Science Friday - 13,000-Year-Old Footprints, Climate Court, Native Bees, Cell Phones And Cancer. March 30, 2018, Part 1

Episode Date: March 30, 2018

Planting tomatoes in the garden this year? Better hope you have bumblebees too, because tomato flowers need a good shaking to get the pollen out. “What the bumblebee does is grab a tomato flower, curve its abdomen around the bottom of the tomato flower, and then shiver its wing muscles at a specific frequency, shaking pollen out of the holes like a salt shaker,” says Paige Embry, author of Our Native Bees: North America’s Endangered Pollinators and the Fight to Save Them. This week, a panel of peer reviewers met for three days to discuss a draft report on two long-running studies on the potential health effects of cell phone radiation. In their conclusions, and voted to increase the level of confidence in the findings, saying that there was a clear link between the radiofrequency radiation exposure and the male rat heart tissue tumors. The National Toxicology Program now has to decide whether to accept the panel’s recommendation before the final report is released.    In this week's State of Science, a judge requested a climate science tutorial in a federal lawsuit where two California cities are suing the oil company Chevron. In an unprecedented courtroom tutorial on climate science, Chevron went on record agreeing with the scientific consensus that people are causing global warming. But the company also deflected any responsibility for it under federal law and played up uncertainties in projections for both the volume and future consequences of greenhouse gas emissions. The tack signals a potential legal defense against financial liability for climate change impacts such as rising sea levels.       Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Our current era of climate change is unprecedented in human history, but it's not the first time the Earth has been through such a change. 56 million years ago, shortly after the extinction of the dinosaurs, the planet warmed faster than it has at any other point in time except for today. Can something be learned from history repeating itself? Here to discuss that question and other short subjects in science, is Sarah Kaplan, science reporter for the Washington Post.

Welcome back. Thanks. Good to see you in person. Yeah, good to see you too. All right, let's talk about this. So what happened 56 million years ago? Why was it getting warmer? Yeah, so it's this period called the Paleocene-Aocene Thermal Maximum.

Holy? If you don't run out of oxygen, just getting the name out. It's actually a really critical period in Earth's history. Over the course of about 5,000 years, huge amounts of carbon were released into the atmosphere, something between 4 and 7 trillion tons. And 5,000 years doesn't sound like a lot. I mean, it doesn't sound very short, but it's really fast, geologically speaking.

And we know what happens when carbon goes into the atmosphere, the Earth heats up. So we think that the Earth heated about 5 to 8 degrees Celsius. And if you think about in that today's terms, we're talking about trying to limit Earth's the rise in temperature to 2 degrees. So that was quite a lot at the time. So you had ocean warming and acidification and weird weather and all the stuff that went along.

Yeah. So, I mean, some of the things, we're seeing now, those same things happened during the PETM. There were mass extinctions. Mammals actually got smaller. That's something we haven't seen yet. Yeah. The ancestors of modern day horses, which at the time had been roughly the size of dogs,

they shrunk down to the size of house cats, about 30%. And then also, like, things started showing up in places where they shouldn't be. So the main place to look at the PETM is in the Big Horn Basin in Wyoming. It's kind of like a badlands area. But right before the PETM, it was kind of like Florida. It was sort of a swampy, warm place and very wet. And then during the PETM, it got super dry and the kinds of plants that you see their change. And also they have a lot more insect bites in them, which is weird.

Is this what we have to look forward to? Well, you know, kind of the hope is that we'll learn from the past, right? We know what the consequences are. And climatologists who are trying to predict, you know, what will happen as we continue to add carbon to the atmosphere today. maybe knowing what some of the consequences are, including the fact that it's going to take 150,000 years to get back to normal. That's how long the PETM took to recover. So maybe we can learn from Earth's past.

Oh, we hope so. Yeah, yeah. All right, let's move on to something different. Scientists have uncovered the fossilized footprints of ancient Americans doing something. What was, what were they doing? What was happening there? Yeah, so on this island off the coast of British Columbia, they've actually uncovered. I've evered 29 prints from people living 13,000 years ago,

and it kind of looks like they were climbing out of a boat. There's three different sets of prints representing three different sizes. So they look kind of like two adults and a child, and they're all kind of trampling over each other, and so it kind of looks like they were getting out of a boat and coming onto land. Wow, it's amazing they could be preserved. Yeah. Especially in that kind of watery situation where you might have, you know,

if we were walking on the sand, it would be gone. Yeah, so you have to get very lucky. I mean, there's not that many fossil footprints in the world and sort of just the right circumstances have to collide. But these prints are really important because, you know, scientists have been questioning for a while. How did people get down into the Americas once they cross the Bering Land Bridge at the end of the Ice Age?

And they couldn't cross through the middle of Canada because it's covered in a gigantic ice sheet. So one thought is that they took boats down what's called the Kelp Highway. And this is sort of suggesting. of that. But it's also really important to the native community that lives there, the Hiltzuk First Nation. They have an oral history that says that their people arrived in this area at a time when the continent was covered in ice. And I spoke with a representative from the community who said, now we can see this is a place where our ancestors walked, and here we still are today.

Wow, what a great story. We also received news this week that the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope is going to be pushed back yet again. This time to 2020, right? Poor James Webb just can't get off the ground. This telescope is conceived as kind of the bigger and even more impressive successor to Hubble. It's supposed to be able to look back to cosmic dawn when the first stars emerged. And it was originally conceived in 1996 and was supposed to launch sort of in the mid-2000s, if you can believe it. It is now 2018, and it's still in what's known as the integration and testing phase. It's been delayed so many times and now more problems have popped up. So this week, NASA said they're going to push back the launch of the launch of the first. at least a year from supposed to launch next spring, and now it'll be May 2020 at the earliest. So they've spent $8 billion on it so far, and they're going to go over budget even more than that? Yeah, so Congress will give them more money to do it? Well, we hope so. Or I guess astronomers hope so.

Congress had passed a $8 billion funding cap on the telescope, and they're probably going to exceed that. So now NASA's going to have to go and ask for reauthorization. Now, the thing is, I remember when the Hubble Space Telescope went up, I remember I knew that we interviewed. the crew that went up and fixed it. There's the kind of stuff like that. They could actually go up and replace parts. They can't do that, send it up a little bit broken and fix it? James Webb is going to go out four times farther than the moon, about a million miles from Earth,

which is further than any human has ever been and way too far to be fixed in orbit. So NASA kind of, I mean, that's what the folks at NASA say is that they need to make sure that the telescope is perfect when it launches, because if it goes into orbit, that's it. That's what we've got. That's it. You're stuck with. You have to go into orbit with the satellite you have, not the one. All right, well, something that is in space, but it won't be there for much longer.

Is this Chinese space station that is tumbling out of orbit? It's going to come crashing down? Yeah, it's Yangang one. It was launched in 2011, and China lost contact weather in 2016. So we've sort of known for a while. It was going to, its orbit would decay and eventually would crash down. down to Earth. And now it's finally going to happen this weekend, probably sometime between midday,

Saturday, and midday Sunday. And the chance of anyone getting bonked is pretty unlikely. I think it's been estimated to less than one in one trillion. But if you find a piece, don't touch it because there's hazardous hydrozine fuel probably on the pieces. And also, they're technically still the property of the Chinese government and they might want it back. You may have to pay tariffs on it also in this new environment.

Thank you very much, Sarah. Yeah, thanks. Sarah Kaplan's science reporter for the Washington Post. And now it's time to check in on the state of science. This is KERNO. St. Louis Public Radio News. Iowa Public Radio News. Local science stories of national importance.

And as the Trump administration seeks to play down climate change, some states are pushing back. Now, two California cities have brought a lawsuit against the Chevron Corporation and other big oil companies looking to find them responsible for their role in climate change. And because the federal judge in the case felt he wasn't quite up on his climate science, he asked each side to teach him how they viewed the state of the research. Molly Peterson was in that courtroom and is here to fill us in on that story. She's a reporter for a K-QED science out there in San Francisco. Thanks for joining us this hour. Yeah, my pleasure.

So each side had a different tactic for presenting the climate data. Tell us, the Chevron was the only company, though, representing all the old companies? Yeah, that day he was. So for both sides, the judge wanted both the current state of the science and a kind of history of what they knew, what scientists knew when they knew it. Each side had two hours to present. The city's let, turned it over to scientists. The city attorney was there to introduce scientists to give this story. And Chevron used a lawyer to convey its information. So what, so what was his argument?

Well, I mean, he went on the record saying it is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the 20th century. So Chevron says it has been its position for 10 years that it accepts the findings of the IPCC report. But at the same time, Chevron was also pointing out and casting doubt wherever it could on how certain scientists were about the influence of humans on climate change over this time. And now San Francisco and Oakland are the two cities involved in this case, and so they presented their side. And their side focuses a lot on sea level rise, because obviously that's a major concern in California. And I should say that this is part of this growing body of cases, not just San Francisco and Oakland, but the city of Richmond, San Mateo County, Imperial Beach, and Southern California. yet these other cities are also suing using different legal strategies that one historian of science kind of told me reminded him of the tobacco lawsuits.

Yeah. And so they're upset, of course, that if the oceans are rising, they're going to be underwater. And they can show then that there is actual money damages that are going to occur to their cities. That's right. I mean, in San Francisco in particular, they're talking about billions of dollars, including, I think, a $350 million bond that might be on the ballot there later this year. The city's got engineers and consultants out there trying to figure out what would happen to the Embarcodero along San Francisco. So, yeah, they are connecting it to that. And so the presence of IPCC science

and scientists was interesting and important because the most recent IPCC was 2013, 2014. The end of the data for that report was 2012, and a lot has happened in sea level rise science since then. Now, I understand this isn't the first time that this judge has done research for a court case. No, it's not. And he doesn't do it exclusively in science, but he did it for LIDAR in a case involving self-driving cars. He did it for DACA recently. He's famous for having taught himself how to program in Basic and for learning a few lines of Java for a case involving Oracle.

Wow. So where does this head? This is not the actual court case itself, right? It's not. In fact, Chevron was kind of subtly trying to make this argument that it is also filed with the court a motion to dismiss. Chevron says this is a global problem. It needs a global solution. So even though they're saying that human activity contributed to this, they say that they're beyond the reach of this court. So the judge still has to rule on that. So do all of the oil companies agree with what Chevron is saying? Well, at the end of the hearing, the judge looked at the other oil companies and said, do you agree with everything this guy said?

and they all kind of sat there. And he said, well, you can have two weeks, which is up just about now for them to weigh in on every single word that was said. So he said to them, his message was clear, you can't get away sitting here in silence. So there's going to be a lot more we're going to hear about this as it moves forward. Yeah. I mean, it is interesting that the judge is trying to figure out how to use this science as evidence if the case goes forward. And then to turn it into damages if you're going to penalize somebody. What's your role or your part in it?

Yeah, I mean, like with the tobacco cases, I think we're talking about $250 billion so far that tobacco companies have paid as settlements. Well, we'll see. Thank you, Molly, for taking time to be with us today. We'll check in on later as it's necessary. Molly Peterson, reporter at KQED Science in Los Angeles. We're going to take a break when we come back. We're going to talk about why bumblebees and not honeybees may be the key to a bumper crop of tomatoes. I'm waiting to plant my tomatoes.

I didn't know that the honeybees can't pollinate. them. Did you know that? No. No, well, we're going to tell you why. It's really interesting. We'll talk about all these other types of bees after the break. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm I reflato. Every year when I plant my garden, and that's about now, I think about my tomato patch. What kind of tomatoes? How to stake them just right, the soil. You know these kinds of things. But after all of these years of careful planting, I never once thought about the bees that would come and pollinate those little yellow flowers. I just took them for granted.

But I was amazed to learn reading my next-guess book that tomato flowers need to be vibrated to let loose their pollen. They call it buzz pollination. And more amazingly, I learned that honeybees just aren't good at that job. Bumble bees are truly where the buzz is at. Add to that, the weirdos, I say that lovingly, of the bee world discussed in the book, bees that secrete silk or build towers, thieving bees that masquerade in other bees perfume.

You might find yourself planning a wild bee steak out around flowers this weekend to catch a glimpse of one of these native bees in action or mounting a bee house to your fence like I'm going to be doing to give these hiveless bees a home. Let me introduce my guest. Page Embry is the author of our native bees, North America's endangered pollinators, and the fight to save them. She joins us from K-U-O-W.

Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having me. What an eye-opening book this was. It's just amazing. One bee fact after another, the fact about tomatoes and bubble bees just totally shocked me. Well, it shocked me when I learned it a few years ago as well. So how did you discover? What got you interested in studying these bees?

So I have been a gardener for a long time, decades. And about five years ago, I learned that honeybees, can't pollinate tomatoes, and I was flabbergasted that I hadn't learned it. I felt sort of dim, in fact. But then I went and started asking other people, and none of them knew that honeybees couldn't pollinate tomatoes, but that there were some native bees that could, because honeybees aren't native to North America that came over from Europe with the early colonist, honey and beeswax serfs, I guess.

And that's what got me going on learning more of. about the bees that could buzz pollinate tomatoes. And there were so many of them, and they were nothing like honeybees. Wow. I think of honeybees as the workhorses of farms, but one thing you've been covering for Scientific America and the Food and Environment Reporting Network is the Blue Orchard Bee, how do they call them Bob, developing them as a replacement for honeybees. Are they better pollinators?

How difficult has it been? Will they get the job done? Well, whether they'll get the job done, that's a good question. They are certainly better pollinators. You can, so if you think a hive box of honey bees has maybe 10,000 worker bees who go out and do the pollinating. And on an acre of almonds, for example, you would put two of those hive boxes. But you can replace one of them with just 400 female blue orchard bees. So they are much more efficient pollinators.

The problem is how do you raise? enough blue orchard bees to make them useful in some of those big orchards. And we have an excerpt of the book up at Science Friday.com slash bees. And if you have any questions about bees, you're looking to attract bees to your garden. Give us a call. 844-724-8255-8-4-Sy-Talk. Or you can buzz us at SciFRI. I mean, tweet us at SciFRI.

S-Z-I-F-R-I. Sorry about that. So how hard will it be to get these? bees, the bob's out there, and how will we know if they can do the job? Well, so again, people have been working for decades to figure out how to manage Blue Orchard Bees, because learning how to manage a new bee isn't as straightforward as you might think. You've got to figure out how to manage enough of them and get them to the field at exactly the right moment when the plants are flowering. And so there's out of 20,000 species

of bees worldwide, there's only maybe a dozen or so that are managed. And so with the Blue Orchard Bees, again, the hard part is how do you raise enough of them? And so people have been working on that. I understand from the book that the wonderful company, the big almond grower, was looking into the Blue Orchard Bees, and they discontinued that project because of what you're saying. Yeah, what they did was it was really cool. they, on 20 acres of land, they put up these giant net houses, like giant warehouses, and they filled them with flowers that had good pollen and nectar resources that the blue orchard bees loved.

And then they would put the blue orchard bees in there and say, you know, go forth and multiply. And their hope was to get a million female blue orchard bees off that 20 acres of land. And they thought they were going to get there in 2017, but they didn't get their plants in in time, and so there wasn't enough food. And again, the guy who runs the project had hoped that they would get there this year in 2018, but Wonderful, decided to close down the research project right before it was time to put the blue orchard bees out in the cages. Now, I understand that alfalfa fields are pollinated with another unusual bee, the alkali bee. Why is that? Well, they're actually pollinated with two bees. One is the alkali bee, which

is a native ground nesting bee, and another is called the alfalfa leaf cutting bee. But the reason why they need those bees is that honeybees don't like pollinating alfalfa because what happens when you land on an alfalfa flower, if you're a bee, you trip the stigma and anthers so that they sort of pop up out of the flower and whack the bee upside the head. And honeybees just don't like that very much. Do you think honeybees get too much press? I mean, you know, we don't talk about these other bees that live solitary lives that are not, you know, living in big hives, making giant globs of honey that we're eating?

I absolutely think that the other bees deserve more press. A lot of them do a lot of pollination services for crops that they probably aren't getting recognized for. And then there's all of the other plants out there that they're busy pollinating. and nobody even notices them. And you write about a lot of weird bee behaviors in your book. Some secret silk, others shave fuzzy plants to make plush pillows for their eggs, some nest in snail shells, really, an amazing cast of characters there. Again, that was one of the things I found when I started looking into these other bees.

We all sort of tend to think of a bee as either a honeybee or just something with a stripy bottom that stings. But there's all these bees, some of them smaller than a grain of rice. Some are beautiful, beautifully colored with iridescent exoskeletons, and then they have all these behaviors. So they're a really diverse group of animals, and we've sort of shoehorned them into this word that we call a bee. Speaking of behaviors, you're right, there are parasitic bees that lay their eggs in other bees nests. How do they get away with that? Ah, yeah, well, I asked the guy who is sort of the expert on those bees. They're called kleptoparasites.

And they, what happens is rather than gathering pollen and nectar for their babes themselves, the mother bees slide into the holes of another bee's nest and lay their eggs in there. So I asked the guy who's been studying these bees, I'm like, well, how come the mother bee who was making the nest doesn't know and do something about it? And he said, well, it's dark in there, and they don't have a flashlight. That's a great answer. Well, that's a great cue. Let's get some more questions. Our number 844-7-8255.

Scott and Reno. Hi, welcome to Science Friday. Thank you so much for taking my call. I love the show. Thank you. Go ahead. All right. So we have a garden now, and we live in Reno, so it's really, really dry here.

And I was wondering what kind of flowers we could plant that would actually grow, and what kind of bees are around here that those flowers would attract. Okay, so some of the best bee diversity certainly is in the dry parts of the southwestern United States. I can't speak specifically to Reno, but again, there tend to be a lot of bees. So what I would do would be to look to my answer always when people ask me what to plant, and it's someplace I don't know well, is go out for a walk and look around. on a day when it's maybe above 55 degrees. There's not much wind.

The sun is out and see which plants the bees are visiting. And if you don't know that plant, then you can take a picture of it and hopefully find it on the web or take it to a local nursery. If you were willing to do some irrigation, clearly you would have more. But if you want to stick with native drought-tolerant plants, then that take-a-walk idea is the best one I've got.

All right. Thanks for calling. And you do point out in your book, as you have said in passing, that bees do like to live in these dry, arid places in the ground, if not in flowers? Well, bees, where are bees? So we think, again, of honeybees nesting in a hive, maybe in a tree somewhere or in a hive box, but most bees nest in holes in the ground. And so you need to have places for those bees to nest in holes in the ground. And others nest in like old beetle burrows or, you know, inside pithy stems like blackberry.

or elderberry. So there's all sorts of places. Or as you pointed out, there's the ones that nest in the snail shells or dung patties or all sorts of surprising places. Here's a tweet coming in. It says, I've seen bee houses made of small reeds. You set them on the ground for native bees in use. Do they really work? Wouldn't other insects take them over? They certainly work. I don't know about setting them on the ground. Usually they're sort of put up on the side of a house or sort of up in the air a little bit. And there are some other insects that will also nest in there, but they're usually desirable insects. So you may, if you have different-sized reeds, you can get a variety of bees and some of the little wasps that are desirable

as opposed to yellow jackets or hornets or something along those lines. Lynn Brunnell, who's a great author of stuff to do about science, she has a new book out of when she talks about how you can make a bee house by taking a pop bottle, cutting it in half and just putting the straws, just putting straws in it, hanging it up. Yep. And how do the bees occupy that place? What do they do with those little holes? So what happens is the bee, well, the female bee, because she's the one that lays the eggs and does all the baby work. She goes and collects nectar and pollen from a flower, and she usually has to make several trips, and she'll make a little wad of that mixture, and she'll lay an egg on it. And then she closes that egg off from the rest of the hole, maybe with a wall of mud.

or chewed up bits of leaves or there's a whole variety of things. So she closes each egg and its little food wad off, and then she just starts over again and sort of fills in that hole. So sometimes with some of those reeds or tubes, you can tell that they're full of baby bees because you'll see a little wall at the very end of the tube. Wow. Cool, as we say, I'd like to bring on another guest now who has the secret to attracting more native bees to your yard.

And, you know, she says, stop mowing the lawn every week. our studies out in the journal Biological Conservation. Susanna Lerman is a research ecologist with the USDA Forest Service in Amherst, Massachusetts. She joins us from New England Public Radio. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having me on. So I shouldn't be mowing my lawn every week. That's right.

So I wanted to figure out other ways that we can help bees. And I think a lot of the listeners probably have heard about the plight of bees. A lot of their habitat has been taken away or altered. from urban development. But when we look in our cities and suburbs, we see that there's actually a lot of flowers that are still present in places like community gardens, on meadows, or in pollinator gardens in people's backyards. But I wanted to see whether or not bees could also be attracted to the biggest area of green spaces in these areas, which are lawns. Lons cover something like 65,000 square miles. So to put that in perspective, that's roughly the size of Florida.

A lot of my colleagues have really dismissed lawns as non-habitat because you look at a lawn and it's just grass. It's very low. There's no structure to it. But I kept thinking, well, there's so much lawn available. How do we make these lawns less bad? And so really trying to figure out are the ways that we can manage these lawns so that they can provide B habitat? Our number 844-724-8255. You can also tweet us at SciFri.

In case you're just joining us, this is Science Friday from PRI. Public Radio International. We're talking about bees this hour, and about bees you probably never heard of them. My Gages, MacGessor Pat, page embryo author of our native bees, North America's endangered pollinators in the fight to save them.

Susanna Lerman, research ecologist with the USDA Forest Service at Amherst, Massachusetts. So if you mow your lawn every other week, your study found that you can have a good survival, rate for bees, lawn? Yeah, so we found that when you mow your lawn less, you have more lawn flowers. So these are what we call these unsung heroes for conservation, these dandelions and clover and yellow wood sorrel,

horseweed, all of these, what I think some people might consider these weeds, but they actually seem to be providing some nectar and pollen sources for bees. And so we wanted to see whether we mowed less, do you have more flowers? And if you have more flowers, do you have more bees? Do you have more bees. And so we found that, yes, indeed, you mow less, there's more flowers, but when you mow every two weeks, that's kind of the sweet spot for when you have the most bees. Paige, you mentioned in your book about how people are working with golf courses to turn them into preservation areas for the habitat there. Yeah, there are a number of groups that are looking to build pollinator to habitat on golf courses, and it's not where you would be mowing less,

but more taking some of those areas that are not actually used for golf, and rather than just having them be sort of rough and grass to actually plant flowers there for them. There's also some folks who are up in Minnesota who are working on sort of a lawn seed mix where they're adding flowers to grass as well, so sort of along the same ideas of putting flowers back in actual lawns. You're right that managed bees like honeybees can suck up all the pot. if you'll put down a bunch of beehives and leaving little for the wild bees? Yeah, there was a study done.

A lot of times after sort of the pollination season is mostly done, the beekeepers will want to have someplace good to put their bees. And when you put down dozens maybe of colonies of honeybees with 10,000 or more bees in them, they use a lot of the resources. So they sort of calculated just how much resources they were using in it. and it would take a lot from a lot of solitary and local wild bees. Let's see if I can get a quick phone call before the break. Let's go to Jupiter, Florida.

Hi, Adriana. Hi, how are you? Hi there. Go ahead. Wow, this is exciting. Okay, I just wanted to share something. Maybe you can speak on it. I think you kind of did a little bit already.

I planted an avocado tree from seed, and it's actually after eight years, it's flowering for the first time. I'm very excited, so I got closed. and I noticed there's some bees on there, so, of course, I had to go take some pictures up close. And as I'm looking around, I realize there are a tremendous variety of bees on there. You know, there was your regular little fatty bees sort of doing its thing. And then there was a green one with a big red-up.

Oh, I think we... It looked like washed. And it was just amazing. Amazing. Yeah, let me just get a reaction from our experts before we go to the break here. There are a lot more bees out there than people think there are, or are they not, Susanna? Yeah, absolutely.

So we identified 111 different species that we're using our lawns. So this is in 16 yards in Springfield, Massachusetts. So in suburban areas, these are lawn-dominated yards, so these yards didn't have pollinator gardens or special plants to attract bees. And so that's roughly a quarter of all bees that have been recorded in the state.

And so, you know, there's a lot going on in these yards when you start looking for them. Well, we're going to be right back. after the break and talk more about all the different kinds of bees out there. 844-7-48255. You can also, ooh, lots of tweets coming in at SciFri. We'll be right back after the break. Stay with us.

You're listening to Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. We're talking this hour about North America's wild bees, not the honey bees that are in nests, you know, in hives. We're talking about bees that make nests all over the place. With my guests, Susanna Lerman from the USDA Forest Service, Paige Embry, author of our native bees.

It's a great book. Page is a great book. It's terrific. And beautiful photos in there. Plates of stuff that you'd never seen before. Our number 844-724-8255. Let me go to some tweets that have come in. I'll just going to go through them and we'll try to pick off as many as we can. Tweet from Moore Square Garden Club. Will flowers planted in a garden really attract more bees or can that reduce fruit produced? Hmm. Someone is seriously concerned about the lack of pollinators. in North Alabama, what do you suggest individuals do to promote them? And then this last one, enjoying the discussion of bees, I planted fig trees last year and learned about the wasps.

Could you talk about bees versus wasps? And Susanna, can you talk about them? What is the difference? So actually, I'd like to answer the question from Alabama. Okay. Because I think in terms of things that people can do, and this kind of builds on some of the work that Paige was talking about in her book, about golf courses and planting pollinator gardens. So that's one thing that everybody can do.

But for those of us who don't have the time or the money or the green thumb, another way that we can contribute to providing for bees is to mow our lawns less. And so I think this is something that you don't have to do. In our paper, we call this the lazy lawnmower approach. And I think for a lot of people who want to do something good but don't have the time, this might resonate for them. And so that's another thing that we can put in our toolbox. But up here in the Northeast where Lyme disease was invented, so to speak, I mean, we keep hearing that if you don't mow your lawn down, the ticks are going to be all over the place. So that's really interesting. So another thing that we looked at, but we didn't publish it in our paper, was we did tick checks in all of our lawns that we worked in, and in the yards that remote every week, every two weeks, and every three weeks.

And we saw absolutely zero ticks. And that's not to say that ticks aren't around. They are, especially in areas that where yards might abut more forested areas or wood lots. But at least in some of these yards in Springfield, Massachusetts, we didn't find any ticks. So that wasn't a problem. Let's go to the phones because we have lots of calls. Tom from Hot Springs Village, Arkansas. Welcome to Science Friday.

Hi there, Ira. Hi there. Go ahead. And Susanna. Hi, I have a question about what your feeling is about, the use of neonicotinoids on nursery plants. Okay. Would you like this, Susanna or Paige?

Talk about that? Paige, do you want to take this one? This is not some place that I went down for the book because it was a big rabbit hole to be jumping down. So, you know, actually, I can sort of pass that one on to you. I will say with respect to the neonic is that because it's such a different kind of pesticide from the one we're used to where the pesticide gets sprayed on the surface of the plant, but with neonix, it's taken up by the cells and moved throughout the plant that, you know, it has been found in pollen and nectar.

But perhaps you have some more information on that? I think I'm going to take the same pass as you. This is a very controversial subject, is it not, about, colony collapse. These are mostly talk about honeybees instead of, we very rarely talk about wild bees when we talk about neonic. Right. And also for my research,

we really were looking at these spontaneous plants that were already growing in the lawns. So we weren't, none of these lawns had any sort of chemical inputs on them. So we weren't addressing that issue. Let's go to Jan in Memphis, who has an interesting story about something that Paige did cover in her book. Jan, go ahead. Yes, hi. Thank you for having me on your show. We have a problem with carpenter bees. I guess that's what they call. They bore into the side of your house. Are they pollinators? They are absolutely pollinators. And I was just in the southeast where I live in Seattle, we don't have the large carpenter bees. So it's not a problem I've personally dealt with. But I think every place I went and everybody I talked to was,

concerned about those bees. And one of the questions was, are they pollinators? And they are absolutely pollinators. And there's some of the native plants that they pollinate and a whole variety of other plants. So they're good pollinators. They're great drill bits, too. I mean, they bore a perfect hole right into my mailbox post.

Like, perfect. Like I had taken out of saw my drill myself and done it. But you say in your book, they will not attack painted surfaces, is that correct? Well, not that they, I have been told that they definitely attack painted surfaces, but they, but they tend to prefer surfaces that are unpainted. So one of the things that you might be able to do is to paint and see, and then maybe provide them with some other place that they can go that might have some nice, desirable unpainted

wood instead. So maybe they'll choose that. All right, well, so coming full circle now, back to my tomato pack. which I talked about at the beginning, how do I attract the bumblebees that I'm going to need to, you know, to get those little yellow flowers working? Well, I can think of two good things. One thing is a bumblebee queen overwinners in a little hole living on her fat for the winter. And so she comes out in early spring or mid-spring, and she needs food right then.

And so this is before the tomatoes come out. So you're going to want to have flowers in your garden sort of in the springtime. for those bees that come out of their winters, hibernation-like state, really hungry. So you want those queens to do well, so they'll build up lots of daughters, so there'll be lots of bees available for your tomatoes. And the other thing, again, is they need, tomatoes only have pollen. They don't have nectar. And so you're going to want to have a lot of other plants around so that they can get both nectar and pollen. And they like to have a balanced diet.

They're a generalist bee. So they like to get pollen from other plants as well. Susanna, what is most fascinating to you about bees? He has been studying them. To me, I think that there are so many. And so I had a quick look in Page's book and was just fascinated by all the different colors and shapes of these bees. And I hadn't really thought about them before I started this study.

But now realizing that they're buzzing all around. And again, you don't know what's going to happen in these areas. But also that for many people, this is a way that they can connect with nature. There's bees, there's wildlife in their backyards. And so I think by doing exploration in these yards, it's really letting people know that their yards have a role to play, and they can go out and experience these wild animals. You know, and Paige, for those of us who thought that honeybees were what's out there, I mean, to look through the gorgeous pages of your book,

and we have photos of the unusual bees up at our website at ScienceFriday.com slash bees, science friday.com slash bees. It's just really eye-opening to see how many different and wild and wonderful different kinds of beads there are. It is. And it's when you go out in your yard and you really start looking, you'll see them. And it's like they've been there all along and they're there. And it's so fun when you plant a plant, a specific plant thinking, this is going to be good for bees. And you go out.

and they've come. It's like the easiest conservation ever. Well, I'm going to do it this weekend. Try to get my bee house up this weekend. Susanna Lerman, a research ecologist with the USDA Forest Service in Amherst, Massachusetts, Paige Embry, author of Our Native Bees, North America's Endangered Pollinators, and the Fight to Save Them. Thank you both for taking time to be with us today.

Thanks very much. Thank you, Ira. There is a palpable fear some people have about cell phone radiation. Earlier this spring, the National Toxicology Program, sorry, part of the NIH released a draft report on a long-running study on the potential health effects of cell phone radiation. Mice and rats were exposed to high levels of radio frequency radiation, like from cell phones, for nine hours per day over their entire bodies for up to two years. And the researchers found that exposure to those high levels of radio frequency radiation was linked to a slight increase in. and the incidence of malignant schwanomas, a rare type of tumor in nerve tissue near the hearts of male rats. They also found some association with damage to heart tissue in both male and female rats.

Mice, however, didn't have similar effects. Well, this week, a panel of peer reviewers met for three days to discuss the studies and their conclusions, and they voted to increase their level of confidence in the findings, saying there was a clear link between radio, frequency radiation exposure and the male rat heart tissue tumors. The NTP now has to decide whether to accept the panel's recommendation before the final report is released. So Schlanger, Environmental Reporter at Quartz, joins us now to talk about the meeting and the study. Welcome to the program.

Thanks for having me, Ava. You listen to the whole meeting or close to you. Most of it. It was a pretty tedious three days, but it did get exciting towards the end. What do you mean it got exciting towards the end? Well, when you watch peer review panels, you don't typically see the peer reviewers changing the conclusions or upgrading them to be more significant than the study authors actually decided prior. So what we saw was that this expert panel of toxicologists and, you know, all these cancer specialists decided that it was clearly evident that the cancer in the heart was directly related to the cell phone radiation. In other words, they were not as unsure as the original report was.

They were more sure after they read and discussed it. Exactly, yeah. Now, the NTP is going to continue with more testing. This is not the final testing program that they've done. What happens now is that the NTP has figured out what the risk is like in rats. And that doesn't necessarily mean what the risk is for humans. But what happens now is that the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, takes these results. and they're responsible for telling us and analyzing those results to tell us whether or not that risk is beyond the acceptable amount of risk for humans.

And what's interesting about the study is it goes back so far that the researchers did not, they only used 2G phone frequencies, not 3G, not 4G, not 5G that's coming up. They did use 3G. They used 2G and 3G, and those were the dominant technologies at the time because this study has been in the works for almost 10 years. It's the biggest study we've had so far on this subject. And there are some people who have some concerns that if we're finding risk at this level, that 5G could potentially expose people to higher degrees of radiation, having further results. And so I actually was talking to communicating with folks over at the NTP, and they said that they're building new facilities to study different frequencies and modulations.

And I'll quote them, to keep up with changing technologies and the telemetes, in the telecommunications industries, and these studies may include frequencies and modulations use for 4G and 5G technologies. It's funny, the peer review study process will never quite keep up with technology. It'll always be a little behind. Yeah, this is Science Friday from PRI, Public Radio International.

We're talking about this cell phone study. It is unusual, though, for a peer review panel to look at the data and come back with something stronger than actually what the study was implying, isn't it? Yeah, it did seem that the actual study authors were trying to be as circumspect as possible. The peer reviewers looked at it in context of what they knew about cancer and the rarity of certain cancers or the aggressiveness of this particular heart cancer and decided with their knowledge that this was significant enough to warrant that clear signal. Because it changes how the public sees us, too.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, and let's talk about the specific tumor they found that was elevated in only male rats but not female rats or might. in the study? Did they have a reason for that? So the levels were actually elevated in the female rats as well, but it didn't reach statistical significance. So it's a very high bar for something to be considered clear evidence of significance. There could be various reasons for this. There could be difference in the controls of the two populations. Or it could really be a gender affected thing. For example, men, human men are much more susceptible to kidney cancer, for example.

Yeah, this is just going to keep the debate alive even further, isn't it? I think it really actually changes the debate quite a bit because up to this point, we've regulated phones and looked at that science as assuming they can't possibly cause cancer because the type of radiation is not strong enough to break bonds. So it can't alter your DNA, which means it can't give you cancer. But now that we're finding this, we know that it's possible. that's what we've come away with. It's possible for this to cause cancer and cells. We just don't know the mechanism. And did they find it's possible to change the DNA also? They did find some levels of DNA damage in the brain. That was not considered clear evidence. So they're a little unsure about that. And this was, as you say, it's been going on for a while, it's a $25 million study. Absolutely. It started in the works in 1999. Were the people who were opponents of cell phone technology well represented at the peer review hearing?

Well, the nature of the peer review hearing is that the people who are meant to be given the most airtime are the experts. There were representatives of groups. I think there was a brain tumor association, and people were questioning whether or not those peer reviewers should be there, whether or not they were expert enough. but from my perspective, they were all major players in their fields. And did the people who are fearful of cell phone radiation come away thinking, oh, maybe we have a minor victory? Or maybe we've convinced some people that this should be studied further,

especially the peer review group. It's hard to say I wouldn't judge a victory or not, but I will say that this definitely adds to the weight of evidence that cell phones are something that need to be scrutinized in the future. And also the 5G technology, which is transmitting a signal in a much different way than all cell phone towers. Right. It's a very different technology. Yeah, because people are concerned that that might be of concern to us or should be of concern to us, too.

It's going to take many more studies to figure that out. Do we know when the recommendation will be finalized? We are not totally sure. I did speak to the designer of the study on the phone earlier today. He said that, in his opinion, the FDA should come right out and suggest to people basic guidelines. lines for how to use their cell phones differently, to not put it near their head, not keep them around children, things like that. But it's up to the FDA at this point. Didn't the original instructions with the cell phone when they first came out and said, don't put it to your head?

You know, I didn't realize that until years later. But if you look at your cell phone manual, any of your cell phones, it does say that. They say use a headset and don't put it in your pocket. We've had Nora Volkov come on the show. She's with NIH, and she's, you know, the science head of one of the institutes. And she says, I would never put a cell phone to my head. She said this to us a few times. You know, it has changed the way I behave around my phone as well. Yeah, she says, I use the, you know, plug me into your phones, whatever. Okay.

So, thank you. Thank you so much. For taking time to be with us today. She's an environmental reporter at Quartz. When that's about all the time we have for today, thanks, thanks for joining us. One last thing before we go. Please join me on April 9th at the Green Space here in New York City to talk about one of my favorite subjects, The Orchid. We've put together a fantastic evening for you with special guests, Mark Hachedorian,

of the New York Botanical Garden and Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief, which I am rereading and it's a better read even the second time. So they're going to be drinks and food and you might even get to take home an orchid from one that I get to choose for you, if you like my kinds of orchids, that is. You can get your tickets today at ScienceFriday.com

slash events at ScienceFriday.com slash events. Hope to see you there on April 9th at the Green Space here in New York City. Charles Berkwis is our director, senior producer Christopher Taliazza, produces RLXLM, Christy Taylor, Katie Heiler. We have technical help every week from Rich Kim, Sarah Fishman, and Jack Harowitz. And of course, we are active all week on Facebook, Twitter, all the social media. And if you're celebrating, have a happy Easter and Passover. I'm Ira Flato in New York.