Pandas Return To Washington, D.C., Zoo

JOHN DANKOSKY: This is Science Friday. I’m John Dankosky.

KATHLEEN DAVIS: And I’m Kathleen Davis. Later in the hour, NASA’s Europa Clipper has launched. We’ll learn more about this Jupiter-bound spacecraft. Plus, playing possum and what animals know about death.

JOHN DANKOSKY: But first, big news on the cute animal front. Yes, this week, giant pandas returned to the National Zoo in Washington, DC. Here to tell us more about this and some other big science stories from the week is Sophie Bushwick, senior news editor at New Scientist. Sophie, always good to have you here. Welcome back.

SOPHIE BUSHWICK: Thank you.

JOHN DANKOSKY: OK, so tell us more about these pandas who are coming back.

SOPHIE BUSHWICK: So these are two pandas. They’re Bao Li and Qing Bao, and they have arrived at the zoo in Washington, DC. It’s very exciting because this year is the first year in decades that China has sent pandas to the US.

Earlier this year, a couple arrived at the San Diego Zoo. And so first of all, it’s great for people who love pandas. If you’re in the DC area, you’re going to be able to check the pandas out starting in January. If you’re anywhere, you can use the panda cam at the San Diego Zoo to check those pandas out. It’s also good for what’s called panda diplomacy, which is the idea that by sending pandas to the US, it’s a sign of goodwill from China.

JOHN DANKOSKY: Yeah. So actually, I have a big story about this, that we did at the end of last year at sciencefriday.com/pandas. Panda diplomacy has been going on for a very long time. I have to ask you, Sophie, how exactly do you ship a Panda?

SOPHIE BUSHWICK: Very carefully. So there’s a plane called the FedEx Panda Express.

JOHN DANKOSKY: Of course there is.

SOPHIE BUSHWICK: So it’s the Aircraft– of course, you have to. You have to use the name. The pandas traveled there with some humans, keeping an eye on them. And then their crates were moved to trucks, and then the trucks took them to the zoo. You can see there’s pictures of pandas on the truck. So if you saw them driving by, then that’s what was inside.

And they made it to the zoo and were unloaded. And the reason they’re not going to be on display till January is because they need some time to acclimate to their new habitat, and they’re going to have human handlers helping and making sure that they’re healthy and happy before they start making them available to the viewing public.

JOHN DANKOSKY: That’s excellent. So we got East Coast pandas. We’ve got West Coast pandas. You can now see pandas in different parts of America. So while we’re talking about endangered animals, there’s a company that wants to bring back some more extinct animals. And they have news this week about the thylacine. So I want you to tell us more, but first, describe exactly what a thylacine was.

SOPHIE BUSHWICK: So a thylacine, was also called the Tasmanian tiger. This was a marsupial, but a meat-eating one, a predator, and it used to be living in Australia. And then by the time European explorers arrived, they were all in Tasmania, and then after a while they all died out. The last known thylacine died in 1936.

So they’ve been extinct for a while, and now, the company, Colossal, says they have nearly completely sequenced the genome of this extinct animal, and Colossal is interested in de-extinction, so bringing extinct species back.

JOHN DANKOSKY: And just to be clear, this is the company saying this. This is not peer reviewed. This is not a publication here. But if they do have the genome, as they say, how would you go from having the genome of this animal to actually making a new animal?

SOPHIE BUSHWICK: Right. I mean, it’s not as easy as just popping the genome in a fresh cell. But they think that genome is going to do is help them understand more about the thylacine. But the technique that they want to actually use for bringing the thylacine back, they would modify a different marsupial species called the fat-tailed dunnart, and they want to modify its genes to make it more like a thylacine.

So knowing the thylacine genome is great because maybe you can put pieces of the genome in the cell, but it’s also not like the end. They’re not done with this process. I mean, a dunnart does not look that much like a Tasmanian tiger.

JOHN DANKOSKY: But I think that that’s the important thing here is if you look at the dunnart and you look at the thylacine, you’re like, these are not even close to the same animals, are they?

SOPHIE BUSHWICK: Right. What you would really have is not a thylacine, but it’s a weird version of a dunnart. It’ll be sort of like a thylacine-like dunnart is what you’re really going to be ending up with in the end.

JOHN DANKOSKY: Yeah, the weird thylacine dunnart, the animal that nobody asked for.

SOPHIE BUSHWICK: Yes.

JOHN DANKOSKY: So next on our list, there’s some news about nut allergies and airplanes. We thought that flying was potentially dangerous for people with nut allergies, with all these bags of peanuts opening up. But there’s a new study out about this. What can you tell us?

SOPHIE BUSHWICK: So for people with severe peanut allergies, just having fragments of peanut in the air can be dangerous. They can inhale it and have a life-threatening allergic reaction. And so the fear in planes was if someone with a nut allergy is anywhere on the plane, we don’t want to have any nuts open because they could get into the air.

But a new study actually looked at how the filters on the airplane move air around, and they found that airborne peanut fragments would not be a problem. There’s not enough of it getting into the air to really hurt someone with an allergy unless they were in pretty close proximity to the person actually eating the peanuts, so if they were maybe in the same row.

JOHN DANKOSKY: Of course. But this probably doesn’t mean that all the airlines are going to go back to having peanuts all the time, because it’s not just the airborne peanut air, I suppose, but I don’t know. There’s little peanut particles everywhere, just like there’s crumbs underneath the seat and in that little bag that’s on the back of the seat in front of you.

SOPHIE BUSHWICK: Yeah, I cannot eat a snack on a plane without getting crumbs on the tray, on the seat, on the floor. And if those crumbs are peanut crumbs, that could be dangerous for someone with a peanut allergy, for sure.

JOHN DANKOSKY: So let’s switch to sending other things through the air, and we’re going to talk about wireless networks. We have a story about research into a faster way to transmit data. What can you tell us?

SOPHIE BUSHWICK: This is pretty cool. Researchers set a new record for sending data. They sent 938 gigabits per second. So that’s roughly the equivalent of downloading 20 movies in a second. And it’s 9,000 times the average speed of a 5G connection today.

And the researchers achieved this by– most 5G networks are operating in a pretty narrow band of frequencies, so it’s limited. And the researchers expanded the size of the frequency bands that they’re able to operate in by using both radio waves and light. And that’s how they achieved this record. And it’s possible that this could be a candidate for being the basis of futuristic 6G networks. But there are actually other potential technologies that could become the basis of 6G, so it’s not certain that this will be the new version of data.

JOHN DANKOSKY: So it’s possible that there’s some other technology. I mean, is there a chance that this is something that will be in our phones soon, or is there just too much other development to go and honestly, too much cost to build out a system like this?

SOPHIE BUSHWICK: There’s a chance that this could be in our phones someday. I would not say soon. But yeah, for 6G to happen, there’s a lot of infrastructure that needs to be built. Like you said, you have to have phones and devices that are capable of working with it. And so this isn’t something that will be coming next year. But it is cool that researchers are like, 5G is passé. We’re done with it. We want 6G. We want the future. We want speeds to be even faster.

JOHN DANKOSKY: So let’s blast off into space for a minute here. There are two new papers about a strange brown dwarf star. Sophie, what can you tell us?

SOPHIE BUSHWICK: The first brown dwarf star ever found was very, very weird. So brown dwarfs are sort of like failed stars. They didn’t have enough matter and they were too cool to maintain nuclear fusion. And so they kind of faded out. And in the night sky, they look more like planets than stars.

And researchers found the first one in 1995, and they said, this is a really weird thing because this is a big object. It’s 71 times the size of Jupiter. It should be big enough to have sustained nuclear fusion. So what’s going on here? Why did this star fail? It’s been this mystery.

And someone suggested that maybe what they’re looking at isn’t a single brown dwarf, but a pair of brown dwarf twins orbiting around each other. And this was really hard to confirm because of the detail you would need in the observations. But now, two different research teams have done it, and they’ve published papers showing that what we thought was Gliese 229B is actually two brown dwarfs. It’s Gliese 229BA and Gliese 229BB.

JOHN DANKOSKY: So since we’re talking about intertwined fates, let’s move to AI, Sophie. There’s AI in everything these days. Researchers are looking at whether it can be used to develop scientific hypotheses. What can you tell us about this?

SOPHIE BUSHWICK: A lot of AI is really good at very specific tasks, but the question is, how good is it at going through the scientific process? So not just modeling different shapes of how proteins could fold, but developing a hypothesis and then performing an experiment to test it and analyzing the results and drawing conclusions from them.

So researchers, in order to figure this out, they built what’s, essentially, a simulator. It seems like a game. It’s called Discovery World, but really, it has a lot of both challenging and less challenging tasks that mimic the process of going through the scientific method and developing these experiments.

And then they developed a few different AI agents. These were all based on OpenAI’s GPT 4.0 model, but they each took a different approach to solving problems, so they weren’t exactly working the same way. And they had these AIs work in the Discovery World simulator and try to do science. And then they compared them with 11 humans who either had PhDs or master’s degrees in engineering or natural sciences.

JOHN DANKOSKY: So how did the humans do?

SOPHIE BUSHWICK: Yeah. So humans, still ahead of AI when it comes to Science. Go us! In the problems, the tasks they had to solve the, AI agents saw less than 20% of them, and the humans solved about 66% of them, on average. So we’re still ahead of AI in this particular way.

JOHN DANKOSKY: You’ve got one last story for us, Sophie, and we’re going to start with some sound. Let’s listen.

[BIRD’S CHIRPING]

OK, Sophie. So I know that you know what these sounds are. What do they sound like to you?

SOPHIE BUSHWICK: Honestly, to me, they do sound like frogs, which is what they are. However, sometimes you hear what you want to hear. And when scientists listen to these frog calls, they didn’t think frogs, they thought, gee, that sounds just like Star Trek sound effects to me.

And this is a study. Researchers went to look at this frog species that lives in Madagascar. It’s called Boophis marojezensis. And in studying it, they realized, hey, maybe this isn’t actually a single species. And they looked at the DNA and they listened to those frog calls, and they realized there’s actually seven different species here, and each one has this distinct call. And these calls all sound like Star Trek sound effects to us. So let’s name them after Star Trek characters.

JOHN DANKOSKY: Oh, no.

SOPHIE BUSHWICK: And now, there are seven new frog species named after captains in Star Trek. So there’s Boophis Kirki in honor of James T. Kirk. And there’s also frogs named after Jean-Luc Picard and Kathryn Janeway and Christopher Pike.

JOHN DANKOSKY: When I listen to these frogs the first time, I thought to myself, they sound to me like frogs. But again, if you’re hearing Star Trek sound effects, what the heck. Name it, whatever you want.

SOPHIE BUSHWICK: And if you’re the one who’s studying them, you get to name them. You have the privilege. You put in the work. You’ve listened to the calls. And if what you want to name them after is Star Trek, then yeah, go ahead.

JOHN DANKOSKY: Well, Sophie, as always, thank you for bringing us such enlightening and interesting and in weird stories. It’s always good to talk to you.

SOPHIE BUSHWICK: Thanks for having me.

JOHN DANKOSKY: Sophie Bushwick, a senior news editor at New Scientist.

Copyright © 2024 Science Friday Initiative. All rights reserved. Science Friday transcripts are produced on a tight deadline by 3Play Media. Fidelity to the original aired/published audio or video file might vary, and text might be updated or amended in the future. For the authoritative record of Science Friday’s programming, please visit the original aired/published recording. For terms of use and more information, visit our policies pages at http://www.sciencefriday.com/about/policies/