Science Friday - New Alzheimer’s Drug, Bangladeshi Water Machine, Recording Earth’s Sounds. Sept 30, 2022, Part 1

Episode Date: September 30, 2022

New Alzheimer’s Drug Reduces Cognitive Decline, Say Biotech Firms This week, the biotech firms Biogen and Eisai released preliminary data from the clinical trials for their new Alzheimer’s drug, lecanemab. The companies said that the drug slowed cognitive decline by 27% in patients treated with the intravenous medication. It’s likely the drug will get the FDA’s approval by the end of the year. This all comes after the recent controversy surrounding Biogen’s last Alzheimer’s drug Aduhelm. Medicare recently announced that they will not cover that drug and others like it, unless patients are enrolled in a clinical trial. Guest host John Dankosky talks with science journalist Roxanne Khamsi about this and other top science news of the week including a diamond that hints that Earth’s mantle contains water, brainy birds, and hearing aids made of false teeth.   Bangladeshi Farmers Found A Way To Save Massive Amounts Of Water The People’s Republic of Bangladesh is one of the most densely populated countries on Earth, with a population of 165 million people living in an area a bit smaller than the state of Iowa. To feed all those people, farmers in Bangladesh work year-round: Instead of just growing crops during the rainy monsoon season, they grow a second or even third crop during the dry season—using groundwater to irrigate, and creating a more food-secure region. Research published in the journal Science this month found something amazing about all that groundwater. By pumping water for crops in the dry season, Bangladeshi farmers were leaving space in the aquifers to recharge during the rainy monsoon season. And this space allowed the aquifers to recapture more than 20 trillion gallons of water, or twice the capacity of China’s massive Three Gorges Dam, over the last 30 years. The researchers call this the Bengal Water Machine, evidence for a similar concept that was first proposed nearly 50 years ago called the Ganges Water Machine. Guest host John Dankosky talks to lead author Mohammad Shamsudduha and International Water Management Institute researcher Aditi Mukherji about how this groundwater pumping benefits farmers, and the need for more data as climate change continues.   This Soundscape Artist Has Been Listening To The Planet For Decades Jim Metzner is one of the pioneers of science radio—he’s been making field recordings and sharing them with audiences for more than 40 years. He hosted shows such as “Sounds of Science” in the 1980s, which later grew into “Pulse of the Planet,” a radio show about “the sound of life on Earth.” Over the decades, Metzner has created an incredible time capsule of soundscapes, and now, his entire collection is going to the Library of Congress. John Dankosky talks with Metzner about what he’s learned about the natural world from endless hours of recordings and what we can all learn from listening. Plus, they’ll discuss some of his favorite recordings. To hear the best audio quality, it might be a good idea to use headphones if you can.   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 John Dankoski in for Ira Flato. Later this hour, how farmers in Bangladesh are capturing monsoon rains for the next dry season. It's an invisible water machine. Plus a conversation with a pioneer in science radio, Jim Metzner, will talk about the lessons he's learned from carefully listening to the pulse of our planet. But first, this week, the biotech firms, Biogen and E.Sai released preliminary data from the clinical trials for their new Alzheimer's drug. They say the drug is effective in reducing cognitive decline by 27% for patients in the trial, and it appears likely the medicine will get the FDA's approval by the end of the year.

All this comes after the recent controversy surrounding Biogen's previous Alzheimer's drug, Aduhlm, which Medicare and other private insurers will not cover. Joining me now to talk more about this and other top science stories of the week is my guest, Roxanne Camsey is a science journalist based in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Roxanne, welcome back to Science Friday. Hi, John. It's great to be here. So to start off, tell us more about this new intravenous Alzheimer's medicine, Lacanamab. How effective is it? Well, as you say, it only seems to slow the effect of cognitive decline by about a quarter.

And really, it's on the scale from zero to 18. People were being tested on this cognitive test called the clinical dementia rating. And they found that people over 18 months who were on the drug did 0.45 points. better. So not quite a stunning difference, I would say, than those who didn't receive the drug. So, I mean, it kind of comes down to how you calculate it. I think the interesting thing here is that we've gone almost 20 years without new drugs for Alzheimer's. And now in the last two years, this is the second one. As you mentioned, the first one has kind of not been a home run for the drug companies and for patients. So it's a little bit of way to see with this one, too, I think.

Yeah, and I think a lot of the reaction to it is because we haven't had a new drug in 20 years and there's just a lot of excitement about anything that seems to move the needle. This is part of a study looking at the underlying science of what causes Alzheimer's. So what does all this tell us about how amyloid plaques work? Yes, and as you mentioned, anything that moves the needle is important because Alzheimer's affects so many people in the U.S., in the world. And for the last 15 years or so, the predominant theory has been that these plaques form in the brain, amyloid toxins, and that clearing those toxins somehow will reduce the cognitive decline.

That being said, just in the last year, there was an investigation suggesting that maybe some of the data that prompted this whole interest in amyloid might have been from manipulated data in a study. So there's a little bit of a question mark hanging over that as well. And there's some skepticism about this drug for all the reasons we just laid out. What are some of the other concerns that we're hearing from people this week? Well, nothing is without cost, I guess, sometimes with drugs, not just the price tag. And for the one that you mentioned that Medicare doesn't cover, it's $56,000 a year. But in terms of the side effects, there can be some brain swelling. It could be temporary.

but anytime your brain's swelling or acting unusual, it's not necessarily a great thing. So I think doctors and patients, if this drug gets approved, will have to weigh a lot of different factors. We'll continue to follow that story in the weeks and months ahead. Now, this next story you brought us is going in a different direction, deep inside the earth. And I don't know, dare I say, it might even be a little bit of a sparkly story. Scientists have found a diamond that suggests a whole lot of water in the earth's mantle. So how can a diamond tell us that, Roxanne? Yes, I love talking about diamonds.

Let's talk about diamonds all the time. So this was a gem quality diamond, but it had a flaw in it. It had a beautiful flaw, if you might say, that actually gives us a clue about what's going on deep inside the earth. So we don't really have a great way to look at the earth's mantle because it's so far down deep below us. And yet there's this question of what's there? So this impurity, this imperfection in this diamond that it's kind of like a cloudy blue white haze. It tells us that there are potentially some water in the mantle and how the water got there. We don't know. We have some questions. But I love the fact that this tiny diamond is giving us a picture into what might be going on beneath the surface of the earth. So a diamond with an impurity like this might actually be a more valuable diamond for science. Yes. And unfortunately, they've found one of these kinds of gems before about a decade ago. And it was also miraculously potentially providing clues to whether there's water in the mantle of the earth.

But they destroyed it in the process of analyzing it. So hopefully this time we'll be able to learn more. And they can take better care of the diamond. Yes, destroyed diamonds are never good. Oh, my goodness. Well, speaking of traveling back in time and finding unusual things about the earth, so scientists have analyzed an 80 million-year-old bird skull, and it turns out, Roxanne, that ancient birds might have been just as smart as current ones.

How do they figure this out? Yes, and let's also say that current birds are actually not that bird-brained. I did not know this, but living birds today have brains that are, more complex than any other animals besides mammals. So actually, let's give some birds some respect for their brains. What had happened was researchers found this skull that was about 80 million years old, and it has kind of a structure that they're able to use a CT scan to look and analyze and slices. They can create a virtual reconstruction of what this bird's brain was. And it gives them clues to the structure and how it might have been actually able to function a little bit better than other brains out there 80 million years ago.

So what does this tell us though about the bird family tree, the birds that maybe descended from this 80 million year old, relatively smart bird? Yes. So the structure of the brain here is it's kind of flexed. It flexes downwards. And it looks more like modern hummingbirds rather than. in the brain of some of the ancient dinosaurs that might have been related to it. So it kind of tells us that maybe around this time there was a divergence and birds had this kind of new formatting structure that gave them maybe even a better ability to fly. We don't know, but there's a lot of conjecture, a lot of speculation that there was a branching potentially off of some of the older types of birds, dinosaurs and things like that. It took flight, if you will, this new

kind of brain. Now, there's another study that you brought us here that I think it helps to answer one of the questions I've always had about just being human, that feeling of being sick. Like what gives us that feeling like, oh, I'm not well today? And we're starting to learn a little bit more about that kind of icky feeling. Tell us more about this study. Yeah, so we're going from brains 80 million years ago and birds to our brains today. And what scientists found is that they looked at some of the neurons in the in the brain stem of mice, which then they hope to say it's like ours because we're not that different from mice as much as we want to believe. And these these neurons seem to regulate some of those very common symptoms across all different kinds

of illnesses that we get. So I don't know about you, but sometimes when I'm sick, I lose my appetite. I get lethargic. I just want to snooze. You know, sometimes I wish my doctor would just prescribe watching movies or something like that because that's all I want to do. But so it seems that the mice had the same effect. So they did a lot of tricky, sophisticated work to be able to turn on these neurons, even when the mice weren't sick from an actual pathogen. And they found the same kind of lethargy and loss of appetite in the animals, really cluing us into that this might be an area for us to pay more attention to.

in terms of what makes us feel the way we do when we're sick. Whenever we see studies that are done in mice, there is always a little bit of a red flag. They're like mice aren't exactly like humans. Is this the sort of study, Roxanne, that you think, I don't know, might be something worth looking more into? I think so. I do want to say that one of the interesting caveats is all the mice in the study were male. So would be nice if they actually threw some female mice in there, too, just for kicks. But I do think that this isn't something where the mice have to perform some sophisticated mental task. It's really a basic function of behavior from being sick.

So I would not be surprised. I'm not a scientist, obviously, but I wouldn't be surprised if we perhaps find some clues in our own brainstem about why we feel the way we do when we're sick. Well, I want to close with, I think, a really hopeful and interesting story. And something I didn't know is possible. researchers are looking into how to make false teeth into hearing aids. So how exactly does this work? Yes, this might be a preview into how I will listen to Science Friday 40 years from now. If I lose my front teeth especially.

Your front teeth especially. Okay, interesting. Tell us more. Yes, yes. And not just because they're huge. So scientists essentially, we're looking for different ways to enhance hearing. because a lot of us are either losing our hearing or have had some hearing impairment. And what we typically know about is these hearing aids that go in our ears.

But what if the hearing aids went in our mouths is the kind of idea behind all this? So they want to engineer a tooth implant that can function like a hearing aid. So picking up sound in our teeth because essentially even our ears are kind of picking up sound ultimately through bones and things like that. So we're trying to get good vibrations here. They wanted to test whether implants that were already in people, they had 38 participants in this study, they found that the implants actually conducted sound

better than regular natural teeth, and that the implants in the front of the mouth were particularly suited to picking up sound better than ones like deep in the back of the mouth, like molars and things like that. So now they might want to engineer something that specifically functions to act as a hearing aid and a tooth implant. It's a two and one. A two and one, but would it require you to, I don't know, pull out one of your front teeth in order to make this work? They don't say in the paper whether they would ask people to do that.

But I know plenty of people that have implants. somebody in my family is this week undergoing an implant procedure. So let's just say they're not suggesting you, you ask your friend to punch you in the face so that you can get a hearing aid. But there might be an opportunity for people that are looking to upgrade their implants to really upgrade their implants. That's so interesting. Well, we'll have to keep watching that technology as it develops. I want to thank my guest, Roxanne Camsey. She's a science journalist based in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Always good to talk to you, Roxanne. Thank you, John. I appreciate it very much.

After the break, how do you make monsoon rains an asset for the dry season? New research reveals a self-sustaining water machine being used by farmers in Bangladesh. This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankowski. The People's Republic of Bangladesh is one of the most densely populated countries on earth, with a population of 165 million people in an area a bit smaller than the state of Iowa. To feed all those people, farmers and best people, Bangladesh work year round. Instead of just growing crops during the rainy monsoon season, they have to grow a second or even third crop during the dry season, using groundwater to irrigate and thus creating

a more secure food region. Research published in the journal Science this month found something pretty amazing about all that groundwater. Bangladeshi farmers, by pumping water for crops in the dry season, were actually leaving space in the aquifers to recharge during the rainy monsoon season. in this space allowed the aquifers to recapture more than 20 trillion gallons of water, or twice the capacity of China's three gorges dam. The researchers call this the Bengal water machine, and it's the proof of a concept that was proposed nearly 50 years ago. Here to explain more is the lead author of that research, Dr. Muhammad Shamsadduha. He's an associate professor at the University of London's Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction. His friends and students call him Shams.

and Dr. Aditi Mukherji, whose principal researcher for the International Water Management Institute's New Delhi office. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you, John. Thank you, John. It's a pleasure to be here.

I'll start with you, Muhammad. In simple terms, tell us how farmers are managing to store all of this water. So the paper that we published in science, the Bengal water machine, is an invisible but a giant machine that operates undergrates, underground in many parts of Bangladesh by millions of farmers.

This water machine has been working for the past three decades and enabled capture of huge amount of fresh water from monsoon rainfall and floodwater as a result of intense pumping of groundwater to produce rice crops during the dry season. As you mentioned that in Bangladesh during the dry season, there isn't much rainfall, very little rainfalls during a six-month period, which is the dry period between November and April. So farmers do use groundwater a lot. And it started in the early 90s when government of Bangladesh relaxed some of the policies around importing diesel-operated pumps. So farmers started to copy each other, and they started to

install shallow boreholes and to start pumping groundwater for producing rice. And the pumping of groundwater during the dry season enabled more capture of fresh water in the aquifer during the subsequent monsoon, creating this storage base and capturing of fresh water that is, as you mentioned, more than twice the size of the three gorges dam in China. So how then is this different from how groundwater systems might work if the farmers weren't doing so much pumping? What would be happening instead? Good question. Groundwater is found in Bangladesh at very shallow depth. So it talking about less than 10 meters or so below ground level in many places. Imagine there wasn't any groundwater pumping for irrigation. Groundwater would feed to river channels during the dry season.

Now during the monsoon season, groundwater gets recharged, as he said, from the monsoon rainfall. And you see the oscillation up and down of groundwater levels in monitoring wells. When farmers, started to pump groundwater since the late 80s, early 90s, the seasonal dynamics suddenly changed. So dry season water levels started to go down and down each year as farmers withdraw more and more water to produce rice crops. In the monsoon season, in many places where we have seen the operation of the Bengal water machine, groundwater levels rise to the pre-development condition, suggesting that the aquifers were getting more fresh water through seasonal recharge. So the very existence of the Bengal water machine is possible, happened because of the intervention of millions of farmers in Bangladesh. So let's talk about these farmers and what they're able to do that's a little bit different because this machine.

works so well. Aditi, this number trillions of gallons of water stored by the system, farmers can of course use it during the next dry season. It seems as though this is allowing farmers to do something that they just couldn't do otherwise. Yes. So let me say that the farmers, when they started irrigation and growing the third crop, it wasn't necessarily that they knew that there is this particular mechanism of groundwater storage. Farmers' original intention of using groundwater was literally to produce their food that they needed to sustain themselves and also to provide food security for the country. But because of the unique hydrogeology of the region and the very high rainfall, as Sham's paper shows very clearly, this also turned into one

of those few cases in natural sciences where it's almost like a win-win solution. I'm from India and we have actually basket cases of groundwater over exploitation. You know, similar things. Farmers benefited tremendously from groundwater irrigation, but it has resulted in a long-term decline in groundwater tables simply because the rainfall wasn't sufficient to recharge all that that was been extracted, or maybe because the hydrogeology was not conducive for good recharge. So Bangladesh indeed got quite lucky in terms of these natural systems of groundwater aquifers, which are not only very conducive for the kind of recharge, but also that the very fact that they receive very high rainfall, 1500 plus 2,000 mm-plus.

I find that incredibly interesting and also very exciting that Sharm's papers actually provides proof for the hypothesis that was suggested way back in 1975, again published in science. Well, and that's really important, though. It is very exciting. And this hypothesis goes back quite some time. It's the first time, though, anyone's really proven that this is working, right? Yes, indeed. And the reason we were able to demonstrate that the very concept that was proposed 50 years ago in science by Roger Revell and Vancouver, Lakshalia, Lakshmina, Ayaona is because of the availability of monitoring data in Bangladesh. So there are 1,250 monitoring stations all across Bangladesh that monitor weekly groundwater levels. So we analyzed about a million data points at 465 monitoring stations all across the country. And we have seen that at about 153 boreholes, this incremental increase in dry season water levels and then filling it up during the monsoon season happened. So about a third of the borehole records that we looked at showed. the operation of the Bengal water machine, and it was only possible because we have high-quality monitoring data on ground water levels in Bangladesh. And Diti, how exciting is it

to have that kind of data to be able to prove this theory? I think it's very, very exciting. So there have been other papers that have kind of modeled, but not actual validation, because this kind of empirical study is only possible with the kind of data, the sham, is mentioning very high density data for a long period of time. In India, for example, the central groundwater board also monitors groundwater, but they do it only four times in a year. So I think this also goes back to the importance of very good data monitoring that countries like ours needs to do to be able to understand these mechanisms in greater detail. Mohamed, if there's more water going into the ground, thanks to this water machine, is it

possible that this entire region is benefiting from less flooding than it might have otherwise seen? Yes, I think it is very much possible. So what we showed in the paper is that groundwater captured more freshwater through recharge during the monsoon season. And the amount of water we are talking is 75 to 90 cubic kilometer of water over a 30-year period. So that is nearly three cubic kilometer of water per year, which is more than the groundwater is used here in the UK. So that water would have otherwise flown through the rivers and would cause river flooding. We don't have the concrete evidence actually to show that it has actually mitigated. flooding or kind of reduce the extent of flood disasters. I think further study is needed to prove it,

but there is a huge potential for flood mitigation through the operation of this water machine. I'm wondering, though, as with all parts of the globe, climate change is causing so much disruption. Aditi, what are we looking at in terms of how climate change could alter these results? Are we looking at the possibility that somehow this Bengal water machine starts to break down because of the impacts of climate change? I think a big unknown is what will happen to the recharge mechanism in the future. I think to the best of my knowledge, we do not understand the recharge under climate change situation. There is some evidence, but not enough to tell us how the changes in the rainfall pattern will affect recharge. So one of the projections for the region is that the monsoon rains are projected to intensify.

We are either going to have either the same amount of rain or just more rain in the future. But the other part of the projection also says that we may have those more intense period of rain. So basically the same amount of rain, but fewer rainfall evens. So how all of those effect recharge is a bit of an unknown. I think the other part that has got quite a close link to climate change is also the middle. part of it. The tool that the farmers used to extract groundwater are diesel pumps. So Bangladesh currently has around 1.3 million diesel pumps. India has around 10 million diesel pumps and these all run on diesel obviously and that causes a large amount

of carbon emissions. So one of the ways we have to pay attention is how do we provide clean source of irrigation to the farmers and here switching these diesel pumps to solar irrigation farms is one of those low-hanging fruit that needs to be really explored. Are there concerns that rising sea levels, especially in a country like Bangladesh, that is so close to sea level, that rising sea levels could bring more seawater into critical parts of the aquifer, that that's one of the climate change problems with groundwater systems that you rely on in the years to come? We have actually not seen the scale, the spatial scale and the extent to which the Bengal water machine operates in the coastal region.

It is mainly working in the northern and the north-central part of Bangladesh, where there is plenty of rainfall and it is very far away from the coast. And there is very little groundwater pumping for producing rice crops going on in the coastal area. So in that sense, there is a bit of positive side to the discovery of this water machine that going forward under climate change, as Audity just mentioned, it might just benefit because of the heavy monsoon precipitation may lead to more groundwater recharge. But again, we need further study to prove that. Just a quick reminder that I'm John Dankowski, and this is Sondon. Science Friday from WNYC Studios.

We're talking about the amazing capture of trillions of gallons of groundwater by farmers in Bangladesh. It's called the Bengal water machine. And we're talking with Mohamed Shamsaduhha and Aditi Mukherjee. Aditi, I'm wondering if farmers in other parts of the world could benefit from this type of system. Are there other places that you think the Bengal water machine could work? So there are two things that are happening.

You need a certain kind of aquifers that are closely connected to the surface water body, kind of unconfined aquifers, and you also need a high amount of rainfall, 1,000mm, 1,200 millimetre plus rainfall. So when these two things come together, this water machine is likely to deliver in all those places. So there are large parts of India starting all the way from eastern Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal, Assam, where this is actually working. Same with the Nepal Taray. Here we find that farmers have been withdrawing groundwater without, in many places,

we do not notice even after 20, 30 years, the steep drawdown in the water tables. But as I said earlier, the very fact that in many parts of India, for instance, our groundwater data is limited. We do have a large number of monitoring wells, but then the data is limited to only four times in a year. So that kind of makes it a bit harder to authoritatively prove this hypothesis. I think this is already working, but it will be very hard to prove it in the authoritative way that Shams and colleagues could do it with the data from Bangladesh. I'd like to ask you both before we let you go about what these findings can teach us about how we might manage water in the future.

We talked a bit about climate change. Obviously, there are so many people around the world. world concerned about food security. What are some of the big takeaways for you from this paper and what we've learned so far and how we might change our water management tactics around the world in the future? Yes, right. So I think for me, the most important takeaways, both Shams and I have been working on groundwater for a long time. And I think he will agree with me when I say that the major worldview around groundwater is that a bit negative. It's kind of, okay, wherever you use groundwater, groundwater levels will decline. And that has kind of necessarily come from

studies that have been done in the more arid and semi-arid regions with limited recharge potential. You think of California, for instance, or you think of North China Plains or the western part of India, Pakistan, etc. All those places we have seen intensive use of groundwater, but then not commensurate recharge simply because the rainfall isn't adequate, leading to long-term decline in groundwater. So that is kind of shaped policymakers' views that groundwater is always quote unquote bad and must be avoided. But what we are seeing in this case that we have to be very, very context specific and in cases like Bangladesh, Eastern India, all these regions with high rainfall and alluvial aquifers, actually groundwater can be a very powerful tool of poverty alleviation. And similar story

can actually play out in Africa if we are careful about how we are managing groundwater. It can be a very successful tool for poverty alleviation as well as food security, providing one, we are managing it properly through the correct policies, and we are also kind of investing in very good data collection and monitoring wells. I just want to add that this is new knowledge and the discovery of the Bengal water machine will definitely inform climate adaptation policies and groundwater pumping strategies in Bangladesh and beyond. And this finding will guide us in developing better strategies for groundwater resource management to ensure food security in future. Dr. Mohamed Shamsaduha is an associate professor at the University of London's Institute for Risk and

Disaster Reduction. His friends and colleagues call him Shams. Thank you so much for joining us. I appreciate it. Thank you for having me, John. And Dr. Aditi Mukherjee is a principal researcher for the International Water Management Institute's New Delhi Office. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you, John. It was a pleasure. Coming up after the break, I'll talk with legendary sound recordist Jim Metzter about what he's learned from years of listening to the pulse of our planet. This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankoski. I don't know about you, but for years, the alarm clock in my bedroom woke me up with my local public radio station.

And what voice did I hear? Very first thing in the morning? Every summer in the McNeil River in Alaska is filled with spawning salmon. It's an annual feast that bears in this region have come to rely on. I'm Jim Metzner, and this is the pulse of the planet. And it wasn't just Jim's voice that eased me out of my sleep. It was the weird and wonderful sounds that he gathered from around our planet. Maybe your memory goes back even further to his show, The Sounds of Science, where his guests included Coco the Gorilla.

She's nice to be with. She's got a sense of humor. she's very warm and outgoing. And she is a gorilla. I'm Jim Metzner, and these are the Sounds of Science. Jim Metzner is one of the pioneers of science radio, making field recordings and sharing them with audiences for more than 40 years. And now this time capsule of sound he's created, his entire collection, is going to the Library of Congress.

Today we're going to talk with Jim about what he's learned about the natural world from endless hours of recordings, and what we can all learn from listening. We're going to hear some of his favorite recordings too, so I don't know if you can listen along with headphones, now might be a good time to put them on. Jim Metzner, welcome back to Science Friday. Hi, it's a pleasure to be here,

and I just wanted to tell you to put a bookend on it. You might have wakened with my voice, but my voice puts my wife to sleep every night. Well, I certainly appreciated waking up to your voice all those mornings on Pulse of the, planet. Of all the ways that you can tell a story, Jim, why do you think sound helps us understand the world around us so well? Ooh, boy, we could talk about that the whole, a whole day. It's such a great question.

How does it that sounds grab you? Where do they hit you? They certainly hit me where I live. You know, there's a voice, but then there's the sound of my mother's voice. There's the sound of something that I grew up with. It's like a sound that came in and never left. Sounds are the touchstones to our emotional world, our emotional life. So that's part of it. They also seem to trickle down, you know, as if there was like some cave inside, the sounds trickle down and go to places where words don't go.

And they tell us things. So you could be listening to somebody and you can tell us. as much by the sound of their voice as what they are saying. I want to actually play a sound here that I know really resonated with you. It's the sound of a parrot and a girl laughing, Jim. So, of course, I can't help but to laugh when I hear that. Tell us about that sound. I still smile and laugh every time I hear it, this recording.

So it took place in Brazil and by day. I was in Bahia. In the 70s, I was in my 20s, and I stumbled upon this group of young women who were all clustered around another woman with a parrot. And they're talking back and forth. And, you know, it was a serendipitous moment. I waltzed in and recorded it. And what the parrot is saying, I'm mad at you. And the girl says, you're mad at me? Yeah, I'm mad at you. But it's like, you know, the glee of this moment, you know, I think I could play this anywhere in the world and people would get it. There's something in that sound that just cracks everybody up. Yeah. And that's, as you say, it sort of touches a place inside you that just hearing people talk isn't going to do. The

sound of people's laughter is something that we have a physiological response to, Jim. Yeah. Yeah. And I bet you there's something about the sound itself, songs video, that just does it. I don't think a video would necessarily help. It's the sounds that carry that emotion. So let's go back a little bit to the start of your series Pulse of the Planet. It's this very popular series in which you've intertwined science and nature and culture and these really short, beautiful segments there on, hundreds of public radio stations around the country. Do you have an idea of what the pulse of the planet is? Is the Pulse of the Planet what we hear on the daily news every day? I hope not. Underneath is,

sort of the tsunamis of the news. There's something else going on. There's the seasonal rhythms of nature. The whales are migrating. The cicadas are emerging and so forth. When you said that, the thing that resonated with me is I remember being in the, in the rainforests in Costa Rica and feeling, I don't know what to say. It's a vibration coming from around you.

And as you listen, you hear millions of insects and birds and other animals and and people and motorbikes and the ocean waves, and they're all coming together. And it feels like this vibration of the earth. And if you think about, I mean, at least for me, the pulse is not a regular glub-dub, glub that a human would have, but it's this amazing vibration that's coming from everywhere. Yes, indeed.

It's many. It is diverse. It is varied. It's ever-changing. So if you were in the rainforest, you'd notice that there was a different sound at night than in the morning, of course, and you don't have to go to the rainforest to hear that anyone in the country, or I dare say the city as well.

Sounds morph and change moment to moment. So take us through a day of field recording. Like, what is it like? When you go out with a microphone, what are you carrying? Does anybody come with you? Just, I know, give us a little day in a life because I think our listeners would really love to know how you go and capture the sounds, especially of the natural world. Okay.

I rarely use the word capture. I'll tell you why in a moment, but it's a great question. I remind listeners that right now, for the first time in human history, virtually every one of us is carrying a sound recording device in our pocket. And it makes a damn good recording. And so go out today, take a soundwalk, and you record the sounds. Please, listeners, try it, whether you're interviewing. mom or grandpa or whoever, or just the sounds of the neighborhood, go on a journey of discovery.

But if I go out with a recorder, there's no typical day, no typical day. And that's the beauty of sound recording. And I tend to be a bit more inclusive. I don't go out and say, I'm going to record a yellow belly sapsucker today or whatever. I mean, if it comes across my path, then great. but I usually, rarely, sometimes, however, I do go out and search for sounds, but more often than not, whatever comes out, my way is grist through the mill. I want to play another sound that you sound along to us as one of your favorites, and this is

a sound that is very rich and varied. It was recorded in Grampians National Park in Victoria, Australia. Let's listen for a moment. Jim, what are we hearing there? So there I was in Grampians National Park. just west of Melbourne, a park that is run by indigenous peoples. It was an extraordinary place and one of the great visuals. It had nothing really to do with the sound, but I'll just tell you, because it was just so out of the ordinary. I was surrounded by kangaroos. They weren't making any

sounds, but there they were. And then, of course, there were this canopy of trees and this immense textured panoply. I'm running out of adjectives to just try to describe it because words only dance around what sounds do. They do so much better than words. But I think the challenge for me and maybe other listeners too is I see that typically, honestly, I don't know how to listen to the sounds of nature. I mean, it's wondrous at moments. But, you know, if you're going to sit down and listen to, you know, a Bach concerto or, you know, a little bit of Mozart, you can give yourself 10 minutes for that easy, longer maybe. But for sounds, which every bit is interesting and varied, we don't typically have that kind of training and experience. So I'm still learning

how to listen to. And you can listen for species. Oh, that's a, that's a liar bird, for example, or you could listen in another way to this orchestration. That's so interesting the way that you just put that, Jim, though, because by contrast, if you're listening to a Bach keyboard piece, part of the context that's important to you is you know that this man, some hundreds of years ago, wrote this piece, and it's been adapted and adopted, and all the context of it is also what you're listening to and for. but that sound that we just heard, we might not know what any of the birds are that we just heard, but the sound itself clearly is beautiful.

It speaks to a natural environment that we can potentially imagine in our minds. And it's just so evocative of something and hits us in a way that even without context, I think people might think is just stunningly beautiful. I think so too. and just following your line of thought, you could say, you know, unlike Baku only put a year, a mere 10 years into it, this is the result of a million years of evolution that we're hearing right now. They've been working on it for a long time. They're finally starting to get good at it, huh?

I have to ask you, with all of these sounds that you've collected over all of these years, they're now going to go into the library of Congress. I mean, it's the most basic question in the world, but how does that make you feel? That must be an amazing feeling to know that you've contributed so much and that people will be able to experience these sounds forever. Yes, recording is often a solo endeavor.

You go into a booth, it's a solo endeavor. You know that a lot of people are listening, but that's sort of like an idea. To know that these vibrations will be heard, that's why I don't use the word capture. These were incredible gifts to me. I was extraordinarily honored to receive these sounds to be the one who was entrusted with them. And so the imperative to share them.

So how do you share them? That's in part up to the library. To me, I'm writing a book about my adventures called Adventures of a Lifelong listener. So to answer your question, you know, it's like, I mean, every time you press the red button, button. It's with the hope that something wonderful will happen. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn't. And then there's that imperative, that's human imperative, the wish to share these vibrations with other sentient beings, because in the act of sharing, it's like we're all resonating again together with the environment, with the world around us. So in the act of sharing and

knowing that for centuries, people will share in these vibrations, it's a good feeling. but also I feel like I've fulfilled my part of the bargain that I was given this material, and now I've done my best to share it in a way that hopefully will reach across the gap. I'm John Dankowski, and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. I'm talking with Jim Metzner, the host of Pulse of the Planet, about all the many recordings that he's made of our world. They're all going to the Library of Congress. I'd like to share one more sound that you brought us here.

And I won't even set this up first. Let's just listen to this sound that you've sent along. Right, now we're covering them with blankets and sheets. One, to keep the sun off them and keep them moist. And also, in some degree, help them control their body temperature. They can quickly overheat in a situation like this. So it'll keep the water on and keep them cool. Or in some cases, if they go into shock, they can start getting cold.

In that case, we'll use other things and put more blankets on and try to keep them warm. This is a good example, Jim, of something where if you give people just a little bit of information or no information at all, they can make up their own minds. Tell us where you recorded this sound. I was in Cape Cod some years back, just driving around listening to the radio. And it was a call out to this ad hoc network of seed of your pants, animal rescuers, just vigilante rescuers. anybody within the sound of the voice of the announcer to come because there was a whale pilot whales were beaching at this particular location. I thought, well, I'm near there. I'm going to show up. And I had my tape recorder with me. So they show up and I'm with them. And they're trying to rescue

these whales who have beached themselves for no apparent reason, one of these odd quandaries that we're still facing. Why do whales beach? We really don't know. And so I join them and saw that they were putting blankets on them to keep, just as he was this man was describing. And then they were trying to lift getting blankets underneath them and, and stretchers that they were jury rigging and taking them out and trying to get them out swimming again. And at a certain point, I just put down my microphone and joined in. But for a moment, you know, to hear the sounds, to be with them and to look a whale in the eye from close up, which I never had that experience before was extraordinary. And to think that you were helping, how could you not

want to help them and feel for them and see that all of these people with the best of intentions were trying to do the best they could to help these fellow creatures? Before I let you go, Jim, quickly, I'd love to hear about your American Soundscapes project. It's a crowdsource project where people can submit their own special sounds. Can you tell us about? about it. Thank you. American soundscapes.com. You can be among the first to check it out in its beta form. So if you go, you'll see that there are some featured soundscapes from some professional sound recorders, some of the best sound recordists I know of. But the chance for anybody using that sound recording device that you have in your pocketbook or back pocket to go out,

take that journey of discovery that we were speaking about earlier, go out and have your own journey that way and send it in. It doesn't have to be a whale rescue. It can be something as simple as the bells of the church in the town where you live, the sound that your grandfather makes whenever he picks up a heavy box, a word that only your family knows and is privy to, or whatever sounds that are in your home, your neighborhood, your environment, or in your cultural group that are significant, that are emblematic, that are significant. They can be sounds of nature or culture, but share them with us. This American Soundscape Project is an opportunity for us to share our sounds with each other. That's fantastic. Jim Metzner, thank you so much and congratulations.

Thank you. It's been a pleasure. Jim Metzner is a field recordist and radio producer based in Kingston, New York. His entire collection of sounds is going to the Library of Congress. But you can't listen to all of them there just yet, though. That much sound, it takes a while to upload. Here's grants manager Jason Rosenberg, with some of the people who helped to make this show possible. Kyle Marion Viterbo is our community manager. Annie Nero is our individual giving manager.

Dee Peter Schmidt and Emma Gomez are our digital. digital producers, and I'm Jason Rosenberg, grants manager. Thanks for listening. Thanks so much, Jason. BJ Leederman composed or theme music. If you missed any part of this program or you'd like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts. I'm John Dankowski. IRIS back next week.