Transcript

3.12.26 · Science Show KY

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Speaker 1: Hello, this is Kelly Taylor. I'll be your host for
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Radioized Diary of Science and Nature. We'll have articles on
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the topics of science and nature. But first a reminder
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that RADIOI is a reading service intended for people who
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are blind or have other disabilities that make it difficult
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to read printed material. We'll start off with an article
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from National Geography. The headline is Meet Tattoo and Loulie.
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The last of the quote talking in quote Chimpanzees. This
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is from February twentieth Lazing outside her home in the
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Montreal suburb of Carrignan on a breezy day in June, Tattoo,
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the chimpanzee, notices she has visitors. She slowly ambles over,
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peers downward at the onlookers, and draws her right index
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finger across her forehead. The gesture is American sign language
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for the color black. It's Tattoo's favorite color and the
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words she uses for describing things she thinks are cool.
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The chimpanzee, forty nine years old at the time, is
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expressing something akin to oh company neat Next, Tattoo makes
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a fist and brings it to her mouth in a
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circular motion. Ice cream would be a good idea, agrees
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Mary Lee Jenswold, a chimpanzee researcher and associate director of
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the Fauna Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to providing sanctuary to
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non human primates, including Tattoo and a forty seven year
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old male chimpanzee named lu Lee. Tattoo and Lulie are
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the last two surviving chimps from a series of experiments
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that began in the nineteen sixties. The pair have spent
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their entire lives in captivity, including stints at facilities in
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Oklahoma and Washington where researchers study their ability to learn
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asl American sign language, hoping to challenge the prevailing belief
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that only humans could use language. Since twenty thirteen, they've
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been living at Fauna, where both chimpanzees continue to sign. Tattoo,
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the more loquacious one, has mastery of two hundred and
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fifteen signs, while Luli can use seventy eight. Among their
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favorite things to talk to their caregivers about are food
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and activities. Tattoo is partial to cheese and enjoys a
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nice cup of coffee or tea, while Luli prefers asking
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his caregivers to play a game of chase where the
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language is unique to humans. Has been a subject of
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fascination to linguists and scientists for centuries, and in the
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nineteen sixties they began turning in earnest to one of
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our closest genetic relatives to finally put the question to rest.
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This research was pioneered by a pair of psychology professors
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at the University of Nevada Reno, the husband and wife
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couple Allan and Beatrix or Trixie Gardiner, who sought to
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prove that, under the right circumstances, chimpanzees could learn a
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human language. Their research began in nineteen sixty six with
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an infant ship chimp taken from West Africa for use
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in the US Air Force experiments, whom they adopted and
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named Washo. The Gardeners raised Washow as much like a
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human child as possible. She learned to use a potty,
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which she would call dirty good in sign language, played
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with dolls, and admired the photos in magazines. Washo became
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a sensation in academia, but her fame would be surpassed
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in the nineteen seventies by two other primates, Koko the gorilla,
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and Nim Chimpsky. While the mythol methodologies for those experiments
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would later come under fire, asking into doubt whether Coco
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and Nim understood what they were saying, the same was
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not true for Washow, who ultimately developed a vocabulary of
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two hundred and forty five words before her death in
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two thousand and seven. At Central Washington University, the gardeners
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repeated their experiments with four more chimpanzees, Moha, who loved
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to paint, Dar, who enjoyed wearing hats and examining mechanical objects, Peeley,
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a male who died from leukemia before age two, and Tattoo.
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They eventually turned their work over to their former graduate students,
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Roger Fouts and his wife Deborah, who took in Washow, Moja,
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and Dar, and Tattoo, as well as young Luli, who
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became the first and only chip to learn ASL from
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other chimps. It's unlikely that Tattoo and Lulie are aware
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they were at the heart of groundbreaking scientific research or
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the complex ethical questions that came with it. While the
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chimpanzee ASL experiments taught researchers much about how humans evolved
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our communication abilities. The knowledge came at a cost to
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the research subjects. Now in their geriatric years, chimps rarely
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live past sixty Tattoo and Lulie will likely never again
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see their natural habitats in the tropical forests of West
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and Central Africa. Successfully introducing chimps raised in captivity to
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the wild is impossible. Not only do they lack the
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skills to survive in the wild, but they could possibly
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face a violent rejection from any communities of chimps they meet.
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Barring a transfer to another similar haven, they are almost
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certain to live out the rest of their days at fauna.
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That cost would eventually lead some of the same scientists
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who raised the chimps to develop intense moral qualms about
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their most famous work and even turn against it. To psychologists,
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in the behaviorist school, which arose in the early nineteen hundreds,
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animal behavior was merely a response to external stimuli. They
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believed that other species inability to talk wasn't just evidence
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they lacked the proper anatomical structures. It made studying their
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inner life, a concept the school found largely inaccessible impossible.
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For some, it was even evidence of a lack of
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true consciousness. Linguists, including Nom Chomsky, pushed the belief that
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humans alone had an ingrained natural grammar from which all
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languages emerged as the thinking when animals would have no
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use for language. The gardeners, however, believed that chimps would
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have plenty to say if given the proper tools to
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do so. They weren't the first to suspect chimps were
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capable of communication. In the nineteen thirties and other pair
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of marriage students or scientists or other took a chimp
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named Gua into their home to see what would happen
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if they raised Gua in the same manner as a
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human child. That included teaching Gua English while they raised
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him alongside their human son Donald, as documented in their
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book The Ape and the Child, Winthrop and Luella Kellogg
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found that the chimp was actually faster at learning to
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use a spoon and open a door, as well as
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responding to spoken commands. However, they abandoned the experiment after
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Donald began speaking and Goua did not. Further experiments conducted
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beginning in the nineteen forties showed that chimps lacked the
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necessary anatomical structures to speak English, though one chimp named
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Vicki was ultimately able to say Mama, Papa, and cup
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after intensive speech therapy that involved humans manually shaping her
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mouth to make the right sounds with human vocalizations out.
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The Gardner's theorized that apes would be able to learn ASL,
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much like the way they learned to communicate via gestures
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in the wild. They'd have to be fully immersed surrounded
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by human caregivers who would communicate with them and each
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other solely in ASL. In nineteen sixty six, the pair
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put their theory into practice. Over the next fifteen years,
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the gardeners and their team of caregivers played with, fed, chased,
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and tickled their young harry charges Washau, dar Peele, Tattoo,
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and Moja. Eventually, each of the chimps began signing back
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as a toddler. Washau quickly grasped the sign for more
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and soon added the gestures for things like bird, smoke,
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and flower. Their work inspired others to try and replicate
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their results, including a Columbia University professor named Herbert Terrace.
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In nineteen seventy three, he acquired a chimpanzee that he
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named Nim Chimski. In reference to Chomsky, Terrence boasted Nim
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would soon be able to share his feelings, describe his imagination,
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and discuss the past and future. These claims, along with
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the Gardeners and fouts, his reluctance to put Washo in
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the limelight, led to Nim outpacing Washo in fame, even
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appearing on the cover of a nineteen seventy five issue
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of New York magazine. Terras would at first claim success
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as Nim learned to make the gestures associated with the
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signs for banana, hug and play, but Terras would later
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conclude that the Chip had been reacting to prompts from
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his trainers, taking the gestures to earn rewards with no
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actual understanding of what he was doing. Nim, he believed,
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could not use the signs he learned conversationally or string
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them together into sentences that reflected thoughts. Perhaps the problem
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wasn't with Nim with his environment. Quote. Nim lived with
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a family in New York on the Upper West Side,
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but he was brought to a classroom on the daily
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quote where he was drilled on signs for outl says
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Valerie Chowcraft, a psychologist who works as an animal behaviorist
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and studied under the gardeners in the nineteen nineties. Nim's
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lessons were given in spare rooms, lacking the normal stimuli
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that a child enjoys in their first years. As a result,
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as Chiwcraft puts it, it shouldn't be surprising that Nim
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didn't have much to say. Quote. Human adults don't teach
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their kids how to speak with rewards and punishments. It
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happens in a natural, relaxed setting, and enriched setting. She says.
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Nim also lacked stability and consistency. At least one close
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caregiver was abruptly cut out of the project, Several others
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left on their own, and Nim had no other chimpanzees
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around during this era. After Terras concluded the study in
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nineteen seventy seven, Nim was transferred to a research facility
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and then to a biomedical lab. Eventually, he was bought
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by a philanthropist and lived on a ranch until he
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died in two thousand of a heart at attack at
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age twenty six. In contrast to them, the chimps raised
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by the gardeners enjoyed a more playful environment closer to
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that of a human toddler. Take Tattoo's early life, for instance,
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Mourning captivity in nineteen seventy five and adopted by the gardeners.
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Tattoo liked sleeping in late and was a stickler for schedules.
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She had a playful side, developing a love for putting
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on masks that glee could sometimes turn a shade impish.
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Patrick Drumm, research assistant at the time and now a
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visiting research scholar at the University of Akron. Because one
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incident where Tattoo realized Moja was terrified of metal ice
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cube trade dividers, she began chasing Moja around with them,
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he recalls, and then because it frightened Moja, she tried
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it on the human companions. It didn't work so well.
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She and the gardener's other chimps proved talkative for a
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young from a young age. In a series of papers,
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the gardeners described how the method by which chimps learned
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sign mirrored how young children learned language, in that they
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were able to reliably answer simple direct questions like who's
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that and what do you want? Quote Man's ego centric
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view that he is distinctively unique from all other forms
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of animal life as being jarred to the core, wrote
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researchers Dwayne Rumbaugh and Sue Savage Rumball, who conducted their
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own linguistic work with Bonobo's. But it soon became evident
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that the gardener's ad hoc backyard facility could no longer
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house increasingly strong chimpanzees. By nineteen eighty, the gardeners had
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sent half of the chimps in their care to the
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University of Oklahoma, where they were looked after by Roger Fouts,
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the gardener's former graduate student. Tattoo and dhar would be
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the last to end up under his care in nineteen
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eighty one. Fouts would go on to make a new
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series of discoveries into chimpanzee communication. He would also begin
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to question the morality of his own life's work. Fouts
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had stumbled into primate asl research almost by accident, originally
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aiming to specialize in child psychology, but recently married and
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with a child on the way, he found himself desperately
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searching for a graduate assistant ship to get his out
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of state tuition waived at the University of Nevada. Just
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as he was about to give up, he was referred
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to the Gardeners. At his first meeting with the young Washow,
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the chimpanzee leaped into his arms for a hug. The
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assistant ship was his His studies are wrapped up, wrapping up.
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Just as the Gardeners realized was show was growing beyond
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their ability to care for her. When they decided to
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center the University of Oklahoma, Alan Gardner pushed Fouts to
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go with her as a caregiver and continue his research
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with her while there. Fouts and his wife, Debbie, who
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had become an integral part of his work, agreed. While
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in Oklahoma, Washo experienced a tragedy that would ultimately bring
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another chimp into the orbit, one whose ability to learn
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would astound the scientific community. In nineteen seventy nine, Washo
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gave birth to a baby named Sequoia. The baby was
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born weak and would only grow weaker after about of pneumonia,
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to which it succumbed after just a few months of life.
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According to Fouts's nineteen seventy seven memoir Next to Ken,
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Washo grew despondent, refusing to eat. In a bid to
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save her, Fouts acquired a baby chimp from Emory university's
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primate Research Center Lully. In his memoir, Fouts recalled the
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moment when he gave Washow the news of the new
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baby chimp's arrival for the first time in two weeks.
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Washo snapped out of her trance and became excited. Baby
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my baby, baby baby. She kept signing as she hooted
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for joy and swaggered on two legs. Her hair was
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standing on end. The arrival of Lului marked a new
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phase in his research. Could a chimpanzee learn sign language
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from other chimps? To test the theory, Fouts in his
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team refrained from signing around Louli. As Louli began adjusting
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to his new life, he soon began imitating his surrogate
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mother's signs. First, he began to sign come or gimme. Later,
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he began to ask for hugs, drinks, or tickles, all
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signs he picked up from Washo. Eventually, he began signing
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short phrases such as hurry, gimme. The learning wasn't just passive.
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Sometimes Washow would take Louley's hand and mold it into
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an appropriate sign, just as humans had done for her
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when she was an infant. That a chimpanzee could teach
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a human language to another chimpanzee was nothing less than astonishing.
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In the years since, field research has revealed that mothers
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teach many skills, such as using tools to lure tasty
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insects to their offspring. Yet, despite these successes, Fouts grew
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to have deep reservations about his work. In March nineteen
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eighty seven, he and Jane Goodall visited a biomedical facility
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where HIV research on schimps was being conducted. The pair
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saw dozens of chimps, including infants, living in small, dark,
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isolated cages. Some chimpanzees rocked back and forth, a clear
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sign of intense negative emotions. At least one chimp just
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clung to the bottom of its cage. After careers spent
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developing loving, affectionate relationships with chimpanzees, Fouts was horrified by
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what he witnessed. While his work was conducted in more
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comfortable living conditions, he became convinced it was just a
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lesser wrong than other injustices committed in the name of science. Quote.
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When we began locking chimpanzees away, we didn't know any better,
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but today we do, he wrote in his memoir. We
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know that chimpanzees are not mindless beasts, but highly intelligent
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and inventive beings who have been transmitting complex cultures for
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millions of years. They are our evolutionary brothers and sisters.
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What are the moral implications of this scientific revelation? The
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proper place for chimps, he came to believe, was in
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their native habitats. Any laboratory or refuge, no matter how comfortable,
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was still a prison. Fouts joined forces with Goodall to
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campaign for more humane treatment of the animals he had
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spent a career studying. At one two thousand and two
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symposium where the pair spoke, Fouts compared the plight of
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these animals to how Nazis treated Jews and the mentally disabled.
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Quote we abuse animals to make ourselves feel better, and
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we justify it, he said. The movement caught on. Scientists
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signed petitions against practices such as infecting chimps with HIV,
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and animal rights groups organized protests on university campuses. Chimpanzees
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who survive a laboratory and humans who survived trauma's share
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a common suffering, said Theodora Capaldo, who had an effort
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to ban chimpannez z research in US labs. In a
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two thousand and eight press release announced a study finding
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chimps could suffer from post traumatic stress disorder quote yet
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science imposes a species barrier on compassion. These efforts ultimately worked.
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In nineteen ninety seven, the Air Force, the very entity
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that had first taken Washo from Africa, announced it would
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no longer conduct biomedical research on chimps. By twenty fifteen,
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the US National Institute of Health came around as well,
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saying it wouldn't support such research on chimpanzees. While many
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chimps that had been used as lab subjects now reside
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in sanctuaries like fauna. According to Chimpcare, one hundred and
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forty three chimps remain in research facilities across the US,
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spared from being used for biomedical experimentation. Instead, they participate
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in cognitive and behavioral studies. Sixty nine others, however, are
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accredited facilities, are being kept by exotic pet breeders, or
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are being used in the entertainment industry. Another two hundred
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and thirty seven live in accredited zoos. And now we'll
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turn to popular science. Earth's Gateway to Hell Quotes is growing.
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This is from June fourth of twenty twenty four. In
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a remote area of the Siberian tundra, dotted with low
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trees and shrubs, there's a place that locals call the
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Gateway to Hell. During the summertime, the sound of water
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pouring over the cliff sides is interrupted every so often
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by the boom and crash of falling earth. It's quite noisy,
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says Julian Merton, geologist at the University of Sussex in England,
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has visited the site as part of his research. Those
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ominous sounds feed into indigenous Yakutian people's wariness surround the
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vast pit. In some ways, the fear is warranted. It
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may not be a portal to another realm, but the
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Quote Gateway or Batta Gay Crater is an unsettling mark
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of our own changing world, and in a sense, the
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formation is an opening to a hidden subsoil dimension, just
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a scientific, not supernatural one. The Bata Gay Crater, also
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sometimes called the Batageiic Crater, is not a crater at all.
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Whether it's a retrogressive thaw slump or RTS, or a
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widening chasm caused by permafrost thaw and rapid land subsidence,
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basically a slow motion landslide. It's the largest RTS in
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the world, and its ever expanding size, currently sitting at
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more than two hundred and fifteen acres, qualifies it for
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the categorization of megaslump. It began forming in the mid
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nineteen hundreds and was first observed on satellite images from
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the nineteen sixties. The megaslump, now shaped like a giant tadpole,
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was likely initially triggered by forest clearing and the passage
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of off road tracked vehicles moving across the delicate tundra
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during mineral and mining exploration. The vehicles and the clear
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cutting destroyed the vegetation, which acts as an insulating blanket
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keeping the permafrost cool. With that cover gone, soil erosions
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swept away the top layer of ground, exposing permafrost to
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the elements. Permafrost is any ground that remains completely frozen
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for at least two years, but much of it is
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significantly older than that, dating back thousands to tens of
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thousands of years to pass glacial periods. About fifteen percent
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of the Northern Hemisphere's land is underlain by permafrost, and
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the northern permafrost region holds up to sixteen hundred million
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metric tons of organic carbon, twice as much as is
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currently in the atmosphere. Under climate change, the Arctic is
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warming faster than the rest of the world, and permafrost
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is degrading and thawing worldwide. The batter gay Megaswamp is
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one particularly conspicuous signal of that human caused global heating.
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Since it first appeared on the landscape as a narrow crevice,
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it's expanded every year in a characteristic horseshoe pattern, growing
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fastest at the upslope headwall, where silt and soil slide
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away most easily. As the exposed permafrost melts, the soil
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contained within softens into mud and collapses in on itself,
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flowing downstream into local waterways and rivers along with the
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melted ice. And this expansion is happening fast. Between nineteen
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ninety one and twenty eighteen, the headwall has retreated by
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up to thirty seven feet per year and up to
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ninety eight feet in some instances. In total, Vatagay has
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lost thirty four point six million cubic meters of material,
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including ground ice and thowed soil, releasing one hundred and
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sixty nine thousand tons of organic carbon altogether. These carbon
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estimates can help santists better understand the climate and landscape
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consequences of permafrost thaw. Quote. Our results demonstrate how quickly
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permafrost degradation occurs, how dynamically the landforms in permafrost areas change,
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says Alexander Keiserkoff, need study author and glaciologists at Moscow
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State University in Russia. He and his co authors used
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remote sensing techniques, drone images, and soil and ized cores
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to come to their comprehensive estimates. The findings shed light
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on this particular megaslamp and also improve our understanding of
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how RTS has evolved. More generally, though Vatige's is a standout,
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RTS formations are not rare and are becoming increasingly common.
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Thaw slumps can be found across the Arctic, and particularly
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in parts of northern Russia, Canada, and Alaska. There's no
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official count, but over the past thirty years slumps have proliferated.
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They have conducted years of research on Banks Island in
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Canada's Northwest territories as they expand and release long frozen
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organic carbon. Thaw slumps become part of the permafrost positive
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feedback loop, where the carbon dioxide and methane they emit
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contributes to global warming. Though the volume of carbon currently
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being released by thowing permafrost is far less than the
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amount produced through the burning of fossil fuels, the permafrost
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contribution is not negligible, and in the future it could
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become much more significant as climate change continues. And Now
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from Scientific America dated March the eleventh, we have Hawaii's
25:03
Kilauea volcano erupts, shooting lava thirteen hundred feet into the air.
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The Kilauea volcano on Hawaii's Big Island erupted on Tuesday
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in a nine hour spectacular in which it shot fountains
25:17
of lava some thirteen hundred feet into the air. The
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eruption generated significant heat and ash, the US Geological Survey says,
25:26
with some six inches of tephra bits of volcanic material
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ranging from glass like particles to rocks and ash, accumulating
25:35
on a nearby golf course. Some glassy material, called Pele's
25:39
hair for its strand like structure, traveled as far as
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the city of Hilo. Hilo is some thirty miles away
25:47
by car. Over the course of the eruption on Tuesday,
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Kilowea released an estimated sixteen million cubic yards of lava
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and sent up an ash plume that reached beyond thirty
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thousand feet. Kilauea has been erupting regularly since December of
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twenty twenty four. Tuesday's fiery display was the forty third
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eruptive episode since then. Kiloea is a shield volcano, which
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means it is flatter and shorter than the classical conical
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peak of a composite volcano. But what such volcanoes lack
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in height, they make up for in size. Much wider
26:26
than they are high, shield volcanoes are the largest volcanoes
26:29
on Earth. These volcanoes often produce slow moving lava flows.
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Kilauea is among the planet's most active volcanoes and has
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been erupting for as long as humans have been around
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to document it. And now from Time Magazine meteor fragments
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hit the southeast US. Here's what to know. It's from
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March tenth. The Inner Solar System is a lot calmer
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than it was four billion years ago during what's known
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as the Heavy Bombardment Period. Over the course of that
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violent stretch, which lasted about five hundred million years, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars,
27:06
and the Moon were regularly pounded by asteroids, meteors, and
27:10
other cosmic ordinance. Many of the objects as big as
27:13
a six mile wide rock that wiped out the dinosaurs.
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Things have gotten a lot quieter since then, but that's
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not to say everything has gone entirely still. Earth still
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lives inside a shooting gallery, with thousands of objects totaling
27:27
about forty eight point five tons per year entering the atmosphere. Yesterday,
27:33
one of those space boulders exploded in the skies over Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia,
27:38
North Carolina, and South Carolina at eleven to fifty one
27:41
am Eastern time. The brilliant flash, which was accompanied by
27:45
a sonic boom, resulted in hundreds of calls and posts
27:49
to the American Meteor Society, NASA's recommended organization for reporting fireballs.
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In Henry County, Georgia, one house was struck by debris
28:00
that broke through the roof and landed inside the residence.
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There were no reported injuries. Well that's all for this
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week's Diary of Science and Nature. Your reader was Kelly Taylor.
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Now stay tuned for further programming on RADIOI