Science Friday - Did Dinosaur Flight Evolve More Than Once? | Biodiversity’s Biggest Event Is Underway

Episode Date: October 25, 2024

Some paleontologists argue the ancient footprints found in South Korea show flight may have evolved in multiple dinosaur lineages. And, COP16 will tackle questions like who should profit from non-human DNA, and who is responsible for financing critical conservation projects.Do Fossil Prints Show Dinosaur Flight Evolved More Than Once?Researchers studying tracks fossilized in Cretaceous-era lakeshore mud in what is now South Korea argue this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the dinosaur footprints are “indirect evidence of pre-avian aerial behavior” in a tiny microraptor.The tracks, which belong to a sparrow-sized theropod related to Tyrannosaurus rex, are spaced far enough apart to indicate that the tiny dino was moving across the mud very quickly. That speed, the researchers argue, is faster than the animal should have been able to go just by running with its hindlimbs. However, if flapping wings were added into the equation to give a power boost, the spacing might make sense.If the microraptor did, in fact, have flight-capable wings, that would mean that the ability to fly may have evolved in multiple lineages of dinosaurs, not just the descendants of Archaeopteryx we see as modern birds. Other researchers are not convinced of the analysis, arguing that the tracks may not all have come from the same individual at the same time.Jason Dinh, climate editor for Atmos, joins guest host Sophie Bushswick to talk about the debate, and other stories from the week in science, including an archeological find of medieval-era Silk Road cities in the Uzbek mountains, breathing differences in people born with the inability to smell, and the surprising ability of hornets to hold their liquor.Biodiversity’s Biggest Event Is Underway In ColombiaFrom now until November 1, bureaucrats from nearly every country in the world will be gathered in Cali, Colombia, for COP16, better known as the United Nations biodiversity summit. This “conference of the parties” comes together about every two years to deliberate on the biggest issue in conservation science: how to stop ecological collapse.At the last summit, COP15, nearly every country agreed to a deal to halt biodiversity loss by 2030. This year’s conference will take a temperature check on how nations are doing in their quest to meet this goal (spoiler alert: not well).Also on the agenda are the questions of who should profit from non-human DNA, and how a $700 billion funding gap for conservation work can be filled. Joining guest host Sophie Bushwick to parse through these big ideas is Benji Jones, environmental correspondent for Vox based in New York.Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

The biggest event that you probably haven't heard of is underway in Colombia. So they're really trying to figure out a way to put an end to just this rampant loss that we're seeing in our forests and with wildlife as well. It's Friday, October 25th. The best day of the week. Today is Science Friday. I'm sci-fi producer Kathleen Davis. For the next week, representatives from almost every country in the world are a meeting in Kali, Colombia, for COP 16, the UN's Conference on Biodiversity. They have a big job ahead of them to figure out how to save the planet and halt species loss around the world. We'll talk about that story in just a bit, but first, here's guest host Sophie Bushwick

with a roundup of the biggest science stories of the week. You may have encountered a protest that disrupted your day, blocking traffic on your route to work, for instance. And maybe you grumbled to yourself that this sort of disruptive. protest is not winning any hearts and minds. But new research finds that it could actually have a positive effect. Here to talk more about that and other stories from the week in science is Jason Din, climate editor at Atmos in Washington, D.C. Welcome back, Jason. Thanks for having me. Okay, so tell me about this study. Yeah, I think some listeners may find this result to be quite

surprising, but in this new study that was published in the journal Nature Sustainability, social scientists found that disruptive, high-profile climate protests can actually boost public support for moderate climate groups. This runs counter to a widespread opposition we often hear whenever these more fringe demonstrations happen, right? There's this gut feeling that disrupting people's lives might hurt support for social movements. But this study showed that that isn't the case, and in fact, they can actually increase support. This particular study looked at a case from the UK in 2022, when the group just stopped oil shut down the country's busiest motorway, the M25, for four days. They found that within weeks of that demonstration happening, public support

for more moderate environmental groups like Friends of the Earth increased. And scientists and activists have theorized that these radical fringes of social movements might have this type of consensus-building effect, but this is really the first time they've been able to test it in real time, in real time, response to an actual protest. So the research was just looking at this one specific protest, not some of the other forms of disruption we've seen, like the people who throw soup on famous paintings. Yeah, exactly. They pulled about 1,400 people in response to this particular protest. And do they know why people increase their support for the environmental cause, even though they had to put up with this action that might have annoyed them personally?

So we can't really point to a precise mechanism based on this study and the reason why any individual changes their minds is probably going to differ person to person. But in general, the finding supports this hypothesis called the radical flank effect where there's a heightened awareness of an issue sparked by a radical group. And that increases solidarity with and support for the more moderate ones. Okay. Stepping back in time for a moment. You also have the story this week about a tiny feathered dinosaur. Yeah, what a great hook, right? This study was published in the journal PNAS. it analyzed these fossilized footprints that were left behind by a tiny raptor, so a relative of T-Rex that was about the size of a sparrow. And the distance between consecutive footsteps

on one set of these dinosaur tracks were so far apart that the scientists who published the study said that the animal must have been flapping its wings to generate lift and lengthen its stride to be able to produce them. Some even think that this track might have been left behind as the dinosaur was taking off for flight, like, you know, a plane accelerating down the runway before it goes airborne. And the really interesting part about this theory is that this species isn't part of the dinosaur lineage that eventually evolved into birds. So if the theory holds up, it could suggest that flying evolved multiple times across different dinosaur lineages. I have to say this image of like a tiny T-Rex running at top speed while flapping its arms

is very, extremely cute. Yeah, it would make a great Pixar movie. But not everyone agrees on this interpretation, right? Yeah, that's right. They're definitely skeptics. So this is all based on a comparison between just two tracks of footprints. Some skeptics say that maybe that track has footprints from multiple individuals, not one individual. Others think that maybe they don't actually represent consecutive footprints. Maybe some of the intervening ones were erased over time.

But the study authors are pretty insistent, even though they want to be conservative, that they suspect that this is some sort of pre-flight run. And going even further back in time, let's look back to when the planet was largely a water world, and then an ancient asteroid came along. Yeah, so this goes all the way back three billion years to Earth's early history, and just to paint the picture for you, Earth was mostly water at the time.

There were a few volcanoes and large islands that jutted out above the sea surface, and there was very little life aside from microbes. And this asteroid that these researchers studied, named S2, was about 50 to 200 times larger than the one that killed the dinosaurs. Wow. The surprising result here is that although this asteroid was pretty devastating when it hit Earth, it may have been beneficial to life in the short to medium term. So when this asteroid hit Earth, it basically caused these massive tsunamis. it evaporated the top layer of the ocean, and it sent up up to 10,000 cubic kilometers of debris into space. And that blocked out the sun. All that debris eventually recondensed as these molten

droplets that then rains back down onto the surface of the Earth. So, as you can imagine, that's pretty devastating. But they say that only lasted, you know, a few years, maybe a few decades. But after all of that dust settled, apparently the seas were, you know, star for nutrients at the time. and this asteroid actually brought 360 billion metric tons of phosphorus, a really critical nutrient from space into the oceans. And the tsunamis that it caused circulated the oceans in a way that lifted iron and other nutrients from the deep up to the surface where primitive photosynthesizing microbes could use them. So essentially it was this huge extraterrestrial fertilizer for early Earth.

The scientists who did this study compared it to like brushing your teeth where you wipe out a whole bunch of the microbes, in the morning, but by midday, a bunch of them are resilient and they bounce back. Let's skip back forward in time again to the time of the Silk Road. Tell us about this story. If you remember back to your history lessons, the Silk Road was this famous network of trade routes that connected Europe and China for about 1,500 years. It was really long thought that all of the major hubs in the network were these low-altitude cities that had enough water and fertile land to cope with harsh desert conditions. But now in the

journal Nature, scientists reported that they discovered a previously unknown city within the Silk Road that's 2,000 meters up in the mountains of modern-day Uzbekistan. And this is a really major discovery because cities were rarely built at high altitudes in medieval times. There are only a few that we know of, like Kusko in Peru or Lhasa in Tibet. And we're a very much, we're in Europe. And we're And one expert who wasn't involved in this study even told science that the discovery of this mountain metropolis could force us to rethink what the Silk Road looked like, but it could also rewrite the history of Central Asia more broadly. Wow.

Do we know what people were doing up there in the mountains then? Yeah. So based on the excavations that they were doing, they found that there was, you know, a pretty big foundry and a furnace and a ton of iron ore nearby. So they think that the city was a big steel manufacturer and exoner. exporter. And because there weren't many permanent structures within the fortified parts of the city, they also think that the residents were highly mobile. So maybe they were sheep or goat herders who pitched yurts up in the mountains during the summer, but went back to the lowlands when it got

cooled in the winter. Changing directions entirely, there's a story this week about the people who are born without the ability to smell. Yes, this new study was published in nature communications, and it found that people who are born without a sense of smell breathe differently than those who have a typical sense of smell. Essentially, the shapes of the inhales and exhales differ between those two groups. And the most obvious difference was that people with a typical sense of smell tended to have a tiny inhalation peak at the top of their breath as if they were investigating their environment for different smells and odors.

They made these conclusions based on a data set with just over 50 people. 21 of them were born without smell. 31 of them had a typical sense of smell. And the researchers gave them these relatively unobstructive devices that could measure nasal breathing continuously for 24 hours. And then they sent them home wearing this device to go about the rest of their day. When the researchers got the data back and were able to spot these subtle differences in breath, they could actually build a predictive model that could guess with 83% accuracy, whether a person was born with their sense of smell or not based solely on the differences in their breathing.

And what's the value of knowing this? How does this help us? The authors think that this might be related to a bevy of health effects that arise when people don't have a sense of smell, like depression or early mortality. But a lot of outside experts say that it's way too premature to make those leaps of causality. And there needs to be a lot more research done before we can start thinking about that. Staying on the health track for a moment, there's also news this week from a trial of people with depression who used a brain stimulation technique. Yeah, these results come from a phase two trial for this new depression treatment.

And they were published in the journal Nature Medicine. They're looking into this novel treatment that applies tiny currents of electrical stimulation to the brain, specifically in areas that are known to be affected by depression. Basically, patients put on this headset wearing two electrodes that apply this current, and they wear it for half an hour at a time a few times a week over the course of 10 weeks. In this trial, the patients were actually self-administering this treatment from their own homes while they were being supervised by the researchers conducting this study. And compared to the control group, those that received this treatment were twice as likely to have their depression go into remission. So about 45% of them did. And if this treatment goes on to get approved, it could be a game changer on a few fronts.

It could be huge for the one-third or so of depression patients who never go into remission using current psychotherapies and medications. And depending on how well it's implemented, it could also be a big boost to healthcare accessibility. The treatment can be done in your home as you go about your normal life. And there's no need to find and go to a specialized clinic every day. Of course, there's some doubt, as the trials always have, but even some of the skeptics have told journalists that they agree with the authors that this could be really helpful to patients and it's definitely worth studying further. Finally, the most important finding, in my opinion from this week is about Hornets and alcohol. Tell us about that. This new study showed that the Oriental Hornet, which is a type of wasp that's about an inch long, can drink 80% alcohol and show no ill health offense.

or behavioral changes. This is a level of alcohol tolerance that's not known in any other animal. And although the study sounds kind of silly, it's actually quite important from a biological standpoint. Hornets and a lot of other animals eat ripe fruits, which can naturally ferment and produce ethanol. And ethanol has a calorie density that's almost double that of sugar. So it can be a great nutrient source as long as you can handle the unintended side

effects of it. So if you are celebrating anything this weekend with a hornet, please do so responsibly. Thanks so much, Jason. Thank you. Jason Din is climate editor at Atmos in Washington, D.C. This week, representatives of nearly 200 countries are gathered in Kali, Colombia for COP16, the UN's conference on biodiversity and protecting nature. In 2022, nearly every country in the world agreed on an ambitious deal to halt biodiversity loss by 2030. So, how's our progress? And what will this year's conference focus on? Joining me today to help break it down for us is my guest, Benji Jones,

environmental correspondent at Vox based in New York. Welcome back to Science Friday. Hey, good to be with you. So get us up to speed. Tell us about COP16. Yeah, so COP16 is, I would argue, the most important conference. for nature in the world. And it happens about every two years. This year is happening in Colombia. And what's so important about these events is that it brings together all the environmental

leaders from around the world essentially, which includes environmental ministers, some heads of state even, as well as NGO leaders, scientists. So they're really trying to figure out a way to put an end to just this rampant loss that we're seeing in our forests and and with wildlife as well. So this meeting COP16 is under a global treaty called the Convention on Biological Diversity. And it's essentially an agreement among almost every country in the world to conserve nature and to share the benefits of nature. So things like cosmetics or medicines that are derived from plants and animals. That treaty was crafted in the 90s. And ever since then, we've had, these conferences of all the governments that were part of that treaty that come together. And those

conferences are known as COPS. And this COP16 is the 16th one of those conferences. But the U.S. is not really part of this, right? Yes, that's right. So when I said nearly every country is a part of this agreement, the U.S. is the one exception in addition to the Vatican state, but that's very, very tiny. The U.S. is, of course, a powerhouse financially, economically, and it is not part of this agreement, and that's because the U.S. Senate has not ratified the treaty. So we've signed the agreement, but we haven't actually joined it formally through the ratification process. Why not? Yeah.

So the U.S. tends to not like treaties in general because some lawmakers worry that by signing up to some global agreement, we're going to have to change the way we do things. It's going to infringe on our economics, our businesses, and so forth. And I mentioned earlier that at the last conference, there was this big deal made to stop biodiversity loss by 2030. So how is that going? I guess the short of it is not super great. So by most measures, we're still seeing pretty horrific rates of biodiversity loss. There was a recent report that showed that the average size of animal populations is declined by over 70 percent. In the last 50 years, we've seen millions of hectares of forests cut down in the last year alone.

Three billion birds have disappeared from North America. So there are a lot of negative signs for biodiversity. And it doesn't seem like we have made much progress in reversing those trends. There's been some positive movement. So we've done a good job at restoring some forests. But since 2022, when these countries agreed on this landmark deal, as you mentioned, which really, really was a huge moment. It includes all these different targets for conserving nature, including conserving 30% of all land and oceans by 2030. We still have a very long way to go. So if you look at that target of conserving 30% of all land, for example, I believe the number globally right now is 17%. And if you look at the oceans, we've only conserved about 8%. And again, we're trying to get

to 30% by 2030. So we're still a long ways off. And that is pretty concerning. Let's talk about one of the big topic areas of this year's conference. The idea of who gets to profit from the DNA of wild organisms. Tell us about this. Yeah, so this is one of the thornyest topics that will come up at COP16. Lots of medicines and cosmetics and other products that we use that companies sell are derived from nature. So you can think of things like aspirin, derived from some kind of bark or penicillin from mold, even Botox comes from a microbe.

And companies make a lot of money from these products, even though they are derived from nature. There's been a history of companies in wealthier countries taking natural products, so taking microbes, animals, and plants, using them to create products, again, like medicines or cosmetics, selling those products, making a bunch of money, and then not sharing the benefits from those products, whether it's money or even just access to medicines with the countries which those animals or

plants came from. So this is called biopiracy, basically like stealing one country's nature, commercializing it, and then not giving that country access to it. And there are a bunch of examples of this that have come up. So that's a problem. There is a sort of solution to this, which is that under that convention, under the CBD, the Convention on Biological Diversity, countries are able to manage access to their resources. So if you're a scientist working for a company that is making cosmetics, you may need to sign some sort of benefit sharing agreement to extract resources from that country. So if you want to go into the Amazon and take, I don't know, rare plants that create some sort of compound that's useful for a drug, you might need to agree

that you will share the medicine back with the country. You might need to agree to give them other resources like access to lab so that they can do their own data analysis and make their own products or whatever it might be, or money as well. And so there is a way to manage access. But a big issue with this is that now a lot of the plants and animals and microbes that companies use to do research for their products are present in a digital form. So basically like the digital version of biodiversity. And by that, I mean all these different plants and animals that are used to create products. We sequence their DNA, their RNA, their proteins. That sequence information is uploaded to databases. Those databases are, for the most part, open access, free for anyone to use.

And so now companies can use genetic data in a digital form to create things, products, cosmetics, etc. without actually having to go into a country and extract some kind of physical sample. So that means that companies that are using the genetics from wild animals from other countries don't necessarily need to share benefits from those products under any kind of official agreement. So it's a way to kind of skirt this convention and the rules that it has for sharing benefits from nature. Well, I mean, do you think that they're going to come up with a sort of one-size-fifference, solve rule for what to do about that? Or is this going to be one of those things where it's a case by case basis? Yeah. So if there is news that's going to come out of this conference, it will be

related to an agreement about what to do with this digital genetic information and who should manage it and benefit from it. I would say it's sort of 50-50 right now, whether countries are going to reach an agreement. You have a lot of the wealthier countries that don't want any sort of mandatory benefit sharing related to this digital sequence information or DSI. You have a lot of developing countries say, look, like companies in sectors that rely on the sequence information should be mandated to pay into some kind of fund that will then send money to developing countries or countries that have high biodiversity. But it's not clear just yet whether there's going to be an agreement on this. And it is going to be very, very contentious just because

there's a big, yeah, kind of north-south divide between developed and developing countries around what to do here. And what are the other big topic? areas of this conference. Yeah. So the other big one, I would say, is money. How to raise more money for biodiversity conservation. So about two years ago, a report came out that identified that there was a $700 billion gap yearly for funding conservation. So if we want to stop the decline of nature, protect biodiversity, we need to come up with another $700 billion a year. And so the big deal that countries struck in 2022, this landmark deal to conserve nature, mentions that there's the $700 billion gap. They mentioned some of the ways to find that money. So rich countries should be paying

poor countries for conserving their biodiversity. We should see the private sector involved. We should also see subsidy reform. So basically, figuring out how to close the $700 billion gap in funding for nature is going to be another kind of really hotly debated topic at COP. And it's not totally clear that we'll see agreement on that either. I mean, is there any way to combine those two? Like use some of the profits from organisms DNA to fund conservation? Sophie, that's a great question. And one of the ideas on the table is just that.

So creating a fund that comes from payments from companies that rely on DSI and that fund would raise money that would then go towards closing this funding gap. I think there's just a question of how much money that would actually create. Like, there are a lot of skeptics that, like, if you're actually trying to get companies to pay into a fund, like they're not going to actually pay that much money. So it's not going to make a ton of headway on closing this gap. But it's definitely an idea on the table and something that a lot of countries want to see. And COP16 can produce these big global agreements.

And we've seen this before with other global agreements like the Paris Agreement on climate. But the question is, do they? even work? Oh, God. That is a very good question because I often feel a little bit jaded when I go to these events and the level of ambition is super high. Everyone seems to agree on what needs to happen when you're in these spaces. And you see similar things at like New York Climate Week, for example, it's super high energy, a ton of excitement. But then when everybody returns back to their own countries and faces priorities that might be very different than what these environmental leaders are agreeing to, you tend to see a lessening of the ambition. So there was actually a set of

sort of similar targets agreed to in 2010 called the Aichi targets. Those targets were supposed to be met by 2020 and not a single target was met. And so there has been this disconnect between ambition and reality. I think on the bright side, biodiversity is getting. more attention than it ever has before. And by setting these ambitious targets, you at least raise the bar for what people think will happen. And it does, I think, move the needle at least a little bit. It kind of lights a fire under the private sector to do more around this stuff. Governments feel more motivated to do conservation. And really just getting everyone in the room the same time, like that alone is a pretty big deal. So I don't think that there's no purpose to,

to these events, I think that the kind of pressure just needs to be applied constantly for anything to happen. That's all the time we have for now. I'd like to thank my guest, Benji Jones, environmental correspondent at Vox, based in New York. Thank you. And that's all the time that we have for now. A lot of folks help make the show happen, including... Danielle Johnson.

Jason Rosenberg. Full of some airs. Shoshana Buxbaum. And many more. Next time, we'll take a close look into how crumption. humbling wastewater infrastructure threatens public health. But for now, I'm SciFRI producer Kathleen Davis. Have a great weekend.