10.30.25

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, this is Linda Rice, your host for Radio Eye's
Diary of Science and Nature. I will be reading from
a variety of articles selected for the greatest interest to
our listeners. As a reminder, RADIOI is a reading service
intended for people who are blind or have other disabilities
that make it difficult to read. For their material today,

(00:22):
we will start with Scientific American dated October twenty ninth,
twenty twenty five. The first articles entitled this overlooked bird
flu strain might be the next pandemic risk, written by
Rachel Fieldhouse and Nature Magazine. A bird flu virus that

(00:45):
has often been ignored because it mostly causes minor disease
and birds, has the potential to cause a human pandemic,
says a team that has tracked how the HN and
two virus has become better adapted to infect people. The
reachures say more surveillance of the virus is needed. In
the past few years, surveillance has been focused on the

(01:07):
av and influenza virus H five and one, which has
spread across most continents and can cause severe disease and
death in people. Since twenty twenty, h five and one
has killed about twenty one people in North America. The
virus is also spreading among dairy cows. Less attention is

(01:27):
being paid ton H nine and two, says Calvin To,
a clinical microbiologist at the University of Hong Kong, despite
the virus being the second most common strain of bird
flu that infects people h N I'm sorry. H nine
and two has caused one hundred and seventy three infections

(01:49):
in people since nineteen ninety eight, mostly in China, says Toe,
who presented his team's research at the Pandemic Research Alliance
International Symposium in Melbourne, Australia, on October twenty seven. H
nine and two might be more prevalent than we realize,
says the shell While, who studies bird flu at the

(02:09):
Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity in Melbourne. Infections
are probably being missed because they do not result in
severe infection or hospitalization in people, or because people are
more commonly tested for the H five and one instead,
she adds, geneic changes. Scientists are yet to find evidence
of person to person transmission of the H nine and two,

(02:33):
which would be needed for it if lead to a pandemic,
but Toe and his team have found that H nine
and two underwent genetic changes that began around twenty fifteen
that have made the virus more infectious. In cell based experiments,
a version of the H nine and two virus collected
in twenty twenty four infected more human cells than did

(02:56):
a historical sample collected in nineteen ninety nine. The modern
version also showed improved binding to various receptors on human cells.
This means the virus has adapted to spread among people,
reported Toe and his colleagues in Emerging Microbes and Infections
earlier this month. The virus would have to undergo several

(03:18):
more changes before it could cause sustained transmission between people,
says Well. The virus has to change preferentially bind to
human receptors instead of receptors found in bird cells, and
has to adapt how well it grows at temperatures and
pH levels of humans, which are different from birds. Increased

(03:39):
surveillance and communication about the risks of avian fluenza is needed,
says Well. Part of the issue is that countries are
not required to report infections caused by strains that are
considered to be of low pathogenicity, such as the H
nine and two Toe says greater virus surveillance among mammals

(03:59):
in close contact with wild birds or poultry would help
scientists understand whether the virus has been adapted to mammals
or other human other than humans. He is concerned that
when animals are infected with multiple viruses, genetic material gets
mixed and matched when the viruses replicate inside the cell,
and could create new viruses that can infect humans. Scientists

(04:23):
are concerned that this reassortment could also happen in people too,
TOAs has other researches found genetic material from the H
nine and among the viruses that have caused previous bird
flu outbreaks in people. This article is reproduced with permission
and was first published on October twenty seventh, twenty twenty five.

(04:46):
The next article is entitled Hurricane Melissa Images reveal a
monster storm for the record books. The images of Hurricane
Melissa show the Category five storm and all of its power,
written by Andrea Thompson and Gina Breyner, with maximums distained
winds of one hundred and eighty five miles per hour

(05:07):
as it batters the Caribbean island of Jamaica on Tuesday.
Hurricane Melissa is a beast of a storm. Satellite and
other images starkly illustrate Melissa's monstrosity, from its rapid intensification
to the sheer power of the convection at its core.
Here's an inside look at this, one of the storm's

(05:27):
strongest storms to ever make landfall in the Atlantic since
record keeping began. Melissa's cold cloud tops underscore the storm's strength.
The engine at the heart of any tropical cyclone is
the convection powered by the temperature difference between the warm
sea surface and the cold atmosphere at the top of
the storm, where air flows out. On October twenty seventh,

(05:49):
a crew from the Air Force's Hurricane Hunters or fifty
third Weather Reconnaissance Squadron, flies through Hurricane Melissa to collect
information for the National Hurricane Center. The calm, clear eye
of Melissa appears with a stadium effect of the clouds
in the eyewall where the strongest winds are, as seen

(06:10):
from the Hurricane Hunter's aircraft. Another view shows Melissa's central eye,
which looks like a textbook eye for a strong hurricane.
Lightning flashes in the eye wall of Category five Melissa
are a marker of how strong the storm is. It
reached a central pressure of eight hundred and ninety two millibars,
among the lowest ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean. It

(06:33):
is tied to the third most intense Atlantic storm with
the devastating nineteen thirty five Labor Day hurricane. Hurricane Melissa
swirls above the Caribbean Sea in fitting sunlight on October
twenty sixth and now we will switch to the journal
entitled Science News. The first article, Our relationship with alcohol

(06:55):
is fraught. Ancient customs might inspire a reset. Drinking in
the past was social and ritualized, with less potent bruise,
written by Sujanagupta on October seventeenth, twenty twenty five. Sober
October is upon us. The month provides an opportunity to
drink less or not at all. But for people evaluating

(07:16):
their long term relationship with alcohol, what happens whence the
month is over. Back in the heady nineteen nineties and
two thousands, word on the street was that a drinker
to a day, especially red wine, was good for health.
Everyone loved that story, says Anya Topowala, a psychiatric researcher
at the University of Oxford. Now the pendulum has swung.

(07:38):
Drinking even a few times a week has been linked
with numerous health problems, particularly cancer. Some public health agencies,
the World Health Organization included, now say no amount of
drinking is safe. Current US guidelines suggest a maximum of
two drinks a day for men and one drink a
day for women. Those guidelines are due for an update

(08:00):
this fall, so US health officials will have a choice
stick with the status quo, follow the World Health Organization's lead,
or chart a different course. It's complicated. Even researchers who
believe drinking can cause health problems or shrink lifespans aren't
necessarily advocating for teetotaling. Tapa Walla's September study in the

(08:22):
VMJ Evidence Based Medicine showed, for instance, that even light
drinking increases a person's risk of developing dementia, with that
risk rising alongside the quantity of alcohol consumed. Tapa Wallace
simply wants people to be aware of that drinking dementia link.
Many people still don't realize that the narrative around drinking

(08:44):
and health has changed. She says, I'm not telling people
not to drink, but to make an informed choice, you
have to know the evidence, and maybe history can be
informative too. After all, humans have been drinking for millennia.
While less core to human progress, as say fire or
the emergence of agriculture, drinking likely bolstered co operation, creativity,

(09:08):
and social bonding. Historic and anthropo anthropological account suggests. Yet
ancient drinking practices bear little resemblance to drinking practices to day,
says philosopher and psychologist Edward Slingerland of the University of
British Columbia and Vancouver. Perhaps, he says, those who drink

(09:28):
to day should take their cue from the ancients booze, creativity,
and co operation. Scholars have long debated why people drink.
A prevailing theory is that the ethanol and alcohol hijacked
a reward system in the brain that evowed to enhance
certain behaviors, such as those related to motivation and learning.

(09:50):
Given the social and health related harms associated with alcohol,
drinking was, in that view, a painful evolutionary accident or mistake,
says Thing Berlin, author of the twenty twenty one book Drunk,
How We Sipped, danced and stumbled our way to Civilization. Slingerland,
whose work tends to sit outside of the mainstream rejects

(10:12):
that idea. Some evolutionary mistakes, such as seeking sexual pleasure
through masturbation instead of intercourse, persists because they cost very
little in terms of survival. He says, humans have both
masturbated and reproduced without issue across the ages. Costly mistakes, meanwhile,
tend to die out. Humans taste for alcohol had an

(10:33):
opportunity to do just that. The alcohol flushing response is
a genetic mutation thought to have evolved some nine thousand
years ago in southern China alongside rice domestication. Researchers reported
in the twenty ten BMC Evolutionary Biology. The response, which
affects over a third of East Asian people, includes a

(10:56):
flushed face, nausea, rapid heart rate, and headache. Researchers suspect
the mutation protected people from consuming too much fermented rice
or rice wine. If our taste for alcohol was an
evolutionary mistake, then that mutation should spread everywhere, Slingerland says.
He suspects the cost of drinking, including violence, addiction, and disease,

(11:21):
were offset by the benefits. Consider the human brain. Slingerland says,
the prefrontal cortex, which doesn't fully develop until the mid
twenties or so. Gives people the cognitive control to do
adult things like pay their bills and get to work
on time, but that same control can impede creativity. Research

(11:42):
shows by dolling prefrontal activity, booze can free people to
write poetry and make art. Slangerland says, more than a
creativity amplifier. Slingerland posts that drinking and loss of executive
control may also have helped humans get a lung. Other
primates don't tend to cooperate with those they are related

(12:04):
to and strangers. He says, how do humans trust each other?
I argue one way is alcohol. Nowadays that cooperation could
look like a business deal between strangers. Slinger Lynn says,
if I sit down with you and we have a
few drinks, I'm voluntarily cognitively disarming ancient drinking patterns. While tantalizing,

(12:27):
slinger Lynn's drunk hypothesis is hard to test. Researchers, though,
are trying. One team recently dug into literature on one
hundred and eighty six pre industrial societies from around the
world to see if the presence of alcohol correlated with
more complex societies. Societal complexity was measured on a scale

(12:47):
from one for no formal leaders to five for centralized
hierarch hierarchical governments. About half of the society's in the
sample drink, the team reported in July. In Humanities and
Social Sciences, communications and drinking correlated with about a third
of a point increase in societal complexity. There is an

(13:09):
association between the presence of alcohol and higher political complexity,
but the effect is rather small, says evolutionary anthropologist of
the klav Hanukcher of Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
in Leipzig, Germany. His team suspects that alcohol is just
one factor that facilitated the evolution of complex societies, alongside

(13:33):
other bonding activities such as music, dance, ritual and shared
religious beliefs. Identifying precise patterns in ancient data sets is challenging,
Henussir says, historical accounts tend to be spotty, and those
data do exist indicate that drinking practices varied widely across groups. Nonetheless,

(13:55):
case studies hint at some striking cross cultural similarities. First off,
the drinking story isn't all wine and roses. When her
Haranosur and his team zoomed in on individual societies, they
discovered that feast centered on drinking among the Brazilian Kangnank
Gang people often involved as much fighting as friendliness. Similarly,

(14:19):
they learned that drinking parties among the Colombian Quibio were
intended to find siblings but often ended in quarrels. Yet
in the past, tight social and logistical constraints around drinking
seemed to have protected people from booz's worst effects. Her
Renister says in ancient summer, for instance, elites offered beer

(14:42):
to the gods in exchange for prosperity, and to construction
workers as a form of payment. They also poured beer
at feast and other celebrations to bolster camaraderie and reinforce
social ranks, including their own. Among the best studied ancient
studies in Greece, Slingerland says those masters of a good

(15:02):
time through wild parties known as symposia, featuring acrobats, musicians,
poetry readings, lude jokes, and sex. Overseeing all that creative
debauchery was the party's patriarch or simphostiarch. As routiness increased,
the symposiarch would dilute the wine with water drinking room alone.

(15:26):
Drinking over the past few centuries, though, has undergone dramatic changes.
For one, if symposiarchs were around today, they would need
a lot more water. Booze has gotten stronger. Historically, people
drank naturally fermented beers and fruit wines with alcohol contents
from roughly two to six percent by volume. Slingerland says,

(15:48):
after generations of breeding, hardier yeast wines and even some
beers today contained double or even triple the amount alcohol
by volume, and hard liquors such as rum gin and
vodka with alcohol contents ranging from thirty five to ninety
five percent by volume have become increasingly popular. The shift

(16:08):
from drinking low proof to high proof alcohol mirrors the
shift from chewing coca leaves to snorting cocaine. Slingerland says.
When alcohol is in that concentration, it completely overwhelms our
body's machinery for detoxifying it. How we drink has also changed.
Once inseparable from its social milieu, drinking has turned to

(16:30):
increase increasingly solitary. For instance, young adults in the United
States are drinking less than previous generations, but many experts
aren't ready to declare that a public health win. That's
in part because the percentage of youth and young adults
who report drinking alone had been declining since nineteen seventies,

(16:51):
but began ticking upward again over the past few decades,
researchers reported in a forty six year longitudinal study of
all amost thirteen thousand people published in August in Alcohol
Clinical and Experimental Research. For instance, when the team zoomed
in on nineteen twenty year olds in the United States,

(17:11):
they found that forty percent of men and almost twenty
percent of women reported drinking alone in nineteen seventy seven.
By twenty ten, those numbers had dropped to about twenty
percent of men and fifteen percent of women, but then
began steadily rising, so that by twenty twenty two, almost
twenty five percent of men and twenty percent of women

(17:33):
reported drinking alone. The timing coincides with the uptick in
mental health problems among teens and young adults that some
researchers have linked to the emergence of smartphones and social media.
Young adults who drink alone typically do so to cope
with negative emotions, and are considerably more likely than social

(17:53):
drinkers to struggle with problematic drinking by the age of
thirty five. The same team reported in September twenty twenty
two in Drug and Alcohol Dependence Relief Versus Reward Drinking.
Unlike in the past, drinking today has been untethered from
its social fabric. Herronster says, now people have unlimited access

(18:16):
to alcohol with no elite gatekeeper, and they can drink
any type and quality of alcohol they desire, with anyone
or no one left to sort out for themselves. If
drinking does more harm than good, many people have become
interested in trialing sobriety. Dry January and Sober October, which
had been around for about a decade, encourage followers to

(18:38):
quit drinking for a month to improve health and well being. Meanwhile,
the sober Curious movement arose out of author Ruby Warrington's
epononymous twenty eighteen book Sober Curious. Abstinence from alcohol while
encouraged is less important than drinking more mindfully. One way

(18:58):
to evaluate one's drinking mindset is to reflect on the pandemic,
says Keith Humphries, a psychiatric and addiction researcher at Stanford University.
Drinking went down around the world from January twenty twenty
to December twenty twenty three, researchers reported in a March
review of one hundred studies in human psychopharmacology, clinical and experimental,

(19:21):
but this shifting behavior wasn't universal. In fact, fewer than
a quarter of the people drove that decline by drinking less.
Half of the respondents did not change their drinking patterns,
while just over a quarter drank more. Those who drank
more included people with declining mental health and individuals with
children at home. For Humphreys, who was not involved in

(19:44):
that With that study, those contradictory drinking patterns highlight two
types of drinkers, relief drinkers like those Harry caregivers, and
reward drinkers. Those who drink for reward, such as to
celebrate special occasions with friends, are less mos likely than
those drinking for relief from stress to develop alcohol problems,

(20:04):
Humphrey says. Consider his own experience, He adds, at the
pandemic start, Humphrey's had six bottles of wine at home.
Half a year later, five bottles remained unopened. I drink
for reward. I have a friend come over. It's fun,
he says, when all that stuff was taken on my
life from the pandemic, I went half a year without

(20:25):
much drink. Perhaps given mounting evidence that drinking harms help,
keeping that relief reward framing in mind can help people
reset their relationship to alcohol long after sober October ends,
and designating a sympathiarch or friend to manage the revelie

(20:45):
can't hurt. The next article is entitled A conference just
tested AI agent's ability to do science. You have to
be really careful when working with AI, says one participant,
written by Katherine Hoolich October twenty fourth, twenty twenty five.
In a first scientific conference, welcome paper submissions from any

(21:09):
area of science, but with one catch, AI had to
do most of the work. Called Agents for Science twenty
twenty five, the October twenty second virtual event focused on
the work of artificial intelligence agents, systems that pair large
language models with other tools or databases to perform multi

(21:29):
step tasks, from formulating hypotheses to analyzing data and providing
the first round of peer reviews. AI agents took the lead.
Human reviewers then stepped in to assess the top submissions.
In all, forty eight papers of three hundred fourteen made
the cut. Each had to detail how people and AI

(21:50):
collaborated on every stage of the research and writing process.
We are seeing this interesting paradigm shift, says James Zu,
a Computer Sciences as Stanford University, who co organize the conference.
People are starting to explore using AI as a co scientist.
Most scientific journals and meetings currently ban AI co authors

(22:13):
and prohibit peer reviewers from relying on AI. These policies
aim to avoid hallucinations and other issues related to AI use. However,
this approach makes it tough to learn how good AI
is at science. That's what Agent for Science aim to explorers,
who said calling the conference and experiment with all the

(22:35):
materials publicly available for anyone to study. At the virtual meeting,
humans presented AI assistant work spending fields such as economics, biology,
and engineering. Min Minfong and economists at the University of
California at Berkeley and her team collaborate with AI to
study cartoing data from San Francisco. Their study found that

(22:59):
waving high towing fees helped low income people keep their vehicles.
AI was really great at helping us with computational acceleration,
Pong said, but she found you had to be really
careful when working with AI. As an example, the AI
kept citing the wrong date for when San Francisco's rule
waving towing fees waiting to effect. Fong had to check

(23:22):
this in the original source to discover the error. The
core scientific work still remains human driven, she said. For
reason what Wexler, a computational astrophysicist at Stanford who helped
review submissions. The results were mixed. The papers she saw
were technically correct, she said, but they were neither interesting

(23:42):
nor important. She was excited about the potential AI for research,
but remained unconvinced that today's agents can design robust scientific questions,
and she added the technical skill AI can mask poor
scientific judgment. Still, the event included some glimmers of hope
for the future of AI and science. Sylvia Tarragani, a

(24:06):
machine learning engineer at the company Upwork in San Francisco,
said that she gave chet GPT some context about the
kind of problems her company deals with with and asked
the bot to propose paper ideas. One of these was
the winner, she said, selected as one of the three
top papers in the conference. It was a study about
using AI reasoning in a job marketplace, I think AI

(24:30):
can actually come up with novel ideas, she said. Our
next article is entitled what to Know about Vaccine and
Your dogg or cap Vaccine hesitancy is on the rise
among pet owners. Here are the answers to some common
questions about animal vaccines, written by Anili Anthos and Teddy Rosenbluth,
October twenty seven, twenty twenty five. Over the last few years,

(24:52):
public health experts have expressed alarm about the spread of
anti vaccine sentiment in the United States and the fall
in childhood vaccination and rates. Now, veterinarians report they are
facing a parallel problem a growing number of plants who
are hesitant to vaccinate their pets. Although all medical interventions
have side effects, essential pet vaccines are widely considered to

(25:13):
be both safe and effective, experts said, and they are
an invaluable tool for giving pet owners something that they
very much seem to want, more time with their animal companions.
Vaccinations are one of the best methods we have to
extend life, said doctor Michael Bailey, the president of the
American Veterinary Medical Association. Some serious diseases like rabies can
also pass from pets to people. Vaccinating our cats and

(25:37):
dogs helps protect human health. Here's what to know about
vaccining your pet. Who develops vaccine guidelines for pets. In
the United States, veterinarians tend to follow the vaccine gaidlines
developed by the American Animal Hospital Association in partnership with
the Feline Veterinarian Medical Association. The organization develops separate gadlands
for cats and dogs and classifies recommended vaccines as core

(26:00):
or noncore. Core vaccines, which are recommended for all dogs
or cats, include vaccines for canine parva virus for dogs,
feline leukemia virus for kittens, and rabies for both cats
and dogs. The group also endorses additional non core vaccines
for animals that are high risks for particular diseases. Dogs
that live in places where lime disease is endemic may

(26:21):
benefit from the lime vaccine for insanes, while those that
attend doggy deadcare might need be vaccinated against contagious respiratory
diseases like bordetella or canine influenza. The guidelines are reviewed
and revised periodically. For example, the vaccine for leptospirosis, a
bacterial disease often transmitted from rodents to dogs was recently
added to the list of core canine vaccines after it

(26:44):
became clear that the risk of the disease was widespread.
What kind of vaccines mean? What kind of vaccine mandates
exist for pets? It depends on where you live and
which pet related services you use. Many states and cities
require rabies vaccines for cats and dogs, although some of
these laws are stricter than others. Many pet care companies

(27:05):
have their own vaccine policies, requiring the animals to be
vaccinated against a handful of highly contagious diseases before they
are allowed to tend daycare or stay overnight in a
boarding kettle. What are the risks of vaccination? In one
recent study examining vaccine safety and millions of dogs, researchers
reported an ad adverse event rate of about zero point

(27:26):
two percent, or two in every thousand vaccine appointments. The
most common side effects are mild and temporary, such as
painters swelling at the injection site. More serious reactions are
rare but possible. Vaccines are very safe, and I've seen
so many animals suffer and die from vaccine preventable illnesses.
Said doctor Sara Gonzalez, a veterinarian at the University of Georgia.

(27:49):
There are risks from vaccines, but they outweigh by far
the risks that come with not vaccinating pets. Does an
indoor only cat need to be vaccinated? What about a
that never goes to the dog park. Pet owners should
talk to their veterinarians about which vaccines make sense for
their pets. Even animals with live, cloistered lives need some vaccines.

(28:11):
Dogs can pick up diseases in their own yards, while
even indoor cats can encounter RUMs and bats and pathogens
they shed. As is the case with human medicine, widespread
vaccination of healthy animals also benefits the wider community by
helping to prevent outbreaks and protect more vulnerable pets, including
kittens and puppies that are too young to be fully

(28:32):
at vaccinated. This concludes today's Diary of Science and Nature.
Your host today has been Linda Rice. Thank you for listening,
and now please stay tuned for continued programming on Radio
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