Science Friday - Hemp and CBD, Phytosaurs, Mosquito Control. Dec 7, 2018, Part 1

Episode Date: December 7, 2018

Good news could be coming soon for anyone interested in hemp, the THC-free, no-high strain of cannabis whose use ranges from fibers to food to pharmaceuticals. If the 2018 Farm Bill passes Congress in its current form, growing hemp would be legal and products derived from hemp would be removed from their current legal gray area. Cornell horticulture professor Larry Smart explains why a plant that hasn’t been grown legally in the U.S. for nearly a century will require a monumental effort from scientists to catch up to crops like soybean and tomatoes. Plus, Dr. Esther Blessing, an assistant professor of psychiatry at NYU Langone Health, breaks down where the research stands on other uses of CBD, and what we still don’t know. Then: Mass extinctions are a window into past climate disasters. They give a glimpse of the chemical and atmospheric ingredients that spell out doom for the Earth’s biodiversity. Scientists have identified five big mass extinctions that have happened in the past. The end Triassic mass extinction—number four on the list—happened around 200 million years ago, when three-quarters of the Earth’s species went extinct. But the exact play-by-play is still a mystery. Paleontologist Randy Irmis at the Natural History Museum of Utah and his team are searching for phytosaur fossils, and Science Friday producers Katie Hiler and Lauren J. Young joined him in the field. Plus, could the answer to controlling mosquitos be...more mosquitos? Or, at least, more mosquitos with a bacterial infection. We check in with Valley Public Radio reporter Kerry Klein on the State Of Science. And it's been a big week for space news. Science Friday director Charles Bergquist joins Ira for the News Round-up.   Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Hi there, Ira here. You know, the end of the year is right around the corner, and we want to hear your favorite science stories of 2018. What affected you the most? Or was there an interesting discovery that you're still talking about? We want to hear from you. Record a voice memo with your name, city, and what your top story is, and email it to voices at science Friday.com. That's a voice memo, your name, city, and what the top story is. Email it to voices, and what your top story is. email it to Voices at Science Friday.com. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. Later in the hour, we'll be talking about the research behind farming hemp. Soon to be legal in the U.S. if the current farm bill goes through.

But first, you know how the winter holidays can get so busy, so much traffic, circling, circling, circling, circling. Oh, I'm talking about circling the earth, of course. It's been a busy week for space flight around the planet. And if all goes according to plan, seven different rockets are scheduled to launch over a period of just five days. Joining me now to talk about that. I know there's science news from the week is Charles Berkwis, Science Friday Director and Contributing Producer. He's here in a New York studio. Charles.

Hi, Ira. Let's talk about some of these rockets. Tell me about this Chinese rocket. Yeah, so this is pretty exciting. It launched just minutes ago. a Chinese rocket carrying the Changa 4 mission. And what's really cool about this is it's going to try to make the first ever successful landing on the far side of the moon. It's probably end of this month, first couple days of January.

We're not quite sure of the timeline here. But if all goes well, this is going to be super cool. We've never been there before. Let's talk about the other launching. Yeah, well, it's been, as you said, a busy week. It started off on Monday. There was a Soyuz rocket carried three people to space to the International Space Station. And that was good news because that was the first successful Soyuz launch after that flight in October when they had to make the emergency landing.

So they made it safely and were very happy about that. Then after that, there were two SpaceX launches this week. One on Monday brought 64 small satellites to orbit. And that was cool because, so SpaceX is. is the one that does the reusable rocket that sort of lands itself backwards, right? This one, the rocket had actually flown twice before. So this was its third flight, so it's sort of proving like, yes, our reusable stuff actually is a working idea.

Wednesday, they had a second launch. That one, they did not stick the landing. There was a problem with one of the fins that controls the descent of the first stage. and so it ended up splashing down into the water. But the flight itself worked well and is going to be bringing about two and a half tons of material to the International Space Station, a whole bunch of material for their scientific experiments and also Christmas dinner. Oh, you've got to have that. Flight working. Absolutely.

All right. Other stuff that was going up. Yeah, well, so don't, I can trust you right. Yes, absolutely. No one's listening. Since no one's listening, there's a. A spy satellite could have launched tonight, maybe. Don't tell anyone.

A spy satellite. Yeah, don't tell anyone. And so that should bring us to the full total of seven. There were a few commercial launches as well. And further afield, there's more space news out there. Yeah, so to add to all of this, the Osiris Rex spacecraft arrived at the asteroid Benu earlier this week after a two-year journey. And over the next coming weeks, it's going to sort of be circling in closer and closer mapping out the surface of this asteroid. planning for a sample return mission.

Hopefully, it's eventually going to scoop up about two ounces of material and bring it back to Earth in 2023. Why do we care so much about? What is so special about this asteroid? So this asteroid, they chose it for a couple of reasons. One, it's a near-Earth asteroid. It zips by here about every six years or so. But it's a type called a carbonaceous asteroid. It's a very carbon-rich.

And they think that this is a sort of primitive form of asteroid that hasn't had a lot happened to it in the last four billion years or so. It's pretty much a snapshot of what the early solar system looked like back when planets and stuff were just starting to form. So they're interested in getting a look at what this early material looked like. And also has a really slight chance of hitting the Earth? I mean, it's like a one in 2,700 chance, but that's not for another 150 years or so. Oh, okay.

Yeah. Okay. Closer to home, there's news about carbon emissions. We've heard a little bit about the story. Tell us, fill us in a little more. Yeah, so, I mean, as we know, research has shown that humans really need to cut back our carbon emissions by a lot if we want to stave off the most serious parts of climate change. Some estimates put that number at around a 50% reduction by 2030. But this new report out this week from a group called the Global Carbon Project found that we're not on track for that.

our emissions are increasing. They grew by about 2.7% this year, which is definitely not the kind of decrease that we would be wanting to have. Do we know where that increase is coming from? So there's a whole bunch of reasons for this. One is India has been increasing their electricity generation. A lot of that is coal-fired. China. They've been on a bit of a building boom lately, increasing construction that hasn't been helping. And in the U.S., a lot of it has to do with transportation. We've been gas prices are still cheap. We've been driving bigger cars, driving them more, driving them further, and that adds to the carbon emissions here. Interesting.

Finally, on a more hopeful note, there's a new salamander in town. Yeah, so this is neat because scientists are saying this is one of the largest species discovered in North America in probably the last hundred years or so. It's called the reticulated siren. and it's this massive two and a half foot long salamander. Wow, that's big. It is. I mean, it's a little goofy looking thing. It's a bit different from your regular salamander because it lives its whole life underwater, doesn't have the hind legs.

It has these big frills behind its head, excuse me, almost it looked like it's got its head stuck in a fern or something. Those are its gills. Right. And this one has sort of dark skin with a kind of modeled net-like pattern all over it. There's a fun story with this where it's been rumored to exist for years. They called it the leopard eel, and it's sort of this southern Alabama and Florida Panhandle area. There have been reports of it. A couple of researchers have been on their private treasure hunt trying to find it, and in 2009, they finally caught one.

This is, it took since then to find a few more samples and do all the characterization that you would need to finally say, yes, this is definitely a new species. Wow, that's terrific. It's sort of like looking for orchids in Florida. But that's another subject. Charles Berkwis, Science Friday Director and Contributing Producer. Thank you for being with us today. And now it's time to check in on the state of science. This is KERNO.

For W.WIS Public Radio News. Iowa Public Radio News. Local science stories of national significance. And now that it's December, peak mosquito season, is finally over in the San Joaquin Valley of California. And so public health officials around Fresno have a chance, to take stock of their battle against mosquitoes. And they've teamed up with a Kentucky company called Mosquito Mate

and with Verily, that's a company owned by Google's parent company Alphabet, to test out an innovative mosquito control program that relies on producing and releasing millions of male mosquitoes. Joining me now to talk about the project is Carrie Klein, reporter at Valley Public Radio in Fresna. Welcome to the program. Hi, Ira. Hi, how are you?

I'm great. Thank you. So how does releasing millions of mosquitoes help the mosquito population? Yeah, that sounds like quite a paradox, doesn't it? Yeah. But the way this project works is that, as you said, it's releasing male mosquitoes, millions upon millions of male mosquitoes, in fact, and they've been infected with a bacteria called Wolbachia. And it essentially interferes with their ability to reproduce, that when these Wolbachia-infected male mosquitoes try to reproduce with females in the wild who don't have Wolbachia,

they can lay the eggs and the eggs will never hatch. So it's an attempt to really bring down this population by basically preventing them from reproducing. Pretty tricky, if you say so. Okay, give me an idea what it looks like. How does it work in practicality? Right. So, well, so as you said, there are these three different companies or organizations involved. Verily and Mosquito Mate being two, and then this consolidated mosquito abatement district here locally in Fresno.

The mosquitoes are all grown in a lab in San Francisco, owned by Verily. They're brought down to Fresno, and they're released in these vans. They're kind of unassuming-looking white, you know, high-top vans, but they have a debug Fresno logo on the side, a big cartoon mosquito. Yeah, you see those driving around and you know exactly what it is. And they have these little vents out the side of the van that just kind of pump out. a couple times a day, you know, lots of mosquitoes into a handful of neighborhoods in the Fresno area. They don't see like a swarm coming out of the van.

You don't, you don't. At least I didn't when I was there watching these. It's over the course of a day. And so, yeah, you don't see that many. Let's be clear about this. These are not genetically modified or some kind of mutant mosquito, right? That's absolutely right. And that's one of the biggest concerns that people raise, you know, about this, is that they think that they're genetically modified.

But no, there's absolutely no changes to the genetic code being done to these mosquitoes. It's a naturally occurring bacterium, this Wolbachia, that they're infected with. And, in fact, you know, estimates are that as much as two-thirds of all insect species have Wolbachia, you know, carry Wolbachia in them. And so it's, you know, they'd have this bacteria carried in them, but there's absolutely no genetic changes going on. You know, the cynics among us are going to say, hey, you're releasing all these millions of mosquitoes. They're all going to be biting us.

Right. It's also a major concern. Fun fact, it's only female mosquitoes that bite of any species. And so they're only releasing these male ones. And so you'll see more of them, but they shouldn't bite. Have they tested this out already? Yeah, actually, they just wrapped up their third year testing this program here in Fresno is the biggest one. They released, you know, estimates are around 15 million mosquitoes over the course of the mosquito season.

and the companies involved have said that it's been a tremendous success, and they estimate that in these test areas, at least, it's brought down the biting female population by 95%, 95% reduction. And which kind of mosquito are they trying to get rid of? So this is a species called 80s Egypti, and it's a particularly nasty species of mosquito that is not native in the U.S., but it's begun showing up here in the last couple of days.

decades. In California, it showed up in 2013, at least officially. And it's really nasty because, you know, most of us may think of mosquitoes as biting around dusk, but these guys will bite all throughout the day. They're real pernicious, and they also are known to carry a bunch of really nasty diseases. So things like Zika, Chikungunya, Denguea, are all carried by this species. And so why is, you know, Alphabet, Google's parent involved in this? Verily. Yeah, so. So Verily is a life sciences company, and they've given themselves this broad mission statement of trying to solve a number of major health problems around the world. And, you know, they're getting involved with this one because they can bring tremendous,

or at least they're attempting to bring tremendous automation technologies into it. And so, as you can imagine, if you're trying to release millions of mosquitoes, and they're only male ones. You've got to make them and sort them and get them out. there and that's what they're good at, right? That exactly. All right. Thank you very much, Kerry Klein reporter at Valley Public Radio in Fresno. We're going to come back and talk about the new farm bill, which could bring legal hemp

to farm fields around the country. What does it take to turn hemp back into an American crop? What can we do with it? We'll talk about it after the break. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. It's been nearly a century since hemp, the THC free strain of cannabis, was grown legally

on masts in the United States, and we may soon see it again. The 2000-2018 Farm Bill, soon to go before Congress, looks poised to remove hemp from the list of Schedule I controlled substances and free up farmers to try their hands. Hemp has a lot of potentially profitable uses. After all, if you can use the fibers to make clothing, and ropes used to be made from it, you can make food, the pharmaceuticals, but you can't just wave your hand and turn a new-to-us,

plant into a thriving crop overnight. Research has been going on in some states since 2014 to understand just what it will take for U.S. farmers to succeed, which strains to grow, in which states, which U.S. pests may pose the most risk to a brand new agricultural market. And here to explain that process on what could happen in a more open regulatory environment is Larry Smart, Professor of Horticulture at Cornell University in Ithaca. Welcome to Science Friday, Dr. Smart. Thank you, Ira. It's great to be with you.

Nice to have you. So exactly what exactly don't we know about farming hemp? Well, we used to farm hemp all the time, right? Back before World War II, what don't we know now about farming ham? Well, you know, every crop has its regional specificities. And I will say that there is a lot of hemp grown in Canada and China and Europe. but those cultivars that have been bred for those environments may or may not perform well in the U.S.

and specifically where I am in New York State. So one of the first things that we've been doing is evaluating commercially available cultivars so that we can give good advice to farmers on what they should grow. And you have to rediscover what pests are going to attack the crop? That's right, pests and diseases. And in fact, at Cornell, we've identified

a new species of fungus that was also identified in Kentucky, which is a pathogen of hemp that had never been described before in the genus bipolaris. Do we have a genus? Have we, you know, looked at the genome of hemp yet? Yeah, in fact, there have been a few genome sequences. It had been released some in the last month. So, yeah, there's a lot of interest in using genomics to speed our breeding program. and to better understand the biochemistry of industrial hemp.

What would you describe hemp most like? What kind of other crop would it grow like? Well, you know, hemp has been bred for multiple market classes. So when you think about the grain, it's a lot like wheat. When you think about the fiber, it's a lot like flax. But it also has these medicinal properties. So it really has been tailored for multiple uses. But we hope that the future expansion will be in the grain and fiber markets.

There's one piece of language in the bill that, as it was last written, that seems a bit counterproductive. And I'm talking about the part that says you couldn't be involved in growing hemp if you have a drug-related felony in your history. Wouldn't that rule out a lot of people with valuable expertise related to, say, growing marijuana? Well, over the last several decades, a lot of the work on cannabis setiva, which is the binomial for marijuana and hemp, has been done underground, so to speak, or in basements. And there is a certain amount of expertise, but I will say as a university scientist, it's been a challenge to sort out. the scientific veracity of the work that's available on the internet. And of course, if this farm, if this bill comes forward, you would deschedule it from Schedule 1,

which has been very preventative from science for actually researching the plan. Exactly. And again, as a university professor, I don't want to put Cornell University in legal jeopardy, and yet this is a crop that's regulated by the Drug Enforcement Agency. So at times we're a little bit nervous about that. But people are already growing hemp in different states, aren't they? Yes, Kentucky, Colorado, and Oregon have been the leaders.

New York and North Carolina are right behind them, and we've received very enthusiastic support from Governor Cuomo and New York State agon markets. Let me give out our number, 844-8255. We're talking about hemp here, and we're going to get in a little bit. in a few minutes into the medicinal aspects of it. Now hemp has been illegal to grow for nearly a century.

Well, what has that cost to us in terms of agricultural progress? Yeah, one of the costs has been in plant breeding. And in fact, plant breeders rely on a broad germplasm repository, you know, material that's collected around the world, and in particular from the site of or, of the species, which has the greatest genetic diversity. We in the U.S. rely on the USDA to maintain those germplasm collections, and when the Controlled Substance Act passed in the 70s, our germplasm collection was destroyed by my understanding. Does that mean that if we're going to grow hemp in any large quantity, we have to go abroad and bring the seeds in because we don't have our own?

That's what we're doing right now, yes, is we're importing cultivars at and bread in Europe, in Canada, and in China. But it's my hope personally and at Cornell University to establish a long-term academic public breeding program so that we can have domestically produced and selected cultivars of industrial hemp. Can me an idea of what kinds of cool stuff you can make with hemp? Well, you mentioned that in colonial days,

we produced hemp as a fiber source for rope and fabric for the British Navy. But these days, we're taking those fibers and making industrial composites that can replace, you know, fossil fuel-based products. So it can be a bio-based replacement for fossil fuels. But on the food market, there are a lot of opportunities. It's a very healthy oil and protein source. And people are being very creative. So one of my favorite food products is to replace hops with hemp.

their close relatives to make a craft beer. So the flavor of hemp instead of the flavor of hops in your beer. You should try it. I'm waiting. I don't think there's any better way to get people to adopt hemp than to put it into beer. We love craft beer out here. Do you have to harvest a big field? I mean, do you have to grow it in greater quantities in order to harvest it?

Can you get as much production out of the same kind of farming? Yeah, so the harvesting operations will be a challenge for farmers to pick up. Again, there are different harvesting operations for grain, for fiber, or for CBD, the medicinal compound. For CBD, it's largely a horticultural production system, similar to tobacco or tomatoes. Very labor intensive right now. For grain, it's a little bit simpler, similar to combining wheat, and that would be done most efficiently on large acreage. And then for fiber, there is a lot of processing involved to convert that plant material into a usable fiber source. How different is the plant you would grow for him for material and fiber different than you would grow for CBD?

Right. So the fiber, we want tall, thin stems. So it grows to 12 to 14 feet tall, while the plants grown for CBD are shaped more like a Christmas tree that are very branchy because we're trying to get the flower buds on the tip of every branch. So it's not the stuff that people were growing in the 60s. So again, cannabis sativa has been selected for high THC production, that's marijuana. Right. Or for high CBD and low THC production, and we call that industrial housing. So you're excited about this, I imagine. It's exciting.

I learn something new every day. And the other thing, it's generated incredible excitement in the public and especially among young people. You know, we have an aging farmer population, and this has really spurred interest in young people in plant science and in agriculture again. Let me see if I can get a quick call on Amy in Manhattan. Hi, Amy. Hi.

I'm wondering if there are any environmental implications. If anything is problematic, how might that be addressed? Okay, good question. Well, yeah, as with any crop, when we add it to the landscape, it potentially will have some impact on other crop species and on other species in general. One thing we've learned early on is that the pollen of hemp is very attractive to bees, and it may actually fill a niche in the middle.

of the growing season providing a food source, especially for bumblebees. So that's a potentially positive impact on our pollinator populations. Wow. All these things that you hadn't thought about. Right. I mean, there could be other things, other good things that come out of this we haven't thought about. Well, and one possible negative thing, again, we need to think about diseases and disease epidemics, and we found that industrial hemp is very susceptible to a disease called white mold, which also affects soybean and other beans. So putting hemp in a rotation with other bean crops may increase the incidence of white mold disease. All right.

It's good. The Yinnani Yang and the whole thing. Exactly. Larry Smart, Professor of Horticulture at the famous Cornell University in Ithaca, where they have a great agricultural department. Thank you for taking time to be with it today, Larry. It was great to be with you, Ira. I want to switch gears slightly now, as my last guest,

to mention a big reason farmers are interested in hemp is CBD. Cannabidiol, just this June, the FDA approved the first drug made from CBD called Epidialex, and it's approved for treating two rare forms of epilepsy that young children can have. But in the meantime, it seems like you can find CBD-infused products nearly everywhere, and people take it for everything from pain to PTSD to sleeping, and all without the FDA's involvement. So what do we know so far? What don't we know yet about the benefits and safety considerations of CBD?

My next guest is one of the many researchers asking those questions. Dr. Esther Blessing, a researcher and assistant professor of psychiatry at NYU Landgown Health here in New York City. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, I are a pleasure to be here. CBD is all the talk right now. It seems to be everywhere, right? Absolutely, yeah. I'm hearing podcasts advertise it.

You can buy CBD containing products and grocery stores. Why suddenly this explosion? I think it's come from a lot of really exciting discoveries in basic science and clinical trials, as well as this sudden push in the advertising industry for CBD-infused products. And they're two very different types of evidence, or one without evidence. Yeah. Yeah, and you are researching CBD specifically. for anxiety, PTSD, other psychiatric issues.

What's happening so far, how have we done? I think it's really important to know that there are no clinical trials that have yet been completed in any anxiety disorder, including PTSD. And those types of clinical trials take years to complete, and they're probably at least one or two years away. But even so, there's promising pre-clinical evidence, which comes from rodent models and also from human. in experimental studies.

And these studies have shown that CBD, when given to, say, normal volunteers can reduce the anxiety that you experience when giving a public speech. And that there were placebo-controlled, a number of small studies. And the doses that were effective in those studies were something between 300 to 600 milligrams. And also social anxiety disorder subjects were studied. But they're very small studies. And that type of evidence isn't the sort of thing that can really tell us about a clinical dose in an actual patient who's been diagnosed with anxiety or PTSD. Also studies in rodent models have shown that CBD inhibits activity in areas of the brain that cause anxiety.

So that's the type of evidence we have. But in order to be able to say here's the dose that's going to treat anxiety or PTSD, that evidence is a long way away. I'm Ira Flater. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios talking about CBD with Dr. Esther Blessing. Of course, with any drug, don't you have to, even if you know what dosage range, don't you have to continually adjust it up and down for each individual patient to see what the best dose is for that person? Absolutely. And CBD in particular might be very variable between individuals because of the way it's metabolized. but even to get that initial range, those types of clinical trials need to be conducted. And there may be some complexities in how CBD is dosed for anxiety. So there's some evidence out there that maybe higher doses are less effective and lower doses

are not as effective. So there probably is a range that's effective. And if people are kind of just playing around with things they buy, which often have much lower doses than 100, they're more like 10 or 20, it's unlikely that they're going to be getting a therapeutic range. And not only that, people may not know what they're getting, right? If it's not regulated, which it isn't now. Absolutely.

The standards for a nutritive product or a food product are completely different from the standards for a pharma-grade product. And so it's quite possible that these things you buy on the street or in a latte or something have traces of THC or other cannabinoids in them or whoever knows what. and the amount of THC that's required to cause an effect is much, much less than CBD. So you could have even less than around 10 milligrams of CBD would cause an effect, like impair your driving or concentration.

And so if there's even a trace amount of THC in these substances and you take a lot of them, you'll get a significant amount of THC. Let's talk about this one CBD drug epidialyx. What is that being prescribed for? Does that work? Right, so research at NYU Langeon by Professor Oren Divinski, he's conducted several large, randomized, controlled clinical trials in childhood epilepsy, as you mentioned, rare forms of child epilepsy that are resistant to treatment with other agents.

And that's shown that when epidialylaxes add as a treatment to their standard treatments, there was a significant reduction in seizure frequency and overall clinical wellness, which is really exciting. It's interesting that there are receptors in the brain for CBD? I mean, like, how did the brain know it wanted to use this? You know what I'm saying? Right. Yeah.

We evolve in receptors for them. Yeah, it's interesting. It's really interesting that there should be these two chemicals in cannabis that have such different effects. But so most of the knowledge on how CBD affects the brain comes from rodent studies and only a select few human neuroimaging studies. We really don't know this is just getting started. But CBD seems to affect a lot of different receptors in the brain. And overall, it seems to reduce activity in areas of the brain that cause anxiety, like the amygdala, reduce hyper-excidability there,

and improve activity in areas of the brain that regulate anxiety like the prefrontal cortex. And it probably does this by increasing levels of a neurotransmitter called anandamide, which comes from the word for bliss in Sanskrit. And this neurotransmitter, which is released in response to stress or activity, dampens down the stress response. Gotcha. Yeah. We'll talk more about it with Dr. Esther Blessing.

our number 8447248255 talking about CBD as a medication. We'll be right back after this break with more talk about it. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. We're talking with Dr. Esther Blessing, a researcher and assistant professor of psychiatry at NYU Langone Health, about CBD and possibilities for its use. Seems like all kinds.

Let me go to the calls because we have some interesting calls on here that Alfonso, So in Tracy, California, hi, welcome to Science Friday. Good afternoon, guys. Thank you. I wanted to say thank you for having this program of Science Friday is very informative. Yes, my name is Alphonse. I'm from Tracy, California. Ira and Dr. Esther Bessing, I have a question regarding the hemp using a CBD in addiction issues.

I won't get into too much detail exactly what addiction is, but what kind of help doctor would... in CBD, the oil of hemp, maybe in VAPs that is known. Could that be helpful at all? Well, again, there's no clinical trials that have been conducted in addiction yet for substance use, but there is evidence from work from Yasmin, Professor Yasmin heard at Mount Sinai that CBD could reduce craving in abstinent heroin users. And in general, CBD affects the brain in a way that should reduce activity in addictive circuits and increase activity in regulatory circuits. So there's good suggestion that it could be useful, but clinical trials are needed.

And we haven't had a chance to do any of those trials until now. And the sort of decrease in regulations would be exactly what's needed. What other kinds of mental illnesses or problems might CBD help? So there's been two clinical trials, controlled clinical trials in treating schizophrenia, and CBD was as effective as an antipsychotic drug in treating schizophrenia. And that was a small study, so it's only preliminary evidence. And then when added on to regular treatments, it improved symptoms over those treatments. So there are two clinical trials that suggest potential for treating schizophrenia as well, which is really exciting.

So are you saying that we should have a large-scale testing of CBD and lots of different fronts once it becomes? Absolutely. I think... What would be the best case for you? What would you think? Well, I just say that CBD is really exceptional. There's been no other drug in the history of neuropsychiatry that has the potential to treat so many different disorders.

I'm not saying that it does treat them all, but the evidence is good so far. So it would be ideal to put aside all of these issues of legality and the fact that it comes from the cannabis plant and start to be able to treat it as a medicinal agent with controlled clinical trials and get it out to people who need it as quickly as possible. That's interesting. Calvin on Twitter says with the legalization of cannabis and opening of markets growing rapidly,

what new directions are researchers see opening with industry funding? Should industry be doing a lot of this research? Or is it government or NIH people like that be doing it? I think these types of large clinical trials really need a partnership between all these groups, industry, NIH, and clinicians because obviously companies need to be able to be incentivized to provide a drug that can give a long-term supply. But this sort of funding that you need for large clinical trials really needs of private public cooperation. Last question to you.

While we await the scientific verdict and the legalization, national legalization, taking it off Schedule 1, what should consumers do? I mean, it's all around them now. Right. I think that people need to be aware. aware of a safety issue, first of all, which is that CBD can interact with other medications. So don't go out there and take a lot of these small dose stuff, things that you can get on the street because they might interact with medications you're currently taking. And then we just need people to step up to increase funding for research.

That's the answer. That's a good place to stop. Thank you very much, Dr. Esther Blessing. Dr. Esther Blessing is an assistant professor of psychiatry at NYU Langone Health here in New York City. You've heard that there have been five mass extinctions, huge wipeouts that have erased a whole lot of life millions of years ago. And being so far in the past, right, that makes studying these extinctions, socially put it, well, quite a challenge. Paleontologist Randy Irmiss and his team have been digging into the desert to piece together clues about one of those mass extinctions during the end of the Triassic. Producer Katie Heiler brings us this story from the field.

There's nothing more annoying than having your tools break down in the middle of a job, especially when you're standing on a Utah cliff, just a few cuts away from securing one of the best fossil finds of your career. Paleontologist Randy Irmis and his team have found a Triassic-era Phytosaur skull here in Indian Creek. They're chipping away at the rock around it, hoping not to crack the precious cargo inside. We're lucky if we find one skull a season, so if you think about a skisket, of any animal. There's only one skull, but there's many ribs, there's many vertebrae, there's two of each type of limb, so you don't find a lot of skulls, so that's always really

exciting. Back in the heyday of the Triassic period, 250 million years ago, phytosaurs were one of the top predators of southeastern Utah. They looked kind of like crocodiles, with long, narrow snouts, studded with teeth. They even ate dinosaurs when they got the chance, though in Triassic, Utah, dinos were just small, dog-sized meat eaters, side players, not the big Hollywood versions we think of today. But the fearsome phytosaurs weren't built to last. They went extinct at the end of the Triassic during this big mass extinction called the N-Triassic mass extinction.

They were super successful for 30 million years, and then they died out. Mass extinctions are a window on past climate disasters, a glimpse of the chemical and atmospheric ingredients that spell doom for the planet's biodiversity. You already know about the one that killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. That was the fifth of the so-called Big Five mass extinctions that devastated the Earth. The end Triassic mass extinction, number four on that list, happened around 200 million years ago when three-quarters of all species on Earth went extinct. Randy's phytosaurs didn't make it out alive, but somehow those small early dinosaurs did. No one knows exactly why. I always think of it as kind of a black box. You have

happy triassic faunas with a few dinosaurs in there, then big question mark and then lots of dinosaurs without all the classic triassic reptiles. Sterling Nesbit is a paleontologist at Virginia Tech. He says dinosaurs didn't just make it through the mass extinction. They thrived afterwards. And therein lies the mystery. What makes a dinosaur? How are dinosaurs unique? We know they're survivors, but is there actually something unique about dinosaurs that allowed them to take over the world?

To find out, it helps to go back to the beginning of the Triassic to piece together a climate disaster that would decimate the Earth's biodiversity and pave way for the dominion of the dynos. Back then, the seven continents were still united as one huge supercontinent, Pangea. But then Pangea began to violently break apart along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where the Atlantic Ocean is today. So there was a whole lot of volcanic eruptions, CO2 was being emitted, methane was being emitted. And so you had global warming at that time period and big habitat changes happening. Selena Suarez studies Earth's early climate, and she says traces of that ancient atmosphere are trapped in rocks,

like a geologic fingerprint in the form of calcium carbonate. And those fingerprints reveal that temperatures increased between 3 and 6 degrees Celsius over the course of the end Triassic. If those rising temperatures contributed to the death of the phytosaurs, Randy would find fewer bones as he traveled through the late Triassic, and fewer species of phytosaurs too. But if climate change killed the phytosaurs, and a lot of other species, why not the dinosaurs? Paleontologists aren't in agreement about this, but it could have been, that dinosaurs were better equipped to deal with the heat. One of the things that dinosaurs probably had going for them

is that they were, to a certain extent, thermoregulating. And there's some debate as to whether or not they were warm-blooded like mammals are today. But dinosaurs most likely did regulate their temperature. And so that may have been one of the things that allowed them to thrive in these abandoned ecosystems. The climate events of the late Triassic should feel pretty familiar, an increase in methane and carbon dioxide emissions, global warming, ocean acidification. Selena says she is very aware of the parallel.

We are always concerned about what's going to happen in the future with modern rapid climate change. Well, that experiment has already been run in the past. So we just have to go back into the past and look at it and evaluate it and understand it. Another parallel? Disappearing species. The causes and the players may be different, but the outcome could be the same. Some paleontologists have even started to call our current diversity crisis the sixth mass extinction. I think it's fair to call it a sixth mass extinction. It hasn't played itself out. Spencer Lucas is a paleontologist at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History.

He's known in the field for being skeptical that the Big Five extinctions were the blockbuster wipeouts they're made out to be. Even so, he's not shy about putting a label on the climate change we see today. What scary about it to me is it's how. happening really fast. You know, this is an extinction that's only happening so far on the scale of perhaps a few hundred years or less. Selina, on the other hand, isn't willing to go that far yet. Our time frame for defining mass extinction is on the order of thousands of years, so we have to be careful. However, the geology part of me that understands the long-term carbon cycle sees this as a major, major event. If you check back with me in a 100,000 years or a million years, I'd say

probably we'll see this as a mass extinction. So who will be the winners and the losers of this mass extinction? If indeed we are going through one right now. The phytosaurs are gone. So are all the non-avian dinosaurs? Cleaner than the last time we saw each other. So, all right, are we ready to go? All right, well, welcome to our geology collections room. In his lab at the Natural History Museum of Utah, Randy is examining the skull of one of the casualties of the end Triassic extinction, one of his phytosaurs. And then we can see right here, there's two openings, the nostrils, and these are really critical because that's one of the things that tells us that this animal is not related to

crocodiles, even though it looks very similar. There's one more thing that sets the phytosaurs apart from the early crocs. The ancestors of today's crocodiles made it out of the Triassic alive. Then, over 100 million years later, when all the dinosaurs disappeared from the land, it was again the mighty proto-crocodiles, the ultimate survivors who stuck it out. There's been a lot of debate about why it is crocodiles and alligators made it through living on land, whereas dinosaurs didn't. So I know people like to say that cephalopods, or maybe robots,

will be the winners in a world altered by human-caused climate change. But if the past is any guide, I'm putting my money on the crocodiles. For Science Friday, I'm Katie Heiler. Great story. Katie Heiler is here to tell us more about that, along with digital producer Lauren Young, who was also out on that trip. Welcome to the program. Hi, Ira. You still putting your money on the crocodile? I am. You know, the phytosaurs and the non-avian dinosaurs were both taken out by two different mass extinctions. But the crocodile ancestors, they held on through both of those, so they really know how to weather a climate crisis. That's true. Lauren, this story is part of a science.

project called Methods. Tell us about Methods. Sure. We're really excited about it. So Methods is a project where we want to bring you into the field but through the page. There's an entire online piece that I wrote that goes along with Katie's story. It takes you on the front lines of science and into the desert with Randy. So you can see videos of those paleontologists wielding that rock saw that you just heard and as well as illustrations of those prehistoric animals, hear more sounds. And we've got a handy interactive extinction timeline too that if you have trouble remembering the big mass extinction. it'll help you out. It really all brings this story to life in a visual, beautiful way. So check it out on Science Friday.com slash methods. Let's talk more about this story. The scientists you talked to said that climate change today looks similar to what was happening at the end of the Triassic during this big extinction. Right. So to be clear, the planet was a lot hotter back in the Triassic, about 140 degrees Fahrenheit. So it wouldn't feel like it does today. But what's similar is the way the climate is changing. CO2 is getting pumped into the atmosphere, causing all these different climate effects.

Back then, it was volcanoes. Today, it's humans. But the magnitude of the change is also similar. The Earth was warming by 3 to 6 degrees Celsius at the end of the Triassic. Today, scientists say if we don't do anything about our current climate change, the Earth could warm by three degrees by the end of this century. I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking with Katie Haller and Lauren Young.

That's pretty scary. It is. Yeah, we don't want that to happen. So how do these phytosaurs help us tell us about this climate story? Did they really suddenly drop out of the fossil record completely? Yeah, what you see is phytosaurs all the way up to what's known as the Triassic-Jurassic boundary. And then suddenly, once you get into the Jurassic, they're gone. We know that they were the victims of this mass extinction caused by climate change. But we don't know, we don't have many details about sort of how that happened.

That's why it's this black box. So what Randy is doing is digging up phytosaurs closer and closer to that extinction level to try and figure out what happened. Each skull he gets is sort of like a data point. Right. And so Randy has actually really found three Triassic phytosaur skulls in Indian Creek so far. So he needs to obviously search for a few more to fill out those data points. But if climate change caused this extinction, Randy will see fewer individual phytosaurs as well as fewer species as he travels further through the late Triassic rock. So that would mean there was a plunge in diversity caused by the...

the climate stressing them out. That's what they would see. Like Sherlock Holmes. Yeah. Tell me about camping out. You both camped out overnight with Randy and his crew for this story. What's it like to be on a dig with a paleontologist? Katie?

Ira. Fossil hunting is no joke. There's so much physical labor involved in this work. You're hiking long distances in the hot desert. You're lugging multiple gallons of water so you don't get dehydrated. There's bags of plaster. There's a rock saw. Randy's going to get mad at us for telling this story.

but on our second day, he was working on another fossil, buried in a large chunk of rock. But before he could recover that fossil from the rock, the saw broke again. So Randy just had to strap the huge rock with the fossil in it to his back, and he carries it out of the desert like that. We were all convinced he was going to kill himself. But later on, I asked him, I was like, why do you go to such great lengths for this? And he's like, you know, this is our data. And if we don't have data, then we can't do our work. I was really impressed.

Yeah, I am, like, completely have a new appreciation for. for paleontology, like spotting fossils in the field for the untrained eye like me. Like, it is so hard to do. One of the paleontologists, Andrew Milner, had asked us if we could see, like, a fossil. It was in the site. It was literally in a rock, like, right next to our feet. And I had no idea. But the paleontologists and the volunteers, they know how to read that colorful, you know,

rock out there. I couldn't do it. But, like, you know, if they can see these, like, little pieces of bone and it could be a phytosaurus. That's why they do what they do, and you guys do what you do so very well. I want to thank both of you for. taking time to be with us. This is a great series. Katie Hiler is a SciFry. Radio producer Lauren Young is one of our digital producers. And you can find the full package at ScienceFriety.com slash methods. Great work.

One more thing before we go, we're going to bid a fond and tearful farewell to Rachel Bouton. Rachel's been a linchpin behind the scenes and out front on stage during our trivia contest. Her great sense of humor and good nature have been a boost to all of us over these years at SciFri. wish her will and she will be missed. Thank you, Rachel. Good luck to you. Charles Berkowitz is our director. Our senior producer is Christopher Antaliyata. Our producers are Alexa Lim, Christy Taylor, Katie Heiler. We had technical engineering help today from Rich Kim, Sarah Fishman, and Kevin Wolf. We're active all week on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all the social media. You can ask you a smart speaker to play Science Friday. So every day is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato in New York.