Science Friday - Antarctic Ice, Itching, Ancient Birds. Oct. 2, 2020, Part 2

Episode Date: October 2, 2020

New Study Shows No Second Chance For Antarctic Ice Shelves From the heat waves and wildfires in the western U.S. to the active hurricane season in the Gulf, the climate crisis is intensifying. Sea ice is melting in the Arctic, and the ice sheets covering Antarctica are shrinking.  Now, researchers have released the results of a study using satellite data, radar readings, and a massive computer simulation looking at the effects of gravity on ice in Antarctica. Their projections aren’t hopeful. Once Antarctic glaciers melt, the scientists found, they don’t re-freeze the same way, even if temperatures drop again.  That spells bad news for sea level rise. Even if the world manages to hold to the 2 degrees Celsius rise targeted in the Paris climate agreements, the study predicts enough ice will likely to melt to cause roughly five meters of sea level rise—leading to flooding in cities from New York to Shanghai to London to Calcutta.  Anders Levermann, a professor of the dynamics of the climate system at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany joins Ira to talk about the team’s ice melt predictions, and the need for fundamental changes in society to forestall even more catastrophic climate results. Ask An Expert: Why Do We Itch? The pandemic has us feeling a lot of things: anxious, stressed, tired. But what about itchy?  Have you ever had a hard time not scratching or rubbing your face in public? Or had an unreachable itch beneath a mask? This week on Science Friday, we ask an expert: why do we itch? And is there any relief to be found in understanding the neuroscience behind why we scratch?  Ira asks these questions and more to Diana Bautista, professor of molecular and cellular biology at the University of California Berkeley. They were joined by a live Zoom audience, who were also itching to ask their own questions. Digging For Answers To Avians’ Ancestors One of the biggest questions in paleontology is figuring out how dinosaurs transitioned into the modern birds we see today—and all of the intermediate steps involved in that process.  China is becoming one of the latest hotspots for unearthing fossils of these prehistoric birds and bird-like dinosaurs. Paleontologist Jiangmai O’Connor is featured in our second season of ‘Breakthrough: Portraits of Women in Science,’ a video series profiling scientists and how their lives and work intersect. Here, she discusses her work in China, where she’s spent ten years trying to uncover clues about the diversity of ancient birds by examining their bones and preserved soft tissues, like lungs and ovaries.    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. A bit later in the hour, a look at why we itch. But first, with heat waves and wildfires in the west, an active hurricane season in the Gulf, our attention has been turned away from other dramatic and life-changing evidence of our climate crisis, the rapid melting of the ice at the poles, with sea ice shrinking in the Arctic and the ice sheets covering Antarctica, cracking and slipping into the southern seas. But, science, Scientists have been paying attention, using satellite data, radar readings, and a massive computer simulation, and the projections are not good. Once the glaciers melt, they don't re-freeze the same way, even as temperatures drop again, and that spells bad news for sea level rise. That study was recently published in the journal Nature. Joining me is one of the authors Anders Leverman, Professor for the Dynamics of the Climate System,

He's based at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Potsdam, Germany. Welcome back to Science Friday. Hi, how are you? Fine, thank you. Your research shows something I think a lot of us would be surprised to learn, and that is what gravity has to do with ice melting. Can you explain that for us? Well, ice sheets form by snow that falls onto land and then slowly builds up to be an ice sheet.

But if you stack up ice up to a certain height, like in Antarctica, you have almost four kilometers. That's 4,000 meters of ice sheet up into the sky. Then this is really pulled down by gravity, and it's kind of squeezed on its own weight out into the ocean. That's why there's a balance between the snowfall and the flow into the ocean under the ice sheet's own gravity. So how does that influence how the ice is melting in Antarctica? In this case, actually not really melting because we have a lot of melting in Greenland and elsewhere on the planet, but on Arctica is around the South Pole and it's terribly cold there. So most of the ice that is lost is flowing into the ocean.

It's not really melting. It's flowing into the ocean. And the ice flows faster when it gets warmer, and that's the problem. So when it reaches the coastline, it's calving off on those giant icebergs and things like that. Exactly. And partially melted, of course, when it reaches the ocean. So the takeaway message here then is it's not good. I mean, what does your model say, even if we keep to the two degrees Celsius mentioned in the Paris Agreement?

Yes, we find that on really long timescales, we can compute how much ice will actually survive at different levels of warming. We found that the ice sheet becomes more and more sensitive to warming, up to two degrees Celsius of warming, which is, the Paris Climate Agreement, we lose about five feet of sea level equivalent, sea level rise equivalent of ice per degree of warming. But beyond that, after the two degrees target is reached, we even lose seven feet per degree of warming, up to six degrees, which we will reach without any climate protection within the next hundred years, roughly. And after that, after six degrees, which is really a terrible amount of warming, it would have much more problems than just sea level

rise by then. But after that, it gets even more dramatic because we get 30 feet for every degree of warming. So it's not a linear rise in sea level? No, it's not. I mean, like most things in nature, things are not really linear. And in Antarctica, we have a number of feedbacks that play a role. Whenever you have an ice sheet that's actually grounded under the sea level, so it's grounded on the sea floor. But it's so thick that it reaches out into the air. And if you have this kind of situation and then the seafloor is falling when you go inland, it's falling down. Then you have a situation which is prone to a so-called marine ice instability. And once you have melted a little bit away of the ice on the fringes and the coast,

then all of a sudden you don't have to melt anymore. You're just losing the ice through an instability, meaning of self-amprification feedback that pushes all the ice into the ocean until the basin is empty. me an idea of what five meters means to people who live around the world. Yes, five meters or like roughly 15 feet is what we get eventually at two degrees of warm. And five meters of sea level rise really puts a number of big cities at risk around the world. That's relevant for New York, Shanghai, Calcutta, Hamburg for that matter, which is a relatively small city, but in generally ever. about it because it had its 750 year anniversary when I was a kid.

And for the next 750 years, we really, oh, well, I don't see it. I don't see that we'll live in Hamburg in 750 years. And that's just with the five-meter rise, but it could be even worse or deeper than that. Well, what people don't realize is that if we continue to emit carbon into the atmosphere, This carbon stays there for practically forever. It's not like if we reduce the carbon emissions and we reduce the warming. That's not the case. No, we just reduce the speed, the rate with which it's warming.

If we want to stop the temperature increase of the planet, the rise of the temperature, we'll have to go to zero emissions, and we are far from that, obviously. We're going up almost every year with the emissions. So even if these temperature limits of two degrees, degrees, three degrees, so on, so what seemed very far away, they will come if we don't stop emitting carbon. We found enough coal in the ground to make it as hot as it was when the coal was actually built, when the dinosaurs were on the planet.

And that was like 15 degrees Celsius warmer than today. And with 15 degrees warmer temperatures, which we will reach if we don't stop limiting carbon, we'll have an ice-free plant. and that means 60 meters of sea level ice worldwide or even more. How many meters was that? 60. That's 180 feet. That's an incredible amount. And it won't happen overnight.

Don't worry. It'll take a long, long time. But that's the amount of ice that we have on the planet, mainly in Antarctica. And that's what we'll get if we don't stop emitting carbon. I'm trying to be hopeful about this, but you don't make it sound very hopeful. Well, sea level rise is not really a threat to lives if you take it seriously. If the administrations take it seriously, then you can always abandon the coasts, right? Or you can protect again a certain amount of sea level in some region.

But if you take it seriously, it's not really a threat to life, but it's a threat to what we build near the coast. And it sounds less dramatic in a sense. But it's the cultural heritage that we built there, right? we build it in New Orleans, we build it in New York, we build it in Shanghai, Calcutta, Hong Kong, Tokyo. And that's what we're going to lose if we don't stop emitting carbon. The United States is not taking it very seriously in terms of looking toward the future and building or cutting down on carbon emissions. But are there other countries that say, hey, we better start doing something.

If not talking about reducing carbon emissions, at least moving away, from the coast and anticipating exactly the kind of sea rise you're talking about? Most coastal cities or like the countries that really have only coast, the island states, they take it very seriously. And they know, for example, for the Pacific Island states, a lot of them, it's an existential threat. And some one has already been abandoned, actually. No, it's generally not like, let's say a problem that coastal protection agencies take seriously because they see the sea level rising, right?

The problem is that we really have to get to zero emissions. And that sounds like a dramatic or almost radical political request or demand, but it's not. It's a physical reality. It's quite simple. But it's actually also good for the economy. That sounds paradox, I know. But doing something less, like reducing emissions is always.

It sounds in the years of most people in industry as if we want to not have growth, not economic prosperity and so on. But getting to zero emissions means we have to do something completely different. And completely different is a different issue, right? You can make money out of that. I don't want to say, let's all make money of protecting the climate. We have to protect the climate because we really need to. But, you know, conveying it like this might be sometimes helpful because we really have to get the technologies that get us. to zero emissions, not just less.

We're in the middle of a political season here, of course, in the United States, and one of the ways that people talk about the Green New Deal or Joe Biden's plan, as he spoke about it during the debate this week, was doing this would create new jobs. That's exactly what it is. It's not bad for the economy to save the planet. We're giving a gift to industry because we're telling you what's going to happen in 30 years. Now, if you can't make money out of this information, then you're kind of not a very good businessman.

In the European Union, what has been done is we've given carbon a price. And that's how you can create a competitive advantage by carbon emission reduction. And that's exactly the path forward. Now we have the EU Commission President has just come up with a stronger plan and it's not finished yet. But if it works out, then a huge market on the planet will go. carbon-free in a lot of sectors, economic sectors, and that'll have obviously some influence on the other regions. And are you hopeful that we can do any of this? Give me a scenario, what you would view as a

scenario? Yeah, there are a number of possible scenarios. You know, China has a huge climate problem. They have a huge pollution problem, which is a different one from the climate problem, because CO2 is a molecule and we don't see it. What makes the air dirty is pollution, meaning aerosols. But they come together in China because it's a lot from cars and a lot from coal power plants. So I think that China has good reason to go ahead and then go for renewable energies in the future.

But recently, Europe has really taken a lead again. They hadn't for a while, but now they seem to be taking the lead again. And if one of these big centers, economic centers, North America, Asia, or Europe is flipping into carbon neutrality, then this really sends a strong signal to the other, simply because, you know, they will only buy stuff that's carbon neutral. I don't want to sound naive, but we are on the past.

Germany, you know, is crazy for cars. We're going electric at the moment, and it's going so rapidly that we have to get the cars from outside, Tesla and so on and so forth. It's amazing. Small revolution is taking place that are not so small anymore. Well, I'm going to leave it on that hopeful note.

We've run out of time. I want to thank you for taking time to speak with us today. Yeah, thank you very much. Andrews Leverman is a professor for the dynamics of climate system at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research

in Potsdam, Germany. We're going to take a break, and when we come back, the strange world of itching. We'll be right back after the short break. This is Science Friday. I'm I, Myr-Fledo. The pandemic has us feeling a lot of things, but what about itchy? Now, here's a situation that has happened to me recently. I headed into the drugstore, so I put on my mask.

I went inside, but pretty soon my face started to itch right between my nose and my cheek, but right there, right under my mask. So what was I supposed to do? I didn't want to touch my face or take off my mask to scratch it. That would kind of defeat the point of wearing one, right? It's so difficult to resist that itchy feeling, but I suffered through it until I could get back into my car and safely scratch. The things we do to keep ourselves and others safe, right? Well, how many times has this happened to you over the last several months? And wouldn't it be nice if we could just suppress that itchy feeling? Maybe there's something we could learn from neuroscience to keep us from pulling off our masks to scratch that itch. Well, we're going to

talk to an expert here to help explain the science behind our itchy pandemic experiences. And to answer all things, itch is our expert, Dr. Diana Battista, professor in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, University of California at Berkeley. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you. I'm excited to be here. And we want everyone listening to know this interview is being recorded in front of a live Zoom audience because, well, we miss having you being a part of our show. So this is our way of bringing you into our conversation. And if you didn't get to join us this time, don't worry about it. Keep an eye out for announcements of future Zoom tapings so you can participate in our social media or on our website at ScienceFriday.com slash events. Let's begin, Dr.

Batista. Can you relate to the itchy encounter I had? I'm sure it's happened to. you, right? Oh, it happens to me many times a day. We are by nature very itchy animals, human beings. And even just the mention of the word itch, I have to apologize to everyone. You're going to be scratching a lot during this interview. And the idea that you can't touch your face, which we're being told all the time these days due to COVID, is just enough to make you obsess and think about it constantly. You know, I've always wondered, why is it that there are some things that make you itch when they touch your body? Maybe it's wool, something like that, and then you have cloth, something that does not make you itch. Do we know why that is? We know that it varies a lot from person to

person. Some people love cashmere and other people find it incredibly itchy. And that touch evoked it is also known as mechanical itch. And it actually represents one of the great mysteries in biology. we don't really understand how something like a gentle touch could be innocuous in some cases and really itchy in another. Is there a relationship between itch and pain? I've heard before that those systems are connected in some way. Yeah, there is a very intimate interaction between our itch neurons and our pain neurons and how we experience these sensations. And for a long time, it was thought that itch is a subset of pain or a mild pain, but not. now we know that it's its own sensation and there are unique free nerve endings in our skin

that mediate itch sensations and send signals from your skin to your brain to trigger that sensation of itch, to trigger that negative emotion you have to an itchy sensation and to drive scratching. When you say that there are a signal sent to our brain, is there an itch center in my brain someplace? Definitely when you experience itch, there are several regions. of the brain that become activated are cortical regions that help you identify where that itch is located. You activate the motor system to trigger scratching behaviors. And then there's the emotional component as well. Wow. So if I scratch, are there endorphins sort of pleasure things released in our brain at the same time saying, oh, that feels good? Yeah. Scratching is quite

complex and interesting to neuroscientists because scratching helps you and makes you feel better in many ways. There's a very local effect of scratching where applying scratching or any type of pain, like really hot water or icy compress, anything that causes pain can literally block that itch signal from reaching the brain or decrease the intensity of the itch sensation. So you get this sort of immediate relief from that scratching. But there's a secondary effect when you scratch brain regions that are associated with reward and also addiction, release dopamine and serotonin gets released, and you get this big reward from scratching as well. And that can lead to a really horrible itch scratch cycle where it's very hard to stop. And probably people have done this

when they've scratched their itchy mosquito bite until it bleeds. It's because of that reward. Yeah. We have our first Zoom question from Shiro Tanaka, who's says how the itchy sensation defined dermatologically. Is it an inflammation? Yes. So acute itch is very different from chronic itch. In acute itch, you activate these itch-specific neurons that send an electrical signal to the brain to trigger the sensation and then to trigger scratching behaviors.

And it's very short term. With something like a mosquito bite that's a little bit longer, your nervous system actually releases compounds and regulates the vascular to allow immune cells to come in. And that's really important in the case of, for example, insects that could burrow into your skin that carry disease vectors or parasitic worms. And that immune system comes in. The scratching removes the insect, the immune system gets rid of infected cells. But then this system goes crazy under chronic itch conditions. Tell me what a chronic itch condition is. Yeah, chronic itch refers to a variety.

of different disorders and dysfunctions that lead to itch that really can't be treated by antihistamines and they're very poor therapeutics. And it's itch that is really long term. So if you imagine the worst it you ever experienced and imagine what your life would be like if that itch were to spread over extended parts of your body and were present for every second of every day. And chronic it has a decreased quality of life similar to the very worst chronic pain conditions. Are there treatments for these kinds of things? There are a lot of clinical trials going on right now due to the big boon and itch research over the last five years. But right now, corticosteroids are often the first line that are prescribed.

But they're really not super effective. And even antihistamines for some forms of allergic itch don't really work. So there's a big therapeutic meat out there. I remember doctors used to tell kids not to scratch their chicken pox. I mean, it's sort of counterintuitive to you. own mind, but it's bad for you. Yeah, I think short-term acute itch serves as an important warning system, right? We feel itchy when we get a mosquito bite. Mosquitoes carry malaria, learning to associate that itch with a mosquito helps you develop protective behaviors,

like putting on d'et or going into the tent when you're camping when you're surrounded by mosquitoes or scratching, swatting away. And those are good things, but under chronic itch conditions, the constant scratching causes damage to the skin and makes the itch worse. And so it's really counterintuitive. But anybody who's had a kid who has had eczema knows it's really hard to not scratch that chronic itch. And it's called this really vicious itch scratch cycle that's really difficult to stop. That's a good segue to our next listener.

Lisa Hale has a question about mosquito bites. Hi, go ahead. Hi. Yeah, I was wondering. Are some people more allergic? If they are, do they tend to itch more than, like, say, someone who isn't? Yeah, so there's a lot of variation. Some people don't have an allergic reaction at all or notice when they have mosquito bites.

Other people are unfortunate, like myself, who suffered from eczema as a kid, and now I'm super sensitive to bug bites and nocems and mosquitoes, and I have a very large allergic reaction that occurs, and the itch can persist for several days. So there's a great variation depending on who you are and what your biology is. Let's go back to my drugstore visit for a second. It was so hard to fight the urge to scratch.

I almost couldn't do it. Are there any tricks to overriding these? Can you think about something, you know, whatever, to say, because I always wonder, one of the things I've always wondered about why I could never be an astronaut besides a lot of other reasons, is that if I had the helmet and the space suit on and I had to scratch my nose or whatever, it would drive me crazy. Yes, it definitely drives me crazy. And so when I go to the pharmacy or grocery shopping, I do have a period in my car where I sit there and I touch my face and I scratch. And then I

actively think because we can suppress that strong desire to scratch through, Right? We have control over our motor system. It's sometimes hard to exert that control, but we can do it. And so I scratch, I get it out of my system, and I actively think, okay, don't touch your face, don't touch your mask, don't scratch. And I think that distraction is a big part of it. And actually, children with eczema, one of the most effective therapies to get them to stop scratching is through playing video games. probably educational video games are encouraged to get their minds off of their itchiness. And so that's what I suggest you do at the pharmacy. So you pre-scratch yourself. I do.

You give yourself sort of a pep talk before you go in there and say, I'm going to get it out of my system. Now listen, system. I'm scratching now. I'm getting it out of my system. And it listens. Yes. Active, actively fighting that urge.

And one thing people don't realize is how much we touch our face. Our face, because most people primarily use their visual system to navigate the world, we have a lot of innervation, a lot of these free nerve endings in our face that makes it super sensitive, that allows us to be very responsive if a bug lands there or if we get something harmful in our eye. And so we're super sensitive. And we touch our face hundreds and hundreds of times a day without even realizing it. I'm doing it now without thinking of it.

Yeah, definitely. Well, that brings me to a question I hadn't thought about until this very moment, and that is why when we touch our faces or scratch our face, it feels like a sensation of scratching, but on our souls of our feet, it feels like it's tickling. I mean, you ever thought about that? Is that a whole different, that's a whole different subject? Yeah, and it's a fascinating mystery in sensory biology. We know a lot about the senses, but our sense of touch that spans,

gentle, pleasant touching to itchiness, to tickle, to pain is one of the least understood senses, which is really surprising to most people. We're all familiar, of course, with the experience of an itchy bug bite that you just can't find any relief from, and there are other times you scratch an itch and the feeling goes away. Why are we able to satisfy an itch in some cases, but not in other cases. Yeah, so the itch relief you get from that temporary pain of scratching or putting on really hot water on your mosquito bite is very temporary and it's not complete. So you get partial relief, but it's really not enough. When you have chronic itch, that itch is really constant. And the neurons that innervate the skin that send these signals become hyperactive,

as well as the brain regions that are processing these signals, the system becomes primed so that it's very difficult to turn off. And scratching as hard as you can, which normally would hurt if you scratch an area of your body that doesn't have that itch, is not providing relief. But you're still triggering some of those reward centers without getting the actual relief of itchy sensations. And that drives this constant damage to the skin

and more itch, and that's why it's a cycle that's really difficult to break. Irafledo, this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Some people have this talent. I call it a talent. I remember seeing it in the Odd Couple movie. They're sitting in the restaurant, and one of the characters, I can't remember which Felix, starts doing this, and starts making a noise inside his mouth, and his,

his roommate says, what are you doing? And he says, I'm itching the inside of my ear. Do you know what I'm talking about? I do. I know exactly what you're talking about. And we do experience itch in the back of our throat. Sometimes if you eat something that you're allergic to people with severe allergies, especially you can feel itch inside your ears in the back of your throat and inside your nose. And the same types of neurons that innervate our skin that respond to different. chemical itch compounds can be triggered actually internally. But little is known about those. It's very embarrassing. I do it. I know how to do it. And when I saw that in the movie, I said, gee, I'm not the only one. Who does that? Moving on, I've seen cats and dogs scratch themselves.

We all have. How prevalent is then itchiness in the animal kingdom? Do all animals scratch an itch? Yeah, I think people don't realize that itch is really a highly conserved process and scratching across the entire animal kingdom because it is really an important protective system that we've evolved to avoid harm. And it's not limited to cats and dogs and humans. Even fish can experience a itch type sensation. They get infected by parasites just like we do. Of course, they can't scratch themselves. So what they do is they'll rub against coral to try to get rid of that and get some relief. Or they'll actually, some fish will go to cleaning stations in the ocean

where there are small fish that come in and actually bite them and remove those parasites. Even insects can be infected. So even flies can be infected with mites. And they also have behaviors that look a lot like scratching, where they actually can rub and remove mites from their body. Okay. you certainly do know a lot about itching, but there's got to be some stuff you still want to know about. What do you still want to know about?

Yeah, one of the big questions that were interested in is understanding mechanical itch. What is it about that itchy sweater that gets you or the itchy mask? We really don't know. We know a lot more about chemical itch. The other big question that really, I think, is shocking that we don't know more about, are switches very quick and, and in some cases, quick to turn on, and long-lasting changes in normal sensitivity.

So for example, when you have chronic itch, a gentle touch that's normally pleasant or innocuous becomes itchy. But if you have chronic pain, that gentle touch becomes painful. How do these normal sensations that we just take for granted really switch and it could be really debilitating where if you constantly feel the itch

from the weight of your clothes or chronic pain from a gentle touch or caress. And we really don't know how these switches occur and why we're seeing these chronic conditions at really crazy high rates across the world population. These are normal protective systems that warn us against burning ourselves or avoiding toxic plants that now are just turned on all of the time.

Well, you have driven me to try the Diana-Bautista method talking myself out of scratch. I so want to scratch this part of my shoulder now that you've talked about it, but I'm not going to do it. It doesn't, it doesn't itch. Thank you, Diana. It's been a great conversation. Thank you so much. And I know we have just scratched the surface of this topic, so we'll come back and talk with you more, Dr. Diana-Bautista, professor in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at the University of California at Berkeley. And you can watch the entire video of this interview and sign up to find out. out about sitting in on a future Zoom interview on our website at ScienceFriady.com

slash events. We're going to take a break, and when we come back, we're going to talk to a paleontologist working in China about the paleontology boom and studying the diversity of ancient birds. That's all when we come back after the break. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. One of the big questions in paleontology is figuring out how dinosaurs transitioned into the modern birds we see today and all of the steps that were involved in that process. China is one of the latest hotspots for unearthing fossils of these prehistoric birds and bird-like dynos. A real prehistoric bird boom is going on there. My next guest has been working in China for the past 10 years to uncover clues about the

diversity of ancient birds. She does this by examining their bones. and preserved soft tissues like lungs and ovaries, and she's here to share with us her work, and what excites her about it. Jingmey O'Connor is the associate curator of fossil reptiles at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. She's also an adjunct professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.

She's featured in our second season of Breakthrough, Portraits of Women in Science, a video series that profile scientists, and gets a closer look at how their lives and work intersect. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you so much, Ira. It's a pleasure to be here. Oh, it's so nice to have you.

You know, Jurassic Park, I think, got a lot of people hooked on paleontology and dinosaurs and kids really became fascinated with dinosaurs then. Were you one of these dinosaur kids? I most definitely was not. I found paleontology much later in life. I actually kind of stumbled upon it while in college. But I did become interested in geology by my mother, who is also a geologist. And she went and did her PhD when I was about eight years old.

So she would drag us along into the field with her. And I started falling in love with geology itself. And then I went to college, met a paleontologist, and just found my passion in paleontology. So actually, the first Jurassic Park movie that came out since I became a paleontologist was the Jurassic World movies. You know, I got really excited. I have to say I was a little bit terribly disappointed because the whole point of the Jurassic World movie

was they make these like genetically modified, half dinosaur, half-crocodillion chimeras. And I mean, to me, dinosaurs and just basically all extinct animals are so fascinating in their own right that to me you shouldn't have to make these GMO-based dinosaurs just to get interest. So I was a little disappointed by that. Yeah, yeah, you're finding out.

that fact is stranger than fiction. Yeah, exactly. Every time we find this animal or some animal and we make hypotheses, I always find how our human imagination is so limited because when we get additional information and we actually find out what was really going on, it's always totally different than what we had imagined. And I think that's really exciting. That's one reason I love science. I know you study ancient birds and not dinosaurs necessarily. Give me the distinction between the two? Why are ancient birds interesting to you rather than dinosaurs?

First of all, birds are dinosaurs. So, yeah, so I do technically study dinosaurs and also, you know, in order to understand these earliest birds, we have to look at the dinosaurs that they evolved from. So I do sometimes study dinosaurs, small feathered dinosaurs closely related to birds. Based on the programs I got into, I had a smattering of choices.

And in the end, I chose early birds because at the time and still continuing today, all these fantastic discoveries had been coming out of China, you know, four-wing dinosaurs like Microraptor. And I'm half-Chinese and very, very proud and fascinated by my Chinese culture. I really liked the idea of being able to combine my interest in China with my new interest in paleontology. So I just saw this as a perfect opportunity to, you know, intersect these two interests. I was studying Chinese in college, and I had just been to China to mainland China for the first time.

So I was really excited about that. So everything just kind of came together, you know, naturally precipitated, I suppose. Why is China such a great place to study what you're doing, the evolution of birds there? Well, China is actually a great place for all different types of paleontology, everything from some of the earliest animals all the way to paleoanthropology, like Peking Man. that kind of thing. So it's not just the birds. But yeah, I think it's partially because science there is really starting to get going at a very high pace only in the past few decades. So that means that there's just a ton of work to be done, a lot of new discoveries to do, whereas paleontology in America, it's a little bit older. You know, a lot of these bad lands that have produced some of these really big famous dinosaurs have been picked over for over 100 years, whereas it's much newer in China.

But in the particular area that I work on, all these small feathered dinosaurs, including the earliest birds, it's really, it's a numbers game. Paleontologists, if at all, we spend a couple months a year in the field. And then the rest of the time, we're processing the specimens we found, we're studying them, we're teaching, we're curating all these other duties that we have. And in China, it's the same, of course. However, this region where all these feathered dinosaurs come from, it's called Liaoning, it's Northeastern China. the first feather dinosaur was found by a farmer who is just cultivating his land. And so this kind of, you know, this made the cover of nature and it sparked its huge amount of interest.

So, of course, paleontologists, you know, also started digging in earnest. And they had also been working there before looking for fishes, actually. You know, feather dinosaur had been found before. But also a lot of these local farmers realized, like, hey, if I find a feather dinosaur or is one of these beautiful fossil birds, I can sell it for a little. lot more money than I make farming. So you have a lot more farmers than you have paleontologists. Because of these numbers, the amount of people who are looking for fossils and looking all year round, you just have a huge number of specimens being unearthed. So, for example, T-Rex, everybody's

favorite dinosaur, big guy, you know, there's like about 40 fairly complete specimens. People have been collecting T-Rex for a long time. Now, take another theropod dinosaur, but a small feathered their pod dinosaur named Anke Ornus. And Anke Ornus was only described in 2009, so 11 years ago, and there's already about 250 specimens that are known that are 90% complete or more. So this is not just because there's more material there. It's because there's more people spending more time looking for these things. Wow, you sound pretty excited. Sounds like I have a pretty good job. I love my job. Is working in China different than working in the U.S.? Most definitely, but every place is different. And even within the U.S. where you might be working would be different. Neither is better. Both has good and bad sides. So in China, you have, for example, Mao Zedong said that women hold up half the sky. So there is not this chauvinism against women in China the same way that it exists in America. So that's one thing that's really nice. Another thing is you don't have all these fundamental Christians who are saying that,

that evolution doesn't exist, and science itself is not under constant attack in China the way it is here in America. And also the government recognizes the importance of science. So there is a ton of money to do research, which is not the case in America. You have more and more people applying for the National Science Foundation grants, but you have the amount of money that has been allocated for research not really growing in proportion to the number of people who are applying for this money. So those are some of the really nice aspects of working in China. But of course, now I'm back in America. I'm also really excited about that. I'm going to be at the Field Museum.

And, I mean, there's something really incredible about working at an institution, a grand old institution with these collections that are over 100 years old and that scientists for such a long history have been slowly contributing to. And it's really exciting to be part of that history, to be another scientist who's going to contribute to this well-eastern. of knowledge that has been held in this beautiful old institution. You know, your excitement has gotten me really interested about some of the stuff, some of the stuff you're doing over there.

And I want to specifically look at Mesozoic birds, what, around 150 to 65 million years ago. Can you give me an idea of what bird diversity was like back then? If I were able to be alive, what would I be looking at? So specifically 165 to 150 million years ago, the only bird you would have is Archaeopteryx. Archaeopteryx first appears 155 to 150 million years ago in southern Germany, and it is the oldest and most primitive fossil bird that we know of. And really interestingly, it was the oldest and most primitive fossil bird when it was discovered.

And now 150 years later, it is still, it still has this position. But if you move into sediments that are a little bit younger, say 130 to 120 million years old, This is where all the famous Jeho Bioda from Lowning province. So if you're in Launing, 130, 120 million years ago, you would have definitely not the diversity of birds you have today, but you would have birds with long bony tails, you know, like that show that they came from, you know, reptiles, that they are reptiles, that they descended from dinosaurs that also have this trait.

But you also would have some of the earliest birds with beaks, a group called the Confucius ornithoforms, mostly this group called Confucius Ornus, of course, named after Confucius. And so this is the earliest bird with an abbreviated tail, earliest bird with a beak. It has really weird, long, narrow wings. So I mean, I think it would look maybe like a crow with weird wings to you, but it's essentially has the plan of a modern bird, except it has these big claws on its wings. So that's really weird. We still don't exactly know what these claws were for, because these claws are bigger than the claws we have in the dinosaurs that are closely related to birds. So we think in the evolution of

birds that they're losing their claws, they're losing their teeth. But we also have birds with big teeth, more teeth than the dinosaurs that they're related to, or bigger claws than the dinosaurs they're related to. And then you would have a group called the Anantuanathines, which is what I did my PhD on. So in Antoinathines, we consider the first major avian radiation. And a lot of people say that this parallels the radiation of modern birds that we saw after. the KT extinction. And you know, modern birds are the most diverse group of animals living on land today. So if you take all the species of lizards and you take all the species of mammals and you add them together, there are more species of birds. So that's incredible diversity, right?

So comparing that radiation to the radiation of an antionate, isn't very fair. Because if you're in the Cretaceous, you don't have ales, you don't have penguins, you don't have, you know, ostriches. You don't even have any birds that have these types of ecologies. You know what you mean? You don't have large flightless birds running around. You don't have specialized night hunters. You don't have any birds with extreme aquatic specializations, at least not in the early pretaceous. So you would have a lot of different birds, but you wouldn't have this shape and size diversity that we see today. I mean, those descriptions are terrific. I'm still, I'm still back with the bird that has claws on its wings, trying to figure out how crazy

that must be. I know that you work with fossilized soft tissue like lungs and ovaries. This is extremely rare. You know, it's not like 40%. It's, you know, 0.001% that we get these other types of tissues preserved. So I've studied a bunch of birds that preserved traces of the ovaries. And that was also very cool. And so, for example, living birds all have only a single, okay, not all.

but most living birds have a single functional ovary and ovaduct. And this is unique to birds. All other animals with ovaries have two, a pair of ovaries like humans do. Like crocodilians, the avian, the closest living relatives to birds, they all have two functional ovaries. But these fossils that preserve these soft tissues showed us that the earliest birds had already lost function of one of the ovaries, same as living birds. And that was really, that was, you know, it's interesting because it confirms the idea that this one ovary was lost. because of flight in order to reduce weight. As you imagine if this bird is pecking on the ground for food

and a predator startles the bird and it needs to escape really quickly. If it has two developing eggs inside it, it's really heavy. It makes it difficult to fly, especially because these early birds weren't as good at flying as living birds. This is what ornithologists had hypothesized was the reason they lost one ovary. And now we can show that since their earliest birds already had a single ovary, that this kind of supports a hypothesis that the appearance of flight coincides with the loss of one of the ovaries. And of course, a lot of people think, no, these kind of things they can't preserve. There's no way

ovarian tissue can preserve. And I mean, I understand there has their, you know, reservations. And I also will be completely transparent that my first study of these soft tissues was extremely superficial. But I have since gone back with a postdoc of mine, Alita Bayol. And we have. have gone deeper into these traces. We've done, well, she has mostly done, a bunch of really cool analyses, and we've been actually able to prove that these are indeed ovarian follicles. I'm Ira Flato, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. I also know that this year you had a study published about what would have been the world's smallest dinosaur, and the study was retracted. Can you talk about that? How did you discover that the results were inaction?

I think it's very important for scientists to own their mistakes. I don't want to just pretend that didn't happen. I think it's important to face that and say, yes, I was wrong. It turned out it was another specimen that proved us wrong. But there were also some researchers who were able to see, like once we published the paper, who were able to see from just the skull that we described alone that that was a lizard. But these are also people who focused more on lizard. So we were basically a group of mostly birdworkers who had what I call now avian tunnel vision. And there were a lot of features that were weird, that were unusual for a bird. In hindsight, they maybe should have been red flags, but we just thought it was a very unusual bird. Turns out, it's a very unusual lizard. But it's still a really fascinating specimen. Yes, the paper was retracted, but it wasn't retracted because our methods were wrong or because there was fudge data or any of these other reasons that papers are usually retracted. It was simply retracted because we were wrong. And fair enough, you know, journals can do whatever, just make whatever decisions that they choose. But the fun fact is that because we named a species in this paper,

the paper will always continue to be cited. According to the ICCN, the, you know, this code that dictates all the zoological nomenclature, even though the paper's retracted, it's like the nomenclatureal acts in the paper are still valid. So it's this weird gray area. But yeah, the unfortunate thing is we are trying to fix this problem, you know, and talk about the mistakes that we made and talk about observations that, you know, just kind of talk about this controversy. But because of this moratorium on publishing on amber specimens, a lot of journals just don't want to touch it. So it's really hard now to go and kind of rectify this problem because nobody wants to review the papers. No journal wants to publish these reports. So it's, yeah, it's weird kind of purgatory, I guess.

Yeah, well, you have a lot of other work to keep you busy, though, in the meantime. And it's exciting to listen to your enthusiasm. Thank you for taking time to be with us today. Thank you so much. It was my pleasure. It was really nice chatting with you. Jingmey O'Connor is the associate curator of fossil reptiles at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. She's also an adjunct professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.

And you can watch her breakthrough video and see and learn more about ancient birds. Here's the link, breakthroughfilms.org. It's a really great film. You're going to want to see it, breakthroughfilms.org. We're having a watch party for our next breakthrough video featuring neurologist Bianca Jones Marlin. She'll be discussing the video, and it's co-hosted with Black and Neuro Community Group.

Join us online Saturday, October 10th, at 1 p.m. Eastern Time, and you can find out more at Science, Friday.com slash watch party. And this week on the Science Friday Vox Pop app, we want to know, have your dreams changed since the COVID-19 pandemic started? Tell us about it on the Science Friday Vox Pop app wherever you get your apps. If you missed any part of the program, you'd like to hear it again. Subscribe to our podcasts, or you can actually ask a smart speaker now to play Science Friday

and say hi to us on all kinds of social media. We're there all week long. Have a great weekend. We'll see you next week. I'm Ira Flato.