Kirsten: This show is brought to you by listeners like you and your contributions. We couldn’t do it without you. Thanks!
Justin: Disclaimer! Disclaimer! Disclaimer!
The full extent of the changes to come from the Earth’s atmospheric alteration are becoming increasingly clear. The question now is what to do about it.
“Is there a solution?” asked the masses of the world. “Yes, there are many,” say the scientific elite. “If we act immediately to change the way we’re living we may…”
“Wait. Wait. Is there a solution that does not require action?” interrupt the masses. “No,” say the scientists. “But if we act soon, we will have a chance to…”
“Wait. Wait. Wait. When you say ‘we act soon,’ you mean ‘you,’ right?” The scientists sigh and softly mumble something about the irrational having become the norm.
And while the majority of those softly mumbling scientists agree with the following hour of programming, they do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of the University of California at Davis, KDVS or its sponsors.
Mankind gains knowledge of the world only through reason. If knowledge is to be shared with the masses, the masses must be reasonable as well. We will not make the ground-breaking discoveries of the future based on the impulses or opinions of an irrational world.
Science does not make up a democratic decision nor does an ideology, this objective, reasoned methodical calling of the intellect. And it’s about to be broadcast live to the rational masses here on This Week in Science, coming up next.
Good morning, Kirsten!
Kirsten: Good morning, Justin.
Justin: It’s windy out today.
Kirsten: It is. It’s a windy day. There are high wind advisories on the Bay Bridge as I drove across.
Justin: It’s the kind of day that’s so windy, you look up into the sky half-expecting to see the moon like a third of the normal distance from the earth, just looming large in the sky and causing the crazy winds that mark the end of times.
Run for the hills! Not that that would help you from a moon, but that’s I think what you’re supposed to do in any sort of situation like that.
Kirsten: Very interesting.
Justin: Don’t you – isn’t that where I get the feeling like the moon is closer when it’s windy?
Kirsten: No.
Justin: Or is that just…
Kirsten: I think that may just be something that you have an issue with.
Justin: Oh. Okay.
Kirsten: Yeah. Moving on from that though, it is almost Halloween.
Justin: Mm hmm. Halloween.
Kirsten: Mm hmm. And sometimes it does in the fall, you know, the harvest moon. And it does seem as though it’s looming large in the sky.
Justin: It gets huge.
Kirsten: Yeah.
Justin: It gets like really close. Isn’t that what – isn’t it…
Kirsten: But that’s not what’s happening, just so you know. Lensing effects. Lensing.
It is almost Halloween. And in honor, or I guess, theming up our show, we have an interview today with…
Justin: A vampire.
Kirsten: No. No. I doubt.
Justin: This Week in Science interviews a vamp – isn’t that?
Kirsten: No.
Justin: I thought he was.
Kirsten: No, he’s not a vampire.
Justin: He’s a blood sucker
Kirsten: No, he’s a scientist.
Justin: Oh, a scientist vampire.
Kirsten: No.
Justin: No?
Kirsten: But he does study or has studied…
Justin: Vampires!
Kirsten: …vampire bats.
Justin: Oh, oh! Vampire bats. I missed the…
Kirsten: Yeah. Ectoparasites, vampire bats, et cetera. And he’s written this fabulous book called “Dark Banquet”. It’s all about the lives of sanguivores.
Justin: Which is a science-y word for vampire.
Kirsten: No, it means blood-eating.
Justin: Well, yeah. Vampire, blood. It’s the same thing. Work with me. It’s almost Halloween.
Kirsten: Halloween. Right. Okay. So I guess also to theme up the show, I brought a bunch of stories about brains.
Justin: Scary brain.
Kirsten: Scary. Yeah. And a transformer.
Justin: Ooh.
Kirsten: Yeah.
Justin: A transformer.
Kirsten: Yeah, brains and a transformer.
Justin: I’ve got – I brought a blood-sucker story of my own. What else do I got? I have neuroscientists and molecular pathways in the brain. I’ve got a brain story. It’s probably the same one you got.
And I also have some information sent in by minion Steven Sparks down in the – Bio professor of (Olin) College. He knows a bit or two about bees. He’s the owner of Bay Area Beekeeping. He gave me an update on the bees.
Kirsten: That’s very alliterative, too.
Justin: Mm hmm. Alliteratively…
Kirsten: That entire sentence was very…
Justin: I’m just talking in alliteratives today.
Kirsten: Very alliterative.
Justin: Ooh, and what else do I have. Mm hmm. Now, what is this one? This is a good one. I remember…
Kirsten: What is this?
Justin: I have no idea what it is.
Kirsten: What story did you bring?
Justin: Oh! Yes. They’re unblinding people with science.
Kirsten: Why are you bringing all the stories that I’m bringing?
Justin: Did you bring the “unblinded by science?”
Kirsten: Yes.
Justin: Well, there we go. That was the show. Thanks for tuning in folks. Oh, wait. We haven’t done it yet.
Kirsten: Okay. So let’s start with that story – this brainy, brainy science. “The blind will see again,” according to some researchers who, reporting at the Society for Neurosciences annual conference. — this year, it was in Chicago.
This conference is amazing. Over 30,000 neuroscientists descend on cities or just one city a year. But they descend on cities, this flock of tens of thousands of neuroscientists — not just any scientists, but neuroscientists.
Anyway, this year they’re in Chicago. They were all sharing their news with each other and with the world. And I do want to reiterate that a lot of these studies are preliminary.
The fact that they are reported at a conference does not mean that it’s been peer reviewed and that it’s gone through all of the proper scientific channels to be – to support hypotheses.
These are all very preliminary studies. People go, “I got some work I want to report. I haven’t gotten it published yet, but sure I’ve got an abstract.” So…
Justin: What?
Kirsten: Yeah.
Justin: This one I have is hard evidence. Let me read you straight from their press release how…
((Crosstalk))
Kirsten: …straight from the press release. It’s very provocative.
Justin: Well, no – this is – this one, they got into literature on this press release. They told a story. It’s brilliant.
Kirsten: What?
Justin: Listen. “Born with a retinal disease that made him legally blind and would eventually leave him totally sightless, the 9-year-old boy used to sit in the back of the classroom relying on the large print on an electric screen and assisted by teacher aides.”
Kirsten: Mm hmm.
Justin: “Now, after a single injection of genes that produce light sensitive pigments in the back of his eye, he sits in the front with his classmates, participates in class without extra help. In the playground, he joins his classmates in playing his first game of softball.”
Kirsten, that’s science. That’s really – it’s a good story.
Kirsten: That’s a nice anecdote.
Justin: “But his treatment,” – no, this is a real story.
Kirsten: Yes, but the treatment is real. Researchers have – they’ve transplanted what they call sheets, like tissue sheets of fetal retinal cells — so cells from the retina of the area of the eye that would develop into the eye in human fetuses — taken fetal retinal cells and these cells turn into light sensitive cells.
And then a supporting layer of tissue so that it has all the support cells that keep those retinal cells alive and let them get to where they want to be. They transplanted them into the eyes of ten people. And they said, seven of the ten patients improved.
Justin: We have different blind stories.
Kirsten: One remained the same. And two continued to deteriorate. And this is – we have different blind stories?
Justin: We have different…
Kirsten: Completely different stories?
Justin: They are curing blind people in two different ways this week.
Kirsten: That’s pretty cool.
Justin: This one’s – mine is a gene therapy.
Kirsten: Gene therapy?
Justin: Yeah.
Kirsten: Wow. Two different stories. There we go. So yours maybe was published. This one, not so – maybe not so much yet.
Justin: We were about to, once again, going into fisticuffs over disagreeing, but now it turns out it’s a different story.
Kirsten: We were going to just – the smack down. That’s right.
Justin: Excellent.
Kirsten: Well, agreeing that it was a very cool story, but now turning out that this is much broader than what we’ve thought.
Justin: No, they’ve got video of my blind people with light sensitivity now. They’ve got – they use – they have – they put them through this like mazes. And at first, they were just bumping into things. And now, they’re light sensitive enough to navigate them. Yeah.
Kirsten: That’s very cool.
Justin: And this was with a single gene therapy treatment. And the effects took place within a couple of weeks within even – let’s see. They didn’t quite attain normal eyesight. But out of the 12, enough of them improved enough so that they no longer may be classified as legally blind.
Kirsten: Wow.
Justin: Yeah.
Kirsten: That’s very impressive.
Justin: It was a very dramatic result. It happened very quickly. They – now my paper’s all crumpled because I thought I wasn’t going to have to read it.
Kirsten: Crumple. Crumple. Crumple.
Justin: Yeah. The study conducted was conducted by researchers from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and the Center for Cellular and Molecular Therapeutics at the Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia and they used the gene therapy to safely improve vision in five children and seven adults.
Apparently, the children were much more receptive to the therapy. And it was…
Kirsten: Which possibly would make sense considering that the visual system and – many systems in children are still very plastic and undergoing development as opposed to the adults who have become fairly set in their ways cellularly.
Justin: Yeah. Starting after two weeks after the injections, all 12 of the subjects that were involved reported an improved vision in dimly lit environments in the injected eye.
And objective measurement which measures how the eyes’ pupil constrict show that the subjects were able to detect significantly more light after treatment and also showed more light sensitivity. Mm hmm.
Kirsten: That’s neat. The study that I was looking at, these were researchers at the University of California Irvine who, yeah, they used fetal cells, fetal tissue from the retina of the eye and implanted them into adults.
Like I said, ten patients received the transplants. Four of them had an age-related macular degeneration. And six had retinitis pigmentosa. All of them are deteriorate – they’re disorders that where the eyesight deteriorates over time.
And the people were assessed, you know, asked them to read, checked how well they could see. And they followed up with the patients anywhere from one to six years after the transplant.
And everything seemed fine. The researchers say that there were no negative side effects, whatsoever.
Justin: Awesome.
Kirsten: It didn’t work in all of the cases in the transplants, but there were no immunological problems and no negative side effects as far as they could see in any of the ten patients. So this is a very small limited study. But at the same time, it could become broader.
I would think that maybe the gene therapy – I don’t know whether the gene therapy can only be used in particular cases where it’s a specific gene that needs to be fixed.
With the degenerative diseases, it’s more – you’re just transplanting. And so we have the transplant technique that could treat a larger number of people than the gene therapy. However, the transplant technique is limited in how much tissue is available. And so, not as many people will actually end up being treated.
Justin: Right.
Kirsten: So there’s this kind of interesting interplay back and forth.
Justin: If I recall from the story which is now across the room in a paper airplane…
Kirsten: Yes.
Justin: ..it was with the degenerative disease. And one of the things we’re going to follow up with is basically to see if it sticks.
Kirsten: Yeah.
Justin: To see if it…
Kirsten: How long does it last? Does it…
Justin: How long does it last?
Kirsten: Yeah.
Justin: And does it actually ward off further degeneration? Or is it something that’s just – you’d have to go in for every once in a while to maintain that level or what?
Kirsten: Which, you know, isn’t necessarily bad. Not necessarily.
More brainy news. This time, kind of in the world robot domination vein. Robots might touch you with whiskers one day. Yeah.
Whiskers on robots and – yeah, researchers at the Universities of Edinburgh and Sheffield have been looking at the way that mice interpret the world through their whiskers. So mice and cats and animals with whiskers have special sensory areas of the brain that are correlated to each of the whiskers on their faces.
So, they’re called – in the brain, it’s called the barrel cortex. And it allows mice, rats, animals with whiskers to have a very – I guess a broader sense of their environment through this touch, this proprioception of the whiskers.
They took artificial whiskers and stuck them on robots. So they made robots and they gave them artificial whiskers and then checked to see – they allowed the robots to learn how to use the whiskers. And then looked – compared that against how maybe the brain works.
And what they ended up seeing is that the robots learned – the brain learns to understand signals from the senses through experience. So the robots basically learned how to use them in a very similar way to the way that the brain – the mammalian brain does.
They found – this is from an article I believe in the BBC.com – when objects were brushed against the whiskers, the robot brain learned how to interpret the whisker movement according to its direction, so that whatever way the whisker was moved, the brain would go, “Oh, it’s going that way. It’s going that way. It’s going this way. It’s going that way,” and sense the direction.
And it mimicked the function of how a real brain understands the sensations of touch.
Justin: Wow.
Kirsten: Yeah. So one day, and this may actually help to create not just robots with the sense of whiskery touch.
Justin: Robots with moustaches.
Kirsten: Yeah, robots with moustaches. Yes. No.
It may help in having small whiskers or – I can imagine very, very tiny hairs, you know, little wires that you could put in fake limbs to allow limbs to have a sense of touch for people who have lost their limbs and have to use artificial limbs. Which could be very interesting. I mean, to give a sense of touch to people who have lost that.
Justin: Yeah. That’s an amazing idea. You should patent that or something.
Kirsten: I should.
Justin: Then do research by that time.
Kirsten: Brainy, brainy, brainy.
Justin: Scientists, scientists at the University of California, Davis – wherever that is.
Kirsten: Here?
Justin: I don’t know.
Kirsten: Here?
Justin: I don’t think I’ve heard of that one.
Kirsten: What?
Justin: They have identified the dominant odor naturally produced in humans and birds that attracts the blood-feeding culex.
Kirsten: What?
Justin: Mosquitoes.
Kirsten: Oh, yes.
Justin: Mosquitoes. The mosquitoes. Those that transmit the West Nile virus and other life threatening diseases.
The skin-breaking research published this week in the early online edition of the Proceedings of National Academy of Scientists paves a way for key developments in mosquito and disease control. Go, get them!
Mosquitoes, I can’t stand them. I mean, to not, you know, care for one creature on the planet if I’m allowed, it is the mosquito.
Kirsten: Well, it would be so great to be able to get rid of them. People are still using DDT around the world because of mosquitoes and because they spread malaria, other blood-borne pathogens and diseases.
Justin: Right.
Kirsten: And if we could get rid of that, find a way to get them to stop biting people, it would be great.
Justin: And if it turns out that they’re some key part of the food chain, well everything above them must go too because they’re just – I don’t like them.
Kirsten: They’re that despicable? It’s just everything – everything above them got to go.
Justin: If you get rid of it, then you have to get rid of like, you know, the polar bear and unicorns. I’ll be like, “Okay.”
Entomology professor Walter Leal and Post Doctoral researcher Zain Syed found that the nonanal is the powerful semiochemical that triggers the mosquitoes’ keen sense of smell directing them towards a blood meal.
See, the thing is I always thought it was the carbon, you know, from your breath.
Kirsten: Well, carbon dioxide is a very strong attractant.
Justin: Mm hmm.
Kirsten: It’s a big part of it. Mm hmm.
Justin: Supposedly. But they’ve baited traps with a combination of nonanal and carbon dioxide. And they were drawing in as many as 2000 a night in Yolo County near Davis.
Basically, it increased trap captures by more than 50% compared to traps based – baited with simply carbon dioxide alone. Mm hmm.
Kirsten: Fifty percent increase.
Justin: Fifty percent increase.
Kirsten: Half. They took…
Justin: So before, they were getting a thousand. Now, they’re getting…
Kirsten: No.
Justin: No, 1500? Wait. How many would it be?
Kirsten: No, they would be getting 4000 or they’re…
Justin: Now you’re getting confused.
Kirsten: Yeah. Whatever.
Justin: Before, they were getting 1000. Now, they’re getting 2000.
Kirsten: Fifty percent. You’re adding 50%.
Justin: Yes, that’s what I meant.
Kirsten: Yes. Adding half.
Justin: Adding half?
Kirsten: Adding half.
Justin: That may – requires math. However, it was a significant startling improvement over the past – wow. Yeah, so maybe we’re one step closer to creating a countermeasure, a chemical countermeasure than can hide our nonanal.
Kirsten: Right. So, maybe there’s a way to be able to block the interaction between nonanal and carbon dioxide to just block their sense of nonanal.
Justin: Or just create really powerful traps that collect all of them in the night and keep them from buzzing around.
Kirsten: That could work too. Just decrease the numbers.
Justin: Because they wait until you – when you turn on the light to go get them…
Kirsten: They hide. They hide.
Justin: They hide. You turn off the light, they’re like, “Buzzzzz zzzz zzzzz.” And then it seems you don’t hear them, you know you’re getting bit somewhere. And, you know, you want to sleep because you have a show to do in the morning. It’s really time to get some shuteye.
Kirsten: Poor, poor thing. Poor thing. Yes, I think it’s exciting. It’s great. I mean, this is just – the more we know about how the mosquitoes love us, the better we will be able to break up with them.
Music. Music. It’s in your brain. Music is in your brain. Music is in you. And researchers, again, at the Society of Neuroscience and because Society of Neuroscience, their meeting was last week; I’m reporting…
Justin: You don’t have to apologize. It’s sort of your thing.
Kirsten: I’m totally reporting brain…
Justin: You kind of got your PhD in the, you know, neurology department.
Kirsten: Yeah. Some of that stuff. Exactly. So it has to be said.
A researcher from Georgetown University’s Medical Center is listening to the brain of monkeys. They took the auditory cortex and recorded from the neurons in the auditory cortex and found specific neurons that respond to fundamental frequencies and harmonics.
And these neurons are really close to the auditory area of the brain that is arranged in basically a tonal spectrum. So there’s a part of the auditory cortex where it’s like a group of neurons reports – responds to very low frequency sounds and then it kind of moves up. And there’s, you know, different group of neurons that respond to different sounds, different frequency sounds. And each neuron has specific frequency that it responds to best.
So you basically have a piano in your – if you could have a piano that listened instead of played. You have a piano in your ear – in your head.
And so they – in addition to these neurons that respond to specific sounds, they just – for the first time – reported on finding neurons that respond to harmonics.
Justin: Wow. To groups at once.
Kirsten: To groups – yeah. So instead of just responding to one…
Justin: It’s not just that you’re being – you’re responding on those individual notes, there’s a whole – wow.
Kirsten: Whole series of notes that one neuron responds to. And they think that this is really important because many animals, especially mammals, we have multiple frequencies that sometimes lay on top of each other in the sounds that we make when we’re giving different mating calls, when we’re having alarm calls, whatever…
Justin: We have a mating call? What’s the mating call? I didn’t learn it.
Kirsten: Human mating call. I think that – isn’t it that joke, the blond joke like, “Oh my god, I’m so drunk!”
Justin: Is that the mating call?
Kirsten: Yeah. Something like that. I don’t know.
Justin: It’s not attractive.
Kirsten: It’s not attractive at all.
Justin: Why are you making fun of blonds? Where did that come from?
Kirsten: It’s a blond joke.
Justin: Oh, my goodness.
Kirsten: It’s something I heard ages ago. Old joke.
Anyway, the question is, you know, why is music something that we respond to so well. I mean, people use music therapy for some disorders for – music scenes to have a therapeutic effect on us.
Music is something that crosses cultural boundaries. What it is about music – what is it about our brains that allows us to respond to music in the way that we do and why is it so important?
Justin: If you think about it too like almost as if it were inherent with us because yeah, it’s in every culture no matter how diverse, no matter how separated by time and space of the planet over the years, every culture has some form of music.
Kirsten: Right. And as you go back, I mean, maybe monkeys or, you know, any of our ancestors that we can’t unfortunately record from their brains anymore. But if you were to go back in time, our early, early ancestors probably didn’t have language and music. But they probably did have some amount of musical sound making that they used for communication.
And it’s possible. I mean, there’s another recent story talking about how rats respond to high-pitched, high frequency sounds that they make when they’re under stress or in fear.
They had a rat that they exposed to a high – to a tone and a shock at the same time so that the rat learned that if they heard the tone, they’re going to get shocked, right?
And then they had another rat that – they didn’t give him a tone. They just shocked him. So this one rat didn’t have any association with the tone. The other rat, tone is bad.
Justin: Yeah. Tone bad, tone very bad.
Kirsten: Yeah. You put them in sound proof containers next to each other where they can see each other but can’t hear each other and play the tone for each animal, the one that learned the tone is bad has a fear response. The one that didn’t has no reaction whatsoever because it doesn’t know the tone is bad.
But if you put them in the same cage together where they can hear each other and you play the tone, the one that learned the tone is bad has a fear response and so does the other rat.
And what they’ve pinned it down to is the fact that these rats have like, “Eeeeeeeee!” really high-pitched sounds that we can’t hear that they can hear, that they make. And so…
Justin: The other rat is like, “Stop doing that. What are you doing? You’re freaking me out.”
Kirsten: So there are all sorts of, you know, ranges of sounds of various frequencies that animals make that our brains need to respond to. And maybe that lead to music.
Justin: And I figure that without big brains, having been in the jungle – I think the jungle.
Kirsten: The jungle.
Justin: Being in the trees. That’s where I think music came from.
Kirsten: Birds.
Justin: From the birds. Because we…
Kirsten: Howler monkeys.
Justin: We probably – with our larger brains even back then – were monitoring the jungle.
Kirsten: Probably.
Justin: And the jungle makes different sounds. And there’s different creatures in the jungle that make different response to different warning sounds.
Kirsten: Yup.
Justin: Some on the ground. Some in the air. Some for different predators or different arrivals or movements in the…
Kirsten: Mm hmm.
Justin: So really, the music of the jungle was probably very important information for us to be listening to this bird and that squirrel or whatever is in the jungle that makes noise.
Kirsten: Yeah.
Justin: And yeah, that’s probably where it came from.
Kirsten: And George.
Justin: And George.
Kirsten: George of the jungle.
Justin: Do we have time? I still got more stories. You look like you’re about to push the buttons.
Kirsten: Yeah, we’ve got about four minutes before the break. I love that – this figuring out how music is in our brain.
Justin: Oh, my goodness. There’s so much going on out there. Researchers at Children’s Hospital, Boston, report an enzyme known as Mst3b. It’s essential for regenerating damaged nerve fibers a.k.a. axons.
And in live models in both the peripheral and central nervous systems, they have been able to do – make treatments for spinal cord damage, traumatic brain injury.
This is something that could – basically, what this does is this enzyme is involved with overcoming the natural breaks in cell signaling. We have a system that prevents nerve regeneration under normal conditions.
Kirsten: Yeah, we do. And so to be able to get past that and to be able to re-grow lost nerves, broken nerves, et cetera, would be fantastic.
Justin: We can fix brain damage. We may be able to rewire the, you know…
Kirsten: And that could be huge for repairing damage for diseases like multiple sclerosis, other disease in which the myelin is damaged. If we can re-grow…
Justin: Even the – maybe even like schizophrenia.
Kirsten: Wow.
Justin: Alzheimer. Everything – and of course the spinal cord injuries and – so we’re curing everything. We’re going to live forever.
Kirsten: We haven’t cured it yet. We’re getting there. But…
Justin: Yeah. We cured blindness twice this week alone. Isn’t that…
Kirsten: It’s true. It’s true.
Justin: Here’s the email from Steven Sparks. He’s the owner of Bay Area Beekeeping. And I was asking him the other day about, “What’s up with the bees?” And it looks like over the last two winters, there’ve been large scale, unexplained losses of managed honey bees colonies in the United States. In the absence of a known cause, this syndrome was named Colony Collapse Disorder because the main trait was a rapid loss of the adult worker bees.
And if you’re not familiar, it’s not just about honey. We’re in the heart of Ag Land. In California, we sell more rice to Japan than Japan makes. We sell – we’re a bread basket not just of the country, but of the world.
It’s a huge agricultural statement. A lot of people don’t realize that about California. But that’s our – probably our number one industry here.
The rundown here is this – the honey bee was introduced in 1622 to North America. And it doesn’t have much of a natural immunity to parasites as with the native bee.
Native bee has been playing this evolutionary cat and mouse game for a thousand to a million times longer in an otherwise stable environment. And native may have a boom bust cycle, but rarely a collapse.
So our assumption that there must be something horrible or man-made that is killing our little canary in the coal mine is not as tenable as one might think. So this might not be a new bee-killing virus or something that’s out there.
Honey bees are like cattle. They’re managed. They get sick because they’re about as vigorous as a pure-bred poodle, not like a wolf. It is then bee policy to keep exotic bees out of the country. The parasite threats are real. We have not been breeding queen bees for strength against the parasites. But this is something that Professor Steven Sparks is currently working on.
Kirsten: Very cool.
Justin: Native bee die off seem to be a combo of habitat loss, disease, caught-for-managed bees. And the bumble bee decline is linked to viruses picked up from managed bumble bees used in hothouses.
Kirsten: Right. Lure wild bees!
Justin: For natives – for livestock, you have to keep the genetic line strong because natural selection is no longer occurring. It goes without saying that habitat for livestock is important.
And then he throws out some rough numbers. Twenty-five percent of all managed honey bee colonies die every year. So this is – that’s the norm.
Kirsten: That’s normal.
Justin: This is not so bad since bees naturally double or triple in their populations.
Kirsten: Very interesting.
Justin: The 25% started when the Varroa mite started attacking honeybees. In 2006-2007 a loss of over 50%. The next year, 40%. Then 35% last year. This seems to be the typical rebound after the entry of new disease.
Only colonies with some immunity make it to the next year. And those hardy bees are split and used for the next generation. If it were just pesticides of their habitat, the colony collapse disorder losses would probably be slow – a slower downward spiral.
Kirsten: Right.
Justin: And not be bouncing back as they are. So bees!!!!
Kirsten: Bees are coming back maybe. That’s exciting. I have so many more stories. The coolest dinosaur in the history, if ever, the pterosaur…
Justin: Mm hmm.
Kirsten: …was a transformer.
Justin: Mm hmm.
Kirsten: It could fly. It could sail. And it could walk on four or two legs. Whoa. Researcher Sankar Chatterjee, he presented his findings at the Geological Society of America’s annual meeting in Oregon.
He’s a geoscientist at Texas Tech University. And he’s been modeling all the things that this wonderful pterosaur Tapejara Wellnhoferi could do. One hundred fifteen million year old Brazilian pterosaur could sail faster than the speed of the wind. It’s very exciting, fascinating animal. I’m sure we’ll hear more about that.
And butterflies are listening to you. They have ears in their wings.
Justin: And researchers have found an enzyme that they can block that will reduce – you won’t have sleep deprivation anymore. So we’re going to cure sleep pretty soon.
Kirsten: Sweet. And we have mice to thank for that one, right?
Justin: Thank you, mice.
Kirsten: Thank you, mice.
Justin: We’re curing everything in mice.
Kirsten: Yeah, we are.
Justin: We’re going to live forever.
Kirsten: We are. Without further ado…
Justin: Further ado. No?
Kirsten: It is the end of the half hour.
Justin: No more ado.
Kirsten: We will be back in just a few moments after these messages. Stay tuned please. More TWIS is on the way.
(Interlude)
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Kirsten: Justin wrote a book. Amazing, right? It’s called “Ome.” And you can go to TWIS — T-W-I-S — .org to buy yourself a copy of Ome. Buy one for yourself. Buy one for a friend. Buy one for a complete stranger.
Justin’s book – Ome. Go to twis.org. Buy Justin’s book. Buy it.
(Interlude)
Kirsten: That sounded fabulous.
Justin: Is that on air?
Kirsten: Blood!!!!
Justin: Did I just cough into the microphone? That was lovely.
Kirsten: Blood. Thank you to They Might Be Giants for “Blood” and Melody Sheep on YouTube for creating another – The Symphony of Science, so it had Neil deGrasse Tyson, Carl Sagan, Bill Nye, the science guy and I believe somebody else involved in his autotune remix. Pretty cool stuff.
But we have a guest on the phone. We do. We do. His name is Dr. Bill Schutt. And he is a biologist – Associate Professor of Biology. I know. I know.
Justin: I’m just getting ready.
Kirsten: You’re getting ready to press the button. And he is also tied to the American Museum of Natural History. He’s written a book called “Dark Banquet”. Without further ado. Without further ado, with further ado.
Justin: Enough further ado-ing.
Kirsten: Welcome to the show, Dr. Schutt.
Bill Schutt: Hi. Nice to be here.
Kirsten: Thank you for joining us. All right. So it’s nearing Halloween, so it’s kind of in the theme. Your book…
Justin: It’s all about vampires, correct? No, right?
Kirsten: No, sanguivores.
Justin: Sanguivore. That’s even scarier sounding than vampire because I know what a vampire is. What’s a sanguivore?
Bill Schutt: The same thing. I mean, you’re talking about creatures that can feed on blood and pretty much don’t feed on anything else.
Kirsten: How do you start studying something like a sanguivore?
Justin: Very carefully.
Kirsten: I know. “Don’t bite me.”
Bill Schutt: I went back to school at Cornell University to get my PhD. And the professor that interviewed me – most of his grant money, he picked up from studying muscle physiology. But his real love was the study of bats.
So when he took me on as a student, you know, he said, “What do you want to work on?” And it probably took me about a microsecond to tell him that I wanted to study bats.
Kirsten: Mm hmm.
Bill Schutt: I was a kid who grew – you know, I had a monkey, iguanas. I was a kid that had…
Justin: You had a monkey?
Bill Schutt: …all the weird animals growing up. So, you know, people talk to me 20, 30 years later and they ask what I do for a living. And I say, “I study vampire bats.” Nobody’s really surprised.
Kirsten: You know, that’s pretty fitting. Now, vampire bats – you probably had a colony of bats that you work with. How do you keep – how do you maintain a colony of vampire bats?
Bill Schutt: Yeah, that was a lot of fun. Actually, I had two colonies that I brought back from Trinidad and kept them for three years. And really what it entails is that assuring that, you know, making sure that you can get fresh blood on a daily basis.
So I used to wake up early in the morning with an undergrad assistant of mine. And we used to trek down to the local slaughter house and collect large amounts of cow blood as they slaughter the cows and then…
Kirsten: Wow.
Justin: Wow.
Bill Schutt: …store them in Snapple bottles.
Kirsten: Oh, my gosh.
Justin: Does that – did you get any looks from the rendering crew? Like are you – is that really for science or…
Bill Schutt: Yeah. They thought – you know, here were these guys wielding the, you know, the carcass mess or 500, cut these animals up into pieces. And, you know, they looked at us like we were weird.
Kirsten: So the blood-feeding vampire bat, I mean, it’s really taken people’s interest. People are always fascinated in this idea of animals that feed on blood. Why do you think that it just so permeated our culture?
Bill Schutt: It’s mysterious. It’s kind of scary. It also, you know, you find that people are fascinated by vampires. I mean, it’s – it really – it comes and goes. This time around, it’s really strong because of these movies that are out and TV shows.
But I think we’ve always had a fascination with the things that creep us out. And nothing creeps you out more than a creature that’s sucking out your life’s essence.
Kirsten: Right.
Bill Schutt: Most of the things that people think they know about vampire bats unfortunately are wrong. So I’ve been trying with some friends of mine to clear up some of those problems.
Kirsten: Yeah. That’s something that I was wondering. I mean, we think these blood suckers are creepy. But are they really?
Justin: I think it’s polite.
Kirsten: What are they really like? Are they sweet?
Bill Schutt: Well, one of the species that we brought back, they were like little teddy bears, the white-winged vampire bat, while the common vampire bat is a nasty little bugger.
But most people think that generally speaking, all bats are vampires. And there are 1100 different species of bats throughout the world, only three of them are vampire bats.
Kirsten: Wow. Where are those located? Do they have some kind of a similarity in their environment, in the…
Bill Schutt: Yeah. They’re all found in Central America. Well, some of them are found in Mexico, then throughout Central America and South America and two Caribbean Islands – Margarita and Trinidad – which is where I did most of my vampire bat studies.
But they’re not found, you know, in Transylvania or Europe. They’re not found in United States or Africa or any other place. Strictly speaking, they are, you know, a New World group.
Justin: And they are typically feeding on much larger creatures. Is that right or do I have that wrong?
Bill Schutt: Well, I mean across the board, any vampire species that you’re looking at is feeding on animals that are much larger than it. And vampire bats are certainly a case in point.
Two of the three species feed primarily on birds. And one of the species, the common vampire bats, feeds primarily on large mammals, usually cattle and things like that, pigs.
But that’s a problem that we are causing. It’s not the bat’s fault. We’re the ones who are cutting down the rainforest and bringing them this giant bags of blood and then the vampire bat populations explode because you’ve got all of these, you know, you’ve got this great food source there now.
Kirsten: Right.
Bill Schutt: If you had left things alone, there wouldn’t be that many vampire bats.
Justin: And have you been bitten? I mean, does it hurt?
Bill Schutt: I’ve not been bitten. I make it a point not to get bit by animals. The way I figure it is if you get bit by something that you’re 500 times larger than that creature and you get bit, then you’re mishandling the animal, which is no good for the animal.
Justin: But your curiosity – like, “Hey, I wonder what it feels like. I wonder how…” I mean, you never thought, “Yeah. I may just take one bite, just so I’ll know.”
Bill Schutt: No. My mother drowned all of her really stupid kids. Never – sorry.
Kirsten: Do they secrete any kind of a, I guess, anything to numb – a numbing agent of any kind?
Bill Schutt: That’s really interesting. It’s thought that – it hasn’t been identified yet. But it’s thought that there is something there that may sort of act as an anesthetic. But primarily, we know that they have anti-coagulants in their saliva, so when they make this little razor-sharp bite, you’re not going to feel it anyway for the most part.
And then they lick the wound that’s a little (divot) shaped wound. It’s not two little fang marks that you’d see in movies. But there’s a little (divot) that they carve out with their razor-sharp teeth.
And then their tongues sort of moves in and out of their mouth like a piston. It’s sort of like that guy from Kiss, only not as gross.
Kirsten: Ah, Gene Simmons.
Bill Schutt: And they’ve got anti-coagulants in their saliva that keep the blood flowing. And then they just kind of – the blood flows into their mouth like capillary action. They don’t really suck blood either.
Kirsten: Now, you said they’re New World species. Are there any ideas as to how this blood-feeding behavior actually came about, since they’re so few?
Bill Schutt: Well, there are number of different hypothesis. I actually presented one. Some of the thought behind how vampires evolved was they might be – we call these things protovampires. Protovampires were feeding on ticks and large blood-engorged ectoparasites that were, you know, for example infesting large animals. And then they got a taste for the blood. And then they just kind of converted to feeding on the animal itself.
Justin: Skip the middle man.
Bill Schutt: I didn’t really buy that one because there are no animals that feed like that. There are no bats that feed that way now.
Kirsten: Right.
Bill Schutt: So what I proposed was that if you want to get an idea of how protovampires were acting, look at some creatures that are closely related to vampire bats and see what they’re doing. And the bats that I looked at were arboreal hunters. They were moving around in the branches and sort of ambushing lizards or birds or other bats and overpowering them.
And if that was the protovampire, then we think that vampire bats evolved about 10 million years ago. Then at 10 million years ago, what was going on in South America with that larger animals were evolving and moving into the trees. So you have primates. And you have larger birds.
So my hypothesis said, well, what if they just kept that kind of stealthy, sneaky approach. But instead of overpowering small animals, what if they just went up and took a bite out of something larger? And that is how I think vampire bats evolved.
Kirsten: In your – on your website, and I think also in your book you bring up the vampire finches…
Bill Schutt: Yeah.
Kirsten: …these birds that feed on the blue-footed booby. Do you think that that is the kind of protovampire behavior?
Bill Schutt: Yeah. Exactly right. You know, you’re not going to – I don’t believe you’re going to start off just feeding on blood completely. So these finches are sort of – they’re not really card-carrying vampires yet because they still feed on fruit and seeds, but they supplement their diet by drinking blood.
And so, who knows? You know, 1000, 5000 years from now, maybe they will be feeding solely on blood but right now, they’re sort of just testing the waters, isn’t it?
I think that probably, any creature that evolved to be a vampire was probably – was certainly feeding on something else first whether it was nectar or meat.
Justin: Here’s the question then – do they have the anti-coagulant saliva?
Bill Schutt: That’s an excellent question. And as far as I know, they don’t. That’s a great question.
Justin: Mm hmm. Because that’s what I would first think, like, “Which came first?” Like, how did the anti-coagulant develop to assist the blood feeding?
Bill Schutt: Yeah. That’s an interesting question. You know, you sort of fall back on natural selection and a group of creatures that had a mutation for a substance that allowed the blood to flow a little longer would be the ones that survived and pass that mutation on the next generation.
And then, you know, a couple of generations down the road, you’re not calling that a mutation anymore. You’re calling that an adaptation.
Justin: Adaptation.
Kirsten: It’s just amazing to think that it could just, oh, one day, one animal, a few animals have a mutation that could allow them to feed…
Justin: Propel them.
Kirsten: Yeah – propel them forward evolutionarily to feeding on blood as their main diet.
Bill Schutt: Yeah. You know, it’s very difficult to be a vampire. And so, you know, I think natural selection would have worked rather quickly to sort of to select characteristics like very sharp teeth or stealthy behavior or small size or an anti-coagulant in the saliva. I don’t think it took all that long to evolve.
Justin: Do any other bats have anti-coagulants?
Bill Schutt: No. Another good question. You guys are doing okay today. Not that I know of because they don’t feed on blood. There are only three species that are sanguivores.
Kirsten: Yeah. It would be interesting to do a comparison across bat species and see if there are any similar compounds.
Bill Schutt: Absolutely.
Kirsten: Maybe there are – so how many of the 1100 bat species – how many feed on small animals? I mean, we know of bats as insectivores, that they fly around and they help keep insect populations down. But how many species actually, you know, are carnivores?
Bill Schutt: I’d estimate a couple of dozens, maybe – from various families across the world, not just mere tropical bats or bats from America or South America or Mexico. I don’t know. Roughly, maybe 30, 40 species off the top of my head.
Kirsten: Wow. I think that’s something that not many people know about bats.
Bill Schutt: Most of them feed on insects. Probably 70% of bats feed on insects. Most of those are flying insects.
Kirsten: Do you know anything – this is completely off the topic of the vampires and blood feeding – but do you know anything about the white-nose fungus and how that’s affecting bat populations? I know the East coast is…
Bill Schutt: Yeah. We’re having a real problem with that. And I’m going to North American Bat Research Symposium next week. And I’m sure we’re going to hear a lot about it. But it’s obvious – it’s evidently related to a fungus. The fungus has been around for a long time. But it’s never been known as a pathogen.
And now, it’s causing major problems. In fact, you know, we’re in some serious, serious trouble here with regard to a number of species in the North Eastern United States. And it’s only spreading. It’s getting worse.
Kirsten: And so is it really dropping the populations down to small population sizes that will be difficult for them to come back from?
Bill Schutt: Yes. Yeah. In some cases, you would have a cave that had 50,000 bats in the year before. And you’ll go in – they’ll send people. And this year, there’ll be eight, ten bats.
Justin: Whoa.
Bill Schutt: It’s doing a massive number on species, around here at least.
Kirsten: Yeah.
Bill Schutt: Very scary.
Kirsten: Yeah. It does. Because bats really, I mean, the same with colony collapse disorder and bees that we were talking about earlier, bees are important for pollinating. The bats are important for insect control.
Bill Schutt: Absolutely.
Kirsten: You know, what kind of an effect could it potentially – the loss, the significant loss of bats – what effect might it have on the ecosystems?
Bill Schutt: Well, if all of these bats that are in danger from white-nose syndrome are insect eater. So what you’re looking at are increased populations of, in some instances, disease-transmitting insects.
In other instances, insects that are crop pests. So you’re probably looking at having to spray more pesticides to keep population of insects down. And it’s just, you know, where there was a natural predator for these insects that they may not be around any longer and there’ll be nothing to check them.
Kirsten: Wow. Now, you said that there are a lot of myths about bats that you’re working to change. I mean, bats are an important species that we need to have around. Yet, people are afraid of them.
Bill Schutt: Sure.
Kirsten: What things do we need to get across to people?
Justin: They’re so cute though.
Kirsten: They are really cute.
Justin: I just think most people haven’t seen a bat close up…
Kirsten: You are so…
Justin: …because they look like little puppy dogs. They’re just adorable.
Kirsten: I like the leaf-nosed bat.
Bill Schutt: They’re cute. The white one?
Kirsten: Yes.
Bill Schutt: That’s a beautiful white one.
Kirsten: And pipistrellus – the little tiny one.
Bill Schutt: The thing you need to know about bats – bats are not – they’re not rodents. So they’re, you know, from an evolutionarily perspective, they’re more closely related to humans than they are to rodents…
Justin: Mm hmm.
Kirsten: Whoa.
Bill Schutt: … none of them are blind. They can all see.
Justin: I never understood that because, yeah, bats get around even when it’s dark. So how can they be…
Bill Schutt: That echolocation thing they’ve got does a pretty good job. And that’s why in some instances, their eyes are pretty small. But you’re looking at another sensory system that is probably as acute as our vision is to us.
And so if you’re tooling around at night, you really don’t need to be able to see all that well because they’ve developed this other system. But all bats have eyes.
And let’s see some of the other things. All bats are rabid. That’s another huge mistake. You want to – you know, your audience should know and everybody should know that if you come across an animal out in the field whether it’s a, you know a mouse or a dog or a bat or a rabbit or a raccoon, you just leave it alone. Don’t bother it.
And if you find a bat on the ground, the last thing in the world that you want to do is pick it up.
I do a lot of talks for elementary school kids. And I tell them, “If you see a bat on the ground, that’s to me is about the equivalent of you walking down the street and you see a dog hovering in the air, spinning around.”
And the last thing you want to do, “Oh, I got to go touch that right now while it’s…” Leave it alone. Something is wrong with that dog spinning around. Then that’s just the same as something is wrong with that bat on the ground there.
And that’s how most rabies gets transmitted from bats to humans is people picking up a bat that they find and then…
Justin: It’s not bat attacks. It’s not getting dive-bombed by a rabid bat. It’s going and finding a dead one and poking it with a stick and putting it in your backpack.
Kirsten: Or finding a sick one.
Bill Schutt: And those sick ones.
Kirsten: Yeah. Moving on from the bats, we’re going to be tying up or wrapping up our show here in a few minutes. Your book “Dark Banquet” covers bats, but many other sanguivores in the world.
What are some other examples that we can run through in this pre-Halloween show?
Bill Schutt: Oh, let’s see. What do I cover in Dark Banquet? Leeches – they’re kind of interesting. And probably the thing that people are most creeped out by are bedbugs. And they’ve had a…
Kirsten: Resurgence. Yeah.
Bill Schutt: … massive resurgence. Yeah. They’re a big problem. And they’re going to be a bigger problem. As a matter of fact, it’s been estimated by some people in the know that within the next year or so, they’re going to be the number one insect pest in the United States.
Justin: Wow.
Bill Schutt: So that means they’ll be elbowing the side creatures like termites and ants and cockroaches for the number one spot.
Justin: Yeah. Apparently they’re in all the five star hotels in New York already.
Kirsten: All right.
Bill Schutt: I thought they were in California mostly.
Justin: Yeah. I heard they’re all on the East coast. Come out to the West coast. They’re not here yet. That’s at least what I’ve heard.
Kirsten: That’s what they like to tell us.
Bill Schutt: I’ll be sending a package of them to your studio so you’ll have one.
Kirsten: Great.
Bill Schutt: Yeah. So bed bugs are in the news. And other creatures that to me are really interesting are leeches as I mentioned before and how they’re being used now after reattachment surgeries.
You know, they used to be used just to bleed people back when we used to think that you could get healthy by draining 80 ounces of blood from a sick person. Nowadays, they’re used to sort of reestablish circulation after they, you know, you’ve sliced your finger off and they put it back.
They reattach it but they can’t keep the blood flowing, so they attach leeches in the area. And those leeches, in a sense, set up a circulatory system that pulls off the bad blood after it has delivered its oxygen rather than pulling in a reattached structure.
Justin: Awesome.
Bill Schutt: Yeah. But, you know, if people want to learn a lot more about this, they can go on my website darkbanquet.com. And, you know, I’ve got sections on all sorts of different blood feeders. They can pick up the paperback, Dark Banquet, which just came out now.
Kirsten: I think it’s a fun book. It’s something that’s – it’s good because, yeah, you can have a little fun with it; the creepy side of life, all the things that you wish you didn’t know about.
But then you start getting into it. And it’s really fascinating. And there are some really interesting animals, bugs out there in the world with some fascinating habits. And also, just stories that are linked to them of how humans are using them or how we ourselves are blood eaters sometimes. Mm hmm.
Bill Schutt: Yeah. We are.
Justin: Well, in a way, it’s a little bit more polite system because you’re just borrowing the blood. You don’t have to kill your prey.
Bill Schutt: Okay.
Kirsten: I’d – maybe. This has been really fun. Thank you so much for joining us this morning. I’m fascinated to learn more about bats and the important part that they play in our world. So thank you.
Bill Schutt: Well, thank you very much. It’s been a pleasure to be on your show.
Kirsten: Yeah.
Justin: Yeah. Thanks for coming.
Kirsten: Have a great day.
Bill Schutt: Bye bye, you two.
Kirsten: Bye. That was Dr. Bill Schutt who is an assistant professor of biology at CW – my computer is not working here – Post University over in New York, New Jersey.
Justin: Where all the bedbugs are.
Kirsten: Where all the bedbugs – he lives in bedbug central. His book is Dark Banquet. And – yeah. College of Long Island University. Darkbanquet.com is where you can find out more about that. And it’s fascinating tales of the blood suckers among us.
And that’s about it for this week’s show. Next week, we’re going to be bringing the science – bringing the science!
Justin: More science.
Kirsten: More science! I’d like to shout out to a few Twitter people out there. Ed Dyer, thanks for all the stories this week.
Justin: Thank you, Ed.
Kirsten: It’s been great to hear from you. (John Carabek). And for new listeners this week who listen to us live on kdvs.org, (Kevin Wakely) and (David Burke), thank you.
Justin: Mm hmm.
Kirsten: And I think (xpolen8) was listening live as well because they happen to do a little chant when we were talking about brains in the beginning.
“What do we want? Brains! When do we want them? Brains!” Exactly. Brains. Brains. Brains.
And to everyone else out there, David Eckard also, thank you for stories, (Carly Daza) and others, others, others. So many of you who wrote in, thank you for all of your interest.
You can find us on Twitter; drkiki — D-R-K-I-K-I or jacksonfly — J-A-C-K-S-O-N-F-L-Y. And we are also – we have a FriendFeed. If you’re in FriendFeed, I’ve started a FriendFeed room called “TWIS.”
Justin: Another social something.
Kirsten: Another social something.
Justin: Oh my, oh Kiki, look!
Kirsten: I know. It hurts. It hurts. It does.
Justin: Too many.
Kirsten: This FriendFeed is cool because you can actually have some interesting conversations in there. And you can type a little…
Justin: I thought that’s what Twitter does?
Kirsten: You can type a little more than 140 characters.
Justin: I know people get long winded. You got to keep it short, people.
Kirsten: It’s just a new way for people to connect. That’s all.
Justin: If people connect in too many different places. And we would – we would lose each other in the chaos, in the storm.
Thank you everyone for listening. We hope you enjoyed the show. TWIS is available as a podcast as always. You can go to our website www.twis.org and click on “Subscribe to the TWIS science podcast” for information on how to subscribe. Or you can go to the iTunes and search for This Week in Science.
Kirsten: That’s right.
Justin: And we’ll pop right up there and you can subscribe and get all these onto your internets.
Kirsten: That’s right, all the science-y goodness. For more information on anything you’ve heard here today, show notes are going to be available on our website www.twis — T-W-I-S — .org.
And we want to hear from you. We love hearing from you. So email us at kristen@thisweekinscience.com or justin@thisweekinscience.com.
Justin: And put TWIS — T-W-I-S — somewhere in the subject or your message will be filtered immediately.
Kirsten: Yup.
Justin: We want to hear your feedbacks so put that in there. If there’s a topic you would like us to cover, address, a suggestion for an interview, please let us know.
Kirsten: And we will be back here on KDVS next Tuesday, every Tuesday at 8:30 am Pacific time. And we hope you’ll join us again for more science news.
Justin: And if you’re learned anything from today’s show, remember…
Kirsten: It’s all in your head.
Podcast: http://www.twis.org/audio/2009/10/27/397/