Science Friday - Pandas Return To Washington, D.C. | A Lesser-Known Grain Called Kernza

Episode Date: October 18, 2024

Two giant pandas on loan from China have arrived at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo. Also, originally from Central Asia, Kernza doesn’t need to be replanted every year, unlike crops such as corn and soybeans.Pandas Return To Washington, D.C., ZooOn Tuesday, two VIPs (Very Important Pandas) arrived at Washington’s Dulles International Airport, en route to new quarters at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute.The arrival marks a new chapter of “panda diplomacy,” which leverages the public’s affection for the cute, charismatic animals to both strengthen US-China ties and fund conservation initiatives. Sophie Bushwick, senior news editor at New Scientist, joins SciFri’s John Dankosky to talk about the giant pandas’ arrival and other stories from the week in science.Scientists Push For A Lesser-Known Grain Called KernzaOn a recent weekday afternoon, dozens of people filled the cozy taproom at Blue Jay Brewing Company. On tap that day was a fresh creation called New Roots. The American Lager was a hit, with many of the patrons going back to the bar for another glass.Blue Jay’s owner and brewer, Jason Thompson, was also pleased with the result of this experimental beer, which he described as “earthy, almost nutty,” with a “lingering honey-like sweetness to it.” Those flavors came from his choice to use a novel grain called Kernza for 25% of the 600 pounds of grain needed for the whole brew, he said.Read the rest at sciencefriday.com.Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Have you ever heard of Kernsla? It's a grain that you can use to make, among other things, beer. It's got a little bit different mouth feel, I think, than barley beers, for sure. And definitely earthy, almost nutty. It's Friday, October 18th. Happy Science Friday. I'm sci-fry producer Russia Areidi. The most commonly grown grains in the world are rice, wheat, corn, soybeans, you know, the staples.

But a group of plant scientists are trying to get a grain, called Kernza on the market since it's tasty and growing it has environmental benefits. We'll get into some Kernza science later. But first, let's check in on some science news of the week. Here's Cyphi's John Dankoski. Big news on the cute animal front. Yes, this week, giant pandas returned to the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. Here to tell us more about this and some other big science stories from the week is Sophie

Bushwick, senior news editor at new scientists. Sophie, always good to have you here. Welcome back. Thank you. Okay, so tell us more about these pandas who are coming back. So these are two pandas. They're Bao Li and Ching Bao, and they have arrived at the zoo in Washington, D.C. It's very exciting because this year is the first year in decades that China has sent pandas to the U.S. earlier this year, a couple arrived at the San Diego Zoo. And so first of all, it's great for people who love pandas. If you're in the DC area, you're going to be able to check the pandas out starting in January. If you're anywhere, you can use the PANDICAM at the San Diego Zoo to check those

pandas out. It's also good for what's called Panda Diplomacy, which is sort of the idea that by sending pandas to the U.S., it's a sign of goodwill from China. Yeah, so we actually have a big story about this that we did at the end of last year at at ScienceFriety.com slash pandas. Panda diplomacy has been going on for a very long time. I have to ask you, Sophie, how exactly do you ship a panda? Very carefully.

So there's a plane called the FedEx Panda Express. Of course there is. Of course. You have to. You have to use the name. The pandas traveled there with some humans, keeping an eye on them. And then their crates were moved to trucks. And then the trucks took them to the zoo.

You could see there's pictures of pandas on the truck. So if you saw them driving by, then that's what was inside. and they made it to the zoo and were unloaded. And the reason they're not going to be on display till January is because they need some time to acclimate to their new habitat. And they're going to have human handlers, you know, helping and making sure that they're healthy and happy before they start making them available to the viewing public. That's excellent. So we've got East Coast pandas. We've got West Coast pandas.

You can now see pandas in different parts of America. So while we're talking about endangered animals, there's a company that wants to bring back some more extensive. inked animals, and they have news this week about the thylacine. So I want you to tell us more, but first, describe exactly what a thylacine was. So a thylacine was also called the Tasmanian tiger. This was a marsupial, but a meat-eating one, a predator. And it was used to be living in Australia. And then by the time European, explorers arrived, they were all in Tasmania. And then after a while, they all died out. The last known thylacine died in 1936. So they've been. extinct for a while, and now the company Colossal says they have nearly completely sequenced

the genome of this extinct animal. And Colossol is interested in de-extinction, so bringing extinct species back. Okay. And just to be clear, this is the company saying this, this is not peer-reviewed, this is not a publication here. So, but if they do have the genome, as they say, how would you go from having the genome of this animal to actually making a new animal? Right. I mean, it's not as easy as just, you know, popping the genome in a fresh cell. What they think that genome is going to do is help them understand more about the thylacine. But the technique that they want to actually use for bringing the thylacine back, they would modify a different marsupial species called the Fat-Tale Dunnart, and they want to modify its genes to make it more like a thylacine. So knowing the

thylacine genome is great, because maybe you can put pieces of the genome in the cell, but it's also not like the end. They're not done with this process. I mean, a dynum. Dunnard does not look that much like it doesn't hang you a tiger. But I think that that's the important thing here is if you look at the Dunnart and you look at the thylacine, you're like, these are not even close to the same animals, are they? Right. What you would really have is not a thylacine, but it's a weird version of a Dunnart. You know, it'll be a sort of like a Thylacine-like Dunnart is what you're really going

to be ending up with in the end. Yeah, the weird Thylacine Dunnart, the animal that nobody asked for. Okay, so next on our list, there's some news about nut allergies and airplanes. We thought that flying was potentially dangerous for people with nut allergies with all these bags of peanuts opening up. But there's a new study out about this. What can you tell us? Right. So for people with severe peanut allergies, just having fragments of peanut in the air can be dangerous.

They can inhale it and have a life-threatening allergic reaction. And so the fear in planes was, you know, if someone with a nut allergy is anywhere on the plane, we don't want to have any nuts open. because, you know, they could get into the air. But a new study actually looked at how the filters on the airplane move air around, and they found that airborne peanut fragments would not be a problem. There's not enough of it getting into the air to really hurt someone with an allergy unless they were in pretty close proximity to the person actually eating the peanuts. So, you know, if they were maybe in the same row.

Of course, but this probably doesn't mean that all the airlines are going to go back to having peanuts all the time because it's not just the airborne peanut air, I suppose, but I don't know, there's little peanut particles everywhere, just like there's crumbs underneath the seat and in that little bag that's that's on the back of the seat in front of you. I cannot eat stock on a plane without getting crumbs on the tray, on the seat, on the floor. And if those crumbs are peanut crumbs, that could be dangerous for someone with a peanut allergy, for sure. Okay, so let's switch to sending other things through the air.

And we're going to talk about wireless networks. We have a story about research into a faster way to transmit data. What can you tell us? This is pretty cool. Researchers set a new record for sending data. They sent 938 gigabits per second. So that's roughly the equivalent of downloading 20 movies in a second. And it's 9,000 times the average speed of a 5G connection today.

And the researchers achieved this by most 5G networks are operating in a pretty narrow band of frequencies. So it's limited. And the researchers expanded the size of the frequency bands that they're able to operate in by using both radio waves and light. And that's how they achieved this record. And it's possible that this could be a candidate for being the basis of futuristic 6G networks, but there are actually other potential technologies that could become the basis of 6G. So it's not certain that this will be the new version of data.

Okay. So it's possible that there's some other technology. I mean, is there a chance that this is something, though, that will be in our phones soon? Or is there just too much other development to go? and honestly too much cost to build out a system like this. There is a chance that this could be in our phones someday. I would not say soon. But yeah, you know, for 6G to happen, there's a lot of infrastructure that needs to be built.

Like you said, you have to have like phones and devices that are capable of working with it. And so this isn't something that, you know, will be coming next year. But it is cool that researchers are like 5G is passe. We're done with it. We want 6G. We want the future. We want speeds to be even faster. Okay.

So let's blast off. into space for a minute here. There are two new papers about a strange brown dwarf star. Sophie, what can you tell us? Right. The first brown dwarf star ever found was very, very weird. So brown dwarfs are sort of like failed stars. They didn't have enough matter and they were too cool to maintain nuclear fusion. And so they kind of faded out. And in the night sky, they look more like planets than stars. And researchers found the first one in 1995. And they said, this is a really weird thing. this is a big object, right? It's like 71 times the size of Jupiter. It should be big enough to have sustained nuclear fusion. So what's going on here? Why did this star fail? It's been this

mystery. And someone suggested that maybe what they're looking at isn't a single brown dwarf, but a pair of brown dwarf twins orbiting around each other. And a new, this was really hard to confirm because of the detail you would need in the observations. But now two different research teams have done it and they've published papers showing that what we thought was Gleiza 229B is actually two brown dwarfs. It's Gleiza 229BA and Gleza 229BB. Okay, so since we're talking about intertwined fates, let's move to AI, Sophie. There's AI and everything these days. Researchers are looking at whether it can be used to develop scientific hypotheses. What can you tell us about this? A lot of AI is really good at very specific tasks. But the question is how good is it at, you know,

going through the scientific process. So not just modeling different shapes of how proteins could fold, but developing a hypothesis and then performing an experiment to test it and analyzing the results and drawing conclusions from them. So researchers, in order to figure this out, they built what's essentially a simulator. It seems like a game. It's called Discovery World. But really, it has a lot of both challenging and less challenging tasks that mimic the process of going through the scientific method and developing these experiments. And then they developed a few different AI agents. These were all based on OpenAI's GPT40 model, but they each took a different approach to solving problems. So they weren't exactly working the same way. And they had these AIs work in the

Discovery World simulator and try to do science. And then they compared them with 11 humans who either had PhDs or master's degrees in engineering or natural sciences. Okay. So, So how'd the humans do? Yeah. Yeah. So humans still ahead of AI when it comes to science. Go us. In the problems, the tasks they had to solve, the AI agents solved less than 20% of them.

And the humans solved about 66% of them on average. So we're still ahead of AI in this particular way. You've got one last story for us, Sophie. And we're going to start with some sound. Let's listen. Okay, Sophie. So I know that you know what these sounds are. What do they sound like to you?

Honestly, to me, they do sound like frogs, which is what they are. However, however, you know, sometimes you hear what you want to hear. And when scientists listen to these frog calls, they didn't think frogs. They thought, gee, that sounds just like Star Trek sound effects to me. And this is a study. Researchers went to look at this frog species that lives in Madagascar. It's called Bufus Marogenzensis. And in studying it, they've realized, hey, maybe this isn't actually a single species and they looked at the DNA and they listened to those frog calls and they realized there's actually seven different species here and each one has this distinct call and these calls all sound like Star Trek sound effects to us. So let's name them after Star Trek characters.

Oh no. And now there are seven new frog species named after captains of in the Star Trek. So there's Bufus Kirki in honor of James T. Kirk, and there's also frogs named after John Luke Picard and Catherine Janeway and Christopher Pike. When I listened to these frogs the first time, I thought to myself, they sound to me like frogs. But again, if you're hearing Star Trek sound effects, you know, what the heck, name it whatever you want, right? And if you're the one who's studying them, like, it's your, it's your, you get to name them. You have the privilege. You've put in the work. You've listened to the calls. And if what you want to name them after is Star Trek, then, like, it's your, it's your, you get to name them after is Star Trek. Then, like, it's your, you're you're, you get to name them after Star Trek. Then, Yeah, go ahead. Well, Sophie, as always, thank you for bringing us such enlightening and interesting and weird stories. It's always good to talk to you.

Thanks for having me. Sophie Bushwick, a senior news editor and new scientist. And now here's sci-fri producer Kathleen Davis with news about a grain called Kernza. Corn and soybeans are two of the most produced crops in the United States. They're grown on more than 170 million acres of farmland. But these crops need to be replanted. each year, which can cause problems with the soil. Some plant scientists are serving up an alternative, a grain called Kernsa, which can live in the ground for several years. Here with more is my guest,

Eric Schmidt, Economic Development Reporter at St. Louis Public Radio in Missouri. Eric, welcome back to Science Friday. Thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. Okay, Eric, what is Kernsa. So Kernsa is the grain that comes from intermediate wheatgrass. So intermediate wheatgrass is the plant. And kernza is those little tiny kernels that would be harvested to make flour or to go into beer or any other types of products. Okay. So what are some of the advantages of growing kernza over some other grains that we might be more familiar with? Many of the crops that we have growing in our land today are planted every year. There are these things called annual crops. Fernza is a perennial crop. It stays in the ground every single year, so it doesn't have to be replanted.

This means that it can grow really deep roots, persistent roots that holds the soil in place. They make new soil. They can absorb water, take up extra nutrients. Sequester carbon, even host a really diverse microbiome. I spoke with Allison Miller, who's a plant scientist at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Research Center, and she's somebody who studies Kernsa for its applications into the future. When we're looking for crops that both feed people but also help mitigate some of the effects of people on the planet, something like this long-lived relative of wheat is really appealing. The real question is, what does it taste like? In the beer that I tried for this story, it just tasted really good.

And actually, I think the head brewer who made that, Jason Thompson at Blue J. Brewing, says it better than me. It's got a little bit different mouth feel, I think, than barley beers, for sure. And definitely earthy, almost nutty. And that's the same that I found when I baked with it. I baked a halab bread with half-Kernsa flour and half-white flour. And it just tasted really good. I don't know how else to describe it than just a little bit more full-bodied and, you know, kind of sweet and nutty. How common is Kernza at the moment?

Yeah, it's not very common at the moment at all. The Land Institute, which helped develop the grain for commercial application, They take a survey every single year, and last year they found it's only on about 2,500 acres out of hundreds of millions that are farmed across the country. And part of that problem is there's just not a lot of consumer demand for the grain, partly because it's not really well known. Tessa Peters is the director of strategy at the Land Institute, and she has some thoughts on how that can change. Consumers don't really purchase based on environmental messaging. there's a small percentage of consumers that do, but generally speaking. So I think that's where Kernza really has an edge because it actually tastes great.

And what Peters also says is that it could really benefit if a few large food conglomerates or food companies, you know, say like General Mills, for example, if they were to put very small percentage of Kerranza in some of their best selling products, it could create more of a demand in the marketplace to grow, to process, to bring Kurns, turns to the place where more consumers could, you know, give it a shot. I bought it after I had spoken to Allison Miller for this story. And it didn't arrive until basically when the story was published. And that was almost a month. Well, Eric, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you for having me.

Eric Schmidt is an economic development reporter at St. Louis Public Radio in Missouri. His story was produced in partnership with the Mississippi River Basin Ag and Water Desk. That wraps up today's show. lots of folks help make the show happen, including... Dee Petersmith. Willis Samares. Emma Gomez. Jackie Hirschfeld.

On Monday's episode, NASA spacecraft Europa Clipper is zooming towards Jupiter's icy moon Europa. So what are scientists trying to learn? We'll get into it on Monday. Have a great weekend. I'm Rasha Aridi.