Science Friday - New Human Species, Census, Plankton, Brain Etchings. April 19, 2019, Part 2

Episode Date: April 19, 2019

Last week, researchers announced they’d found the remains of a new species of ancient human on the island of Luzon in the Philippines. It was just a few teeth and bones from toes and hands, but they appeared to have a strange mix of ancient and modern human traits scientists had never seen before. Enter: Homo luzonesis. However, Homo luzonesis’ entry on the hominid family tree is still fuzzy and uncertain. Dr. Shara Bailey, associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at New York University, joins Ira to weigh in on the new find and to discuss how we determine what makes a species “human.” Next year, the United States Census Bureau will send out its 10-year census to collect demographic data on every person in the country. That survey happens once a decade and asks a handful of questions, but the agency also sends out the yearly American Community Survey, or ACS, which is an ongoing survey that collects more detailed data on smaller populations. How is your data used once you turn in your survey? Demographer Catherine Fitch talks about how the information surveys are used for research and policies, why certain questions appear on the forms, and new ways that the census is trying to survey the country. Plus: For half a century, merchant ships have hitched humble metal boxes to their sterns, and towed these robotic passengers across some 6.5 million nautical miles of the world’s oceans. The metal boxes are the “Continuous Plankton Recorder” or CPR, a project conceived, in a more innocent time, to catalogue the diversity of plankton populating the seas. But the first piece of plastic twine got caught up in the device in 1957; the first plastic bag appeared in 1965. In the decades since, the device has picked up more and more plastic pollution. Clare Ostle, a marine biogeochemist and lead author on a study about the CPR’s plastic finds in the journal Nature Communications, joins Ira to talk about the treasures and trash the CPR has collected over the years. And back in 2011, after Greg Dunn completed his PhD in neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania, he didn’t return to the lab. Instead, he decided to focus on art. “The only difference between a landscape of a forest and a landscape of a brain is you need a microscope to see one and not the other,” Dunn told Science Friday. Using the techniques of microetching and lithographing, Dunn has created a project called “Self Reflected,” which visualizes what it might look like to see all the neurons of the brain connected and firing. He joins Ira to discuss his work, which is also the subject of our latest SciArts video. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Later in the hour, we're going to take a look at the census. You know, it's happening next year, and so after you fill out the form, where does all that data go? And we want to know, do you participate in the census? Are you curious about what happens to your data and how it gets used? Give us a call. Our number, 844-8255. That's 844-Sy-Talk, or tweet us at SciFri.

But first, last week, researchers announced they found the remains of a new species of ancient human on the island of Luzon in the Philippines. It was just a few teeth, toe, and handbones, but they looked to have strange mix of ancient and modern human traits. Scientists have never seen before, so enter Homo Lusonneses. Did I get that right, Sheriff? Lusonensis, yeah. Sheriff Bailey is Associate Professor in the Department. of anthropology at New York University. Welcome back to Science Friday.

Thanks. It's so great to be here. Okay, so we now made the human family tree more complex now? Yes, absolutely. In what way? Well, we've added another species. And not only that, but it's a species that was living at the same time as we were. So, you know, it took a long time for us to accept Neanderthals as a separate species, and that coexisted with Homo sapiens, our species.

And now we've got not only Homo sapiens and Homo Neanderers, halenzis, but homo nelady and homo fluoresciensis and now homo lucidensis. So how do you decide where to draw the line about where it belongs? Well, about where it belongs like the relationship of that? Is it a human or non-human? Yeah, well, it's definitely human, right? So it has characteristics that align it much closer to humans than it does with apes. And even though it has some primitive characteristics or like the curved toe bone,

for the most part, the majority of the characteristics align it with our genus Homo. And so how many human-like humanoids, homonids, are there out there, or were there that we know about? I think I could count them on two hands and a foot. That many. That many. But maybe I'd need my other foot, too. I might need both feet. Yeah, it depends because there's several species that are.

not accepted as widely as, let's say, Homo Florisianzus, you know, so there's Homo Georgicus, there's a number of other ones that people don't talk about quite as much, but they're out there. They've been proposed. Well, let's talk about Homo Luzonensis, where it lived and why it's very similar to this other species, right? To which one? Floresienses? Yeah. Well, I mean, they hypothesize, see, the problem is that Homo Fluorizzenzes is a lot more preserved.

It has a skull and it has two jaw bones and it has a lot of post-crania, which are the bones underneath the head. With leucinensis, you have a couple hand bones, a foot bone, a little piece, I think, of the thigh bone and some teeth. And so we don't know what its skull look like. We don't know if it was as small-brained as fluorescence was, which is one of the things that made homo-fluoresianza was so contentious to begin with because it had an ape-sized brain. They have proposed that it's small-bodied, which would align it with Homo Florizians, because both would be then kind of a dwarfed species of human. Under three feet tall, they were saying.

That is small-body. Yeah, and it was not atypical for that to happen on islands. Would we know that if they were related at all? Were they around at the same period? Yeah, probably, because on both islands, Flores and Luzon, they have earlier occupations dating to between 700 and, or I don't know, six or 700,000 years ago, that suggests that the ancestors of these species, homelusinensis and homo Florisiansus, were probably living at the same time. And so I presume that they would have evolved kind of in parallel to one another.

But, you know, they were on different islands, and so they would have acquired some similarities. Maybe the dwarfism is similar, but then the details could be different, especially if they weren't interacting with one another. We talked about the bones, but also on the site, there were also some teeth. I know you're an expert in ancient teeth. Love teeth. Let me chew on that. You haven't heard that one before, I'm sure.

Was there anything curious about the teeth that the researchers found on the site? Well, in many ways, they're similar to homo-fluoresiensis and that they're quite small. And the teeth get smaller towards the back of the tooth row, which is something that you see with Homo sapiens. and the morphology is quite simple, which is something that you see with Homo sapiens. But, you know, the cautionary note is that we have, there are other species. Now there's some fossils from Spain, Simdilisos, now known to be Homo-Hydrobergenzes, or something related to Neanderthals, that were when they've only had the teeth, they thought, and because they were small, they thought that had to be Homo sapiens.

So tooth size is actually very evolvable. But so they have quite small teeth that kind of align them with Homo sapiens. They have some very primitive features. So premolar roots, premolars are your bicuspids. The upper premolars should have one root, maybe two, and these have three. Oh. Or I might have gotten that wrong, but they have two very divergent roots. I have, sorry, I'm blowing that.

But when I look at that, the premolar, which is quite primitive looking. It looks a lot like some material I've seen in China that recently came out that they were kind of like, we don't know what to do with this. So it's very possible that that ancestor is on the mainland. Now, how do we know or how do we think that they, you spoke about the mainland being their ancestors,

how do they get to the island? I mean, what drives them? And, you know, the dwarf ones to the island. Yeah, I don't think they were necessarily driven. I think that their ancestors probably got to the island hundreds of thousands of years before, these species that we're picking up now. It could be that they were blown offshore with some kind of storm. It's not something that they may have commuted back and forth. No, no, I don't think so.

How far apart are we talking to? Tens of miles? No, no, farther. Hundreds of miles. Yeah, so much farther. You wouldn't be doing any commuting. And if you were doing a lot of commuting, then I don't think you would have such strange morphology because there would be gene flow going between populations rather than being isolated. But, yeah, I think most of us would tend to think that they got there by accident.

Do you think we'll be able to find a skull if you search long enough and around there? I hope so. Why not? We need one. Yeah, we really do. So we like, as I think everybody can relate, we like to look at faces to see whether we recognize a face or head as being something similar to us or not. And so very important. Tell me about that.

So it really is us just analyzing visually the connection. Yeah, I think. I mean, I think that's part of it. Yeah. How about analyzing the DNA? Is there any DNA left in any of these bones? No, because it's in tropical areas or even temperate areas. is DNA preservation is very poor.

So the DNA degrades. And I mean, here's a thing, though, because the technology, the DNA technology in the past 10 years has increased exponentially. So perhaps in the next 10 years, they'll be able to extract DNA, but at this point they can't. Do you think that Homo Lu's unencence is going to be one of the discoveries that gets debated a lot? Yeah. Does it belong? Does it not? Where to put it?

I think, well, what is prompting me to do is to really think about how we define species, how much variability there is within species. I'm hoping that it actually makes more than just me, but other people, too, start really thinking about this and reevaluating our paradigms, our theory. Would you like to be over there and taking it up? Yeah, yeah. My friend, Matt Toceri invited me over to see Le Angbois, where Floresiensis is. could always just pop on over there too.

Do you think if you have Florianys and you also have this one, Luzonensis, there might be a third, a fourth, a fifth? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then we have to start really thinking about, are we going to really name all these different species or are they variants of one thing? Do you know what I mean?

So perhaps there was one ancestral species to all of those. And after they got to the island, they diverged in different. different ways, but they're just dwarfed versions of this, you know, whatever they're their ancestral species. And how would you decide that? What would make that, you know? Well, it would take a lot of debating within our community. But, you know, a lot more fossils and something that, some traits that are shared uniquely between

something on the mainland, let's say, and then each one of those island populations. It's interesting because I saw the photos of the bones. and comparing the bone how much it curved versus how straight it was, something as small as that. Yeah. Right. Whether it was a grasping finger bone or was it not? Right.

Those sorts of minor things, to me, minor, decide there are things where you place them. Yeah, because it tells us something about their locomotion. But, you know, one thing that's never been done is, at least not that I know of. I don't know that people have examined curvature in bones of humans who do a lot of climbing. Or, you know, humans can climb trees. I like that. And the thing is that. You're not even muddying the water as more.

I love to do that. But, you know, the toe bones and the finger bones, bone is dynamic. It responds to use. Yes. As you know, and it responds to use. So maybe they're the same except it's one like the climate. tree a little more, and so it's developed a little more of a curvature. Maybe they had to climb trees for their food all the time.

I don't know. You know, I'm really stretching it here, but I think the cool thing about discoveries like this is it makes us think about new hypotheses, and somebody out there is going to go test that or test other hypotheses, and that's how science moves forward, as you know. But very slowly. Unfortunately. Because if you come up with a new idea, you have to have good evidence. Yeah, absolutely.

So you need to go out and find some more of these bones and teeth. Yep, yep, that'll help. I'm not sure it's going to resolve it, you know. Well, you'll come back and talk about it if they find some more stuff, right? Of course. All right. Thank you very much. Sherrod Bailey is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at New York University.

Thank you for taking time to be able with us today. We're going to come back. After a break, we're going to be talking about the 10-year census that starts up next year. And we want to know from you, would you, would you be taking a little? you, you know, not participate in the census? Do you, if citizenship were added to the census, would you not want to put your citizenship in that question, you know? Does it matter to you? Do you think, well, we'll talk about everything we can think of. Our number is 844-724-8255. You can also tweet us. Lots of tweets are coming in at SciFri. Stay with us. We'll be right back after the break.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. Next year, the Census Bureau will send down their survey, you know, that big packet that they have, to every person in the country asking information about households, gender, all the basic info stuff. And that census happens once every 10 years. But, you know, maybe you didn't know. I didn't know. There was another census called the American Community Survey that has sent out all the time to smaller populations.

And both of these surveys are big data collection projects. Add into the mix that next week, the Supreme Court. rule if a citizenship question can be included on the 10-year survey, and we've got lots to talk about. So how does certain questions make it into the census? And once you fill out the survey, how do researchers and policymakers make use of that data? My next guest is here to walk us through those questions and hopefully the answers. Catherine Fitch is the Associate Director at the Institute for Social Research and Data Innovation at the University of Minnesota and Minneapolis.

And we did reach out to the Census Bureau to supply a spokesperson from the agency. I think that phone is still ringing. We're waiting for a response. Dr. Fitch, welcome to Science Friday. Good afternoon. Thanks for having me. You're welcome. The census that is sent out every decade is updated each time.

What is new on the upcoming census? Well, I think the main thing, well, there's a couple of things you might say. One thing that's going to be new this year is how we'll take the census. And so this year there will be an internet response option. So that's one thing that's new. And the other thing is the thing we're everyone is talking about, which is the possibility that they would include citizenship on that survey, which hasn't been done before.

And why are people fearful of that question? Well, I think people fear that and evidence suggests that it will depress the response rate on the survey. And that response rate is really important for two reasons. The higher the response rate, the more accurate the census is going to be because the less and the less expensive it will be. When you don't respond, they need to send someone to track you down. and find, get answers to those questions. And I think there is, from previous studies, the Census Bureau has done,

they can see that this is likely to have a significant response rate, particularly on people who have non-citizens in their household. That's why we've asked our audience, will they take the census and what they think about having the citizens questions? We have lots of people who are really, responding. I'll let me go to a tweet Meg tweets. I'm a statistics teacher from Muskogee, Oklahoma, and I've asked my students how the citizenship question will affect the accuracy of the census. You've already told she asked, what's your take? You've already told us that you think

it's going to suppress the number of people who might answer the question. Let me go to the phones. We have some interesting. Let's go to Jacksonville to Richard and Jacksonville. Hi, Richard. Hey, how you doing? Hi there. Go ahead. Yeah, the census, I think it's very personal. I mean, we pay taxes, so if they're talking about getting their money for rows or for different things or for, I don't know,

different races, creeds and so on and so forth. Are you going to participate in the census? Will you participate in the census? Will you participate in it? No, I never have. No, I never had. But one thing I might want to say, an ad, is that say 100 years from now, if somebody wanted to attract their great-grandfather,

that would be hard for them because I was not part of the census. But other than that, I don't see the reason for a census. Okay. Maybe you have it. He doesn't see the reason for a census. Well, I think if you go back to the Constitution, it's required. And that's how we decide how many representatives. representatives are apportioned allocated to each state.

So that's a really important role. The census plays. And one of the reasons that all states are working with the Census Bureau to increase turnout and response to the census. Right. Right. Now, you're a social scientist who studies marriage formation. That's right. Can you break down how you might use the data from the census? Sure. And do you mind if you're a scientist?

If I take a second, explain a little bit about the American Community Survey first? I'm putting my feet up. Go right ahead. All right. So the census, which is asked every 10 years, has a small number of questions asked. In fact, this year, they're not asking marriage on the census. So the census itself would not be a great source for me. But the American Community Survey, which is, as you mentioned, always in the field, has a rich array. of questions, including demographic questions, marital status, as well as changes to marital

status in the last year. So one question I have asked is there's been a big increase in marriage age since the middle of the 20th century and trying to think about what are the causes of that and or what things are associated with increased marriage age. And one thing I wanted to look at is economic opportunity. What role does other opportunities for women play in decreasing or increasing their likelihood they're going to be married? So having a data set that includes information about demographics and marital status, but also about educational background and occupation, other information allows that kind of analysis. Now, the American Community Survey, as you talk about it, that does include a citizenship question, doesn't it?

Yes, that's correct, which is, you know, one of the reasons that questions have been raised about the need to have it on the, on the, what was referred to often as the short form. The reason it's called the short form is before there was an American community survey. There was every census year had a short form that everyone got in a long form, which asked similar questions to the American community survey. and that was asked of maybe around 20% of the population. We have lots of people who, let me read another tweet. He says, if the U.S. census includes a citizenship question, I will not respond to it. The last time there was a controversial question, I refused. My wife finally relented.

So this is, how do you expect the Supreme Court? Give me your over and you're over and the Supreme Court next week. I am not a Supreme Court. I know. It's an unfair question, but you can throw a dart in. We'll accept it. I was talking to someone today who threw out an expectation that maybe they would not allow the citizenship question on the census. But that's what I'll say on guessing on what the Supreme Court is going to say. But I focus a little bit more on what we know, and that is you know, the data exist on the American Community Survey and can be used, and this is

just likely to decrease the accuracy and increase the cost of the census. Let's go to Don in Prescott, Arizona. Hi, Don. Hi, Ira. How you doing? Hi, there. Go ahead. I took part in the 1980 census, and I can tell you there were some improprieties that happened, such as some of my coworkers putting the census in mailboxes, and I, coming back later to pick up the completed forms. A second thing I'd like to talk about is the gerrymandering that occurs and has been occurring for decades now with blue and red

legislatures using this data to put non-competitive districts together. And I advise all my friends put down how many people live permanently in your household, but other than that, the information is, in my opinion, intrusive. Okay. Catherine. Yeah. Not everybody fills in every question on the census, right? That's right.

And they have techniques for trying to fill in the missing information, and they will try to do that. And I encourage people to think about the other thing that the census does. about $80 billion in federal funds will be allocated based on census responses. And that's important. If you have kids and you're in a growing school district, they need this information to help plan for coming years and make sure they have the schools and the teachers available to support your family and your neighbors. So there's a lot of important information to be gathered from the census. A tweet from Tina actually backs that up, and she says,

I use census data to help determine how transit access affects minority and low-income populations. Without it, equity concerns would be anecdotal at best. That's exactly right. There are a lot of topics that policymakers and planners would simply be taking on anecdote. And with the American Community Survey data and backed up by census data, They are able to make a lot more precise decisions. And I think that's another reason to consider filling it out. Well, let me ask you the difference between the American Community Survey and the census to you,

which is the more important census or survey? The American Community Survey by far, I think, is a source that most researchers are using. And so we focus on the American Community Survey at the University of Minnesota and making that available to researchers in an easy-to-use format. But the census is sort of an underlying necessity for also a strong American. community survey, so they can't really exist separately. I don't ever remember seeing a form coming in the mail. Is that, you know, from the American Community Survey? Or if it had, I thought it might be a book offer, you know?

American something, just throw it out. How do I know it's even come in? It would come in the mail. It's got the Census Bureau stamped on the outside, and I think they'd follow up with a couple more mailings if they were trying to get you. But the... How many Americans? One in what? How many Americans?

I think it's, I'm going to guess it's like 2.2 million respondents. I could be off on that. What they get is a 1% sample in the microdata we use of the population, and they have a broader sample to get that 1%. That's about 3 million. 1%, roughly. And that's usually what people do. You know, in marketing, whatever, they get a 1% sample.

They consider that to be significant. Yeah, well, it's actually pretty amazing what you can do with it. We sometimes talk about the American Community Survey and the decennial census that preceded it as the Hubble Telescope for Social Science Research. It offers a lot of detail, and it does allow you to look at small subpopulations, whether that, That is an age group or an occupational group, a geographic region. And you have this great detail as well as this broad scope of time that really is fundamental to understanding the social demographic and economic transformations of the last few decades. I'm Ira Flato.

This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Being educated by Catherine Fitch, who was telling me all kinds of stuff. I didn't even know we existed about the census data. Let me go to the, see if I can get one call in and then another question. Yeah, let's go to Don in Columbia, Missouri. Hi, Don. Yeah, hi. The question I've got is, why can't a government just use existing data, income tax data,

Social Security data, people receiving government benefits, and then maybe some mechanism to account for people that don't fall into any of those categories, rather than having a formal census. Isn't the census and the Constitution we have to take it? We have to count everyone every 10 years, but the strategy that the caller suggests is something the Census Bureau has been implementing and they're working on gathering some of the information

from administrative records. As he describes, you wouldn't, there's a lot of things we already tell the government at different times during the year, It would be great to capture that instead of inquiring about it. I think there's still some work to be done to get through the complete array of information that's included on the American Community Survey to completely replace it with outside data, but they are working on that, and that also helps with the accuracy of the survey.

If I want to, you know, having heard about this survey, the American Community Survey for the first time, If I want to see the results work, is it online? Can I access the data? Sure. You can see descriptions on census.gov, and they have data access tools to help you look up, say, information about your neighborhood, which is one way they disseminate data. You could also go to IPUMS.org. Ipums is the database that we run at the University of Minnesota. We also have census data, and there you can download smaller extracts of the data.

You can also look at some of those tables that describe places and analyze online. I'm going to go look. Please take a look. Tell me what the biggest misconception people have about the census or how the data is used. I think we're already kind of tackling this when people refer to census data, and they're really referring to this annual survey that's called the American Community Survey. I think that's one of the biggest things. I think one of the other things is conceptualizing how important this is to research and the richness of it.

Another factor I talked about how you can get at small populations, another thing you get is you have individual level records describing people in their families, in their households. And that's really helpful for a lot of research questions. one that I was just describing to someone is if you wanted to look at the impact of the new family leave law in California, the ACS will allow you to look at before and after that legislation, and you can look at households with small children, and you can look at the work and income of any parents in the household. And you don't want to look at, say, a mother without the context of a partner who might also be working or who might be at home with a child. So that richness is really important. I have about 30 seconds left. I want to ask me this. You say they take the survey online.

Is there any fear it could be hacked to change the data? The census will be working to make sure they have security in place to make sure responses are not. hacked. I'm sure that is a great preoccupation at the Census Bureau. Well, thank you very much. It's quite informative. Catherine Fitch, Associate Director of the at the Institute for Social Research and Data Innovation at the University of Minnesota and Minneapolis. Happy census to you. Thank you very much. Thanks for taking the time to showcase social science. Wow, we really depend on it. And we're going to take a break. And after the break, we're going to look at one of the sciences longest running experiments. You're going to want to hear about this.

This is a plankton recorder that's been, well, there are dozens of them. They get towed behind boats and ships around the world. It's crazy stuff. You'll love it. Stay with us. We'll be right back. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato.

In 1965, marine scientists fished a very odd specimen out of the Atlantic waters. It was a plastic bag. That bag, as we know now, was only the beginning of an onslaught of plastic trash that would soon foul the world's waters, choking and entangling sea creatures, massing into giant floating garbage patches. Scientists have now compiled a record, a who-done-it of plastic pollution that describes the when, the where, and the how of ocean garbage. And they did it all via a collection of humble metal boxes towed through the world.

oceans for half a century, towed behind ferries and container ships, an ambitious but unsung project called the Continuous Plankton Recorder. Joining us now to talk about the CPR, as it's called is Dr. Claire Austell, a marine biogeochemist at the Marine Biological Association in Plymouth in the U.K., an author of a new study on plastic trash in the journal Nature Communications. Welcome, Dr. Austell. Hello. This is really an old experiment, right? It's been running in some form back to 1931. What was the origin of this idea?

Exactly, yeah. Well, it was actually started between 1925 and 1927 by a man called Sir Alistair Hardy, and he was a zoologist on one of the research vessels that was in the Southern Atlantic, and they were tasked with tracking the movements of whale populations for fishery. And so he had the brilliant idea that if you want to know where the whales are, you need to know where the plankton are. So he designed this contraption to go off the back of the ship and continuously collect plankton in a silk roller. Describe what the thing looks like and how it works. You say it has a silk roller and as

it's towed through the water, what happens? Sure. So it's like a big metal torpedo about, you know, one meter long. And what happens is now we use container ships, ferries, any kind of commercial vessels and they use a metal wire to throw it off the back and they attach to the back of the boat and what happens is the water enters through the front and you've got kind of like a cassette rolling on on the inside with two pieces of silk and as the water passes through the silk anything that's in the water column so the plankton even tiny bits of microplastic all sorts gets trapped on that silk and it's kind of forms a plankton sandwich and that's stored in the plankton recorder and then at the end of the toe it's pulled back on to

to the ship, and the samples are sent back to our lab here in Plymouth, and they're analyzed. And so how many of these boxes exist now? Well, we've got about 53 continuous plankton recorders in our current UK fleet, but we have plankton recorders all over the world now. We've got them towing in the North Pacific, around Australia, in the Southern Ocean, so it's growing continuously. And you actually rode on a banana ship towing one of these things? Yeah, that was during my PhD.

I was on a big container ship. It's called a banana reefer. So they pick up bananas from the Caribbean and brings it back to the UK. And these huge containers are basically like big refrigerators. And yes, that had a continuous plankton recorder off the back. So how does a banana ship get one of these? Do they ask for it? Are they getting paid to do it?

Is it all voluntary? It's all voluntarily. So we're very, very fortunate that we have a great network of shipping companies that we work with. And basically we ask them to tow these things. and they very, very generously do it for free. And so how many miles do you think you have covered in the 70, 80 years this has been going on? We've covered over 6.5 million nautical miles now, which is equivalent to about 12 times to the moon and back.

And do you have to haul it out of the water every couple of hours to check if it's got all tangled up stuff in there? Well, what happens is the cassette is changed over, So after about 500 miles, the crew will pull in the continuous plankton recorder, and that's where they'll note down any kind of entanglements or issues with the recorder, and that's where we built this plastic database of the larger plastic items. But yeah, that's when they take out the cassette and they put a new one in to start a new tow. Your study out this week tracks the appearance of plastic in the ocean.

I was reading the comment about 1965, they were surprised to find a plastic bag in the ocean. A far in that sounds now? Yeah. No, it was quite crazy. We were getting more and more plastic entanglements on the continuous plankton recorder. I was chatting to the guys in the workshop that, you know, fixed these things up every, you know, every day. And so we started to say, well, you know what, we've got these amazing logbooks where the crew record exactly when they put the plankton recorder in the water and what time it's coming out.

And they also note, you know, what the weather's doing, all sorts of different things. So I said, well, let's look through that logbook. And yeah, there the plastic bag was in 1965. Can you also detect the tiny microplastics that are there? Yeah, so actually one of the first studies that was done to kind of coin the term microplastics was written in 2004. That was by Professor Richard Thompson, who's based at Plymouth University. And he used the plankton recorder, the silk samples, to go back through time because we store all of our samples in a massive biological library. So he went back through time and went into each decade on a point.

particular route, and he picked out the samples and then counted the microplastics to demonstrate that these were a thing, and there wasn't increase up until about the 80s in this particular study. Now, I understand that the continuous plankton recorder also discovered a sort of marauding plankton species back on the scene in the Atlantic many years after it disappeared. You found it? Yeah, that was a neidenticular semini, so it's a type of diatom. And generally, it's, it's found in the Pacific Ocean, and kind of around the millennium, we started to see it in our continuous plankton recorder samples, and that was in the Atlantic. So we hadn't seen that species in the Atlantic, according to sediment cause for over 800,000 years. So it's likely that

that was due to changes in temperature and the currents that are occurring around the Labrador Sea, so that it was able to pass through the Northwest Passage. Wow. So you've got something like 50 or so of these recorders, dating back to almost 100 years of recording, what do you do with all the stuff it picks up? Do you store it someplace? Exactly. We keep all of those samples. So we have a huge kind of warehouse.

It's all temperature controlled and very well ventilated because we use a preservative in our samples. And there we've got just stacks and stacks of very organized samples. Well, so is there value in all those samples? I mean, basically as a museum, a historical value. It's hugely valuable. We're finding more and more now as the data is growing, and we've got up to 80 years of data now.

People are coming in with new ideas and new things they want to look at, new technologies. For example, eDNA, so genetic analysis has become a really big thing right now, and there's a lot of new techniques. And so we're looking at applying that. that to some of these historic samples as well to see how ecosystem and other things has changed. Can you also see how plastic might biodegrade being out in the ocean that long?

Potentially, I think there is work to do that. We're starting to look at the elements, the composition of the plastics that we're getting, and using certain, basically, identities of the plastics, you can work out and date where that plastic might have originated from. Now, say I want to get my own recorder. How do I go about applying to, you know, to drag one behind my boat? Well, we'd be very happy to get one built for you, I'm sure. What size boat do you need?

I mean, can a 20-foot sailboat be good enough, or what do you need? No, generally, we go for the big boats. We do have a small kind of version of the plankton recorder called an ocean indicator, and we have used that occasionally, actually, off sailboats, and there was a trip that went out. around the Pacific through the garbage patch actually using one of these smaller recorders, and that was a sailboat.

But, no, the plankton recorders are really heavy, and so you'd want a big boat with a big engine on there. So your design hasn't really changed in 100 years of making these? No, that's why it's so unique. So the design of the continuous plankton recorder, even everything down to the weave of the silk mesh, has remained consistent throughout, and that's why we've got such a consistent time series of data.

I'm surprised there are no fancy lasers in it, or measuring devices is just what you see is what you get from back then. Exactly. We are starting, though, to add, I mean, so I don't know if you've seen some of these seal tags. You get these amazing sensors that they're sticking onto seals to get all sorts of information about salinity and temperature. And we are starting to add some of those small sensors, so we're kind of combining the old with the new. And as long as it doesn't change the flight of the plankton recorder and the way the meshes is working, then we've got all sorts of things to play with there. Well, congratulations to you, and we wish you great success for the next 100 years.

Thank you very much. Dr. Claire Austell is a marine biogeochemist at the Marine Biological Association in Plymouth. That's in the UK, Plymouth. And we have a picture. If you've whetted your appetite about this, we have a picture of the continuous plankton recorder up on our website at science friday.com slash CPR. What would happen if your brain could see itself? Well, outside of an MRI machine, the closest thing we're going to get to that is likely the work of my next guest, neuroscientist and artist Greg Dunn. His new project, titled Self-reflected, shows us what it might look like to see all the neurons of the brain connected and firing.

He uses the technique of micro-etching, and it's the subject of our latest sci- arts video. Greg Dunn, welcome to Science Friday. Howdy, Ira? Good to chat with you. You got your Ph.D. in neuroscience, and then what? became an artist who creates pictures of the brain? Why do you do this kind of work? Well, it's a good question. I mean, this was not my intended career path from when I was five years old.

It just kind of happened this way. And I found that combining my artistic skills with my kind of scientific interest was a good way to keep myself interested and satisfied. But also, too, I think, communicate to the general public in a way that I wasn't able to, you know, just being in the lab. This is gorgeous stuff. I was looking at the video up on our website, and it's up there. ScienceFriday.com slash brain art. Explain what micro-edging is to our listeners. Micro-etching is essentially,

imagine you have like a mirror-finished piece of metal, or we actually use gold in our case. And just like you're key in a car, you put a big scratch in it. That scratch is going to reflect light in a very specific way, depending upon where it's illuminated from. And you can see it very clearly in this mirrored background. Now imagine that you're essentially drawing the out-of-eastern, of various objects in specific angles of etch.

What ends up happening is that when you have a light source over this piece, is that depending upon the angle of etch at any given spot on the micro-etching, the viewer will be able to see elements of the piece appear and disappear. And by using a lot of physics and math, you can actually cause this micro-reaching to animate neural forms in this case. I mean, it's a flexible technique can be used for a lot of different things, but in our case, we use it to depict. action potentials and the communication of neurons in the brain.

So depending on what angle you're looking at it, you'll see something else. It's like three-dimensional. That's right. Yeah, yeah. It's a distant cousin of holography. It's closer to lenticular printing, I would say. But there's more of a kind of deliberate engineering of the surface in order to make those animations happening.

Oftentimes, similar techniques will have an object flash on and off. In our case, we're able to make continuous animations by varying these. angles continuously. Talking with Greg Dunn, Neuroscientist, an artist based in Philadelphia on Science Friday from WNYC Studios. It's gorgeous. The video, the stuff is gorgeous. Have you ever thought about, the first thing I thought about is making virtual reality part of this, you know, so you could touch it with a virtual reality goggles on? Yeah, that's a good, that's a good question. It's something that I have considered, I mean, just my personal kind of proclivities are such that I prefer to make physical objects at the end of the day as opposed to be working purely

digital, although for sure, you know, the potential of a purely 3D medium is very high. Yeah, so I've strayed away from it up to this point, although perhaps... I'm not, no, don't get me wrong, I'm not encouraging you to do this because I love the physicality of it and the fact that you, you know, don't have to make it, the object, so to speaks for itself in the way that you etch these photos. It's just gorgeous. That's actually, yeah, that's, thank you. And it's actually a very deliberate part of the process that when somebody sees a

micro-etching that's hanging in a museum or in somebody's house, for example, it's probably the first time they've ever seen any art like it. I mean, we've essentially invented this technique. And I should say, I work with my collaborator, Dr. Brian Edwards, who's an applied physicist on this work. and the idea that you have a physical object, which is something you haven't seen before, is designed to help emotionally drawing the viewer. A lot of people have looked at a TV monitor and seen brain activity simulated in that way,

but to have that extra added elements of surprise to it, I think that it helps to engage people's emotions, and that's truly how people learn. I mean, once you've engaged a person's emotional kind of structure in their brain, and you've given them that wow moment, that moment where they're not quite sure how this works, it encourages them to ask deeper questions about what the artwork is. And where can your artwork be seen? Well, the full-size self-reflectic can be seen at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. There are smaller versions of it at several museums around the country,

and I have art hanging in people's homes in neuroscience institutes, that sort of thing, you know, from sea to shining sea. And so the artwork shows us long. long strings of neurons stretched out across beautiful depictions. Have you thought of any other cell structures you might go into? Yeah. You know, some of my earlier work, which is more based on kind of the tenets of Asian art, explores different cell types, different types of inner neurons.

You know, the piece Self-reflected contains maybe 150 different cell types in it as well. And I see my future work straying away from just the purely anatomical and going more into the kind of human element of the brain. You know, what is our subjective experience like? Because up to this point, I've depicted the brain artistically and more of its typical functioning state, but there are a lot of ways in which the brain can go wrong. And a lot of people suffer very profoundly

from neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders. And so kind of the next two years of my career or so are going to be dedicated towards those types of depictions. Well, we'll have to hook you up with our friend, Dr. Eric Candell, who can probably add some stuff. Oh, yeah. Yep. Yeah, he's into art also. Well, thank you.

Indeed. And this is, you know, we've been talking about it, but you really can't appreciate it until you take a look at it. So go check out our video about Greg's latest artwork. It's up on our website at ScienceFriety.com slash brain art. Greg Dunn, congratulations, and thank you for sharing this with us. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for your time.

I appreciate it. You're welcome. One last thing before we go. We are headed to Boulder, Colorado. We'll be putting on an evening of science conversations, live music, demos, more at the Chautauqua Auditorium, right up there at the foot of the Flat Irons. It's a Saturday night live event, June 15th. You're not going to want to miss it. For more information and tickets, you can go to Science Friday.com slash Boulder.

It's a show like you've never seen us do before. It's really got really entertaining features, audience participation, live music, as I say, a lot of fun. Again, I'll repeat that, the Chautauqua Auditorium right up there at the foot of the flat irons. That's Saturday night, June 15th. You're not going to want to miss. We hope to see you there. More info and tickets, science Friday.com slash boulder. J. Leederman composed.

The music you're listening to now. If you miss any part of the program, you'll like to hear it again. Subscribe to our podcast and, you know, all the smart speakers play Science Friday. Every day now is Science Friday. Have a great and safe holiday weekend. see you next week. I'm Ira Flato in New York.