Science Friday - Spring Climate Effects, Octopus Sleep, Housing and Health. March 26, 2021, Part 2

Episode Date: March 26, 2021

In New York, Essential Workers Face Eviction If you walk through many towns during this pandemic, you can tell that something is different just by looking at the storefronts. Some businesses have limited hours, others have capacity restrictions. Still other businesses are temporarily closed. Some are gone altogether. The pandemic has also had other financial effects that are harder to see—and often, that financial stress is hitting the same people who are already most likely to have gotten sick. According to a recent analysis of court data, New York City landlords seek evictions nearly four times more often in the neighborhoods hardest hit by COVID-19 deaths—neighborhoods that also tend to be largely Black and Latino. Areas with high numbers of evictions also tend to be where many of the city’s “essential workers” live—people with public-facing jobs, with limited options for avoiding the risk of infection.  A recent New York Times article dove into the dataset created by the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development. Stefanos Chen, the article’s author, joins Ira to talk about how the housing market in New York has been affected by the pandemic, and the ways that certain neighborhoods have been disproportionately threatened by eviction.  Allergy Season Is Blooming With Climate Change Spring is in the air, and for many people that means allergy season is rearing its ugly head. If it feels like your allergies have recently gotten worse, there’s now data to back that up. New research shows that since 1990, pollen season in North America has grown by 20 days and gotten 20% more intense, with the greatest increases in Texas and the Midwest. This is because climate change is triggering plants’ internal timing to produce pollen earlier and earlier. It’s a problem that’s expected to get worse. SciFri producer Kathleen Davis speaks with William Anderegg, assistant professor at the University of Utah’s School of Biological Sciences about pollen counts, and pollen as a respiratory irritant. Flowers Are Finding New Hues In A Climate Crisis It’s that time of the year where flowers bloom and the world starts to feel more colorful after a dormant winter. But what if the colors of the flowers we see now aren’t the same as they were a century ago? New research from Clemson University scientists finds that climate change has impacted the hues of flowers. Temperature and aridity changes since 1895 have caused some flowers to go from purple to white, and others from white to purple. Ira is joined by the lead researcher and Clemson Department of Biological Sciences graduate student Cierra Sullivan to talk about these strange changes, and the possible impact on the pollinators we know and love. I Dream Of Octopuses, But Do They Dream About Me? Sleep is nearly universal in the animal kingdom, but how animals sleep is not the same. Studies have found that in mammals, giraffes get the least amount of shut eye, while koalas can sleep up to 22 hours a day.  There are also different types of sleep cycles—including a stage called rapid-eye movement or REM, which is often compared to non-REM sleep. A team of researchers wanted to study these different sleep cycles to understand how they might be connected to learning and memory. The scientists turned to the octopus as their study subject, selected for their complex behaviors and large brains. Their results were recently published in the journal iScience.  Neuroscientist Sidarta Ribeiro, one of the authors on the study, joins Science Friday to explain how you measure the sleep cycles of an octopus, and what this can tell us about if an octopus might dream. 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 Iroflato. A bit later in the hour, I'll look at the link between climate change and your allergies and a question of whether octopus's dream. But first, while going down the main street of many towns and areas heart hit by COVID, you can tell that something is different just by looking at the storefronts, some businesses with limited hours, some temporarily closed, some gone altogether. But it's not just those shuttered stores. New data maps out the residential and real estate rental market in New York and looks at evictions across the area and the intersections between COVID, real estate, and race. Here to talk about what they found is Stephanos Chen, a reporter covering real estate for the New York Times.

You'll find a link to his article on this topic on our website at ScienceFriday.com. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having me. Give us a snapshot of what you looked at here and what you found. So we received some new data from a nonprofit housing coalition where they looked at basically the full last year since the pandemic really hit New York at court data. We know from other reporting that some of the places hit hardest in the city have been the places that have already sort of had gaps in their social safety net even before the pandemic. And this report confirms that in a way, you know, in a very broad and systemic way. We look here at how since the pandemic started last March, eviction filings are taking place now

nearly four times more often in the New York neighborhoods that had the most deaths from COVID compared to the ones with the least deaths. And when we look a little closer, if you overlay the data, those neighborhoods also are in areas that are predominantly black and Latino places where what we think of with essential workers, these are their homes, the people who didn't get to work remotely in the last year. who had to get on the subway and go to work. So there's a lot of different factors here that we can lay on top of each other here and see the patterns. So the people who were most hit by COVID medically who were suffering were also being hit most economically? That's right. Yeah,

I think there is a lot of overlap between health and housing here in the sense that these are the people who've been working in jobs, service jobs that don't pay a ton to begin with. And when they get sick, being unable to pay the rent becomes a problem really quickly. Did this data come as a surprise to anybody? I don't think so much as a surprise to people who've been paying attention to just the inequalities in the city. But I think for many, it is confirmation of what they sort of knew already, which is that this virus has exacerbated very longstanding inequalities in the city. These patterns here are not naturally occurring. It's the fact that, you know, the people with the least protection, the most vulnerable people are on the front lines for us. And these are also industries

where there's been a ton of job losses. Unemployment is a lot higher in service industries, like if you're a cook or a janitor or a grocery clerk, these are all the jobs that had to happen during the pandemic. And that job might not exist anymore. So these are the people who got hit hardest and first. For our listeners, not in the New York area, describe the neighborhoods that you're talking about? So I think a lot of people think of Manhattan as New York, if they're not from here. But what we see in this data is that almost all of the neighborhoods, the highest eviction rates, were not in Manhattan.

Eight of the ten were in the Bronx, which is the borough north of Manhattan. Others were in, there's one in Queens, there's one Staten Island. These are all sort of what we consider the outer boroughs. And if you look at the income here, you know, Manhattan is the wealthiest of the boroughs. The Bronx is the least affluent. So again, it kind of goes back to this idea that the people making the least money before this happened are also the people now facing eviction. And even in the lower income parts of this city, these are not what you exactly call affordable apartments, are they? I know. It's funny that, you know, there's a lot of these headlines about how the city's had record rent cuts in the last year, which is totally true.

Numerically, the numbers are lower than they have been in more than a decade. But when you look at what those numbers are, a lot of it still reflects a Manhattan standard. In Manhattan, people were going nuts about the median rent dipping below $3,000, which is the first time it's done that in about a decade. But when you look at more broad data citywide, you know, the median rent that people pay is just under $1,500 a month. And they're not doing that successfully all the time. A lot of times they're struggling to do that,

they're paying a lot more of their salary than they comfortably should to hit that mark. So these neighborhoods are what you'd consider more affordable than Manhattan. But if you're already living there, it's because you couldn't afford Manhattan and you can sort of push to neighborhoods farther from core Manhattan. What you seem to be saying is that if you draw other kinds of maps of the city, let's say income equality or air quality, for example, they would overlap in sort of a Venn diagram way, right? Yeah, yeah, it really would.

If you sort of color-coded this, you'd kind of get whatever nasty color you get when you mix everything together. It's because it's really the same neighborhoods that are affected by all these different factors. You know, when you look at data about higher rates of asthma in the city, it's in these lower income neighborhoods. When you look at where people lost the most jobs in these same neighborhoods,

where there were the most cases of COVID, as we see here, it's in these same neighborhoods. So you have these folks who, you really, they're the blue-collar backbone of the city, and we put a lot on their shoulders. And I think this data shows that it's all sort of compounding those effects. New York City is well known for having some eccentricities in its rent laws with respect to things like rent control, eviction laws. Could any of this effect be attributed to that?

Or is this a more systemic thing that you think you'd see in other metro areas also? Well, I would say that New York, yes, does have a very Byzantine and difficult to understand. rent laws. But I do also think that this is not just the New York City phenomenon. This, you could go to any bigger mid-sized city in the country and see something similar happening. The thing about New York, though, and I think a lot of critics would point to this, is that one other factor here is that the landlords in some of these neighborhoods, these critics would say to be more litigious even before the pandemic, because if you can, let's say, get rid of a tenant who was rent regulated, whose rent can only rise so much per year,

if that person is out of the picture, the next person who comes in, you can now charge them significantly more in some cases. So there's also that kind of jaundiced view here that these people who are most vulnerable to eviction, they were already targets to begin with because these are in quickly gentrifying neighborhoods where the owners are looking to raise the rent. Of course, we're talking about eviction data here, but isn't there a moratorium on evictions in place? How does that play into this? Yes. So there's been a moratorium. for most of the last year, but it has not prevented filings from occurring.

And many of these filings that we're looking at predate the pandemic, and they've just been held up in courts because the courts have been essentially closed. What we're seeing, though, is that there is still a large share of these that were filed because the pandemic moratorium on evictions has not been absolute. So a lot of these cases have started to move forward. And in the beginning of May, the moratorium lifts unless something else changes. we have in New York State over 220,000 of these cases in the courts, including commercial tenants. And all of those are going to move forward when this moratorium ends.

And that's not going to help the health situation at all, is it? No, and I think this has become kind of a rallying cry for a lot of protesters in the city, that health is housing and vice versa. Housing is health care. And when you are putting folks on the street, you know, in the middle of a pandemic, It really exacerbates this problem. Obviously, you also have to consider the landlord. Many of them are smaller sort of mom-and-pop homeowners, and they too are suffering. But folks getting put out on the street right now is also probably one of the worst things you could do in a pandemic,

when we know this is an airborne virus. And there are crowded homeless shelters currently in the city. Does the pandemic relief bill, which was recently enacted, help this situation at all? It's hopeful. It's a sizable commitment. by the federal government here. We have $1.9 trillion in this stimulus package coming out to all the states. In New York state alone, we could be looking at $2.3 billion in federal rent relief, and then some more from the state. The thing, though, that some of these housing observers have noted, though,

is that a lot of this money, even before this recent attempt, has gotten caught up in red tape. So even though it's coming, that's great. But we don't know how it's going to be dispersed. we don't know the mechanism by which it will be dispersed. And, you know, there's still a lot of concern that this money could just kind of sit somewhere figuratively and not get to the places where it needs to go. At the beginning of the segment, I talked about the shuttered retail stores that we all see.

How is that real estate linked to the residential market that you cover? I think there is a big overlap because especially with retail and with food services, when they shutter, their employees lose their livelihood as well. And again, you know, a lot of these people we call essential workers today were waiters, they were janitors, they were cooks, cashiers. And all of these jobs sort of disappeared. And there's no clear sign that these jobs will come back, you know, when everyone is vaccinated because a lot of these stores are shuttered for good. You know, we're trying to get as many people vaccinated as possible. I would imagine that if you're worried about where you're going to live and whether you're going to be out on a street, tomorrow. Getting vaccinated is not at the top of your health list. That's another thing. I think it's more difficult for a lot of these folks because in these neighborhoods, there's large immigrant populations where English might not be the first language. There's issues of document status, whether they are citizens or not. And there's a culture of reluctance and fear of the government in some ways.

And so you have to deal with that on top of the issue that it's tough to get an appointment. So just think of the folks who may not speak English as a first language, may be working long hours or odd hours and not know how to navigate that process. So that's also compounding this. Of course, you're a New York reporter looking at New York data. You touched on this a bit before about expanding to a national scene. You would expect there to be similarities in your analysis all across the country. I think if you do the same research in basically any other mid-sides, or big city in the country, you'll find something similar in that we have a national housing crisis,

affordable housing crisis. There isn't enough of it. And when you look at what that means on the ground, it's that you have people living in very tight conditions, ones that are really conducive for the virus to spread, people doubling up, tripling up in apartments, that they're struggling to pay for. And they lose a job. And suddenly, they're facing eviction. And so that phenomenon is not New York exclusive. I think you would find that just about anywhere in the country right now. And we're seeing that from many other reports, not specifically about COVID, but even before COVID, this problem existed. And there's really no quick solution to that. Stefanoz, thank you for taking time to be with us today. Thank you.

Stefanos Chen is a reporter covering real estate for the New York Times. And you'll find a link to his article on this topic on our website at science friday.com. When we come back, are your spring allergies picking up? You are not alone. And there's a climate connection. We'll talk about it after the break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Oh, Gazut Haid. You know, I usually don't start a segment with a sneeze, but spring is in the air and our resident allergy sneezer Kathleen Davis is reminding us that, well, it's a lot. It's a little bit. here. Welcome, Kathleen. Yeah. Sorry to sneeze in everybody's year. No problem. I understand you've had a really bad allergy season this year, right? Yes, as you may have heard just now. I've been having a

really rough time, Ira. I wake up every morning and I am all stuffed up. My sneezing is just out of control. I go through so much tissue paper. It is honestly disgusting. I will spare you the details because I don't think you want to know how much I've gone through. It's really brutal. I really think that the past few years have been extra bad allergy-wise for me. And I understand that in between sneezes, you've discovered that there's evidence to back up that recent bad allergy season, right? Yeah. So there's new research that says not only is the amount of pollen growing every allergy season, but the season is actually getting longer. It's not even just recent. This has been the trend over the past 30 years. Oh, man. That's bad news for we allergy suffer as.

Why is this happening? Well, I talked to the lead researcher of this study, whose name is Dr. William Anderrag. He is assistant professor of biological sciences at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. And he says this is happening because of something that seems to be dictating a lot of changes to our planet, climate change. We've known for a long time that plants are really sensitive to temperature. And when you grow plants in a really controlled environment, like a greenhouse, house and you turn up the temperature or you increase the carbon dioxide in the air, plants tend to grow bigger and they tend to produce a lot more pollen. They also tend to shift their flowering seasons

to start to flower earlier in the year. And so in our study, we really tried to ask, do we see this same responses across the entire swath of the U.S. and parts of Canada? And the short answer is yes, We see that in general, plants are starting to flower a lot earlier, and pollen levels start a lot earlier. Pollin seasons are getting longer, and the amount of pollen in the air is going up quite a bit. And just how much longer and how much more intense are we talking about? So since the pollen data really start in the 1990s, pollen seasons now are starting about three weeks earlier compared to the 1990s. And there's about 20% more pollen in the air on average over a year. So a pretty substantial increase in pollen severity as well.

Yeah, that seems like bad news for those of us who are allergy sufferers. Yeah, it's not great news. Obviously, pollen is a major contributor to allergies, to asthma, to a lot of respiratory health conditions. And just how much was climate change responsible for these changes in pollen? Climate change was playing a very large role in the patterns we thought. By our estimates, is responsible for more than half of the change in the, the, the lengthening of pollen seasons and pollen seasons starting earlier and playing a more moderate role in the levels of pollen in the air. Do we have any idea what could be responsible

for the other percentages? There are a number of possible things that might be influencing the other patterns that aren't explained by climate change. We looked at some of the major potential ones, like changes in urban vegetation and didn't see much there in terms of patterns. But we know that plants and vegetation are shifting across the country, both in response to human land use and more subtle changes in climate, like species moving northward. So there's really a lot of possibilities there, and it's going to take more research to tease that apart. So what kind of plants are we actually talking about here that are releasing their pollen earlier in the year? There's certainly a signal across lots of different species of plants. We saw that some of the

really high allergy-producing plants like ragweed and other weeds were pretty large contributors. The largest contributors in our data set were actually a lot of tree pollen. So we saw a lot of increases in tree pollen and earlier springs in tree pollen in our data set. And what's actually happening in the plant that is causing this change in pollen release? Yeah, scientists have studied the physiology that leads to pollen production for a while. And we know from these very controlled greenhouse settings that when you either turn up the temperature or increase carbon dioxide, a couple different effects happen in terms of plant physiology. First, plants tend to grow bigger. They grow more mass. They also seem to make these decisions to allocate more of their mass and their carbon to reproduction and to pollen. So they tend to grow larger flowers, and individual flowers tend to produce more pollen. So they're responding in these ways.

It's almost like, well, the conditions seem favorable. I'm going to put out a lot more pollen to reproduce more. So that's some of the physiological changes that have been documented in these controlled studies. Now, I know that you were looking at North America generally in this study, but I'm curious if you saw any sort of differences regionally in terms of areas that maybe got a little bit more pollen than others or any sort of trends like that. We did see pretty substantial differences regionally. So across the country, pollen seasons are getting longer and pollen levels are going up. But the largest increases really tended to be in the Midwest, in Texas, and across the southeast. Those were the pollen increase hotspots in our study. And as you mentioned, you looked at 30 years of data for this study. Can we expect that this trend is going to continue? the short term, I think we do expect that this trend is going to continue. The driver's temperature

was the largest driver by far across all of these pollen stations. And temperatures are continuing to go up due to human-caused climate change. So at least in the short term, I think the next couple decades, we very much expect a continuing trend. Now we know that pollen impacts the respiratory system. What's the implication of having a pollen season that just keeps growing? So a pollen season that keeps growing means we're going to expose a lot more people to these higher pollen levels and for longer in the year. And I've spoken to several allergists about some of the trends in this. And what allergists have often seen is when pollen seasons start earlier, sometimes their patients are really not prepared and don't have the medications ready and don't

have a lot of their responses ready and they're taken by surprise and then often end up with very severe health consequences. Now, we are in the middle of a respiratory pandemic right now, obviously. Do we have any idea how pollen might interact with COVID-19? We have some preliminary ideas. And actually, a study just came out this week that has found some links, some correlations anyway, between pollen in the air and the infection rate in COVID itself. So it looks like when higher pollen levels are in the air, the infathing.

rate of COVID goes up. This was a study done across 31 countries that just came out a few days ago. And we know from another earlier study that actually when your lungs and your respiratory tract is already inflamed, that this tends to make us more vulnerable to other types of viruses like a lot of the viruses that cause the common cold. We hear a lot about certain pollutants that are constantly being monitored at, I mean, thousands of stations across the U.S. I'm thinking in particular of PM2.5, for example. I mean, do you think that we talk enough about pollen as an irritant? I think one of the striking things that I am always a little stunned by actually in doing this research is that we don't really monitor pollen nearly to the scale that we monitor most of these

other airborne pollutants. And our study, which is one of the largest and most comprehensive in terms of number of stations and scales to date was only able to really look at 60 long-term stations, whereas we have thousands of air pollution stations in many states. So there's really, I think, a lot more that needs to be done to improve our monitoring of pollen levels. Well, this was very informative. Thank you so much for joining us. Dr. William Andreg is an assistant professor at the University of Utah's School of Biological Sciences in Salt Lake City. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you.

Thanks to sci-fi producer Kathleen Davis for bringing us that story. While we're on the topic of climate change and plants, there is something else that's been happening to our plants because of a warming planet. I'm talking about flower colors are changing. Yeah, a new study looked at flower records as far back as the 1800s and found that the flowers of some species in the U.S. have sort of morphed into lighter shades of color. Some are more vibrant. What's going on here? Well, the lead author of that study joins us to explain. Sierra Sullivan, graduate student at Clemson University's Department of Biological Sciences

in Clemson, South Carolina. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here. So nice to have you. Let's talk about this. So flower, colors are changing? Is there a pattern that are changing from one color to another? Yeah, so actually, some flowers are becoming darker, becoming more of your like purples and pinks, whereas some are actually becoming wider in being more white and cream and color. Can you give me an idea? If I go outside this spring and I go to look at a flower in my flower bed, is there any flower I could look at to say, hey, You know, that used to be purple or it's getting more purple or something like that.

There could be some. There are some species that, I guess, they're wild, but some like to put in their lawn. So if you're familiar with something called Dames Rocket or there's something called nodding onion that we looked at, it's also wild. It's an onion. So depending on how much the plant person, you may already have these in your garden or if you go on like trails, you might be able to see them. all over the United States. Wow. And so over what period of time are we talking about

for this change to happen? So this was our oldest plant was from 1895, and our most recent one was from 2019. So that's over a span of a hundred and 24 years. Wait, wait, wait, wait. You said 2019.

Are you saying that something changed from 2019 until now? Yes. We've had things changing up till like two years ago we have some proof of it. Wow. And why are they changing? So from our study, what we looked at was climate. And the biggest drivers we saw was temperature and something called vapor pressure deficit. And if you don't know what that last one is, it's pretty much a measure that relates relative humidity with temperature.

And it's kind of the amount of aridity. the air, so how much kind of sucking out the moisture of the air it has. That's pretty much simply what vapor pressure deficit is. That sounds like a really technical word for dry. Yeah, dry, arid, pretty much what that means. What kinds of records were you looking at to make these color comparisons? So what I looked at was some online hair barrier records, and these are pretty much just time capsules of plants, pressed plants. And those records, they'll tell me where the plant was taken. It'll tell me the color, what it looked like at the time. So I use that to just say, is this white or pigmented? And then from those coordinates of where the plants were collected,

there are these climate databases called Prism or World Clim, and that's where with the coordinates, I was able to get the temperature, the vapor pressure deficit things at that specific location that the plan was collected. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking to Sierra Sullivan, graduate student at Clemson University's Department of Biological Sciences in Clemson, South Carolina, about how climate change is changing flower colors. Okay, let's talk about that location Is that location spread all over, or locations, I guess I should say, are they spread all over the country? Yeah, so we limited this study to just plants that are found in North America, whether it's invasive or native, just plants found in North America. And how many kinds of plants are we talking about?

So this, we had 12 different species, but all together we had 1,900,000. 44 records in the city. And you went through each one of those records? Yep, I had to go through each one of those records and give them a color score. So it's sort of an artistic challenge also. I mean, isn't that sort of subjective to give them a color score? Yeah, so definitely some of the colors like mauve. I was like, I had to look up on Google, what is that?

So there is some subjectiveness to it, but to try to get rid of that bias, I'd make groups of just generally pink, purple, blue, and then just generally is this white to try and eliminate the finikiness of it. Yeah. You know, I'm thinking now, if I'm a bee or an insect, a pollinator, and I'm used to seeing a color of a plant, and suddenly it's a different color, am I in trouble? Not necessarily. So of course, they are visually seeking pollinators, but there are other cues such as maybe nectar rewards or scent things like that. So your pollinator may be tripped up at first, but they do learn that this is the same thing. It's just a different color. They do learn that. They evolve with the changing color of the plant. Yeah, they can learn. Like, they do have preferences, but that doesn't totally mean it won't. ever go to its less preferable plant. You know, changing flower colors sounds pretty wild.

It's not a bad thing, is it? No, it's not bad because even before this study, plants as well as animals, as we always respond to our environment. This study is pretty much capturing plants responding to its changing climatic environment. So it's not bad. It's really more of an observation of this. we saw this happening. So the plants are not migrating

with the climate. You didn't study that. I mean, moving north or south with the weather as it changes, as the climate changes. You're just saying that the colors of the plants are changing. Yeah, so that same population, for instance, let's just say, in Virginia,

just had a shift in color of the same population. If I were to look at the same plant, let's say, in Virginia, and then look the same plant, let's say, growing in Maine, would they be different colors? They could be because a lot of the species actually have a very ubiquitous range or they're found everywhere in the United States versus there were only some that were endemic to,

for example, the south of California. So yeah, it's possible with a wide range. You could see one population in Virginia, it changed color, but maybe up in Maine where it may be. me the changes in temperature weren't as drastic, it's actually the same. But just in the south, those flowers changed color. Boy, you know, I love plants and I go out all the time looking at them. I can see you getting into arguments with folks who come from different states. You know what I mean? No, that's supposed to be purple. No, it's changed color. Sure it has. Yeah, I can see that. Absolutely. We'll have you back. Sierra Sullivan graduate student at Clemson University's Department of biological sciences in Clemson, South Carolina. Thank you for enlightening us today.

Yeah, thank you for having me. This is great. You're welcome. When we come back to sleep per chance to dream, aye, there's the rub for octopuses. What sleeping octopuses can tell us about memory, and if they might dream, we'll talk to scientists about that. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I am I, Rofleto. Birds do it, bees do it. Yes, easy. Even octopuses do it. I'm talking about, of course, sleep. Sleep is nearly universal in the animal kingdom. But how animals sleep is not the same. Studies have found that for mammals, giraffes get the least amount of shadai, and koalas can sleep up to 22 hours a day. Oh, to be a koala. Then there are the different cycles of sleep, like REM versus non-REM sleep. A team of researchers studied these different

sleep cycles to investigate how they might be connected to learning and memory. And they turned to the brainy octopus, of course, as their study subject. Their results were published in the journal, Science, and my next guest is one of the authors on that study. Sidarta Ribeiro is a professor of neuroscience and the vice director and founder of the Brain Institute at the Federal University of Rio Grande de Norte de Norte, and Natal Brazil. Welcome to Science Friday. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you very much, Ira. Tell me why you study an octopus, for example, rather than a shark or some other kind of animal. Okay, so most of my research has been performed in mammals, in rodents, and humans.

When I returned from the United States to Brazil after my PhD and postdoc to begin my lab, I said, you know, I will begin studying octopuses as well because they have such complex behaviors, they have such a big brain. We could probably learn something about the constraints for brain design if we study very complex animals that are very different, like, say, the rat and the octopus. And then for many years, I was looking for the right collaborators. I teamed up with Tatiana Leite, who's a biologist, a specialist in octopuses.

And then she found Sylvia Medeiros, the now graduate student that carried most of the work. And it's been an amazing ride. We discovered that octopuses have something similar to REM sleep. They have what we call active sleep. that occurs very precisely after every 30 minutes with a very precise interval. And it's always coming after a long episode of quiet sleep. And the distinction between the two kinds of sleep is very dramatic.

During quiet sleep, the animals are completely pale with their pupils closed, not moving the arms and really in a very quiescent manner. And then when they transit into active sleep, They become seemingly agitated. The colors change dramatically. The textures of the skin change dramatically. The eyes move around, and still, they are unresponsive to sensory stimulation. We tested the animals while they were in different states, and we found that those two states,

quiet and active sleep, are states of unresponsiveness to sensory stimulation. Now, I know that octopuses have this great talent for changing their color and their shape to avoid predators. Do they sleep this way, or are they not able to do that while they are asleep? Well, so this is the thing. When they are in quiet sleep, they don't change any of that. But when they are in active sleep, they change all of that. And this is what we quantified using some computational strategies to work on the images that we recorded for very long hours, and then we crunch the numbers to really establish that those sleep states are quite distinct. For example, we found that the active sleep states, which is analogous to REM sleep, will only occur after

very long episodes of quiet sleep, episodes that are beyond six minutes. And when active sleep kicks in, it's always a short episode below one minute. So it's something that is very fleeting, but occurs quite precisely every 35 minutes. Is the sleep modality you see in the octopus, the REM, the wake, the different kinds of sleep, the same thing that's going on in humans? Well, we think it's similar, whether it's the same thing. It's highly unlikely that it's the same thing because these animals are quite distance in terms of evolution. If we are to think that this is the conservation of an ancient trait, we would have to go back 500 million years ago. So this is probably a case of convergent evolution.

We're probably right to say that the sleep cycle that consists in going from a quiet sleep episode towards a an active sleep episode is something that evolved twice or even perhaps more times because perhaps Drosophila, the fruit fly also has it. And it's probably related to the complexity of the wiring of the brains of these animals. Most likely we'll see a similar phenomenon that has different underlying mechanisms. How do you know when an octopus is sleeping? I'm guessing they don't snore. So in our case, we confirmed that they were sleeping by stimulating the them with images of crabs that they could prey upon shown on a screen or using a vibratory stimulation test, which we hit the aquariums lightly with a rubber hammer.

And this was something that they could not notice. They wouldn't react to this kind of stimuli when they were in either quiet sleep or actively. But they will, they would react very promptly to these kind of stimulation when they were in different in other states. So they spend about 25% of the time of the daytime sleeping. Only 0.5% of the time is in active sleep. But either in quiet or in active sleep, they are unresponsive to sensory stimulation. We all know that sleep is important. But do we know really why we sleep? What's going on there? What happens during sleep? What the function is? Well, it's interesting you ask me this because I just wrote a book on this, which will come out in the United States and Canada. in August, I believe, by Penguin Random.

It's called the Oracle of Nights. In this book, I argue that, yes, that we do know why we sleep, and it's many, many layers of explanations because they evolved in very different moments and under very different selective pressures. So some of the things that happen during our sleep are as old as animals. And some of the things that happen in our sleep

are, you know, as old as the pandemic. There are many layers of complexity. in terms of what sleep does to us. So sleep is super important for protein synthesis, for hormonal synthesis, for the replenishment of biomolecules that were spent during the day, for the triage of memories, if you want, the separation of memories that should be erased and memories that should be kept,

and memories that should be mixed and restructured to generate new behaviors. So all that happens during sleep. There's detoxification going on during sleep. sleep. And then there's another level of complexity, which is the symbolic level, something that occurs not purely at the neurobiological level, but at the emergent psychological level. And then we go into the symbolism of dreams, and we go into the difference between the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious, so we can dream about things that happen to us or that relate to our lives. But sometimes we dream of symbols that are shared by many cultures

and they have to do either with our shared cultural contents or our innate biology. So all that is compounded. And then we say, so with all that, what is the function of sleep for us now? And I'd say for most people in the urban setting, not much, because sleep in dreams in particular are not something we pay attention to. Sleep is under attack because of all the screens that we have in our lives, because of all the different habits that take time away from sleep. and dreams even more so, right?

If all that that I said has any resemblance to what happens in the octopus, we still don't know. It's a far-fetched comparison at this point. What we can say at this point is that they have a sleep cycle that to some extent resembles what we see in birds, in reptiles, in mammals, which is to have cycle comprising quiet sleep, long episodes of quiet sleep, then falling into active sleep for short periods of time.

particular architecture, it seems to be a hallmark of octopus sleep. It's quite similar to what we see in those vertebrate groups. Is there any way to test whether an octopus is dreaming or not? Ah, this is a very difficult question to address because the fact that they are having something like Ramslie does not necessarily mean they're having a complex inner life experience in which some representation of the self is undergoing lots of adventures. We don't know that. It would be very hard to be sure of that. Of course, one idea that has been floating around in the field

and many laboratories in one way or another pursue it is that we may be able to read the inner state of the animal based on the pattern shown on the skin, this notion that maybe we can read even dreams in octopuses by quantifying and investigating their skin color texture patterns. In our study, we quantified those patterns and we were able to show that they changed dynamically and dramatically during active sleep and not during quiet sleep. But to actually try to infer mental content from those patterns would be a big step, not only for this reason,

but because of the fact that there are more neurons in the periphery, in the body of the octopus than in the brain. So maybe if we can read anything at the skin level, maybe it reflects local processing and not central processing, but it could also reflect central processing. This is an open, interesting question that we want to explore further. That's very interesting. I mean, if there are more neurons in the periphery of the octopus, is it doing most of its processing when it's sleeping in the periphery instead of in its brain? That's a possibility. I actually believe it's probably both. I believe that active sleep is important in many different species because of what we call systems consolidation, which is

memory consolidation, not just within one brain region or one region of the nervous system, but actually allowing the coordination and the integration of information across brain regions. This is a REM sleep plays a big role in this kind of integration in mammals, and it's possible that actively plays a similar role in the octaves. Every pet owner knows this. If you watch your dog sleeping, sometimes they whimper, they look like they're pawing, they look like they're running in their sleep. Can you see this in the octopus at all?

And am I just projecting what I'm doing, and that's not really happening in the animals? Well, during active sleep, they do move their arms, and they do move their eyes, and they do move, the patterns on the skin are very dynamic, right? So I think the question is to come up with quantitative and objective interpretation of those changes. Right now, we know that changes are there. What exactly do they mean? We don't know. It is tempting, for example, to interpret some of these patterns as reminiscent of specific behaviors.

I'll give you an example. The octopus can show a pattern that we call half and half in which half of the body is very dark, and half of the body is very pale, and they can switch which side gets to be pale and which side gets to be dark. This is observed, this is known when animals are awake, and they are, for example, having some courtship interaction, a male-female interaction in which the male can show one side only to the female with a certain color and the other color to the other side to the scene or to another animal. It's also something that you can observe when animals are competing, say two males competing for territory or access to a female.

So this half-and-half pattern is known as a waking thing. We saw a state that we call quiet half-and-half in which the animals are very quiescent and producing the half-and-half pattern. So it is tempting to speculate that maybe the animals were dreaming about one of those either courtship or competition encounters. However, we must ascertain that the animals were actually sleeping. We tried to do that by stimulating the animals during the state. And we found that the arousal threshold was in between what we found for the awake, alert state, and what we found for the quiet sleep state.

So we could not really come to a conclusion, and this is why in our paper we described the state, and we talk about this, but we say we are not sure whether the animals are asleep or not. And to further complicate things, it's difficult to stimulate only one eye of the animal and not have the other eye stimulated when you're inside a glass tank and there's reflection inside the aquarium. So this may wait a little longer before we understand what it means. another possible interpretation for this kind of quiet half and half pattern would be that perhaps octopuses also are able to have uni-hemispheric sleep. So sleep with half of the brain, which is something that is observed in some aquatic mammals and also in birds and sometimes has to do with the fear of predation in addition to the needs to swim and go to the surface and breathe like in mammals,

in aquatic mammals. So it is possible that the octopus has something like unit hemispheric sleep. But again, we are far from knowing the answer right now. What we have is a bunch of new questions, which is great. This is Science Friday from WNIC Studios. One last question for you. As you mentioned before, your lab is in Brazil. What is the state and safety of science there now?

Science is in intensive care and with no oxygen. The Brazilian government is anti-science. It does not believe in vaccines. It does not believe in wearing masks. And it does not believe in science. We should have been producing the Brazilian vaccine and perhaps selling it to our neighbors. And instead, we're trying to buy it and we can't buy it because they didn't buy it at the right time. We only have 5% of the Brazilian population vaccinated right now.

Just yesterday, we had 3,000 people dying from COVID in Brazil. And it's going to get worse and worse. And the Brazilian budget for science, it was brought down to 25% this year of what it was 10 years ago. Currently, Brazilian science is in a very dire state. The students have no fellowships to continue working, many people quitting science. And the fact that we got this paper published in a good journal and that it got so much attention, I never got so much attention for anything I published previously at all. And this, for me, comes at a very good moment

because I'm telling my students, don't quit science, stay in science. Science is important. Science is important for the world. And this moment in Brazil will be overcome. We will get out of this situation. We will have a government that believes in science and that invests in science and education.

I must say to do science to perform and to continue doing science in Brazil, given the current situation, political and economic, is actually a political statement. Well, I hope that our interview and your work and us talking about it helps you out in your work and all the science work that could be going on in Brazil. Thank you very much, Aaron. Thank you for the opportunity. Sadarta Ribeiro, professor of neuroscience and the vice director and founder of the Brain Institute at the Federal University of Rio Grande de Norteurche in Natal Brazil. Oh, one last thing before we go. Our book club is gearing up for the spring.

And you don't want to miss this one. We're reading Lost Feast, a nonfiction book by Lenore Newman, Tales of Species Extinctions, and the foods we've loved to death, and the foods that are in danger now. It's a book somehow both delicious and sobering at the same time. And we're giving away free copies, courtesy of Powell's books. You can learn more about the book, how to participate, and see a schedule of the events, all on our website, ScienceFriday.com slash book club. The book again is

Lenore Newman's Lost Feast. Go get your hands on it from your local bookseller or library and we'll see you in April. And that's about it for this hour. If you missed any part of this program or you'd like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts

or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. And of course, you can say hi to us on social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, email us, SciFri at Science Friday.com.

We'll see you next week. Have a great weekend. I'm Ira Flato.