Science Friday13 Elo 2021

Elephantquakes and Margaret Atwood. August 13, 2021, Part 2

A Stomp, A Roar, An Elephantquake?

An adult African elephant, the largest land animal on Earth, can weigh as much as two tons. Their activities—walking, playing, even bellowing—might shake the ground beneath them. But research in the journal Current Biology finds that the signals from an elephant’s walk are capable of traveling as far as three kilometers, while a roaring bull, or male elephant, might be detectable a full six kilometers away with just seismological monitoring tools.

Biologist Beth Mortimer and seismologist Tarje Nissen-Meyer, both at the University of Oxford and co-authors of the new research, describe the signals they captured in the ground and explain how a network of seismological sensors might help us study elephants from a distance, and even protect endangered elephants from poaching.

Margaret Atwood On The Science Behind ‘Oryx And Crake’

Author Margaret Atwood’s book, Oryx and Crake is set in a post-pandemic world and a genetically engineered dystopian future. In this archival interview, recorded in April 2004, Atwood says science is “a tool for expressing and perfecting human desires—and sometimes it’s a tool for counteracting human fears.” She talks about how she pulls inspiration for her ‘speculative fiction’ from news headlines, and discusses how her entomologist father influenced her writing.

Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that’s keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-472-4374

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Tämä jakso on lisätty Podme-palveluun avoimen RSS-syötteen kautta eikä se ole Podmen omaa tuotantoa. Siksi jakso saattaa sisältää mainontaa.

Jaksot(1382)

Creating 'world models' for robots + An AI math shakeup

When you ask an LLM like ChatGPT or Claude a question, the model goes through its massive amount of training data and guesses the answer by mathematically predicting the word most likely to appear nex...

19 Elo 17min

What can moments of lucidity teach us about Alzheimer’s?

Watching a loved one with Alzheimer's or dementia slowly lose their cognitive abilities can be heartbreaking. While the person you once knew seems to be slipping away, sometimes people with Alzheimer'...

18 Elo 17min

Colorado’s snow drought deals a major blow to recreation

Winter in Colorado looked very different this year. Many parts of the state experienced record-high temperatures and record-low snowpack, which had downstream effects on farming, sports, tourism, and ...

17 Elo 11min

How do you find a ‘lost’ species?

The earth is facing a biodiversity crisis, and there’s a lot of attention on species that are threatened, or at risk of dying out completely. But, there’s another critter category that’s a little more...

14 Elo 18min

What we get wrong about vaccine hesitancy

President Trump has signed an executive order calling for a change to the childhood vaccination schedule. Specifically, he wants to separate the MMR vaccine, which protects against measles, mumps, and...

13 Elo 12min

Why this lab studies the speed of bug pee and other curiosities

In a lab in the Rocky Mountains, a group of scientists is hard at work trying to find answers across biology, physics, and engineering: They’re looking into things like the hydrodynamics of insect pee...

12 Elo 18min

Some primates undergo even more extreme childbirth than humans

Human childbirth is often difficult and incredibly painful—just ask anyone who’s been through it. And for a long time, childbirth seemed to be uniquely difficult for humans. But a new study suggests t...

11 Elo 11min

Deb Haaland is a politician, and proud of it

Former Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe, was the first Native person to hold a cabinet position. Now she’s running to be governor of New Mexico. Haaland joins Host ...

10 Elo 17min