Science Friday - Bee News, Summer Science Reading. June 29, 2018, Part 2

Episode Date: June 29, 2018

Bumblebees and honeybees are two species of bees that form colonies. The colonies of bumblebees are smaller compared to their honeybee cousins, who’s hives can house tens of thousands of individuals. But both of these colonies have complicated compositions and structures that help them thrive. For bumblebees, recent studies showed that colonies located in urban areas may actually be more successful than nests located in agricultural areas. Plus, how do bees pick a new queen? Biologist Ash Samuelson and entomologist Ramesh Sagili join Ira to get the buzz. Plus, school is finally out! No more teachers! No more books! … Except the ones on our summer science reading list. From harvester ants to the ruts of ancient Rome, Annalee Newitz, tech culture editor for Ars Technica shares her picks written by scientists who really dig into their work. And Science Friday education director Ariel Zych sings the praises of a book about the stuff no one likes to talk about—human waste. So, act like a kid again and assign yourself a book or two from our summer science reading list. No book report required. Plus, check out the SciFri staff’s recommendations for summertime science beach reads.   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. This hour, we're going to talk about the bees, bumblebees and honeybees in particular. There are two species of bees that live in communities, and like any group of animals living together, it can get complicated. First, the bumblebee. When you think about bees, what picture pops into your head? A bee buzzing around a flower and a picturesque field of glowing color. Well, I'm betting you don't picture a bee in an urban city environment, unless you're trying to swat one of a wild. as it interferes with your morning latte. Scientists have been interested in how these two different environments affect bumblebees where they live, their nests. Is there a difference in the reproductive success of city versus country living bumblebees?

And the results are going to surprise you. The study was published this week in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society Bee, and my next guest is an author on that study, and she's here to fill us in on the details. Ash Samuelson is a PhD student in biology at Royal Holloway at the University of London in Egham, England, and she joins us by Skype. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi there, thanks for having me on. And just in passing, how are the bumblebees doing in the UK and Europe?

Are they healthy? Yes, well, there's a big range of effects of various environmental stresses on bumblebees in Europe and the UK in the same way that there is in the U.S. US. So some species are doing well, but other species are really at risk here in the UK. Now, we talk about bumblebees living in nests and honeybees living in hives, correct? That's correct. Can you tell us what is unique about bumblebee nests, how is different from the honeybee hives? So you can kind of think of bumblebee nests as a kind of primitive version of honeybee hives. And so honeybee colonies are huge colonies from 20,000.

thousand to 60,000 bees. Whereas in bumblebee colonies, we have about 200 bees at any one time. So they're a lot smaller. They're a lot more simple. So if we think of that really distinctive hexagonal honeycomb structure that you

see in honeybees, you don't see that in bumblebee. So they have this kind of primitive wax pot system that they use to store their honey or their nectar and pollen. Let's talk about the study of the the living conditions and the success rates of reproduction between bumblebees, the city bee and the country bee?

What was the question you were trying to answer and what was the result? So what we were looking at was whether bee colonies, so bumblebee colonies, have higher reproductive success in urban areas compared to agricultural areas. And we're interested in this because previous research has suggested that actually we're seeing higher density, of bumblebees and other bees in the city than in the countryside. And we were thinking, why is this? Why do, is it that they're moving from other areas, they're just migrating in, or is it that they're actually more successful in these areas?

So what we did was we placed colonies of bumblebees out in the field across the gradient of urbanisation, and then we measured various things about their colony success. But the key thing that we mentioned, measured was how many new reproductive offspring they produced. So how many new bumblebee queens and males were produced out of these colonies? And what we found was that the colonies in the urban landscapes produce more reproductive offspring than those in the countryside, which basically means that they're more fit.

So it's kind of the key in biology. You want to be able to pass your genes onto the next generation. And that's what's happening here. populations are going to be stronger. You know, that's so counterintuitive to what we would think. Right. Why are they more successful in the city than they might be in the country? Well, yeah, so it sounds counterintuitive initially because we think of cities as really unnatural environments and the countryside as completely natural. But actually, that's not the situation at all. So the kind of countryside that we have in England and a lot of the world now

is this very intensive agriculture. And this is very different to the environment that the bees evolved in. And so what I think it more shows is rather than urban areas are particularly ideal for bees, is it really shows that agricultural areas are not that good. And this is probably because of a combination of things. And I'd say the main two kind of candidates for that are pesticide use, so exposure to agricultural pesticides. in the agriculture areas.

This has been shown to negatively affect colony success in bumblebees, but also foraging, forage availability. So we know that cities and towns have huge amounts of floral resources in gardens and parks, whereas in the countryside, actually there's really not that much in terms of wildflowers when you've got huge areas of monocultures and not that much for bees to feed on. So there is enough then in the cities, in urban environments, there's enough food and resources for the bumblebees to survive, and it seemed to do very well.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so we can't say for certain that it is because of the food because our study doesn't show the mechanisms behind the increased colony success in the urban areas. But we do find kind of indicators. So one of the results that we had was that bees in the city were more, likely to contain food reserves, which suggests that they have plentiful food coming in. So they have a surplus, so they're able to store it. So there are definitely suggestions that there is lots of food available in the city. You know, we talk about bees a lot on Science Friday,

and we know that they have natural enemies. They have parasites, things like that. Do the city bees have the same kinds or less? Yeah. Yeah. So we looked at two types of parasites in this study, we looked at internal parasites, so what we think of as diseases, and we found actually that there was no difference in the amount of parasites that were in the bees in the urban and the rural environments. But we also looked at different type of parasite, and that's a brood parasite. So these are called cuckoo bees, and so they are very, very similar to the cuckoo bird. What they do is it's a type of bumblebee, so it's a different species of bumblebee. And what they do is they come in and they steal the nest of a bufftailed bumblebee,

which is the species that we did our experiment on. So they come in when the nest is already established, they've got lots of worker bees ready to go, they've got lots of food stores. The cuckoo bee comes in, kills the queen, and then takes over the workers for herself. And she doesn't have to produce any workers. She gets all that work done for her. So we also counted the number of invasions by cuckoo bees in the urban environment and in the rural environment. And we actually found that there were fewer invasions in the city than in the countryside.

And in fact, in the very central city, we found no invasions by cuckoo bees at all. So there's a number of reasons that this could be, but one of them could be that the smell of the nest, which is how cuckoo bees locate them, could be masked by pollution. from cars and such. So there's a silver lining, too. Only the pollution and noise whatever is in the city. Yes, exactly. Yes, I'm not necessarily advocating for more produce and the same bees. I know you're not.

Is there anything we city dwellers here in New York can do to help the bumblebees survive better? Anything we can help them with? Yeah, so I think what our study is showing is that cities can provide. provide a refuge for bees. So in the fact that they do provide so many floral resources, but not all flowers are good for bees. And a lot of particularly the very highly bred horticultural varieties of flowers can actually provide no nectar at all,

or they're so showy, but they're actually inaccessible by bees. So it's really important when people are planting their gardens and trying to attract bees to really look up, and there's lots of information available online, online about which plants are particularly attractive to bees. And once we completely fill our cities with flowers, then they do provide a really good resource. But I think we also need to be doing that in the countryside.

I think what this is highlighting is how much more we need to be focusing on increasing floral resources in the countryside than in the city. So planting diverse kinds of very simple flowers, showy simple flowers. Yes, so more, yes, so more simple. flowers is generally the case. It's not a hard and fast rule, and there's research out there to say which flowers are better and worse, but generally the really highly bred varieties are inaccessible to bees. Yeah, I see them all over the clover and things like that, just simple. Right. Yeah, simple stuff. So what else would you like to know? Where is your research taking you in what direction?

So the way we're heading now is to really delve deeper into that foraging question. So what are bees foraging on in the city? And is it easier for them to find food? So actually, we're switching over to the other type of bee that you mentioned in your intro, the honeybee for this experiment. So what we've been doing is we've been using the honeybee waggle dance, which is a unique form of communication that honeybees have. And bumblebees don't have this, which is why we switch over to the honeybees.

But what it is, is it, honeybees perform a dance. dance to tell their nestmates where they've been foraging. So where a really profitable patch of food is. And so we can decode this dance and track where the bees have been going. So we've done that across urban areas and rural areas with hives that we've set up in those areas. And then we're plotting out where they're foraging. And we're saying, are they having to travel further to find food in the countryside than in the city? So you're involved in that study right now?

Yes, yep, that's in the works. How many hives do you have to put out to study them? And what does it take? Is it 10, 20, 100? So with the study that we're talking about now, the bumblebee study, we put out 38 hives. So generally because the colony itself is kind of the unit that you're measuring, you end up having to work with any kind of social bee, you're ending up having to work with a lot of bees in.

total. But you're working on that colony as the individual unit. Wow, it's fascinating. I wish you wish you a great luck. And good luck in your PhD work. Thank you. Ash Simulson is a PhD student in biology at Royal Holloway at University of London in Egham, and she's joined this by Skype. Have a good weekend. We're going to take a break, and when we come back, we're going to talk about the queen bee. Going to switch to honey bees, talk about the queen bee. What does the colony? What does the hive decide to do when they lose the queen? We'll talk about it. It's fascinating. After the break. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Last month, the royal wedding of Prince Harry and Megan Markle was a big event. But for the British royal family, everyone already

knows who's next in line for the throne after Queen Elizabeth. Sorry, Harry, but for another type of monarchy, that line of succession is less clear. And I'm talking about honeybees. If a honeybee queen suddenly dies, it's up to the rest of the hive. Her kids depict who takes over. But how do they make that decision? Researchers wanted to know how the hive comes to this decision, and their results were published in the journal Science Reports. Ramesh Sagili is author of that study,

and he's also an associate professor in Epiculture at Oregon State. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, Ari. Thank you. That's the study of bees, right, epiculture? Yeah, study of bees or keeping bees as well. Keeping bees. Tell us a bit how the structure of a honeybee hive works. How many queens would the average honeybee hive go through?

Yeah, so in general, when we talk about a functional hive, there is only one queen. And in rare instances, you will see multiple queens, but usually it's not. So I would say 99% of the time there is only one queen in a hive. And there are about, it depends on the time of the year. could be anywhere between 25,000 to 50,000 bees. These are female workers. They are sterile. That means they don't lay eggs as long as the queen is in the hive.

And then there are drones, which are the males, and their only function is to mate with the virgin queens that are produced during the swarming season or even later. So basically that's the structure. They have a very well-defined caste system with a queen, who is the egg-laying machine. She keeps laying eggs throughout her life. It could be two years to five years. and then they produce drones seasonally.

Maybe they are about 5% of the colony's whole strength. So when a queen bee suddenly dies the hive has to find an emergency queen, right? Why would a queen die suddenly? Yeah, that's an emergency situation. That's why this term has been used for a while, emergency, because queens are made at different times of the year as well based on their need, like swarming. When you see all these huge swarms coming in May or June, when the colonies get to a certain strength, they have to divide.

So it's a colony fission. So they have to divide. That's a colony reproduction. So at that time, queens are produced that's a more natural. But then emergency arises when a queen accidentally dies. It could be because a queen was infected with a disease, or she had some parasite load, or it could be a beekeeper as well. As beekeepers, we try to manipulate hives.

And accidentally, she might be smashed between the frames or the tool that you're using. So there could be multiple reasons why a queen can die. Huh. And so how does the hive know the queens died? I mean, it's not an emergency alert system. Maybe there is. Yeah. So it's a very fascinating social insect as far as, you know, honeybees are the most advanced social insects that I can think of.

And so they have this fascinating mechanism. As soon as the queen dies, the queen is emitting a pheromone, which, like, it smells to them, but you can't smell that pheromone. But the pheromone communication is a huge thing in these colonies. So as soon as the queen is dead, within hours, the beasts will know because they are not getting any pheromone from the queen. And that's when they know that they have to make a new queen that can be functional and help the reproduction of the colony.

Now, what's it, that's right. And your study, what's really interesting is that your study looked at how the hive chooses to make a new queen. And you found that they choose the chubby, larva in the rear, and it's turned that one into a queen. Take it through what you did in the study and how you found that out. Yeah, so, you know, honeybees have evolved for millions of years, and then still there is not very clear understanding of, especially in the emergency situation, how do these worker

bees that are making a decision to choose which larvae? And no, colony fitness is huge because honeybee queen is such a vital entity for the hive. because everything is dependent on her queen egg laying rate. So that's a reason why it's such an important task to pick a larva that should be fit. So there was not much understanding before our study. There was speculation that there could be even kin selection. That means the larvae could be based on some nepotism because all the individuals that you see those 30 or 50,000 worker bees, they're not always closely related.

Some are only related to 25% extent and until 75% as well. It depends on how many drones the queen was made it with. If the queen has made it in the sky with 15 drones, so there are 15 patrilines. That means each bee may have, not each bee, maybe a subset of bees, maybe a thousand bees may have one father and the mother is the same for all. So there was a, in the past in 80s and 90s, there was this notion that maybe kin selection or kin discrimination is also, involved and they can really choose who is closely related to them to choose a larva which can become a queen in the hive. So here what we did is there is a well-defined caste system, as I said earlier. So the female caste, especially the workers and the queen, they are

decided based on the nutrition. So we thought maybe nutrition should be tested. So what we did is we deprived a certain age of larva. It was one day old larva. So we were depriving them of their brood food. That means we were depriving them for nutrition for about four hours. And then we gave them back to those colonies after they were queenless. And then we allowed them to pick a larva which could become a queen. And then we always saw that they were preferentially picking the larva which were not starved.

That means they were not deprived of brute food for that four hours. So your analogy of chabines, I know. It may not really, they may not look chubby because it's an age group where four hours doesn't make them look very different. But we think that the larvae wear emitting pheromones telling the nutritional stress or conveying the nutritional stress so that the bees could pick them based on their nutritional status to become a queen. And so when they pick their larvae, how do they turn it into a queen? So, yeah, it's a very complex series of, it's a cascade events that happens when they do this. So usually when a queen is fed a different diet, when compared to a worker, so as soon as a queen lays an egg, it can always become, so it's always laid, it can become, it's basically a female. So you can make a queen or a worker out of that egg that has been laid.

it's the diet. As I said earlier, nutrition decides whether you become a queen or a worker. So they are feeding a different food, which is we usually loosely use this language of royal jelly. So when you are fed royal jelly, which is a little different in the food composition when compared to what you're feeding a worker, you can get a queen out of that. Wow. How does the jelly kick off the DNA or whatever is going on in there to choose to make it into a queen? It's just fascinating. Yeah, it's pretty fascinating. So what we think is so the bees actually are feeding more quantity of food as well.

It's not just so it's high. So most of this protein food that I'm talking about is rich in sugars. And so the queen larva that they have decided to make a queen out of it, they are fed a huge amount of this food, which is high in sugar content. And so we think the stretch receptors, so the queen's guts, the larval gut, has stretch receptors. As soon as you feed them a lot of this food, so the stretch receptors are expanding. So that sends a signal to the brain, and so all these hormonal changes and all those cascade of events happen, and that's how you get a queen.

Fascinating. Never heard the word stretch receptors used about a B before. That's great. It's great to know. That's why we talk to you because we like to learn these things. Thank you very much. Yeah, absolutely. Dr. Sagali, it's been fascinating.

Ramirez Sagali is author of a study that's in this, Scientific Reports, associate professor of apriculture at Oregon State. Thanks for taking time to be with us today. School is out. And across the country, kids are headed into the first week of summer vacation. How did the old song go? No more pencils, no more books? No more, I want the whole thing, you know, except, of course, they get assigned that

dreaded reading, summer reading list. I don't want to do that. But now, you're a lot older and you're a lot wiser, and you welcome the lazy days of summer because of the extra time you have to read. You like reading now, and being ever so cognizant of your desires, we decided to create our own list of classic summer science reads. So you can curl up in the hammock or lays out on the beach blanket with a great summer book. And we're going to talk about that.

And joining me now to share their picks for our summer science reading list is Annalie Nuitz, tech culture editor at Ars Technica. Welcome back, Annalie. Hi, thanks for having me. You're welcome. Ariel Zitch, Science Friday's, Education Director, joins me here in the studio. Good, always have you.

A pleasure as always. And we also want to hear from our listeners. You folks out there, are you looking for a great science book for yourself or a student? Do you have a recommendation you want to share? Give us a call. Our number 844-724-8255. 844-724-8255, or you can tweet us at Sci Talk. Now, we have a special ground rule in our L this year, don't we?

Our rules this year are a little bit different. We didn't just go with the current bestseller list, right? That's right. We went off the beaten path. We figure you've heard about all these other, you know, whatever's out there right now. You're kind of aware of it. You're on board. We wanted to expose you to stuff that maybe you hadn't picked up in a while or hadn't really seen it flew under your radar.

Okay. Let's go on to your first suggestion. What, Ariel, what's your first pick in the book? My first pick is Galileo's daughter by Davis-Obell. Great book. It's published in 1999, but it's really about a 17th century challenge that Galileo undertook to convince the world that, in fact, the sun wasn't revolving around it. It was revolving around the sun. And what made that your first pick?

Did that just jump into your head is, oh, that's a great book, I remember reading it? I got to say that right now, a story about someone using evidence to change the minds of many, many, many millions of people at a time when power oppressed knowledge, that's a compelling narrative. And to see someone do it with, you know, with amazing writing, with diplomacy, with deference, with populism, to essentially infect a world with an understanding was incredible. But then the fact that it was also in the supportive community that he had a daughter who, in spite of the fact that she was in a convent was loving him, was caring for, and was editing his manuscript, starching his collars, and saying, hey, you can do this. And so, you know, really is just inspiring. It's comforting. Yeah, comforting.

Exactly. And it was, you know, he's still, his book was banned for 150 plus years. So it's not like this book that he wrote as a dialogue specifically to make it kind of hypothetical so we could get it through the church. He did that anyway. It still worked. It was the whole black market erupted in Europe to grasp at this knowledge because it was so well written and it was so important and so evidence-based.

So, you know, reading this book, besides being a beautiful read, It was inspiring Galileo's daughter. Annalie, give us your most summary science book. So my most summary book is Deborah Gordon's book, Ants at Work, which is a fantastic

story about a scientist, Gordon, who studies communities and animals, including humans. She'd spent her summers for 17 years studying harvester ants in the broiling heat of the Arizona sun. And from that, she learned a lot about ants that we'd never known before. And one of her big discoveries that she popularized with this book is that, in fact,

queens are not in charge of the colony. Queens are just hanging out laying eggs. And she discovered how workers in the colony learn what they need to do, how each individual aunt makes a decision about what it's going to do with its day. Wow, that is fascinating. We were just talking about bees before, but ants also great social colony. Ants like bees have a colony structure, but one of the great things about Gordon's work is that she uses network theory to think about how ants talk to each other and communicate what's needed. And so she gives us this incredible picture of how ants are basically counting each other. Each time they encounter each other, they touch antennae onto each other's bodies, which is basically kind of like smelling and licking.

So they're smelling each other all the time. And when they smell each other, they can figure out where they've been. And so an ant that's just sort of sitting around in the colony wondering, hmm, what should I do? If it starts to smell a ton of ants coming in that smell like they've been gathering food, for example, it knows to go out and gather food. or if it smells a bunch of ants that have been cleaning something up, it knows how to do that. And so she gives us this picture of ants as both a social organism, but also a bunch of individuals who are making decisions all the time. And on top of that, it's just a really funny, humane book.

It's really, we get a sense of what it's like to be a scientist out in the desert studying these ants and how hard it is, but also how rewarding and exciting. Great book. I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. talking about our summer books with Annalie Newitz and Ariel Zitch. A lot of insects. Creatures this hour.

Ariel, speaking of animal behavior, I hear you have a very peculiar book on your list. Yes, I couldn't resist. This book is called Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation. It's kind of exactly what it sounds like. It's a series of advice columns written by Dr. Tatiana and evolutionary biologist caricature, but to this column, organisms from all shapes and sizes write in about their bizarre sex conundrums, hopeful, lonely, frustrated, near-death experiences, all of these insects and animals and molds and mites, they write in and say, hey, I've got this problem.

And an evolutionary biologist answers those problems with concern, but also with robust evidence with this way of saying, hey, if you're struggling with all of these males attacking you every time you emerge from your solitary bee den, it's probably because there's an equal investment in reproductive strategies between the sexes of your species. Or, you know, if you're a slime mold and you're upset about the fact that you have eight different sexes and have to convene them good news, you probably have closer to 100 different sexes, and ultimately any one of you might get lucky at any given time, so fear not. It's what I like about this book is that I blush and I gape and I laugh out loud when I read it because, like, truly the, you know, if you're getting, if you're feeling like normal, the way you think about sex normally is boring, pick this thing up because it will just horrifying to light you.

And also, you know, I found myself looking over my shoulder while I was reading it to be like, did someone see me just read that? This is bizarre. So apart from that element, it's truly educational. You need no mastery of evolutionary biology. You don't need to have a mastery of the concept of sexual selection to get. the gist because she explains it in this like wildly compelling relatable detail. This is by Olivia Jetson, who is herself, you know, an Oxford-trained Ph.D. Evolutionary biologists. And the other thing I really appreciate about this book is how much we don't know. So like there are these sex systems that are so bizarre and are so elaborate, you know, hyena fallacies and polyandria and, you know, incest that would make Oedipus blush. And sometimes she says, you know what, there's, here's the three theories. We actually, we're still trying to figure out.

how this happened. So it was just, it's absolutely delightful, and you can pick it up and read it column by column all at once. Time to catch our breath here with a break. We're going to take a break and talk lots more about summer books with Annalie Newitz and Ariel Zitch, and you can also send us, oh, we have some recommendations coming in. On number 844-8255. You can also tweet us at SciFri. Stay with us. It'll be right back, and I might throw in a pick of my own when we come back. Stay with us. We'll be right back, as I say, answer. this break.

Hi, I'm Ira Plato. This is Science Friday. We're talking about our summer book reading. Picks of our summer lists with Annalie Newitz, tech culture editor at Ars Technica, Ariel Zich, our SciFry Education Director here in our studio. Our number 844-8255. Let's see if we can get a couple of books.

People are suggesting books. Let's go to Lynn and Savannah. George, you're one of my favorite cities. Hi, Lynn. Hi, how are you doing? there. Go ahead. Well, I liked Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind. That's just this year. It's out this year. Yes, it is, and it's a very interesting book

regarding the passage of psychedelic drugs from the 50s where they were accepted, to the 60s where they were rejected, to the underground research, which is still going on. And then the second half of the, and he took each one of those just once just to see it. And then the second half of the book is how your brain reacts to it. It's a fabulous book. It is a great book, and we had him on a few weeks ago to talk about it. Well, that's why I bought it. Well, that's great. I'll tell Michael Pollan that you'd send

his record. All right. You too. I love his book. All right. Thanks. It is a great book. All of pollen, you know, we're talking about other books, but the whole Pollan series, he's written everything, you know. And it's always through that first-person account, you know, I think that's what comes to me about a lot of these books is that, you know, the nonfiction genre is one in which the writer often experiences the thing.

That's what made Michael Pollan's book so great, and I think that's one of the things that makes a lot of the recommendations on our list this year really pop, is that you feel like you're there because the writer was there while they were experiencing it. Annelie, your next pick. My next pick, Ira, you know that I like archaeology. So I had to put something in here about an ancient city. This is a book by Eric Polar called The Traffic Systems of Pompeii. So usually you don't think of traffic when you think of Pompeii.

You think of the fact that it was buried under volcanic ash after the eruption of Vesuvius. But one of the great things, of course, about Pompeii is that because it was buried for so long, It's basically a city preserved in amber. And so we can really see just the daily life of Romans in this port town. And what Polar does that is just fantastic and at first seems really counterintuitive is that he starts of understanding, he starts understanding everyday life by examining the cobblestone streets of the city. He literally spent months on hands and knees looking at patterns from wagon weeks. in the street and also curb stones.

And by examining curb stones, he was actually able to see from the wearing patterns a lot of different things about daily life, such as the fact that Romans drove on the right-hand side of the street and often took curbs really fast. And so they would drive up on the curb. And he learned a lot about the life of ordinary people like drivers and where they lived, what their lives were like, what kinds of vehicles. belong to different people. And from this book, which like I said, it sounds just like a crazy specific topic, but we get this incredibly visceral sense of street life in Pompeii. And it

really brings the city to life. Polar is a great writer. And he ends the book with a short story about a wagon driver who is very grumpy about having to drive his master's stuff from his home in Pompeii out to his summer estate, which was a very typical thing that the elites in Pompeii would have. And we just learn all about how traffic sucks and how do you find your way around the city and what kinds of, you know, affordances that a wagon driver would have as opposed to a rich guy. And so it's just, it's delightful. It'll transport you to another world. And it'll really make you see your own city differently. I found after reading it that I spent a lot of time looking at curbs in my own city, trying to see what I could learn from it. So it's just delightful.

I can't recommend it enough. That's good. That's very interesting because you just reminded me of one of my favorite books that I was going to recommend, which I will, that is sort of an historical book. Also, it's the Lost City of Z. Great book. Isn't that a great, David Graham wrote this book? It's about the very legendary British explorer, Percy Fawcett, who goes into the Amazon looking for this fable civilization that was there, and it swallows him up and he's never heard from again. And the author goes back there to try to trace what happened to him, and it's so good.

I remember saying to him at the time when we interviewed him. They should make a movie out of it, which they did. Of course, like many movies, not half as good as the novel. And it's not really a novel. It's a work of nonfiction. It's a great book. And it's a great read. And it's a, to say that a, you know, a nonfiction book is a page turner.

It's a good compliment, I think, because it is a page turn. Absolutely. If you can't put it down, that's how you know it belongs on the summer list. I think that's absolutely true. Yeah. It's just, it was great. Let me go to the phones. See if we can get another call.

And from Matthew in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Hi, Matthew. Hi, how are you doing? Hi there. Go ahead. So the book I wanted to recommend is called The Descent of Man and the Selection, what's the rest of the title? Selection based on sex.

I may have missed a few words in there, but it's Charles Darwin, 1871. This was 12 years after the Origin of Species was published. And although Darwin, you know, dives into sexual selection a bit in the origin of species, in this particular book, he goes into it a lot more in depth, you know, based on all the morphological and behavioral evidence he had, and then also talks a bit about human evolution as well. And the thing I love about this book, it's a good read for, you know, probably high school age and up.

But, you know, the thing we have to consider when looking at literature is the author and where they were living and kind of the air of the time. And I think, you know, reading this book, you almost get the feeling, or at least I did, that because this was 12 years after the origin of species was published, and, you know, of course, that was a very controversial book in many ways when it was published, you almost get the sense that people were more open to these ideas

and that Darwin may have, in turn, been more comfortable writing about them, too. So a very classic book. Definitely recommend it for anyone who is just starting to be interested in natural selection and evolution. But, you know, of course, people who are already, you know, very interested in and have read a lot of those sorts of things as well. Yeah, you know, and that's a good suggestion because it's very interesting to go back to the the original, the sources, there are some great scientists who write very well and very easy to understand language. And they're invitational as well.

I mean, like my thought when I was reading about Galileo and even with Darwin, especially with Darwin, is they write how they did it? And if you're like, if this guy could make these observations 200 years ago, I probably could do it too. You know, like these observations are out there to be made and that blows my mind. You know, like, and it is. It's the kind of thing where I think as a teacher, I'm like, my students could replicate this study. This guy did it in his backyard over a summer, you know? One of the things that's great about,

I think, all these books that we've been talking about is that we get a window into the scientific process. So it isn't just someone saying, like, here's the truth and here's what we know. It's actually, you know, here's how I discovered it. And I kind of screwed up sometimes. And I, you know, I had false starts. And it really, it humanizes the scientific process. And we realize, like, yeah, it's just a bunch of people. It was just, you know, Darwin hanging out on a ship observing what he could. And so I think that's just a really important part of good science writing. Yeah.

And you know, you remind me in that genre, one of the books I really, really enjoyed over the last few years, was a book called Einstein and the Quantum, The Quest of the Valiant Swabian, Swabian by Douglas Stone. And, you know, there are a lot of books about Einstein, a lot of stuff. But you never really read the context in which he lived. And in this book, you get to meet Einstein with. all the other famous people around him. It doesn't happen in isolation, doesn't it?

No, and you see how he interacted and how their thinking influenced his thinking and how they all work together and the ideas bounced off of each other and they disagree and whatever. That's why I really like that book. Yeah, science is a group project and it lasts over generations, which is part of what's very beautiful about it. Yeah. 844724-8255 phones are lighting up. Ariel, have you got another pick for us? I do. I will share one that totally blew my mind. It's called

The Big Necessity by Rose George. She's a British journalist who went on a multi-year, multicultural voyage into sanitation. It's not something that we like to talk about, but we all think about it. Into sanitation. Sanitation. Dealing with mostly poo,

but also the other stuff. And it was one of those things where I was expecting potty humor. And she says outright, you know, I'm not, I don't much like toilet humor. and by now I've heard a lot of it, but I also don't think 2.6 billion people without a toilet is funny. And so she makes an incredibly compelling case for why sanitation is that it should be the premier frontier of engineering and civic society. And she does it in a way that is actually really funny. So she goes into sewers with people, the flushers of London and the sewer engineers of New York. She talks to the engineers who design the toto, who have a trade.

secret artificial poo recipe that they used to test their toilets. She talks to untouchables in India who collect and dispose of human waste with their bare hands. But she also, you know, if you're sitting at home listening to Science Friday on your northern porcelain throne thinking, I haven't made in the shade. I've got a flush toilet. People in Japan might be appalled that your toilet isn't heated, that it doesn't close on its own, that it doesn't wash and dry you afterwards. And so I laughed out loud in this book and I also came away positively horrified that There are girls who are quitting school because they don't have proper sanitation. And so, you know, it's a travel log.

You move through all these places with the author, but you also, you see this, like, most human activity from the eyes of astronauts to school children. And, you know, like all good books, it made me think about my own experiences with sanitation. You know, your first pit toilet experience is a memorable one. And, like, good nonfiction, it kind of makes you think a little differently about stuff. Yeah, you know, because you can't. have a society without sanitation. You can't. It's so basic.

It just flies way under the radar screen. And yet we're still like pushing it all into the oceans, rivers, and lakes. I mean, I couldn't believe it. 90% of the world sewage still ends up untreated in water. So yeah, so yeah, it was mind-blowing. Speaking of sewage, I'm I reflato, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. I was talking with Natalie Newitz, Contra of our Technica and Ariel Zitch, Science Friday's Education Director, talking about books this summer, our phone number, 844,

724-8255. Lots of people want to get in. Let's see if we can get another recommendation from here, and then we'll go to the phones. Annalie, what's your next recommendation? So my next recommendation is actually it's a little bit of a heavy topic, so it's not as much of a BT read, but it's something that's really important. It's by Safia Imojja Noble, and it's called Algorithms of Oppression. And it's a very interesting look at how we can answer a question that first came up,

really around 2010 or 2011, when a lot of commentators and people noticed that if you used Google search and you searched for the term black girls, which is what Noble was doing, because she was looking for some fun things for her nieces to do, all of the results were porn. And Google has since changed this, and that's actually one of the things that's wonderful about this book, is that it's already changing some of the problems that it's addressing. But she also found that many other searches related to black women, black people, we're coming up with these results that were really disturbing. For example, if you searched on Michelle Obama, pictures of gorillas would come up in image search on Google. And if you search for something like beautiful women, almost all the

results are white women. And if you search for ugly women, most of the results are black women and people of color. And again, a lot of this stuff is changing partly because of her work. But the book, she's an information studies professor, and the book is about, how did this happen? She doesn't think it is a technical problem. She thinks that it's a social problem, and it has to do with the fact that people designing algorithms basically aren't consulting librarians. And that's part of the thing I love about this book is because librarians kind of emerge at the end as these heroes who can help us fix some of these technical problems with algorithms that are supposed to be really objective. You know, when you go to Google and you do a search, you really expect to get quality information or at least truthful information, certainly not biased or racist information. And so she really feels that, you know, we're having a lot of these technological problems because the people designing algorithms really aren't aware of how biased the data on the web is.

And so they're designing algorithms assuming that data is really neutral when in fact, you know, a piece of data might seem salient to an algorithm, not because people all think it's really good data, but because people all think it's really good data, but because, you know, people hate it or because people are passing around a lie that they really like or it's a popular stereotype. So she really feels that librarians who are, of course, spending their lives, helping people get good information, need to be helping engineers who are trying to design these algorithms and that librarians really have a lot to offer that process. And so it's kind of a call for engineers to work together with people who have a more humanities background or social science background, but also just to get humans in the loop who understand that not all data is neutral. And so it's a fantastic, smart, deep dive into, you know, a question that a lot of us

deal with every day when we use Google search and we're like, how did we get that incredibly weird result? And it also, of course, deals with one of the great social problems of our time, which is racism. Let me see if I can get a quick call into Abby in Brunswick, Georgia. Hi, Abby. Welcome to Science Friday. Quickly. Hi, thanks for taking my call. Go ahead. The book that I'd like to recommend is called The Narrow Edge by Deborah Kramer. And it's a book, kind of a conservation story focused on a species of shorebirds called the Red Knot. And it's a bird that travels from the southern tip of South America in Tierd-Wuego all the way up to the Arctic nest and stops along the way at different important sites along the East Coast.

Some people who can get to see it themselves. Yeah, so I think a nice summer read because you're sitting out on the beach and you might be sharing the beach with these birds that use these super important stopover sites that are critical to their survival. All right, good suggestion. Abby, thanks for taking that. We've run out of time. It goes by quickly.

It does. So many books, and you've got so much time. Go for it. We'll have the book up on our website at ScienceFriety.com. We have Ars Selections up there. Annalie Newitz, Tech Culture Editor for Ars Techrestechica. Ariel Zitch, Science Friday's Education Director. We'll see again next year.

You bet. I hope to see you sooner. All right. Before we go, if you like the segment, we have something special coming up next month for all you linguophiles out there. Science Friday is launching a new newsletter, a new newsletter called Science Diction. You get it? Where we'll be taking a look at the scientific origin of stories of our words and languages, stories of how words and languages begin. You can sign up at Science Friday.com slash sciencediction.

Science Friday.com slash sciencediction. It's going to be really, really interesting. BJ Lehman composed our theme music, and if you missed any part of the program, you know, you can podcast us. You know, we can play Science Friday all week long. Every day now is Science Friday. Just ask your smart speaker to play it. Of course, we have Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all social media. Have a great holiday weekend.

I'm Ira Flato in New York.