11.6.25

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hello. This Kelly Taylor. I'll be your host for Radioized
Diary of Science and Nature. We'll have some articles related
to 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. We'll start off with an

(00:23):
article from Scientific American dated October thirtieth, written by Cody Contier,
and the headline is Chimps can weigh evidence and update
their beliefs. Like humans do. You generally have reasons good
or bad for your beliefs. You can reflect on those reasons.
Why do I think there's a serial killer in the attic?

(00:45):
It's because the floor creaked and a paragon of rationality
that you are. You can also adjust your beliefs when
additional evidence demands it. Having scoured the attic, baseball bat
in hand, I must conclude that it's just an old,
creaky house. This cognitive skill is known as belief revision.
It's long been considered a hallmark of human rationality that

(01:08):
distinguishes us from other animals. It relies on a reflective
awareness of our own thought processes, thinking about thinking or
metacognition that other species don't obviously possess. But a new
study published today in the journal Science shows that our
closest evolutionary relatives also reason in surprisingly sophisticated ways. In

(01:34):
a series of experiments, researchers tested chimpanzees at the Nungamba
Island Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Uganda to see how the animals
juggle different sources of evidence. Each experiment revolved around food
hidden in one of several boxes. The chimps would pick
the box they thought was most promising based on any
initial clue. Then they'd get another clue that sometimes conflicted

(01:57):
with the first. Given the chance to update their decision,
they almost always chose the box predicted by a rational
choice model, and only changed their mind when the new
information was stronger than what they already knew. Quote the
chimps knocked it out of the park, says Brian Hare,
an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University who was not involved

(02:20):
in the study. Quote it's obvious this is so easy
for them. Quote. Most impressively, the animals even accounted for
clues that undermined earlier evidence. If they heard something bouncing
around inside box one they would assume at first that
it was an apple, but then the experimenter would pull
out a stone. Realizing they had been misled. The chimps

(02:44):
would immediately opt for box two, even though it appeared
uninspiring a moment before this was quote the cherry on top,
says study co author Jan Engelman, a comparative psychologist at
the University of California, Berkeley. Quote. None of us thought
they could do it because it's just so complex. Of course,

(03:06):
lots of animals obey reason without reflecting on it, and
Amiba is acting rationally in some sense when it follows
chemical signals toward food. This unreflective responsiveness to evidence, as
it's been called, is a mere shadow of human rationality,
But Engelman argues that chimpanzee's ability to scrutinize evidence engage

(03:27):
the certainty of their own knowledge comes much closer to
the real thing. It's very hard to explain the chimp's
behavior without appealing to some notion of reflection, he says.
Christopher Krupigner, who studies animal cognition at Johns Hopkins University
and was not involved in the study, agrees he's agnostic

(03:48):
about the content of that reflection whether language. It's unclear
how animals could mentally represent the propositions that make up
human beliefs, like in parentheses. They have hear rattling, so
there's probably an apple in the box. It's possible that
chimps think primarily in pictures. Regardless, Kroupigner says, all of

(04:09):
this suggests they're not just driven by simple emotional responses.
They have rather complex awareness. Clearly, however, there's still more
to human rationality. According to study co author Hannah Schleihauf,
a comparative psychologist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, the
crucial ingredient may be social interaction. We're able to sharpen

(04:31):
our beliefs through discussion. This is really what makes humans
so special, she says. We give, give, and ask for reasons. Indeed,
some cognitive scientists think our reasoning skills evolve so that
we could argue with one another. This study reminds us
that those skills evolve from somewhere, namely from cognitive abilities

(04:52):
that were already present in the common ancestor that we
share with chimpanzees and bonobos more than one hundred and
fifty years ago. Charles Darwin predicted that our extraordinary mental
powers would turn out to be extensions of capacities found
throughout the animal kingdom. If chimpanzees are truly capable of reflection,
the gap between us and our primate cousins narrows a

(05:14):
bit further. As Hair puts it, there's no need to
search the stars for intelligence. Akin to our own quote,
we already know we're not alone. He says, there are
beings here considering the world in a way that we
think of as being rational. Quote and now staying with

(05:35):
Scientific American. An article from November third, written by Ashley
Baltz are vigil and headlined first ever footage shows killer
whales attacking great white shark nursery. Orcas, or killer whales,
are not known for their amiable demeanor. The famous bullies

(05:55):
attack boats and pester other animals for reasons that sometimes
aren't entirely clear. Now, for the first time, they've been
spotted repeatedly targeting young great white sharks in a shark nursery.
According to a new paper published in Frontiers and Marine Science,
researchers watched two hunts via drone while monitoring orcas in
the Gulf of California. Newly released footage from August twenty

(06:19):
twenty shows the first clash, during which five orcas teamed
up to go great white shark tipping. After shoving a
shark up to the surface, the orcas rolled it onto
its back. At that point, the battle is already won.
Flipping a shark upside down induces a paralyzing state called
tonic immobility, similar to a case of the twisties for

(06:41):
a gymnast. It throws off the shark's spatial awareness and
disrupts the connection between the animal's mind and body. The
orcas then repeated the process with another young great white shark.
In both cases, they went to all of that trouble,
mainly for each shark's liver, because the organ is loaded
with nutrients and energy. Two years later, in August twenty

(07:04):
twenty two, the researchers saw repeat five orcas flipped over
a young great white shark and ate its liver. The
observations were detailed enough that researchers could identify and track
individual orcas by their dorsal fin confirming that the same group,
known as the Montezuma pod after its best known member,

(07:25):
was behind both attacks. Quote This behavior is a testament
to orca's advanced intelligence, strategic thinking, and sophisticated social learning,
as the hunting techniques are passed down through generations within
their pods, said marine biologist Eric Heghera Rivas, who led
the new paper, in a recent press release. While scientists

(07:45):
had previously seen orcas attack great whites, the killer whales
mainly targeted adults, both for a larger meal and to
get rid of competition for the same prey. The newly
reported sighting surpres of the first direct evidence of orcus
hunting down young great whites specifically. The researchers say the
strange behavior may be linked to climate change induced warming waters,

(08:07):
which seem to be pushing shark nurseries into the orcapod's
hunting grounds. Because baby sharks are on their own from
day one, their nurseries are really more like orphanages. There
are no adults around to guard the little ones as
they mature. That generally works fine because the animals have
so few predators, but now that they've moved into dangerous waters,

(08:28):
they may be forced to relocate once again. Quote Nursery
areas are where young sharks spend time growing and learning
to forage, so displacing them from those habitats can be disruptive,
says Alison Towner, marine biologist at Roodes University in South
Africa who specializes in orcapredation of sharks but wasn't involved

(08:50):
in the new study. Quote. If the pressure is occasional,
the impact may be limited, but if it becomes repeated,
it could force juveniles into less suitable or riskier areas
and ultimately disrupt the entire ecosystem. And now, sticking with
Scientific American, we have an article from November the first,

(09:14):
written by Jonathan O'Callahan. It's nearly time to say goodbye
to the International Space Station. What happens next human spaceflight
is on the cusp of an intriguing new dong. For
twenty five years, astronauts have lived and worked on board
the International Space Station over the ISS, starting with the

(09:35):
arrival of its first occupants on November second of two thousand.
Built through a partnership between the US and Russia in
the aftermath of the Cold War, the ISS has now
witnessed five presidential administrations, the advent and demise of the iPod,
and even the lofting of another orbital habitat China's Changong

(09:55):
space station, but the ISS's days are numbered. By twenty
thirty one one, NASA plans to de orbit the space station,
citing aging hardware and rising costs. The agency will bring
it back through Earth's atmosphere for a fiery plunge into
the Pacific Ocean. If all goes as planned, commercial space

(10:15):
stations outposts operated not by government agencies but instead by
private companies, will take the ISS's place to build on
its success. The first of these is set to launch
next year, with a slew of others scheduled to follow
soon after. All of them have the same goal of
fostering a vibrant, human centered economy in Earth orbit and

(10:37):
ultimately beyond. Quote. We hope to build habitats for the
Moon and Mars, and eventually even an artificial gravity space station,
says Max Hout, CEO of Vast, a Long Beach, California
based company at the forefront of the private sector spacefaring push.

(10:57):
Vast plans to launch its Haven one space station as
soon as May twenty six. On Haven one's heels will
be several other habitats from Axium Space, Blue Origin and
Starlab Space all of them are intended to reach orbit
by the end of the decade and are still somewhat
reliant on NASA as a paying customer. The ISS will

(11:22):
leave behind an important legacy, says Bill Nelson, who is
formerly a US Senator and a Space Shuttle crew member
as well as NASA's administrator from twenty twenty twenty one
to twenty twenty five, and formalize the timeline for the
nation's pivot to commercial space stations. Quote. The station has
done incredible things, he says, from establishing how to live

(11:44):
safely in space to exploring the promise in peril of
microgravity environments. All the while, the ISS has been a
shining beacon of global cooperation. NASA's shift from operator of
the ISS to a tenant on space stations, Nelson's says,
should help the agency focus on more innovative and daring
explorations deeper in the Solar System. It's part of the

(12:07):
evolution of space, he adds. It used to be all government.
Now we have commercial partners and international partners. Some have
argued that the ISS could still have a long life
ahead if it were to be boosted to a higher
orbit where it could endure intact for decades or centuries. Quote.
I think it's the most amazing thing humanity has ever constructed,

(12:28):
says Greg Autry, a space policy expert at the University
of Central Florida. It's kind of like deorbiting Buckingham Palace.
It's an amazing historical structure and it should be recognized
for that. NASA, however, determined that rescuing the ISS would
be too costly and complex. Instead, the space agency opted
to pay SpaceX nearly a billion dollars to develop a

(12:51):
vehicle that will push the station back into Earth's atmosphere
in twenty thirty one, leaving China's Tiangong Space Station as
the only government run an outpost in orbit. By the
time that happens, multiple commercial space stations could be active.
Haven one, the first of them, is a singular camp
or van sized structure that will be launched on a

(13:13):
SpaceX Falcon nine rocket. Initially lofted uncrewed, the station will
offer stays of up to ten days for both governmental
and private sector visitors, all of whom are planned to
reach Haven One via a SpaceX driving capsule. The cost
of a private booking is undisclosed at present. Quote. Our

(13:33):
core business model is eighty five percent sovereign space agencies,
including NASA, and then maybe fifteen percent private individuals, says
out on Board four, occupants will have private sleeping berths
with inflatable beds, a domed window to observe Earth, and
high speed Internet provided by SpaceX's Starlink service. A built

(13:55):
in science lab will allow them to conduct research at
the station. Ie one is a precursor to a much
bigger construct planned by Vast called Haven two, which is
expected to launch by the time the ISS is abandoned.
Haven two will comprise multiple Haven one style modules arranged
in a cross shape to enable a continuous human presence

(14:17):
in orbit, rather than short stays like Haven one will host.
It will be joined by the other commercial ventures Axiom Station,
Blue Origins, Orbital REEF and Starlab. New priorities may come
with any new private era in Earth orbit. Whereas the
ISS was notionally a station focused on science, private habitats

(14:39):
will inevitably have a broader purview, from acting as proverbial
space hotels to being manufacturing hubs for products imported back
to Earth. Quote, you can make much better silicon crystals
for semiconductors in space, says Autry, listing one of several
perennial arguments for more industrial activity in orbit. Quote, there

(15:01):
are a lot of different economic drivers that I think
will eventually pay off, and the space tourism business will
be much larger than most people believe in quote. Autrey
points to Blue Origins new Shepherd rocket, which launches paying
customers straight up and down on suborbital rides lasting just
ten minutes, but has already flown about eighty people, including

(15:22):
some repeat customers. There's a really strong demand, he says,
arguing that an increase in rides to space and destinations
to reach shows space tourism can absolutely be as accessible
as other extreme environments such as the deep sea. Quote,
there's no reason you can't get suborbital ticket prices into
the thousands of dollars and orbital ticket prices under a

(15:45):
million dollars, he says, I think it will happen in
the next ten to twenty years. Quote. What role science
will play on commercial space stations will to some degree
depend on the tools customers can use on board. Already,
the major players have suggested that an assortment of relevant,
high grade laboratory equipment will be the norm Fabrizio Fiore,

(16:06):
and astrophysicist at the Astronomical Observatory of Trieste in Italy,
says this means more opportunities for scientists to conduct research
that was logistically impossible on the ISS. Quote. Even putting
a small thing on the ISS is very, very time
consuming and difficulty. Says, if we're going to have space
stations that are not dedicated to governmental astronauts, it'll be

(16:30):
much easier to build experiments on them. Research institutions and
universities could increase their access to space two, perhaps by
sending their own astronauts. Earlier this year, For example, Purdue
University booked tickets for a twenty twenty seven flight on
Virgin Galactic's suborbital space plane for a pair of its researchers.

(16:53):
It's not unfathomable to think the same might occur on
commercial space stations, especially if the cost of visiting them
can be brought down to a reasonable level. In the
bigger picture, some see the rise of private space stations
as part of a turning point for life itself. Caleb Sharf,
an astrobiologist in the US, argues in his new book

(17:14):
The Giant Leap that space exploration is a next step
in the evolution of humankind. Quote. The capacity to put
objects into orbit around Earth and study Earth from space.
Is this unique perspective that no other organism has ever
had in the history of life on Earth in the
last four billion years, he says. Quote getting into space

(17:35):
is another major evolutionary transition point. You can imagine if
we do spread out across the Solar System in the
centuries to come, that will induce fundamental changes on us
as a species. It will dilute us, it will disperse us.
We will undergo speciation. While we now call ourselves humans
as a single species, the future may be many species

(17:58):
that were derived from what we are today. Commercial space stations,
Sharf says, might be the next step in this journey,
but he's not quite ready to buy a ticket or
the hype. Quote. Maybe we'll learn that commercial space stations
are the best thing ever, he says. Or perhaps we'll
discover that this isn't actually the be all and end all.
It's absolutely possible that commercial space stations, for economic or

(18:22):
financial reasons, do not yield what is expected or hopedote.
By the end of the decade, humans are also planned
to return to the Moon in competing efforts, when led
by the US and the other led by China. Ian Crawford,
a planetary scientist at Birkbeck University of London, has previously
argued that space stations can be a distraction from this endeavor. Quote.

(18:45):
To talk about space exploration properly, we have to move
away from low Earth orbit, he says, how space hotels
and Earth orbit really feed into that. I don't know.
Whatever direction these new stations take, they will mark the
end of a history experiment. A full quarter century and
counting of humans living and working off world the feet

(19:07):
is all the more remarkable for how unremarkable it now appears.
More than forty percent of all the people on Earth
are younger than the ISS, having never known a world
without it. For many of them, the station's quiet technical
triumph of unbroken orbital occupation is understandably banal, boring, and routine.
That is to say, like so many wondrous things we

(19:29):
take for granted, it seems the ISS won't really be
understood for its good until it's gone. And now we're
going to turn to the BBC Science Focus magazine and
they have for their question of the month, how many
spiders are in my house. Pest control companies will often

(19:51):
give a figure of forty spiders in an average house,
but it's hard to find anything in the published literature
that directly backs this up. Sixteen shis study of fifty
houses in North Carolina, US found cobweb spiders in sixty
five percent of all rooms sampled, but this was looking
at biodiversity and didn't count the number of individual spiders.

(20:12):
If a typical house has five or six rooms plus hallways,
the average figure would be around ten spiders per room,
which seems like a lot. To add some research of
my own. I've just hovered or hoovered I'm sorry, hoovered
with a vacuum my entire house, a rare event, and
only found twenty six spiders. But that's just the parts
of the house that we can easily scrutinize. If you

(20:33):
consider under the floorboards, behind the fridge, the law off
the garage, and so on, there could easily be that
many more still hiding if we consider the average density
of spiders outdoors. A widely sighted figure from Kneifeler and
Berkhoff's twenty seventeen paper is one hundred and thirty one
spiders per square meter. That's of the order of ten

(20:55):
quadrillion spiders worldwide, or about a million spiders for every human.
A typical house has actually relatively little spider food available,
but it also has almost none of a spider's main predator,
such as centipedes and birds, so each spider may live
longer indoors than out. Spiders also lay anything from ten

(21:18):
to two hundred and fifty eggs at a time, and
house spiders may lay as many as five clutches per year.
Less than one percent will reach adulthood, but even so,
if we count baby spiders in our household population census,
the figure may be as many as a couple thousand
spiders at any one time. And now we'll go to

(21:39):
BBC Wildlife for an article written by James Fair dated
November third, and the headline is people are cynical about
making money out of nature. We desperately need to rewild
the world, but who's going to foot the bill. The
fields at Slight Farm near Bath in England are not
much to look at. Is bare earth and deeply rutted,

(22:02):
reminiscent of land that has been subjected to the rootling
behavior of wild boares. This says environmental consultant Dominic. Woodfield
was the most rubbish, overgrazed and compacted, and it's had
fertilizers too. To start the process of ecological recovery, Woodfield
site manager Simon Nash and farm manager James Fowles introduced

(22:25):
a couple of Tamworth pigs to the field. The pig's
rooting behavior creates ruts and exposes a soil, giving seeds
other than grass the chance to germinate. Exactly what happens
next the team isn't really sure, but the action of
the pigs should be a kickstart precipitating natural processes that
can bring the field back to life in time. One

(22:45):
can imagine its supporting nesting skylarks, vole hunting barn owls,
and the occasional mad march hare. This field is a
perfect example of why the United Kingdom ranks in the
bottom ten percent of all countries in bout, but it
is also on the front line of a revolution because
the transformation being plotted at Slight Farm isn't born purely

(23:08):
out of altruism or from government subsidy, but because the
landowners have received money from a developer. There is arguably
no more extential question for the human race than how
we halt and reverse declines in nature and wildlife. There
is a basic premise that if we destroy nature, we
destroy ourselves because we rely on it for so much food, water,

(23:32):
protection from flooding, and mitigation of climate change. It was
once thought the solution was a question of raising awareness though,
for example, wild through for example, wildlife documentaries. Then there
was hope that governments would sort things out through international agreements,
and to a certain extent they did. The Rio Conference
on Biodiversity in nineteen ninety two and the Paris Agreement

(23:54):
of twenty fifteen were both hailed as game changers at
the time. Yet none of this seems to have worked.
In the past decade or so, a potential news savior
has emerged, somewhat alarmingly. Perhaps it's the very same entity
that has arguably played the biggest role in waking environmental
destruction in the first place, the private sector companies, investors,

(24:18):
pension funds. But this new funding model for nature has
not taken off either, not yet anyway. Take the UN's
RIEDD Plus program, which aims to help developing countries maintain
carbon rich tropical forests by paying them not to chop
them down. It was initially funded by international governments, but
as long as a decade ago it was hoped that

(24:40):
the private sector would step in and take on more
of that burden. Sadly that hasn't happened, and after all,
if the private sector doesn't have to contribute, then why
should it. Some big companies like to demonstrate they are
environmentally responsible by contributing too, for instance voluntary carbon offsetting scheme.

(25:01):
The problem with such schemes is that they are often
accused of being little more than greenwashing. In general, the
money paid is a tiny percentage of turnover, and the
schemes themselves often achieve only marginal benefits for the environment.
But in England there is now a policy that requires
developers to compensate for the nature lost to their development.

(25:23):
It's called Biodiversity Net Gain or BNNG, and became mandatory
in twenty twenty four. B NG is complex, but the
legislation essentially requires developers to assess how much wildlife is
on the land they are building on in the form
of biodiversity units. They then either recreate the same number

(25:45):
of units plus ten percent on site, or pay for
enhancement or restoration of nature elsewhere. While BNG is being
forced on developers, some business people see it as an opportunity.
Take brothers Philip and Ds the Brainan, owners of the
aforementioned Slight Farm, and co founders of Biofarm, a company

(26:08):
that helps both landowners and private companies with BNG deals. Quote.
Working in BNG appealed because it address three big issues,
says Andy Brainan, climate and nature being in a disastrous state,
the need to build more housing without harming nature, and
farming becoming unviable for landowners. The Brainans are creating habitat banks,

(26:37):
essentially parcels of enhanced nature, and selling the resulting biodiversity
units to companies in need. Given the government's target to
build three hundred thousand homes a year, it's estimated that
annually BNG could result in the enhancement or restoration of
fifteen thousand hectares of new wildlife habitat and drive one

(26:58):
hundred and thirty five to two hundred and six many
million euros into conservation. Or at least those were the
figures that Labor recently announced it could ease or drop
BMNG requirements for small and medium sized housebuilders, which could
nearly have the amount of money going towards conservation. That
is perhaps the biggest weakness of the policy. Again, if

(27:18):
the private sector doesn't have to spend money enhancing wildlife,
it probably won't. It's also not clear how the proposed
Planning and Infrastructure Bill will impact the new policy. But
what if you could persuade private sector companies that safeguarding
biodiversity was in their interest rather than something being foisted
upon them. That's the concept that Rebalance Earth, a boutique

(27:41):
fund manager, is working on. Here's how it works. Pension
funds need to invest clients money in something that will
provide a return. That could be companies listed on the
start market or government bonds. Managing director Robert Gardner believes
Rebalance Earth can provide a return earned by investing in
nature because the private sector is increasingly impacted by natural events.

(28:06):
Well that's all for today's Diary of Science and Nature.
Your reader was Kelly Taylor. Now stay tuned for further
programming on RADIOI