In all, forty eight papers of three hundred fourteen made
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the cut. Each had to detail how people and AI
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collaborated on every stage of the research and writing process.
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We are seeing this interesting paradigm shift, says James Zu,
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a Computer Sciences as Stanford University, who co organize the conference.
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People are starting to explore using AI as a co scientist.
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Most scientific journals and meetings currently ban AI co authors
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and prohibit peer reviewers from relying on AI. These policies
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aim to avoid hallucinations and other issues related to AI use. However,
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this approach makes it tough to learn how good AI
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is at science. That's what Agent for Science aim to explorers,
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who said calling the conference and experiment with all the
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materials publicly available for anyone to study. At the virtual meeting,
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humans presented AI assistant work spending fields such as economics, biology,
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and engineering. Min Minfong and economists at the University of
22:50
California at Berkeley and her team collaborate with AI to
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study cartoing data from San Francisco. Their study found that
22:59
waving high towing fees helped low income people keep their vehicles.
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AI was really great at helping us with computational acceleration,
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Pong said, but she found you had to be really
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careful when working with AI. As an example, the AI
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kept citing the wrong date for when San Francisco's rule
23:19
waving towing fees waiting to effect. Fong had to check
23:22
this in the original source to discover the error. The
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core scientific work still remains human driven, she said. For
23:29
reason what Wexler, a computational astrophysicist at Stanford who helped
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review submissions. The results were mixed. The papers she saw
23:39
were technically correct, she said, but they were neither interesting
23:42
nor important. She was excited about the potential AI for research,
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but remained unconvinced that today's agents can design robust scientific questions,
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and she added the technical skill AI can mask poor
23:57
scientific judgment. Still, the event included some glimmers of hope
24:01
for the future of AI and science. Sylvia Tarragani, a
24:06
machine learning engineer at the company Upwork in San Francisco,
24:09
said that she gave chet GPT some context about the
24:12
kind of problems her company deals with with and asked
24:16
the bot to propose paper ideas. One of these was
24:19
the winner, she said, selected as one of the three
24:22
top papers in the conference. It was a study about
24:25
using AI reasoning in a job marketplace, I think AI
24:30
can actually come up with novel ideas, she said. Our
24:34
next article is entitled what to Know about Vaccine and
24:37
Your dogg or cap Vaccine hesitancy is on the rise
24:40
among pet owners. Here are the answers to some common
24:43
questions about animal vaccines, written by Anili Anthos and Teddy Rosenbluth,
24:49
October twenty seven, twenty twenty five. Over the last few years,
24:52
public health experts have expressed alarm about the spread of
24:55
anti vaccine sentiment in the United States and the fall
24:58
in childhood vaccination and rates. Now, veterinarians report they are
25:02
facing a parallel problem a growing number of plants who
25:05
are hesitant to vaccinate their pets. Although all medical interventions
25:10
have side effects, essential pet vaccines are widely considered to
25:13
be both safe and effective, experts said, and they are
25:16
an invaluable tool for giving pet owners something that they
25:20
very much seem to want, more time with their animal companions.
25:23
Vaccinations are one of the best methods we have to
25:26
extend life, said doctor Michael Bailey, the president of the
25:29
American Veterinary Medical Association. Some serious diseases like rabies can
25:33
also pass from pets to people. Vaccinating our cats and
25:37
dogs helps protect human health. Here's what to know about
25:40
vaccining your pet. Who develops vaccine guidelines for pets. In
25:44
the United States, veterinarians tend to follow the vaccine gaidlines
25:47
developed by the American Animal Hospital Association in partnership with
25:51
the Feline Veterinarian Medical Association. The organization develops separate gadlands
25:56
for cats and dogs and classifies recommended vaccines as core
26:00
or noncore. Core vaccines, which are recommended for all dogs
26:03
or cats, include vaccines for canine parva virus for dogs,
26:07
feline leukemia virus for kittens, and rabies for both cats
26:11
and dogs. The group also endorses additional non core vaccines
26:15
for animals that are high risks for particular diseases. Dogs
26:18
that live in places where lime disease is endemic may
26:21
benefit from the lime vaccine for insanes, while those that
26:24
attend doggy deadcare might need be vaccinated against contagious respiratory
26:28
diseases like bordetella or canine influenza. The guidelines are reviewed
26:32
and revised periodically. For example, the vaccine for leptospirosis, a
26:37
bacterial disease often transmitted from rodents to dogs was recently
26:41
added to the list of core canine vaccines after it
26:44
became clear that the risk of the disease was widespread.
26:47
What kind of vaccines mean? What kind of vaccine mandates
26:51
exist for pets? It depends on where you live and
26:53
which pet related services you use. Many states and cities
26:57
require rabies vaccines for cats and dogs, although some of
27:01
these laws are stricter than others. Many pet care companies
27:05
have their own vaccine policies, requiring the animals to be
27:08
vaccinated against a handful of highly contagious diseases before they
27:12
are allowed to tend daycare or stay overnight in a
27:14
boarding kettle. What are the risks of vaccination? In one
27:18
recent study examining vaccine safety and millions of dogs, researchers
27:22
reported an ad adverse event rate of about zero point
27:26
two percent, or two in every thousand vaccine appointments. The
27:30
most common side effects are mild and temporary, such as
27:33
painters swelling at the injection site. More serious reactions are
27:37
rare but possible. Vaccines are very safe, and I've seen
27:41
so many animals suffer and die from vaccine preventable illnesses.
27:45
Said doctor Sara Gonzalez, a veterinarian at the University of Georgia.
27:49
There are risks from vaccines, but they outweigh by far
27:53
the risks that come with not vaccinating pets. Does an
27:57
indoor only cat need to be vaccinated? What about a
28:00
that never goes to the dog park. Pet owners should
28:02
talk to their veterinarians about which vaccines make sense for
28:05
their pets. Even animals with live, cloistered lives need some vaccines.
28:11
Dogs can pick up diseases in their own yards, while
28:13
even indoor cats can encounter RUMs and bats and pathogens
28:18
they shed. As is the case with human medicine, widespread
28:22
vaccination of healthy animals also benefits the wider community by
28:26
helping to prevent outbreaks and protect more vulnerable pets, including
28:30
kittens and puppies that are too young to be fully
28:32
at vaccinated. This concludes today's Diary of Science and Nature.
28:36
Your host today has been Linda Rice. Thank you for listening,
28:40
and now please stay tuned for continued programming on Radio
28:43
I