4.17.25

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Radioized Diary of Science and Nature. Your reader
is Kelly Taylor. I have some articles related to the
topics of science and nature. At 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 with an article from Popular Mechanics,

(00:25):
and the headline for this article reads, Archaeologists found a
two thousand year old garden beneath a church. It may
be the site of Jesus's tomb. This is from April fifteenth.
At the place where Jesus was crucified, there was a garden,

(00:48):
and in the garden a new tomb in which no
one had ever been laid, quotes John nineteen, verse forty one.
As a literary device, ice this description of the burial
place of Jesus Christ is effected. It offers a contrast
between the site of jesus death at the crucifixion site

(01:09):
of Calvary also called Golgotha, both derived from the Latin
for place of the skull, and a fertile garden brimming
with life. It also provides a cyclical shape to the
final chapter of the Christ's narrative, which begins with his
arrest in the garden of Gethsemone. So as storytelling, this

(01:29):
single sentence from the Gospel of John, the most recently
written of the four canonical Gospels, has a substantial power
to its brevity, But as a historical record of where
exactly one of the most famous men who ever lived
was laid to rest, you'd be forgiven for finding it
sorely lacking in detail. Yet, thanks to a new discovery

(01:53):
reported in the Times of Israel, that sentence might be
key to confirming where the real man at the center
of the Christian faith was placed after his famous crucifixion.
As the Times notes, the site that now hosts the
Church of the Holy Sepulcher is held in the Christian

(02:13):
tradition to encompass both the crucifixion site and the tomb
in which Christ was buried. As such, it is beset
upon at all times by christ following pilgrims from across
the planet determined to worship at the site where they
believe the Messiah lay dead for three days before his
resurrection on Easter Sunday. But this popularity is only part

(02:38):
of the problem for archaeologists hoping to examine the purportedly
holy site. There was, also, as The Times describes, quote,
decades of infighting between the three religious communities charged with
managing the church, the Orthodox Patriarchate the Custody of the

(02:59):
Holy Land, and the Armenian Patriarchic. When these groups finally
came to a consensus in twenty nineteen that the Church
of the Holy Sepulcher required renovations to replace the site's
nineteenth century floor, a team of Italian architects with La
Sapienza University saw their opportunity quote. With the renovation works,

(03:24):
the religious communities decided to allow archaeological excavations under the floor,
says Francesco Romana Stasola from the Sapiensa University of Rome.
The excavations have been under Stasola's direction since they commenced
in twenty twenty two. Quote. We take turns, but our

(03:46):
team in Jerusalem always includes ten or twelve people, says Stassola,
while noting that the bulk of their team remains in
Rome receiving their data for the post production process. But
this core team would occasionally be joined by specialists, including
quote geologists archaeobotanists or archaeo zoologists. Their contributions would prove important,

(04:10):
as beneath the nineteenth century floor there lies a quarry
which dates back to the Iron Age from twelve hundred
to five eighty six PC. During the time of Jesus,
this quarry was a burial site, with several tombs hewn
in the rock. It wasn't the only such site in Jerusalem,
but when Constantine, the first emperor of Rome to convert

(04:31):
to Christianity, was in power, this quarry was the one
exalted by early Christians as the site of the burial,
so the emperor ordered the construction of the first iteration
of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher there. The church
would suffer numerous attacks over the centuries before its current
form was constructed by crusaders in the twelfth century. Whatst

(04:54):
a Solist team found was that in the time between
when the quarry was originally mined during the h Iron
Age and the construction of the church atop it, the
area to which the burial site is attributed had at
one time been used for agriculture. Based on the discovery
of two thousand year old olive trees and grape vines. Quote,

(05:15):
low stone walls were erected and the space between them
was filled with dirt, noted Stussola, who added, the archaeological
findings have been especially interesting for us in light of
what is mentioned in the Gospel of John, whose information
is considered written or collected by someone familiar with Jerusalem
at the time. The gospel mentions a green area between

(05:39):
the cavalry and the tomb, and we identified these cultivated fields.
Stassola acknowledged that a full analysis of all the artifacts
uncovered during the excavation, which also included coins and pottery
dating roughly to the fourth century, would take years to complete.

(06:00):
As for whether this discovery definitively proved the burial site
of Christ, Stassola chose to look at it from a
different angle. Quote. The real treasure we are revealing is
the history of the people who made this sight what
it is by expressing their faith here she told the times.
Whether someone believes or not in the historicity of the

(06:22):
Holy Sepulcher, the fact that generations the people did is objective.
The history of this place is the history of Jerusalem,
and at least from a certain moment, it is the
history of the worship of Jesus Christ. Next story is
from Popular Science. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch isn't just

(06:46):
a floating trash pile. This is from April thirteenth azure
waves lapping against huge piles of built up junk garbage,
mountains rising above the sea, a thick crust of filth
coating the ocean's surface. It's easy to find striking images

(07:07):
of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The problem is that
these pictures of the GPGP are misleading and obscure the
truth about the content of the GPGP, its origins, and
the threat it poses to our ocean life. Visiting the
Great Pacific Garbage Patch is not easy. For Bruno Saint Rose,

(07:28):
a lead computational monitor at the Ocean clean Up, an
organization dedicated to tackling marine waste. A trip begins by
boarding a ship at Victoria Harbor in British Columbia, sailing southwest.
The first thousand miles of ocean is relatively clear. Quote.
Then all of a sudden, after three and a half

(07:50):
days of sailing, you see an increase of debris sightings,
says Saint Rose. This junk isn't piled up on the
sea's surface. Instead, the ocean within the GPGP becomes like
a soup of microplastics, says Saint Rose. Larger objects dot
this broth, including tangles of ghost nets thick masses of

(08:13):
abandoned fishing gear. The Ocean Clean Up estimates that as
much as eighty six percent of the plastics in the
GPGP come from fishing activity. The nonprofit organization reckons that
the GPGP has grown to cover an area of ocean
twice the size of Texas. How did this happen? As

(08:36):
far back as nineteen seventy three, seafarers traveling through the
North Pacific Ocean noticed an unusually high number of man
made objects. While it's no surprise to find pieces of
plastic in our seas, a twenty twenty three study estimated
there are one hundred seventy one trillion of them, it
was surprising to find them so far from any land mass. Quote.

(09:00):
The International Space Station is actually closer to the GPGP
most of the time than it is to the rest
of human beings. Saint Rose points out the remote area
of Cee, where the GPGP is located, is surrounded by
the North Pacific geyer that spelled g y r e
a network of rotating ocean currents. These ensnare plastic and

(09:26):
other debris that enters their flow, gradually moving them across
the ocean, eventually slowly turning borded vortices within the gyre
draw in the debris. The GPGP is split into two
main areas, the Western garbage Patch near Japan and the
Eastern Garbage Patch between California and Hawaii. While the plastic

(09:49):
may subsequently move between these two areas, which change in
size and location as time passes, they are unlikely to
escape these swirling currents. The Ocean clean Up is fighting
against this accumulation. In twenty twenty four, the Foundation removed
eleven and a half million kilos of garbage from the
world's oceans and rivers. They even put a price tag

(10:12):
on cleaning up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch for seven
and a half billion dollars. Saint Rose's team estimates that
the GPGP could be cleared within a decade. Not everyone
agrees that cleaning up the GPGP would be the best
way to address our ocean's plastic problem. The Ocean clean
Up uses large, net based systems to dredge junk from

(10:36):
the oceans. These nets effectively remove larger plastic items, but
over ninety percent of the plastic items in the GPGP
are microplastics less than five millimeters in size. The net
system has been designed to be easy for animals to
swim out of, but as they suck up larger pieces
of plastic from the sea, the clean up team also

(10:58):
removes animals and microbes that cling onto these items. Quote
you do see a very broad diversity of microorganisms attaching
to the plastic, says Sonya ober Beckmann, a marine microbiologist
at the Federal Institute for Material Research and Testing in Germany.

(11:18):
Ober Beckmann says many of these microbes also live on
natural materials, but some are quote thriving on plastic particles.
Saint Rose points to evidence that some of these plastic
riders are invasive species that shouldn't be present in the
ocean in the first place. Additionally, targeting the GPGP is

(11:38):
just one with the ocean cleanups approaches to their goal
of plastic free waters. Dredge systems installed in polluted rivers
halt debris from entering the ocean in the first place.
These coastal cleanups are easier, less expensive proposals from local governments,
which are more willing to fund a river based project

(11:59):
that earns them a highly visible environmental wind. Securing funding
to clean the far from home and hard to visualize
great Pacific garbage patch is a harder sell. It's everyone's
and no one's problem, right, concludes Saint Rose. Next will

(12:21):
turn to Smithstonian and the headline says you might think
of shrimp as bugs of the sea, but a remarkable
discovery shows the opposite bugs are actually shrimp of the land.
This is from April ninth. Shrimp look an awful lot
like bugs. The exoskeletons, jointed legs, and compound eyes of

(12:44):
both groups of living things give them more than a
passing resemblance to each other, so no wonder some people
call shrimp like crawfish mud bugs, and a tattoo reading
shrimp is bugs became a viral meme for underscoring the resemblance,
but the tattoo got the reality backwards. Shrimp or not bugs.
Bugs or more properly, insects, are technically a form of crustacean.

(13:09):
Biologists of many different subdisciplines categorize life in a field
called systematics. Living things of all sorts, both extant and extinct,
are constantly being compared and evaluated to build what we
so commonly think of as the tree of life. The
addition of new species and novel analyzes are constantly reshaping

(13:32):
that evolutionary tree, and sometimes the category changes shift more
than just a few twigs, but entire evolutionary branches. Birds
are now known to be dinosaurs. For example, whales are
technically hoofed mammals called artiodactyls, and thanks to a twenty
twenty three study in Molecular Biology and evolution, insects have

(13:54):
been shifted into the same group as shrimp and crabs,
called pan crustacea. The realization that bugs were close relatives
of crustaceans took almost a century of curiosity to uncover.
Paleontologist Joanna Wolf of Harvard University, one of the authors
of the twenty twenty three study, notes that researchers noticed

(14:18):
some insects and crustaceans had the same structures in their
eyes and nervous systems. The resemblance could have been the
result of convergent evolution when two groups independently evolved in
the same way, so the idea that insects are modified
crustaceans didn't catch but the hypothesis didn't fully go away either.

(14:41):
In twenty thirteen, Wolf and colleagues found that insects were
the sister group or next closest evolutionary relatives too, crustaceans
called remipedes, which live in undersea caves and are the
only venomous crustaceans. Remipedes were supposed to be the odd
balls that were shaped in strange ways due to their

(15:03):
lives in caves. Now they were coming out as the
closest relatives to the flies, mantises, bees, and other insects
we see around us on land. Quote. At that time,
I was shocked and thought there was something wrong with
our results. Wolf recalls only to have additional evidence make
the connection between insects and crustacean stronger. The twenty twenty

(15:28):
three analysis, based on genetic data, found insects next to
remipedes in the middle of the various crustacean subgroups. Specifically,
insects fit within a wide group of crustaceans called Alotriocardia
that not only includes remipedes but also other unusual groups

(15:49):
such as shrimp like brachiopods and wormlike cephalopods sometimes called
horseshoe shrimp. To put in another way, insects are two
cris stations, as bats are to mammals, a subset that
belongs to a broader group despite seeming so different from
their closest relatives. Systematic shifts do far more than simply

(16:15):
rearrange who's related to whom. Quote. Systematics allow us to
make sense of the complexity of life, says Smithsonian National
Museum of Natural History paleontologists ADVT. Jukar. Quote. When we
recategorize species into new groups, we can look at patterns

(16:36):
of how that group might be diversifying and the various
environmental and ecological factors end quote. When birds work recognized
as dinosaurs, the change did more than reshuffle their place
on the evolutionary tree. Quote. The change showed us how
characteristics that we typically associate with birds today, such as feathers,

(17:00):
hollow bones, and air sacks, were widely found within dinosauria.
Jukar says. Paleontologists began finding more feathered dinosaurs and dinosaurs
with traits previously associated with birds, such as complex systems
of air sacks as part of their respiratory systems. Once
the connection was made, the newly understood relationship between birds

(17:23):
and other dinosaurs has allowed experts to better understand why
only birds survived the mass extinction of sixty six million
years ago. Comparisons between birds and bird like dinosaurs revealed
that adaptations for eating seeds and nuts that some birds
developed during the Cretaceous allowed them to survive, while birdlike

(17:45):
raptors perished. The recognition that whales or hoofed mammals occurred
around the same time as birds were found to be dinosaurs.
The shift had a deep effect on how paleontologists carried
out their research, as well as the identity of the
blubbery mammals. Prior to the nineteen nineties, the earliest whales

(18:06):
were thought to have evolved from carnivorous mammals called mason
meson I'm sorry, Masonic kids, mesnychi ds Masonic kids. The
beasts sometimes called wolves with hoofs because they looked like

(18:27):
canids with hoof like toes, or some of Earth's most
prominent carnivores. Around fifty five million years ago, the time
when amphibious whales such as Pakistus began swimming in the shallows,
but genetic evidence kept grouping whales close to hippos and
other mammals with hoofed toes called ardiodactyls. Experts debated the connection,

(18:51):
but about two thousand and one, paleontologists uncovered early whale
ankle bones that possessed traits only seen among ardiodactyls. The
recognition shifted where whales fit in the mammalian evolutionary tree
and recalibrated what sort of ancestral creatures paleontologists should be

(19:11):
looking for, yielding the two thousand and seven discovery that
whales most likely evolved from small deer like creatures in
ancient India. Without the recognition that whales are ardiodactyls, the
relevance of those ancient hoofed creatures to the origin of
whales would have been entirely missed, and paleontologists would still

(19:32):
be wondering where orcas and mink whales come from. In
the case of the aboves wolf notes, the recognition that
insects shared a close common ancestor with remipedes helps narrow
down where and how insects originated. Quote for me, The
exciting part for insects is the recognition that they do

(19:53):
not come from a terrestrial ancestor, Wolf says. Until recently,
the ancestors of insects are thought to be more millipede
like and evolved once invertebrates began to live on land. Now,
Wolf notes the closest relatives of insects are wiggly crustaceans
that live in marine caves. The connection doesn't mean that

(20:13):
remipedes embody the exact ancestral form of the first insects,
but rather that their close relationship will cause experts to
rethink where insects came from and how they evolved. The
effort will require tracing the ancestry of remipedes and other crustaceans,
as well as searching for insects in the fossil record,

(20:35):
both from new fossil sites and perhaps misca characterized fossils
already in collections. Quote. There's a complicated history and still
missing pieces, she notes, but now biologists have a better
sense of what to search for. Bugs are crustaceans, and
now experts can begin to wonder how that came to be.

(20:59):
Now to the Guardian and the headline for this article
is gene edited non browning banana could cut food waste.
Scientists say. This is from March seventh. Many of us
have been guilty of binning or throwing away a mushy,
overripe banana, but now scientists say they have a solution

(21:23):
with the launch of a genetically engineered non browning banana.
The product is the latest in a series of gene
edited fruits and vegetables designed to have a longer shelf life.
Scientists say the technology is emerging as a powerful new
weapon against food waste, which occurs globally on an epic scale.
The banana, developed by Tropic, a biotech company based in

(21:46):
Norwich in England, is said to remain fresh and yellow
for twelve hours after being peeled, and is less susceptible
to turning brown when bunked during harvesting and transportation. Quote.
Food waste is a big contributor to greenhouse gas emissions.
It's a very bad clearly, said Gelad gershaan, chief executive

(22:09):
at Tropic. Bananas are the fourth biggest crop globally, but
also one where the perishability is very high. Some estimates
say that fifty percent of the banana's grown are never eaten.
The company has also developed a slow ripening banana that
has been approved in several countries, which it plans to
launch later in the year. Other research teams are working

(22:30):
on lettuce that wilts more slowly, brews resistant apples and potatoes,
and potatoes and apples, and identifying the genes that determine
how quickly grapes and blueberries shrivel. An estimated thirty three
percent of the produce that is harvested worldwide is never
consumed due to the short half life of many fruit

(22:53):
and vegetable products. Bananas are among the most thrown away foods,
and a government survey suggests that Britons routinely throw away
one point four million edible bananas every day. Since commercially
grown bananas lack seeds, they cannot be hybridized in the
way most fruits can. Bananas are asexual, says Gershan, there's

(23:17):
no real breeding in bananas. We're eating today the same
bananas as our grandparents were eating in the nineteen fifties.
The only real opportunity we have to adjust the banana
to eat. The challenges the industry is facing is through
gene editing. The company worked out how to disable a
gene responsible for the production of an enzyme called polyphenol oxidase,

(23:39):
which causes browning. The same gene is silenced in Arctic apples,
a genetically modified variety which has been sold in the
US since twenty seventeen, and blocking the production of polyphenol
oxidase has been shown to work in tomatoes, melon, kiwifruits
and mushrooms. In the bananas, Tropic made precise changes to

(24:02):
existing genes without introducing foreign genetic material. The company already
has the go ahead to sell the non browning bananas,
which are yet to be given a name, in the Philippines, Columbia, Honduras,
the US and Canada. Gershan says the product is expected
to comply with the requirements of the UK's Genetic Technology

(24:24):
Precision Breeding Act, which could pave the way for the
fruit to be sold in England. Doctor Martin Cottacotacle of
the Khalifa Center for Genetic Engineering and Technology in Abu
Dhabi says gene editing can be used to target several
aspects of the ripening process. His team is investigating non

(24:48):
browning and stay green genes and another pathway involved in
the production of ethylene, a gas released by fruits that
triggers the ripening process. We're working on tomato, lettuce, eggplant,
he said, they're all in the pipeline in quote. Other
teams are investigating genes that influence the waxy protective layer

(25:10):
known as the cuticle that covers the surface of a fruit.
A thicker cuticle can protect against fungal infections in apples
and tiny cracks in soft fruits such as grapes and blueberries,
which cause them to shrivel. Professor Kathy Martin of the
John Innes Center in Norwich said there was increasing interest

(25:32):
in developing products with a longer shelf life. Quote. The
reason russet has been a favorite potato with McDonald's that
is because it doesn't go brown. Non browning is definitely
a desirable trait in quote. Now a story from the
Los Angeles Times. Gray whales are dying off the Pacific

(25:54):
coast again, and scientists aren't sure why this is. From
April to eighth, grey whales are dying in large numbers again.
At least seventy whales have perished since the start of
the year in the shallow protected lagoons of Mexico's Baja
California Peninsula. Where the animals have congregated for eons to calf,

(26:16):
nurse and breed, said Stephen Schwartz, a marine scientists who
have studied grey whales since nineteen seventy seven, and only
five mother calf pears were identified in Laguna San Ignacio,
where most of the wintering whales tend to congregate, at
the lowest number of mother calf paars ever observed in
the lagoon, according to annual reports from Grey Whale Research

(26:39):
in Mexico, an international team of researchers co founded by
Schwartz that has been observing grey whales since the late
nineteen seventies, the whales are now headed north. In just
the last two weeks, three grey whales have died in
San Francisco Bay, one of which was described by veterinarians

(27:00):
and pathologists at the Marine Mammal Center as skinny and malnutritioned.
Evaluations on the other two deaths are still being conducted.
Elisa Schulman Jenniger, who has led the Los Angeles chapter
of American Cetacean Society's Gray Whales Census, said that the

(27:20):
number of whales she and her volunteers have observed migrating
north this spring and swimming south. This past winter is
the lowest on record. Quote, we didn't see a single
southbound calf, which has never happened in forty years, she said. Shulman,
Jenniger and other researchers aren't sure why the whales are dying,

(27:40):
although she and others believe it could be from lack
of food based on the depleted conditions in which some
of the whales have been found. Eastern North Pacific gray
whales cruised the Pacific coastline every year as they migrate
six thousand miles north from the Baja Peninsula to their
summer feeding grounds in the Arctic and sub Arctic regions. There,

(28:05):
the leviathans gorge themselves on small crustaceans and amphipods that
live in the muddy sediment of the Bearing, Chuchki and
Beaufort seas before they head back south to Cavort and
mingle in balmy Mexican waters. Well that's all for today's
Diary of Science and Nature. Your reader was Kelly Taylor.

(28:25):
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