11.13.25

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hello, this is Kelly Taylor. I'll be your host for
Radio Wized Diary of Science and Nature. I'll have some
articles on the topics of science and nature. But first
a reminder that RADIOI is a reading service intended for
people who are blind or have other disabilities that make
it difficult to read printed material. From Popular Science. We

(00:22):
have this first article Meat, Blue and Gold, NASA's first
twin satellites bound for Mars, written by Andrew Paul. This
is dated November sixth. NASA is readying the first dual
satellite mission to another planet, currently scheduled to launch no
earlier than Sunday, November ninth, from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The

(00:45):
Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers acronym ESCAPADE are
a pair of identical spacecraft tasked with traveling to Mars.
Once in the red planet's orbit, the spacecraft will create
three dimensional maps of our cosmic neighbor's upper atmosphere, ion,

(01:09):
a sphere, and magnetic fields. ESCAPADE is overseen by the
University of California, Berkeley, who named the spacecrafts on board
satellites blue and Gold after the school's colors. In addition
to its primary objectives, the spacecraft will be the first
to reach Mars using a new trajectory path. Pass missions

(01:30):
to its closest planetary neighbor have relied on a seven
to eleven month long route known as the Homan Transfer.
While fuel efficient, the trajectory necessitated extremely narrow launch windows
that typically only a few weeks every twenty six months.

(01:50):
Instead of harnessing the home and Transfer, Escapade will first
travel to lagrange point, or a location in space where
the gravitational pull of the Earth and Sun are equal.
From there, it will arc in a kidney being shaped
twelvemonth orbit back towards Earth. In early November twenty twenty six,

(02:12):
Escapade is scheduled to engage its engines and slingshot around
our planet and use that momentum to carry to Mars.
The Martian satellites are expected to arrive in early twenty
twenty seven, at which point Blue and Gold will fire
up its instrument arrays and data processing computers, as well
as deploy boom arrays. A comprehensive map of the red

(02:33):
planet's magnetic fields is necessary to help humans step foot
on Mars in future missions. Unlike Earth, Mars lost its
atmosphere around four billion years ago. Without it, the planet
is routinely bombarded by the Sun's high energy particle radiation.
Last year, for example, NASA's Curiosity Rover recorded a solar

(02:57):
storm that generated one hundred day's worth of the Milky
Way normal background radiation, or the span of a single day.
Solar storms are bad enough to fry electrical grids on
Earth even with its atmosphere, but they would be outright
deadly to anyone lacking proper protection on Mars. According to
Escapade principal investigator Robert Lillis, the satellites will make space

(03:20):
weather measurements necessary to understand the system well enough to
forecast solar storms whose radiation could harm astronauts on the
surface of Mars or in orbit. Previous missions missions showed
that although it no longer possesses a global magnetic field
like Earth, Mars still has localized magnetic fields generated by

(03:44):
its highly magnetized crust. These remain capable of pushing solar
wind as much as nine hundred and thirty two miles
away from the planet's surface, where they could interfere with
communications abilities. Quote understanding how the eyeonosphere varies will be
really important part of understanding how to correct the distortions

(04:05):
in radio signals that we will need to communicate with
each other and to navigate on Mars, said Lilis. Although
blue and gold will travel together to Mars, they'll set
off on separate orbits to supply a three D view
of the Martian atmosphere as it encounters blasts of million
mile per hour solar wind. To understand how the solar

(04:27):
wind drives different kinds of atmospheric to escape is a
key piece of the puzzle of the climate evolution of Mars,
explains Lilis. Escapade gives us what you might call a
stereo perspective, two different vantage points simultaneously. And now from
Scientific American we have an article from November eleventh titled

(04:50):
the world's largest wind turbine will smash previous records. The
world's largest wind turbine, currently being tested off the coast
of Chinina, as blades that are more than twice as
long as a Boeing seven seventy seven's wingspan. It can
generate twenty six megawatts of energy, more than double the

(05:10):
global average for individual turbines, but its record is about
to be smashed to Smithereens. Another offshore wind turbine that
is twice as powerful has been announced by ming yangs
Smart Energy, a company based in southern China, with a
capacity of fifty megawats. This supersized structure is designed to

(05:32):
float on the ocean's surface and can withstand typhoons, according
to the company, which plans to start making the turbine
later this year and to deploy it next year. Though
Western manufacturers such as Siemens Gamesa are also pushing for
bigger and bigger turbines, the trend has been particularly dominant
in China after the government stopped subsidizing offshore wind farms

(05:55):
in twenty twenty two, forcing developers to find ways to
save money. Using bigger turbines means that fewer of them
will be needed to generate the same amount of power.
Says a researcher at yang yang Jing Offshore Wind Energy Laboratory, quote,
you can save on transport, construction and installation fees, which

(06:19):
counts for seventy to eighty percent of the cost of
building an offshore wind farm. Experts say in general, the
turbine with a larger capacity is also physically bigger. This
is because you need longer blades to catch more wind
and generate more electricity per s week. The current record
holding turbine, made by Dongfang Electric, is so enormous that

(06:39):
its tower is as tall as a sixty three story skyscraper.
But ming Yang is taking a different approach. Its megamachine
will have not one, but two sets of engines and blades,
each capable of generating twenty five megawatts of energy. They
are supported by a y shaped tower on a single platform.
Each of its blade aage, is one hundred and forty

(07:01):
five meters long, roughly three times the height of the
Statue of Liberty. The design builds on that of the
world's first twin headed turbine, the sixteen megawat version that's
currently operating in the South China Sea. If successful at
this scale, this model can be a game changer in
the floating wind industry, says Umang Meroda, an offshore wind

(07:24):
analyst at the Norwegian research firm rice Stad Energy. A
researcher of renewable energy at the California based nonprofit Global
Energy Monitor, is most impressed that Minyang intends to increase
a turbine's capacity by more than twenty megawats in one go,
are outpacing the industry's average rate of increase, which is

(07:47):
two to three megawatts each year. Minyang says that the
megawat turbine will have a strong ability to counter typhoons,
but hasn't yet provided more details on how it will
do so. The sixteen megawat model, which is supposed to
serve as a prototype, has survived multiple typhoons over the
past year, including more than one hundred and fifty kilometers

(08:09):
per hour winds from Typhoon Redaza. Some of its resilience
is because of the fact that it is tethered to
the ocean floor at a single point, so we can
rotate three hundred sixty degrees like a weather vane and
stay balanced during high winds. The feature also means that
the turbine can be installed in deeper waters farther away

(08:30):
from shore, where wind is stronger and more consistent. But
the new model will be significantly bigger, so there could
be a lot of risks, and there are potential technical
difficulties in ensuring that the two rotors generate power smoothly
because they are so close together on a single platform.

(08:53):
A representative of Minyang did not respond to requests for
comment from Scientific American. Now in Popular Science, we have
an article written by Jennifer Burne dated November seventh and
headlined how squirrels actually find all their buried nuts. As

(09:13):
someone who routinely hides things from myself, car, keys, receipts,
even my phone while I'm actively talking on it, I
felt instantly validated by Sarah Silverman's joke that squirrels forget
where they bury eighty percent of their nuts, and that's
how trees are planted. Silverman concludes in her twenty twenty
one Netflix special A Speck of Dust. If these bold,

(09:35):
bushytailed little train wrecks are able to thrive despite that
kind of chaos, I figured there might be hope for me.
Turns out it was too good to be true. Quote.
I appreciate Sarah Silverman's comedy, but actually they're remarkably good
at it. Says doctor Noah Perlut, professor at the University
of New England School of Marine and Environmental Programs, who

(09:56):
leads a long running gray squirrel research on campus. Quote.
You can't be an average squirrel, or you'll die. It's
only the above average squirrels that survive and make babies
end quote. Every fall, squirrels spend weeks racing against winter
to stash hundreds of nuts and seeds across their territories.
When food becomes scarce, they rely on these caches to

(10:17):
survive the cold months. So how do these exceptional squirrels
relocate the hundreds of nuts they've hidden? According to Perlot,
squirrels don't use a single strategy to recover their stashes. Instead,
they draw up on a skill set that includes smell,
sight and even cues from other squirrels' movements and scent marks.

(10:37):
They use the whole toolkit, Perlet says. But when it's
time to dig food back up, spatial memory seems to
do much of the heavy lifting. In one field experiment,
scientists tried to trick squirrels into misplacing their meals. They
created fake nut stashes that looked identical to the real ones,
and even swapped the grassy patches between them so the

(10:59):
impossible carried the real scent. The result, the squirrels didn't
waste time going down that rabbit hole. Almost without fail,
they ignored the impostors and dug up their actual caches
decades of research from that nineteen ninety nine experiment to
earlier field work on gray squirrels all point to the

(11:19):
same conclusion. Squirrels are far better at recovering stored food
than Silverman's viral joke suggests. One nineteen eighty urban study
estimated that gray squirrels retrieve roughly eighty five percent of
their cached nuts. More recently, a twenty twenty three study
reports that red squirrels living in an urban park quickly

(11:41):
found the majority of nuts they cased, even when faced
with stiff competition from other squirrels. Another common misconception all
squirrels stashes are buried underground. We commonly think of these
caches as being buried in the ground, but imagine being
a gray squirrel and living in a place that has
a lot of snow or ice. Perlet says, you can't

(12:01):
go out and dig through two feet of ice every
time you want a single acorn. Instead, squirrels in colder
climates store food in tree hollows and branches, further evidence
of how sophisticated their mental maps can be. They have
to rely on remembering where inside many trees they've placed food.
Perlet says, Most tree dwelling squirrels, including the familiar Eastern

(12:25):
gray that's common in the eastern and midwestern United States,
are what biologists call scatter hoarders, stashing hundreds of nuts
across a wide area rather than keeping them all in
one place. Other species, like red squirrels, prefer larder hold quarting,
a fancy scientific term for stockpiling food in a single
defended pantry. Considering the average squirrel's home range spans six

(12:50):
to eight acres, roughly the size of four football fields,
and can include several nests. That's a lot of terrain
to keep track of. And they're not only tracking their
own assets, they're keeping tabs on everyone else's dinner plans too. Quote,
squirrels are not territorial, and they are watching each other's
cashing behavior, stealing their food and then cashing them in

(13:12):
other places. Perlit says. Their memory, in other words, isn't
just about where did I put my food, but also
where did that other squirrel put theirs. Now we have
an article from the Guardian, and this one is headlined
the tigers are hungry, endangered but deadly the world's largest

(13:34):
big cat is sowing fear in Siberia's villages. This is
from November tenth, written by Patrick Greenfield. The attacks seemed
to come from nowhere. At first, the tigers snatched guard
dogs on the edge of villages in Russia's Far East,
emerging from the forest at night to pray. Others went

(13:57):
for livestock, going after horses cattle. Then the attacks on
people began. In January, an ice fissure was mauled at
night and dragged away by a big cat, just weeks
after a forester had been killed. In March, another man
was attacked and partly eaten by a tiger. It was

(14:20):
the deadliest winter for tiger attacks in Siberia for decades.
For years, the tiger, also known as a Siberian tiger,
was so rarely seen in Russia's Far East that it
was considered a ghost of the forest. The world's largest
big cat, celebrated for its power and resilience, is also
one of the most endangered. A few hundred kling on

(14:43):
in a remote fragment of the Siberian Tiger and a
sliver of the Russian Chinese border, remnants of a historic
territory that once spanned the Korean Peninsula and northeast China.
Since twenty twenty, however, amer tigers have left the forest
in unprecedented numbers, sparking fear among the communities that live

(15:05):
alongside them. African swine fever, a disease that is almost
always fatal to most pig species, has swept through the region.
The disease has been described by scientists as an ecological disaster,
driving a number of wild pig species toward extinction, with
enormous knock on effects for ecosystems and other species. It

(15:27):
has killed vast numbers of wild boar, a main food
source for the tigers and particularly popular with females with cubs.
The virus probably came over the border from China, where
millions of pigs died after an outbreak that began in
twenty eighteen. Unrestricted poaching of deer and increased logging in

(15:48):
the tiger's ranges have contributed to a perfect storm to
push the predators out of their forests in search of food.
Some regions have seen a one thousand percent increase in
human tiger conflict incidents as African swine fever has spread.
In a typical year, a handful of tiger deaths and

(16:09):
captures take place. Yet, between October twenty four and September
of this year, at least seventeen am Or tigers have
been killed and twenty seven captured, of which three later died.
According to analysis seen by The Guardian. Of the captured cats,
many were found emaciated and dehydrated, or suffering from the

(16:29):
effects of gunshot wounds or trauma injuries from a vehicle collision. Quote.
The tigers are hungry. That that is why we are
seeing these incidents, says an Amor tiger expert, whom The
Guardian has not named to protect their identity. As tiger
conservation has become increasingly politicized in Russia, some experts fear

(16:52):
speaking published publicly on the issue. Quote. People want to
highlight this to the government, but they do not want
to listen. They say. There are no figures on the
number of wild board that have died from African swine
fever in Eastern Russia, although there are frequent reports from
people who come across carcasses in the forest during mushroom

(17:12):
and nut gathering troops. Doctor Matthias Markov, a researcher at
Cologne Zoo, is part of a group of international experts
working to better understand the global impact of the virus
on wild species. Quote, pigs die in ninety to one
hundred percent of circumstances. It's really fatal. In Asia, there

(17:33):
are lots of pig species restricted to small islands, so
it's having catastrophic consequences. We have already come across examples
in Sumatra and Malaysia where they are having more tiger conflicts,
he says, speaking out about the recent human tiger conflicts
in Russia Far East can be dangerous. In twenty two

(17:53):
thousand and eight, the Russian President Vladimir Putin threw his
weight behind AHM or tiger conservation efforts, pledging to increased
numbers of the big cat. Officially, authorities say there are
now about seven hundred and fifty in the wild, a
significant increase from the nineteen forties when numbers were as
low as forty. While few trust the accuracy of official numbers,

(18:14):
many experts say the push from the Russian leader has helped,
but many conservationists also suspect the big cats are in
far more trouble than authorities recognize. The Aymer Tiger Center,
the main body responsible for their conservation, was established by Putin.
The board for their conservation is overseen by Justice Minister

(18:36):
Constantine Chuchenko, who has been sanctioned by Western countries over
his role in the invasion of Ukraine. Kaarin Nisel, a
former Foreign minister for Austria and a close ally of Putin,
is an international ambassador on tiger protection. Few independent researchers
and conservation groups are allowed to work on the amer

(18:58):
tiger's protection, experts say. At a recent event, Sergei Aramileev,
the Director general of the amer Tiger Center, played down
concerns about issues with amor tigers. Quote, human deaths in
amer tiger attacks are extremely rare. From twenty ten to
twenty twenty four, twenty attacks on humans were recorded, resulting

(19:20):
in thirteen injuries and seven deaths. Of these, twenty eighteen
were provoked by humans. EA skipped two recent cases in
twenty twenty five were consistent with the overall statistics. Both
tigers had multiple gunshot wounds. Therefore, the claim of unprovoked
aggression by a tiger toward a human is far fetched
and exist only in unreliable online publications. The amer Tiger

(19:45):
Center did not respond to the Guardian's request for comment.
But some have chosen to raise the issue online regardless
of the risk. In January, residents in one village used
social media to complain about the impact of a tigris
hunting dog in their town. Others have pledged to boycott
local elections until they get more protection from tigers. Experts

(20:07):
working on the project says more must be done to
protect the forests that are home to the tigers, including
inducing the impact. I'm sorry, reducing the impact of logging
and mining. Quote. If we keep the ecosystem, we keep
the tigers. African swine fever wouldn't be such a big
problem if the forest was in good condition, one says,

(20:33):
Now we go to a national geographic. This is an
article from November seventh, written by Mary Bates and headlined
rats wage war on bats. In stunning new footage in
a dark cave in northern Germany, an invasive brown rat
stands upright, balancing with its tail. Suddenly, it reaches into

(20:55):
the night sky, plucks a bat from the air and
crunches down on it. At first, Miriam North's child was
shocked by the scene, captured with infrared surveillance video as
part of her research. Nornchchild head of the Behavioral Ecology
and Bioacoustics lab at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin,

(21:18):
thought it could be an isolated incident until her investigation
at another German bat cave turned up more macabre evidence.
We observed the same situation with rats patrolling the entrances
and exits of the cave, and we found caches of
more than fifty dead bats that rats had stored. She says.
It makes us think that this is not a unique

(21:39):
problem after all. Nornchchild and her team returned to the
two caves, both important urban hibernation sites for bats, to
document the extent of the rodent menace. Their findings suggest
that invasive rats are an underappreciated threat to city living bats.

(22:00):
This and other recent research on the war between rats
and bats has a larger implication for the spread of
disease to humans, says rain Of Plowwright, a professor of
public and ecosystem health at Cornell University. Quote. Rodents, particularly rats,
tend to do very well in areas that humans modify
or inhabit, says Plowwright. As we move into landscapes, we're

(22:24):
bringing rats with us, and these rats have the potential
to become a bridging host to take viruses from nature
into human populations. Brown rats are adaptive, opportunistic, and one
of the world's most widespread invasive predators. At their study sites,

(22:45):
norns Child and colleagues observed rats using different strategies to
successfully intercept bats in flight and target hibernating bats all
in total darkness. Rats are smart and fascinating creature, says Nornschild.
I don't have anything particularly in particular against rats. It's

(23:05):
just when there are a lot of them, they can
wreak havoc. The researchers estimate that even a small number
of rats could kill thousands of bats in a single year.
At a time when bat species are already under pressure
from habitat loss, climate change, and disease. This added predation
could push fragile populations over the edge. In fact, it's

(23:27):
already happened. Invasive rats are responsible for decimating some island
dwelling bat species or worse. The New Zealand greater short
tailed bat is one such casualty. It was last cited
in nineteen sixty seven, likely driven to extinction following an
invasion of ship rats to prevent urban rats from suffering.

(23:49):
I'm sorry urban bats from suffering a similar fate Nornschild
and colleagues recommend stronger measures to manage invasive rodents at
important hibernation and sights. These include ratproof waste containers, blocking
rodent access to cave entrances, and public awareness campaigns that
discourage littering and the feeding of urban wildlife. Elsewhere, bats

(24:14):
are showing they are capable of adapting and possibly even
coexisting with invasive rodents. At Tel Aviv University in Israel,
researchers maintain a semi natural, open colony of Egyptian fruit bats.
This set up allows bats to fly out to forage,
and return to roost as they please. Researchers make the

(24:35):
space even more bat friendly by setting out fruit every
day before sunset. But the promise of an easy meal
also attracts black rats you'll see. Yovel, head of the
university's bat lab, says that black rats do more than
just steal the bat's food. They kill and eat fruit
bat pups. To understand how bats respond to this complex threat,

(24:58):
Jovel and his team analyzed video of bat rat interactions
over seven months. The results show that fruit bats perceive
rats as dangerous. When rats occupied the food platform, bats
tended to avoid it. When they did land and there
was a rat nearby, the bats took longer to consume

(25:20):
the fruit because they were spending more time vigilant, looking
around and moving their ears. This remind This resulted in
a huge drop in foraging success, says Joville. The fruit
bat's response is changed when the season and situation. In winter,
bats acted more cautiously. In the spring, an abundance of

(25:41):
leftover fruit led to increased rat activity. In this context,
when competition was more intense, some bats actually fought back
and attacked the rats. This means that bats made strategic
calculations about wind to flee, whind to fight, and how
to feast instead of merely avoiding rats out of fear.
This behavior flexibility may allow the bats to live alongside

(26:02):
potentially dangerous rodent neighbors. And Now in Time magazine we
have an article headline how climate change can lead to
earthquakes from November twelfth. Climate change does its damage in
a lot of ways, birthing hurricanes, heat waves, floods, droughts,
and wildfires. Now add to that list earthquakes, continental rifting

(26:27):
or breakup and magma production. That's the conclusion of a
new paper in Scientific Reports, which adds to a growing
agreement among scientists that the Earth's atmospheric processes can affect
its geological processes in surprising ways. Quote Ultimately, plate tectonic
forces play the dominant role in driving continental rifting, says

(26:50):
geologist James Muirhead. However, our study shows that climate plays
a key role in modulating the rate of continental rifting,
which can drive phases of greater earthquakes or volcanic activity.
Merehead and his colleagues base their conclusions on studies they
conducted of Lake Turkana, a body of water one hundred
and fifty five miles long eighteen miles wide in northern Kenya.

(27:15):
That portion of the country is found in a part
of the continent known as the East African Rift Valley,
an area home to numerous deep lakes and technoic fractures.
The researchers collected data on twenty seven faults below Turkana,
looking back over the course of the past ten thousand years,
a time horizon that saw a lot of changes in

(27:35):
East Africa. Water levels in Lake Turkana reflect regional hydro
climates says Chris Scholz, Professor of Earth Sciences. During wetter
intervals approximately ninety six hundred to fifty three hundred years ago,
the lake was hundreds of feet higher than today. That
in turn had an impact on the earth below. The lakes.

(27:56):
Water's heavy, weighing twenty two hundred pounds per cubic meter,
which adds up fast in a lake the size of Trcana.
All of that water weight exerts a steady downward pressure,
suppressing rifting and magma flow, and keeping the subterranean region
relatively quiet. Well that's all for to day's diary of

(28:17):
Saints in Nature. Your reader was Kelly Taylor. Now stay
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