Science Friday23 Mar 2018

Dung Microbes, Gun Research, Airplane Germs, Kepler Mission. March 23, 2018, Part 2

Guns kill more people in the United States than alcohol—from homicides and suicides, to mass shootings like the one that left dead 17 high school students in Parkland, Florida last month. But public health researchers will tell you that studying alcohol-related deaths is much easier. Gun research is so fraught politically that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention doesn’t fund it (though the National Institutes of Health did for three years during the Obama presidency), and a pair of Congressional amendments continue to throw red tape on funding and access to certain kinds of data. Could private foundations, universities, and state governments fill the gap?

Most zoo visitors go to see the animals. U.C. Santa Barbara chemical engineer Michelle O'Malley visits for their poop. That's because the dung of grazers like sheep, giraffes, and elephants is rich in cellulose-chomping fungi and bacteria. She joins Ira to talk about the bacterial and fungal communities within poop.

When you fly on an airplane, you’re trapped inside a metal tube for a few hours with hundreds of other passengers, sharing the overhead compartments, lavatories, and air. It feels like there’s a good chance for disease to spread in flight—but just how likely is it? New research maps out the risks.

Plus, NASA launched the Kepler space telescope in 2009, with plans for it to operate for about three and a half years. Now, nine years later, the telescope is close to running out of fuel.

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.

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(1411)

Are new treatments for celiac disease on the horizon?

For celiac disease sufferers, avoiding gluten is the only way to avoid symptoms. But that’s not always easy to do. Researchers are working on new treatments, including one that targets interleukin-15,...

25 Sep 11min

Everyone is calling for safer AI. So what does that mean?

AI safety has dominated the news cycle for weeks, precipitated in part by an AI attack where a bunch of OpenAI’s agents teamed up and hacked another AI platform, Hugging Face, without humans knowing. ...

24 Sep 22min

Underwater archeology reveals clues about Ice Age humans

During the last ice age, America’s coastlines and waterways looked much different than they do today. When glaciers melted, coasts and shorelines were inundated, burying early human settlements underw...

23 Sep 18min

Climate change is increasing hurricane risk for Hawaiʻi

The Hawaiian Islands tend to be insulated from the worst effects of hurricanes, but this summer has been different. In mid-August, Hurricane Lala pummeled the Big Island, damaging homes and roads and ...

22 Sep 12min

Bringing hard electronics into soft and squishy bodies

A lot of things in life are squishy, including your skin, your organs, and all the goo inside you. But technology tends to be rigid and hard. Figuring out how to get those two worlds to work together ...

21 Sep 18min

What is lymphatic drainage, anyway?

There’s a new wellness trend focused on an obscure capillary system that moves fluid around the body. Things like lymphatic walking, vibration plates, and compression boots have been touted as ways to...

18 Sep 18min

Hot flashes, hormone therapy, and the science of perimenopause

Perimenopause affects more than 4 billion people, but has historically been neglected by medicine. It’s the time before menopause when hormones start fluctuating wildly, leaving women with brain fog, ...

17 Sep 18min

Telling the tale of human origins, one fossil tooth at a time

Where did we come from? How did humanity, with our complicated civilizations and all our human quirks and foibles, come to be? Much of what we know about those questions traces back to important fossi...

16 Sep 25min