2.13.25

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Radioized Diary of Science and Nature. Your reader's
Kelly Taylor. I have articles related to the topics of
science and nature. But first a reminder that radio Eye
is a reading service intended for people who are blind
or have other disabilities that make it difficult to read
printed material. Well, let's start out from Scientific American. The

(00:26):
next viral plague. This is from February the eleventh. At
four point thirty on a chilly morning in Australia, head
lights burn through a dark forest in Central Woodford, a
small rural town fifty miles north of Brisbane, Queensland. Hundreds

(00:50):
of flying foxes, magnificent fruit eating bats with big eyes,
fluffy coats and a wingspan nearly that of an eagle,
had just returned from foraging and dangled on tree branches
like gigantic Christmas ornaments. Below them, rather incongruously, a large
plastic sheep covered the ground. It had been placed there

(01:10):
by a team of ecologists to collect urine and feces
that the animals dropped. The scientists from Griffith University in
Brisbane were probing bat droppings because of a grave human
health concern. Plagues now come at us from the skies.
Viruses carried by the world's only flying mammals, bats have

(01:34):
infected people in the past decades. A series of viral attackers,
many of them deadly, have been found in or linked
to bats, Marburg, Ebola, Hindra, Nepa, Sar's CoV I, MERRS covy, and,
most recently, Sar's Covy two covid. The disease at last

(01:58):
virus causes has killed more than seven million people across
the world. Bat derived viruses seem to threaten our health
with disturbing frequency. But why bats and why now? After
decades of searching for clues and putting together puzzle pieces
involving evolution, ecology, and climate, scientists have come up with

(02:21):
a good answer. Bats have evolved a unique immune system
that lets them coexist with a horde of otherwise harmful viruses,
a development that seems tied in surprising ways to their
ability to fly. But when people destroy their habitats and food,
and trigger disturbing changes in climate, all of which have

(02:43):
coincided recently, bats immune systems can be strained to the
breaking point. The animals can no longer keep viruses in check.
Their burgeoning population of microbes rains down on other animals
and eventually infects people. The search for fur their evidence
to bolster this hypothesis, as well as early warnings of

(03:04):
bat virus outbreaks, had brought the Griffith team to Woodford
last year. The investigators were looking for signs of nutrition
problems or biomarkers of impaired immunity in the bats, among
other indicators. Alison Peel, one of the ecologists, carefully transferred
puddles of bat urine from the plastic sheet into test tubes.

(03:27):
Then she felt something hard land on her back. Great,
I just got hit by batpoop, she said with a grimace.
The first light of dawn began filtering through the dense
forest canopy. The team will be spending several years in
the field trying to pick up causes of virus shedding
that can be easily obscured in a wild environment. Quote

(03:49):
such long term studies are extremely hard, but absolutely critical,
says James Wood, infectious disease ecologists at the University of Cambridge,
who has been working on hindra like viruses in African
bats in Ghana and Madagascar. The basic links between environmental
stress on bats an increased spread of disease were documented

(04:13):
in twenty twenty two in a landmark paper in Nature.
It connected climate variability, deforestation, and food shortages over a
quarter of a century to pulses of heightened virus infections
in bats, other animals and people. One of the authors
of the paper was rain a plow Write and infectious

(04:36):
disease ecologist at Cornell University who has been studying flying
foxes and viruses for two decades. The interwoven nature of
these causes, she says, means that any public health intervention
to prevent future pandemics will need to tackle the whole
environmental tapestry, not just put on a single thread quote.

(04:58):
Halting deforestation and climate change will help address the root cause,
she says. On March March evening in two thousand and six,
Powwright was in the bushland in Northern Australia's knit Miluk
National Park when she felt that something was not quite right.
She had set up a finely meshed net under the

(05:21):
forest canopy to capture flying foxes, then sat back and
stared at the sky. Plow Wright, a graduate student at
the time, was waiting for what she called a flying
river of animals hundreds of thousands of them, rushing from
their roosts to feed as the sun went down, letting

(05:43):
out a cacophony of high pitched calls. Quote. It's absolutely spectacular,
she says. Quote they are the wildebeasts of the Northern
Territory end quote. But that twilight was eerily quiet. Plower
I could barely find a trickle of frime flying foxes,
let alone a gushing river. It was extremely unusual. Where

(06:05):
have the bats gone? She recalls, windering. Plow Right was
part of a team trying to understand why flying foxes
had been spreading the Hindra virus to horses and people.
Hindra had killed two humans at that point, and it
had killed and sickened many more equines, threatening an industry

(06:28):
worth several billions of dollars to Australia. The scientist's job
was to periodically measure the extent of virus infection in
wild bats and monitor their health. When the researchers finally
managed to capture a few bats, they realized all was
not well. The animals were skinny and in bad shape.

(06:49):
It looked as if they had not been eating. The
bats were basically starving and in really poor health, Plowwright says,
and even though it was just after the mating sea season,
none of the captured females as pregnant. The team couldn't
detect any Hindra genetic material in the animals, which is
notoriously tricky to do, but nearly eighty percent of the

(07:13):
bats had immune system antibody proteins against the virus. That
was nearly twice the level measured the year before, and
it meant the bats had caught the pathogen. Quote it
was the first clue that nutritional stress may have a
role in an increased susceptibility to virus infection, Plowright says. Hindra,

(07:36):
the virus that plow Wright and others were tracking, had
made its fearsome debut on the outskirts of Brisbane in
the state of Queensland. In September nineteen ninety four. On
a breezy spring afternoon, a thoroughbred mare named Drama Series
started to look sickly while grazing at a paddock near Hindra,
a sleepy area known for its resources. Drama Series deteriorated

(08:00):
precipitously and she died two days later, says Peter Red
equined veterinarian who treated her. Within a few days, a
dozen more horses fell ill, most of them had shared
a stable with Drama Series. Soon some died and the
rest were euthanized to prevent possible transmission to humans, but

(08:22):
it was too late, Reid says. Within a week flew
like the symptoms descended on Drama Series trainer, who eventually
succumbed to respiratory and kidney failure. Around the same time,
another outbreak killed two horses in Mackay, six hundred miles
north of Brisbane, but the cause remained a mystery until

(08:44):
their owner died fourteen months later. Medical examinations showed that
the cause of his death and that of his horses
was the same viral pathogen that launched the deadly attacks
in Indra, the same virus in two deadly eyes breaks
six hundred miles apart. This gave context for scientists to

(09:07):
form it to find an ominous clue to the pathogen
source quote. We started to consider the possibility that the
virus was transmitted by a flying animal, says lynfo Wong,
infectious disease expert who was then at the Australian Animal
Health laboratory, but which animal scientists decided to focus their

(09:28):
attention on insects, birds and bats. These creatures were the
airborne members of a long list of wild animals, including rodents, snakes,
and marsupials, that field researchers had been trapping and another
team of molecular biologists had been analyzing. Their goal was
to pinpoint the source of the disease. Wong now at

(09:53):
Duke National University of Singapore Medical School, says the work
soon paid off. Blood samples from all four of the
flying fox species in Australia had antibodies to HINDRA. In
the ensuing years, the team managed to isolate the virus
from a bat and obtained the full sequence of its genome.

(10:15):
The discovery focused attention on bats as virus carriers, and
scientists have since discovered dozens of bat born pathogens. They learned,
for instance, that bats are vectors for the NEPA virus,
which killed around one hundred people and led to the
culling of a million pigs in Malaysia in nineteen ninety

(10:35):
eight ninety nine. In the aftermath of TSARS in two
thousand and five, Wong and his colleagues in China, Australia,
and the US reported that bats might be the source
of the new contagion. These discoveries posed a conundrum. Nepa,
Hindra and other viruses can make humans and other animals sick,

(10:57):
often with devastating consequences, yet bats seemed to tolerate them well.
Wong wanted to understand why. He was shocked when he
realized how little was known. It was like stepping into
a void. Wong says, our understanding of bat immunity was
almost zero. It was a void the beginning in the
early two thousands, he and other scientists started to fill.

(11:21):
In two thousand and eight, the Australian government gave Wong
a coveted Blue Sky Research Grant, one awarded to scientists
deemed on a path toward breakthrough discoveries. With around two
million dollars to spend over five years, he could do
whatever he wanted. There was only one thing on his mind. Quote.

(11:41):
I wanted to be the first person in the world
to sequence bat genomes, he said. What he didn't expect
was that the effort would lead to a fascinating link
between bat's unusual immune system and their even more unusual evolution.
Of the six four hundred or so living mammalian species,

(12:02):
bats are the only ones that can fly. More than
one in five mammalian species is a bat. It is
one of the most diverse groups in the class, second
only to rodents. Bat's life spans are extraordinary. Some bats
weigh only a few grams but can live as long
as forty years, equivalent to humans living for almost one

(12:22):
thousand years. Despite such longevity, bats rarely developed cancer. How
and when the only flying mammals evolved wings and became
airborne is still unclear. The oldest fossils of bats that
quote have all the hallmarks of a flying creature are
dated to fifty two and a half million years ago,

(12:44):
says Nancy Simmons, a mammalogist at American Museum of Natural
History in New York City. The signs of wings and
other flight features on the fossils indicate the animal's unique
path to the skies began to evolve millions of years earlier,
and the lineage probably split from other mammalian species before

(13:06):
the massive asteroid impact that wiped out dinosaurs and around
seventy percent of all species sixty six million years ago. Quote.
The advantages of flight are tremendous because you can cover
much larger areas than similarly sized animals that can't fly.
Simon says it opened up a whole new set of

(13:26):
resources that were now available to those that were not
available to those that couldn't fly. Bats became birds of
the night, occupying many of the same ecological niches as birds,
but avoiding competition with them by being nocturnal. This high
flying lifestyle requires a lot of energy in flight. Some

(13:49):
species of bats increased their metabolic rate more than fifteenfold.
Body temperatures can rise from around ninety five fahrenheit to
one hundred and four degrees fahrenheit, and their heart can
speed up from a resting pace of two hundred to
four hundred beats per minute to eleven hundred beats. From
their roost sites, they often travel dozens of miles to

(14:10):
feed in one night. Some migratory species can travel up
to twelve hundred and forty miles from their summer locations
to winter ones. The use of so much energy releases
a large amount of metabolic byproducts, such as damaged DNA
and highly reactive chemicals. These substances trigger inflammatory responses similar

(14:33):
to those caused by microbial infection quote. Bats must have
an efficient system to deal with the insults that come
with flight, says Wong. It's all about damage control quote.
With his Blue Sky grant, Wong set out to systematically
study how bats were physiologically different from other mammals. By

(14:55):
collaborating with BGI, a Chinese genomics company that it already
sequenced the genomes of organisms such as rice and the
giant panda, Wong and his colleagues got the first chance
to read the genetic book of two types of bats,
a small insect eating species from northern China and a
big fruit eating black flying fox from Australia. It was

(15:20):
like hitting the jackpot, Wong says, writing in Science in
twenty thirteen, the team reported that bats have more genes
responsible for repairing DNA damage than other mammals such as
mice and humans, possibly allowing the flying creatures to be
more adept at fixing the molecular wear and tear caused

(15:40):
by their high metabolism. It's becoming increasingly clear that disease
emergence from flying mammals is about the alignment of several elements.
The virus reservoir such as a bat colony has to
be infected and bats have to shed significant amounts of virus. Vironment,

(16:00):
including factors such as temperature and precipitation level, has to
support pathogen survival and infection Victims such as horses and
people must come in contact with bats or the virus
that they shed quote. All of these things have to
align to create the perfect storm. Plow Write says. El Nino,

(16:23):
global warming and habitat loss have conspired to catalyze this
alignment with an increasing frequency. Some researchers suspect the combination
might also have contributed to the emergence of COVID, although
investigations into the origins of that disease are ongoing. If
the link to food shortages continues to hold up, scientists

(16:44):
may be able to predict the risk of virus shedding
by simulating ecological factors, climate conditions, and bat physiology. The
environmental connection could also be tested to see how it
affects the spread of other bat born viruses, especially DEPA,
one of the World Health Organization's top ten priority diseases

(17:04):
for research, killing up to three quarters of the people
it infects. Unlike high INDRA, capable of human to human transmission.
The virus has caused frequent outbreaks in South and Southeast
Asia since it emerges in nineteen ninety eight. Now ago

(17:25):
to Popular Science and the headline reads, five hundred year
old Transylvanian diaries detail the peril of the Little Ice Age.
This is from February eleventh, with centuries old primary source documents.
A team of researchers in Romania are exploring how a
region best known for vampire legends was drastically altered by

(17:49):
the effects of the Little Ice Age. This period of
colder than usual temperatures from the early fourteenth century CE
to the mid nineteenth is known for major socialists, people
famine in play. According to these first person accounts, geographical
regions of the continent also appear to have experienced major
weather changes at different times, and humanity responded. The findings

(18:15):
are detailed in a study published February twelfth in the
journal Frontiers in Climate. The Little Ice Age was a
period of global cooling that began during an around thirteen
hundred CE, lasted until about eighteen fifty. Average temperatures in
the northern hemisphere dropped by about one degree fahrenheit. Scientists

(18:36):
are still not certain what phenomenon caused the Little Ice Age.
Reduced solar output, changes in the circulation of the atmosphere,
and increased volcanism on Earth may have played a role.
Mountain glaciers expanded in several locations across Europe, North and
South America, and Oceania. Famine was widespread as crops failed

(18:57):
due to the cold, social uprisings, even witch trials increased
in response to the weather induced devits station To piece
together Earth's history from this time, scientists can use ice cores,
sediment samples, and pollen. This natural archive can tell us
a fair amount about sea level temperature history, storms, glacier positioning,

(19:19):
and more. Society's archive, written reports and observations about local
climates or chiseled warnings like hunger stones, can help corroborate
what nature's archive says. In this new study, a team
used documents from people who lived in present day Transylvania
during the sixteenth century CE. We show that the climate

(19:45):
was marked by significant variability, including prolonged periods of drought,
heat waves, and episodes of intense rainfall and flooding, says
tutor Cutsiura Kutziura, a study co author and geographer at
the University of Oradia in Romania. Quote. The study illustrates

(20:07):
the complex interplay between heat waves, droughts, floods, and their
cascading impacts on agriculture, public health, and societal stability, emphasizing
the significant role of climate change in shaping human history.
From the documents, it appears that the first half of
the sixteenth century was particularly hot and dry. A passage

(20:30):
describing the summer of fifteen forty reeds the springs dried
up and the rivers dwindled to mere trickles. Livestock fell
in the fields, and the air was thick with despair
as the people gathered in processions praying for rain in quote.
This vivid account underscores the emotional and spiritual dimensions of

(20:51):
living through climate extremes, said Cassiora. The second half of
the sixteenth century saw heavy rainfall and flooding, picularly during
the fifteen nineties. Other parts of Europe were still cooling
significantly when the Little Ice Age's effects began to intensify
and temperatures dropped. However, hot weather was recorded much more

(21:13):
frequently than colder weather in sixteenth century Transylvania. Quote. This
makes us believe the little ice age could have manifested
itself later in this part of Europe, says Cassiora. Additionally,
some later writings describing severe winters and cold waves support
this thesis. These weather variations often resulted in major catastrophes,

(21:37):
including the Black Death, numerous famines, and locust invasions that
were directly and indirectly related to climate. The team believes
that these weather extremes and the resulting upheaval could have
driven changes in settlement patterns. Towns might have adopted flood
resistant infrastructure or migrated to more favorable areas. The challenges

(22:00):
might also have spurred technological innovations, such as improved irrigation
systems or storage facilities. While the diaries do reveal how
people understood and responded to these impact impactful events, there
are several limitations with the study. Not many people at
the time could read or write, records can be fragmented,
and reports are often subjective on a local scale, so

(22:24):
we're not getting a very holistic view of the time.
These writings still provide scientists with a glimpse of the
socioeconomic consequences of extreme weather events and how they have
constantly shaped human history quote. Studying climate records from the
society's archive is as crucial as analyzing natural proxies, said Casiora.

(22:46):
It provides a human centric perspective on past climactic events
and will turn to NPR. January wasn't expected to break
global temperature rec but it did. The planet has been
shattering heat records for the past two years that was

(23:06):
expected to ease in January, and the fact that it
didn't as climate researchers worried. January twenty twenty five was
officially the hottest January ever recorded globally, according to new
data released this week by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,
one of the federal agencies tasked with keeping track of

(23:27):
the world's weather and climate. Both twenty twenty three and
twenty four shattered previous temperature records, hovering near or above
one point five celsius above the Earth's temperature in the
late eighteen hundreds, a time before humans began burning vast
amounts of fossil fuels that have inexorably heated up the planet.

(23:52):
But the forecast was projected to ease slightly, primarily because
of strong al Nino A part of a natural climate
cycle that had contributed to the intense heat has faded
by late last year. During El Nino, the planet is
often warmer than usual, but during the other half of
the cycle, called La Nina, it usually cools down. Earth

(24:14):
flipped into La Nina phase last year, but the expected
reprieve hasn't shown up. Instead, January broke yet more records.
Noah reported the month was the hottest January in their
one hundred seventy six year long record. Copernicus, the European
meteorological service that tracks global climate change, reported that January

(24:36):
was one point seventy five celsius above historic levels. Quote.
There's a pretty dramatic jump in temperature that started in
mid twenty twenty three, and it has really persisted through
the present, says Zeke Housefather, a climate scientist with the
group Berkeley Earth. The persistence, he says, has surprised many

(24:58):
climate scientists and cause them to wonder if climate change
may have begun to push Earth's oceans and temperature atmosphere
into new, potentially unforeseen behaviors. A hot January doesn't mean
the rest of the year will necessarily keep on breaking records.
House Father says, but it does increase the odds that

(25:19):
twenty twenty five could continue the extraordinary pattern from the
past few years. The fundamental reason behind the records setting
temperatures from the past few years as well as this
January is simple, says Samantha Burgess, the director of Copernicus
Climate Change Service. We've burned a lot of fossil fuels,

(25:40):
We've deforested and urbanized a lot of areas, and this
has changed the chemicals the atmosphere on the land and
in the ocean, causing the planet as a whole to
heat up. Burgess says, but the progression isn't always perfectly smooth.
Sometimes warming sloes and other times it jumps forward. The

(26:02):
upper trend is clear, says Columbia University climate scientists Radley Horton.
Quote the last ten years have been the ten warmest
years on record, a direct outcome of ongoing fossil fuel emissions.
Horton says, now from Wired magazine, Why people act so

(26:24):
weirdly at airports? Many of us have witnessed unusual and
even anti social behavior at an airport or on a flight.
These may range from benign acts such as sleeping on
the floor doing yoga in front of the flight information
display system, to serious incidents like early morning drunken arguments
or trying to open the airplane doors mid flight. These

(26:48):
more sinister problems appear to have worsened over recent years
with increasing air rage incidents and flight diversions. But what
is it about airports that make us behave differently? Let's
take a look look at the psychology. Many vacationers feel
that the adventure begins at the airport, putting them in
a different frame of mind than normal. They're eager to

(27:08):
begin their one or two weeks of relaxed hedonism with
a flourish. Others are anxious about flying, which may make
them act out a character or take refuge in alcohol.
The noise and crowds of airports doesn't help either. As
the field of environmental psychology is demonstrated, human beings are
very sensitive to our immediate surroundings and can easily become

(27:32):
overloaded by stressors such as crowds and noise. Stress and
anxiety produce irritability, both on a temporary and ongoing basis.
In my view, we also need to look at the
airport from a psychogeographic perspective. Psychogeography studies the effect of
places on people's emotions and behavior, particularly urban environments. In

(27:56):
the modern technological world, airports can also be seen as
ten places. They are liminal zones where boundaries stayed on
a littoral level. National borders dissolve once we pass through security.
We enter a no man's land between countries. The concept
of place becomes hazy. Well that's all for today's Diary

(28:19):
of Science and Nature. Your reader is Kelly Taylor. Now
stay tuned for the Health Corner on RADIOI