Short Wave - News Round Up: Algal Threats, An Asteroid With Life's Building Blocks And Bee Maps

Episode Date: March 24, 2023

After reading the science headlines this week, we have A LOT of questions. Why did the Virgin Islands declare a state of emergency over a large blob of floating algae? What can a far-off asteroid tell us about the origins of life? Is the ever-popular bee waggle dance not just for directions to the hive but a map? Luckily, it's the job of the Short Wave team to decipher the science behind the day's news. This week, co-host Aaron Scott, Scientist in Residence Regina G. Barber and science correspondent Geoff Brumfield are on the case. Buckle up as we journey beyond the headlines and sail out to sea, blast off to space and then find our way home with the help of some dancing bees!Have suggestions for what we should cover in our next news round up? Email us at [e-mail] pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, Shortweaver is Regina Barber here. With Aaron Scott. And Jeff Brumfield. And today we're back again to talk about some of the big science news from the last couple weeks. We scoured the social media, academic journals, read up on the headlines for the science nuggets that caught our eyes. So today on the show, we've got millions of pounds of algae, possibly coming to a beach near you. Asteroids helping us understand.

the origins of life. And of course, beats, dancing out messages. You're listening to Shortwave, the Daily Science Podcast from Hennie. All right, Aaron, I'm in charge. Yes, you are, Regina Barbary. Yes, you are. And as the person in charge, I'm deciding you're up first. What's the news you're bringing to us today?

Okay, so I've got a riddle for both of you. Okay. What weighs more than 10 million pounds, stretches out more than 5,000 miles, long and rhymes with ectoplasm. I don't know, actually. It is actually a giant floating mat of grassy brown algae called sargasm. Right. It's known as the great Atlantic sargasm belt.

It starts near West Africa. It stretches out across the Atlantic before, you know, making its way into the Gulf of Mexico. And as our NPR colleague Emily Olson reported, it is now so big that it can be seen from space. Whoa. Well, yeah, I've heard of this before. We talked about it on a previous episode. Yeah, so it used to just show up in small patches in the Sargasso Sea, which is kind of northern Atlantic territory. But then beginning around 2011, the Sargazum Belt just exploded. It has grown bigger and bigger, setting new records most years. Last year, the Virgin Islands actually declared a state of emergency to get FEMA's help in order to deal with all the Sargazum

washing up on the shore. And researchers are predicting that this year will be a new record. So why is this like a state of emergency? What's going on? What is so threatening about a bunch of seaweed, right? I mean, really, it's kind of out of a horror movie because it's like a giant roving blob of plant matter that will smother anything in its path, whether that's coral reefs, marinas, fisheries, industrial plants. And then, of course, when it starts to wash up on the beach, it starts to pile up in these just big rotting heaps and walls of decomposing algae that releases ammonia and hydrogen sulfide so that the beach smells like rotting eggs and it actually can cause respiratory problems as well.

So it's actually like affecting people on the beach? People's health. Yes, especially the people who are cleaning it up. And of course, it takes all of the magic out of sunset walks on the beach. it's already washing up on the Florida Keys and the Yucatan Peninsula. What's causing it to grow so much? So researchers don't quite know. There are ideas, of course, climate change. But then they think probably all the nitrogen and phosphate that runs out to sea from our heavy use of fertilizers and, you know, our tendency to dump our human waste into rivers.

I mean, basically, we're just dumping this massive amount of plant food out into the ocean. and the result is this sargasm that gobbles it up and it's going to keep growing through the summer so you can expect we will be hearing more in the coming months. Thanks, Aaron. We'll be on the lookout for that. Okay, Jeff, you're up next with some news from space, right? Yeah, so the thing I want to talk about has to do with the very origins of life on Earth, actually.

They're researchers who think it may have come from outer space. And part of that puzzle has to do with this asteroid called Yugu. Back in 2019, a spacecraft named Hayabusa 2 landed on Yugu, and it scooped up a sample and returned it to Earth the following year. Researchers all over the world have been analyzing those samples, and earlier this year, they announced they found a bunch of organic molecules. But what's really exciting now is they found something called Euracil.

Does anyone know what Euracil is? No. I actually think I do know what this is. This is one of the bases that makes up RNA, right? That's right. So, Aaron, you're way ahead of me. I didn't know this. But, you know, we have the bases that make up DNA, which are what, like G-A-T-C.

But there's this U that shows up in RNA. And so over email, one of the researchers, Yasuhiooro Oba, at Hokkaido University in Japan, he told me this is the first time they've discovered a nucleo base, that's parts of DNA and RNA in a sample from a rock that isn't Earth. Wow. So is this implying that, like, the building blocks of life came from space? I mean, that is the implication. That's the big question out everyone's mind, right?

So some believe that Earth was seeded with these early organic molecules from asteroids like Yugu. meteorites have been to detect on Earth that have organic molecules on them before. And uracil is particularly interested because of the RNA connection. So I spoke to another researcher named Amy Williams at the University of Florida. She wasn't affiliated with the study. And she says many researchers think RNA may have come first. In some models for the evolution of life, there's the idea that RNA was the major genetic information molecule before DNA. I'm actually really impressed that we got like a sample from this asteroid and brought it back within a year.

Like that kind of is amazing science to me. Yeah. And actually, it's one of a number of missions. NASA has a mission as well that's going to be coming back later this year from another asteroid. That's the Osiris Rex mission. I wonder if they'll find uracil. Well, this is the big question. I think this is what's so exciting about this moment is we have all these asteroid return missions.

We're hoping for Mars sample return in the not too distant future. And people are hoping this will tell us where we came from. Love it. So I'm going to close us out with a little joy and a surprise. Do you both know about the B-Waggle dance? I have no idea what the B-Waggle dance is. I know about it. I don't know how to do it.

I don't know the steps. If you required me on the dance floor to do a B-Waggle dance, I'd be pretty lost. But I'd do my best. So I didn't know about it until this week when I was, directed towards some news in honeybee communication. Is that a journal? No. But a study did just come out in a journal, the proceedings from the National Academy of

Sciences. For anyone who doesn't know about the dance, once honeybees have found like a good source of pollen and nectar, they go back to the hive and they want to tell the other bees about it. So they do this by dancing and they get attention from the other bees on kind of like this dance floor in the hive. To be honest, Regina, I'm. scheming up our next live show in which you and I are going to have to learn a waggle dance that we can share with the audience. We can dress like bees.

But continue, I want to know how it works. I mean, do we know how it works? Yeah, so basically these bees, they come back and they move in this loose figure eight. Honestly, I feel like it's more of like an oval shape. And they walk down the middle of that oval shape. And researchers have known about this dance and how, like, the amount of time it takes for the bee to walk down the middle. and how it waggles and moves its body angled. We've known that that dance tells the direction to this food source.

It even takes into account the directions in relation to the sun, which is super wild. But the new news. What is the new news? What's the buzz? What's the buzz? What's the buzz? So a team of researchers from Germany, China, and the U.S., they wanted to know if these dances actually just told directions from the hive. like ignoring surroundings or previous knowledge,

or was this dance more complex and fancier? And so these researchers tag the bees that witness the dance, which they called recruits, and they released them from different locations, hundreds of meters from the hive, and pointing in different directions from that hive. And just like dropped them out there to see, like, okay, do your Google Maps work from your new location

or you completely lost? Yes, exactly. So most of the tag beings actually. actually got to the food source that was communicated through the dance, which means that the waggle dance isn't just sharing directions, like turn left, turn right from the hive, but actually like a map. Hmm. Huh. So like before we thought the bees just knew, like,

how to get from their house to the grocery store. But this study actually says that maybe the bees know how to get to the grocery store from anywhere in their neighborhood. Interesting. So you were saying from now on, like, we need bees as navigator. Like, got to get a bee in that passenger seat, they're going to show us where to go. Yeah, apparently bees are really great navigators, but researchers are still trying to figure out how it all works. But it's pretty amazing.

That is cool. I think if you tried to give me directions and interpretive dance, it wouldn't work. So bees are up on me. And so with that, we've traveled from sea to land to air and Jeff, even to space. There are a few other people I would want to do these things with, so thank you both. Been a pleasure. Yes, anytime. And before we head out, a quick shout out to our Shortwave Plus listeners.

We appreciate you, and we thank you for being a subscriber. Shortwave Plus helps support our show, and if you're a regular listener, we'd love for you to join so you can enjoy the show without sponsor interruptions. Find out more at plus.npr.org slash shortwave. This episode was produced by the brilliant Liz Metzger, edited by our superstar managing producer Rebecca Ramirez, and fact-checked by the incredible Anil Oza. Stu Rushfield was our invaluable audio engineer. Brendan Crump is our podcast coordinator. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Anya Gunman is our senior vice president of programming. I'm Regina Barber.

Thanks, as always, for listening to Shortwave, the Daily Science podcast from NPR.