12 Burst results for "Angela Saney"
WNYC 93.9 FM
"angela saney" Discussed on WNYC 93.9 FM
"Only in hindsight in my experience that researchers have a hold up their hands and say yes we were biased Thank you so much for joining us today Angela Nice family pleasure Thanks so much for having me Angela saney is a science journalist and author Her latest book is superior the return of race science The most pernicious myth about Neanderthals is actually something you hear all the time about humans The idea that some groups of us are destined to die out because we're inferior It comes back to that question of why the Neanderthals disappeared There's lots of theories First of course is that we just killed them all Or maybe the rapidly changing climate killed them Or maybe their social groups were so small they couldn't get enough genetic variety which weakened them Or maybe we simply absorbed them But if you look at how long they lived and how they lived it's impossible to say that they failed In fact they live on in our DNA In your DNA my two and a half percent Yes Long live the Neanderthals and all our hominin sisters And that's it for this week's show I'm the media is produced by Michael lowinger eloise Rebecca Clarke calendar and Eli Cohen Thanks for all your help Eli This is his last week With help from Aki Camaro Xander Ellen writes our fabulous newsletter our technical directors Jennifer Munson our engineers this week were Andrew nerviano and Adrian Lilly Katya Rogers is our executive producer On the media is a production of WNYC studios I'm Brooke gladstone Thank you Anna Lee knew it Thank you so much Brooke It's always great to hang out with a fellow hominin WNYC and the New York public library have teamed up for a virtual book club experience I'm Alison Stewart host of all of it and the book club get lit This month we've been reading the novel our country Friends and now it's time to.
WNYC 93.9 FM
"angela saney" Discussed on WNYC 93.9 FM
"Line You damn dirty ape Today this memorable line isn't just a nerdy reference It's a racist dog whistle In 2014 New York politician Jim Coughlin brought this usage into the mainstream when he called vin MSNBC anchor and now host of the takeaway Melissa Harris Perry a damn dirty ape And in 2018 ABC fired Roseanne Barr from her own show after a nasty tweet linking former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett to Planet of the Apes And is this aspect of the Neanderthal myth that fascinates science journalist Angela saney who writes about the ways that science can perpetuate racism Very quickly after Neanderthal burns were discovered they were recruited into existing ideas about how people thought about race in the 19th century The bones were discovered in Germany but one of the first things scientists did was to compare those bones to the bones of living Aboriginal Australians in the 19th century There was this very widespread belief in the scientific community in this idea of a racial hierarchy that Europeans were at the top in other races were slotted below And also that those at the bottom of this hierarchy were like Neanderthals doomed to die out I wonder if we can blame all of this on linnaeus because I'm thinking about how back in the 18th century this botanist Carl linnaeus he created a bunch of the taxonomic categories of animals and plants that we use today He also developed a hierarchy of humans though based on racial categories and he always put homo africanus at the bottom right alongside homo monstrous and homo faris what he considered to be feral and monstrous people So do you think it goes back to linnaeus Because there were these existing racialized ideas about the world because of colonialism and slavery That became woven into this taxonomic project So when linnaeus was creating these quite arbitrary categories in his head because as we know the human species is one human species We can't There are no natural subdivisions between us He was working within what was already a wider project So you've written about how scientists and journalists began to talk about Neanderthals in a different way when genetic analysis revealed that they were probably fair skinned with red hair Of course we will all know that the word Neanderthal is not something we purely associate with another species of human We also use it to describe a kind of fish stupid man So there was this widespread assumption that Neanderthals went extinct because they were too stupid They were like thugs almost Even those comparisons that were made between Aboriginal Australians and Neanderthal remains in the 19th century I think point to this idea that European scientists North American scientists at that time thought about races in that deeply offensive destructive way in the 19th century one of the very first laws that was passed in Australia was a white Australia policy And this was about essentially breeding the color out of Australia Brutally tearing children away from their parents putting them in care homes where they were often abused or horrible disgusting things happen to them This was all justified under this racialized policy that said that this is a group of people that don't have a right to be here that they're going extinct anyway And science became part of that project Now it's become quite clear over the last couple of decades that modern humans mated with Neanderthals Europeans in particular when you look at the way in which Neanderthals are now being described in the media So over the last ten years or so suddenly we hear them being rehabilitated Neanderthals were actually much smarter than we thought they were They didn't go extinct because they weren't clever enough It was some other reason Look how similar to us they are And that's what I find particularly galling is that only a hundred or so years ago the supposed similarity between Neanderthals and Aboriginal Australians was used to justification to draw living modern humans out of the circle of humanity And now because we see that Neanderthals have some relationship to modern day Europeans Neanderthals themselves and extinct species has been drawn into that circle of humanity I wonder if you could talk more about the implications of this discovery that in a sense a lot of us are a hybrid of humans and Neanderthals who were once viewed as not human So there was this quite popular theory 30 40 years ago and it's very much discredited called the multi regional hypothesis which posited that different races evolved separately on the continents on which they found So it sounds very 19th century and it is and as we know quite categorically you know we are all products of the out of Africa expansion We all evolved into modernity in Africa But that multi regional hypothesis has to some extent or some degree I think been revived with this idea that once we arrived in these various places around the world that we interbred with other human species that were already there and maybe that's what gives rise to our racial differences which I think is nonsensical but you do see in the literature and in the media people trying to make those kind of distinctions which to me smacks sometimes of 19th century pseudoscientific racism It really does And I mean you've talked about how a lot of the scientific theories ascribe to Neanderthals are basically just reckless speculation Why do we keep doing this Why does this keep happening Why do we keep going back to these 19th century models So many of the power structures around us were built from slavery and colonialism And these beliefs have become so internalized and embedded in the way that we think about each other that we believe them to be biological We mistake it for nature We keep going back to it because we just can not convince ourselves that it isn't real So you've talked about the multi regional hypothesis And I wonder if there are any other examples of the scientific speculation about Neanderthals that you consider to be equally absurd You know one thing I did find really interesting was during the COVID-19 pandemic which for me was just chock full of very weird racial speculation You know as soon as we saw I think minority disparities in health people even experts people who should know better began immediately entering into racialized speculation about what they were seeing We saw a number of scientists looking into the possibility that Neanderthal genes and I put that in quotation marks you can see me doing that I can hear it Somehow responsible for why some people were more kind of protected to the virus than others And it was suspect even at the time because there were so many complex reasons why people are exposed to a virus and what they catch it Within families you see such differences in how people respond And yet that did look to me again As an attempt to reinforce this theory that there are.
On The Media
"angela saney" Discussed on On The Media
"It's only in hindsight in my experience that researchers have a hold up their hands and say, yes, we will biased. Thank you so much for joining us today, Angela. Nice family pleasure. Thanks so much for having me. Angela saney is a science journalist and author. Her latest book is superior, the return of race science..
On The Media
"angela saney" Discussed on On The Media
"WNYC studios is supported by HelloFresh, with HelloFresh you get farm fresh pre portioned ingredients and seasonal recipes delivered right to your doorstep. The new year is a great time to focus on what's most important to you. Whether it's saving money by ordering less takeout, learning to cook or prioritizing your wellness, HelloFresh is here to help with endless options to make cooking at home simple and enjoyable. Go to HelloFresh dot com slash WNYC 16 and use code WNYC 16 for up to 16 free meals and three free gifts. That's HelloFresh dot com slash WNYC 16. Okay, so. Hello. Today. Today every day on radio lab. We have the story as old as time. This story begins. I guess you could say with a mystery. Look very misty. It's like a journey about this thing. Birds. Money, spicy science. Man versus animal. An emergency room doctor. Breath. 9 fiction. It's radiolab. Take me away. Yes, yes. Yeah. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. This is on the media. I'm Brooke gladstone. And I'm Anna Lee newitz. As we've heard earlier this hour, pop culture depictions of Neanderthals are just full of foolishness. It's so easy to use Geico dot com, a caveman could do it. Which were followed by a whole cycle of Geico ads where the Neanderthals protested their negative portrayals, which led to a whole new round of jokes about how funny it was when cavemen tried to sound smart. Like this one, featuring the so called stupid caveman from Adult Swim. The enemy was beating boulder into powder because he couldn't eat it and magic ball Landon lap. Naturally, me think all right, free egg because me stupid and me cave man. So we spent something else lurks beneath the surface of these stories. To see it, let's go back to 1953, when the civil rights movement was heating up and some states were striking down laws that banned marriage between people of different races. That year, audiences at the drive in watched a monster movie called Neanderthal man, in which a mad scientist uses an experimental drug to turn himself into a Neanderthal fur reasons. He becomes a swarthy violent brute, who, of course, conks his girlfriend on the head and brings her back to his cave. That's when a mob of white guys with guns track them down. We figure on trying to smoke him out and trust the look that she'll get away. It's too dangerous. Well, the only other solution is to get the state police down with tear gas, that's just as bad. So is this mob of randos with guns gets ready to storm the cave, miss Marshall and her Neanderthal boyfriend emerge. We'll fire over your head. No, don't. Yeah, sure, it's just a monster movie. But to anyone familiar with the history of lynching in the United States up to that point, this scene probably felt a little too on the nose. Then in 1968, we got another story about our hominid cousins that was a thinly veiled allegory for racial politics. In Planet of the Apes, a group of astronauts led by Charlton Heston have gone way off course and found themselves landing on earth in the distant future talking apes have replaced homo sapiens and relegated the planet's former rulers to the status of animals. They assume Charlton Heston is an animal, too, but when they last saw him like a stray cow, he shouts the movie's most famous line. Damn dirty ape. Today this memorable line isn't just a nerdy reference. It's a racist dog whistle. In 2014, New York politician Jim Coughlin brought this usage into the mainstream when he called vin MSNBC anchor and now host of the takeaway, Melissa Harris Perry, a damn dirty ape. And in 2018, ABC fired Roseanne Barr from her own show after a nasty tweet linking former Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett to Planet of the Apes. And is this aspect of the Neanderthal myth that fascinates science journalist Angela saney, who writes about the ways that science can perpetuate racism. Very quickly after Neanderthal burns were discovered they were recruited into existing ideas about how people thought about race in the 19th century. The bones were discovered in Germany, but one of the first things scientists did was to compare those bones to the bones of living Aboriginal Australians in the 19th century. There was this very widespread belief in the scientific community in this idea of a racial hierarchy that Europeans were at the top in other races were slotted below. And also that those at the bottom of this hierarchy were like Neanderthals doomed to die out. I wonder if we can blame all of this on linnaeus because I'm thinking about how back in the 18th century this botanist Carl linnaeus he created a bunch of the taxonomic categories of animals and plants that we use today. He also developed a hierarchy of humans, though, based on racial categories, and he always put homo africanus at the bottom right alongside homo monstrous and homo faris, what he considered to be feral and monstrous people. So do you think it goes back to linnaeus? Because there were these existing racialized ideas about the world because of colonialism and slavery. That became woven into this taxonomic project. So when linnaeus was creating these quite arbitrary categories in his head, because as we know, the human species is one human species. We can't, there are no natural subdivisions between us. He was working within what was already a wider project. So you've written about how scientists and journalists began to talk about Neanderthals in a different way when genetic analysis revealed that they were probably fair skinned with red hair. Of course we will all know that the word Neanderthal is not something we purely associate with another species of human. We also use it to describe oafish stupid man. So there was this widespread assumption that Neanderthals went extinct because they were too stupid. They were like thugs almost. Even those comparisons that were made between Aboriginal Australians and Neanderthal remains in the 19th century I think point to this idea that European scientists North American scientists at that time thought about races in that deeply offensive destructive way in the 19th century, one of the very first laws that was passed in Australia was a white Australia policy. And this was about essentially breeding the color out of Australia. Brutally tearing children away from their parents, putting them in care homes where they were often abused or horrible, disgusting things happen to them. This was all justified under this racialized policy that said that this is a group of people that don't have a right to be here that they're going extinct anyway. And science became part of that project. Now it's become quite clear over the last couple of decades that modern humans mated with Neanderthals, Europeans, in particular, when you look at the way in which Neanderthals are now being described in the media. So over the last ten years or so, suddenly we hear them being rehabilitated. You know, Neanderthals were actually much smarter than we thought they were. They didn't go extinct because they weren't clever enough. It was some other reason. Look how similar to us they are. And that's what I find particularly galling is that only a hundred or so years ago the supposed similarity between Neanderthals and Aboriginal Australians was used as a justification to draw living modern humans out of the circle of humanity. And now, because we see that Neanderthals have some relationship to modern day Europeans, Neanderthals themselves, and extinct species has been drawn into that circle of humanity. I wonder if you could talk more about the implications of this discovery that in a sense a lot of us are hybrid of humans and Neanderthals who were.
Science Magazine Podcast
"angela saney" Discussed on Science Magazine Podcast
"You think about human difference? So when you go to medical school, you have this laser focus, and I need to learn this stuff and learn this stuff and this stuff. Half the time it's fear that, okay, I'm afraid to fail exam. So I've got to do well. And you're not actually philosophically examining what you're doing. You are trying very hard to keep up with everybody else. And not kill people. I would actually argue that the true learning occurs after you leave medical school where you actually start practicing because then you can synthesize the learning that you have. Because I said, I didn't masters in social and I apologize. That is actually where I learned more about human cultural differences. You know, where I examined my own prejudices, and I examined the origins of prejudices that all of that. And even my own relationship with anthropology because as an African, I have no reason to love anthropologists. They really facilitated a lot of colonization, slave trade by creating theories that made it morally acceptable to enslave people or morally acceptable to colonize different civilizations because they were seen as their fear. Sometimes they made the whole thing up. I had to reexamine my relationship to anthropology in that way. But all of it kind of came together because again, you know, I'm a single human being. I'm a unified person, which means that everything, my childhood, my psychological makeup, my training, in various fields, all of that will come together and will be part of me telling a story. You know, it certainly helped understanding human biology definitely. I had an interest in body horror, that also helped as well. But I think it's the idea that I have the freedom to tell whatever story I want to, so I can throw in everything that helps me to make the point that I want to make. And that was what I was doing. Rose water came out in 2018, but in your most recent book, which has just come out far from the light of heaven, you write about afrofuturists who have gone into outer space and developed a colony of their own. Can you describe this to us and for the benefit of listeners, can you explain what afrofuturism is? Okay, it would take a use to describe her, but let me just put it this way. So the idea is that kind of coalesced to become a futurism had been going on for quite a long time. The name itself comes from an essay by a person called Mark dairy called black to the future. That is a pool together a number of ideas, things that were happening already within the black community in America. After features of it is primarily an American thing, at least in terms of its origin. After featuring has spread beyond America in some ways, but there is no real agreement as to where the term itself should be allowed to spread beyond what happens with American yodas, black people. But the ideas are apparent in every place that has a black community thinking in terms of futuristic art, music, literature, every kind of creative endeavor, but also scientific and historical and the ways we think about history. Broadly speaking after futuristic redefines the relationship of people of African descent with the history of the present and the future. It recontextualizes the knowledge and the knowledge is positive that way that they exist around black people. Part of the way of doing that, you know, sometimes conflicting sometimes disparate ways of imagining the future of black people. If you think of Africa, and you have to think of a musician called sunrise, a very flamboyant musician and all that. You have to think about George Clinton. Literally had this rig where he would arrive on stage in the spaceship. So there was a very large bunch of people who thought of the idea of the statement that space is the place. In other words, faces the place for the human race. But the idea is that black people could leave your oppressive places they were in and actually go inform a community in space. It was one of the things that was said. And some of that comes from the idea of the back to Africa movement where people from America were some people had to really well intention but poorly executed idea of returning black people who had been in America for generations to Africa. Without thinking of the white aspects of things without thinking, okay, immunity comes into this, where are they going to settle? Many of them have been systematically detached from their languages of origin. I don't even know where they're from. And this was before DNA was the thing. Even with DNA being a thing, it's not always accurate. The idea of moving from this place where you are oppressed into another place is the primary thing that I was trying to demonstrate by having an entire space station that was afrofuturistic in origin. You know, because even if you look at astronauts, I need to let space travel. There are, like, astronauts and anything, but it's not like you've got large ways of people of color going into space. So in my mind, in the history of the world of this book, people of means black people of me decided, okay, fine. You know what? We're going to have our own space station, okay? We're going to build our own space station and we're going to go there. And that's how that particular space station originated. Thompson, thank you so much. Thank you very much. And thank you at home. That was the last episode in this series. I'm so very grateful to you for listening and to professor Keith we Lou for providing our book suggestions. I really do hope we've inspired you to read some of the books we've discussed. And perhaps also branch out into the wider world of literature on race and what it means to science. There is so much more out there. I imagine. Goodbye. And that concludes the last edition of the science podcast for 2021. If you have any comments or suggestions, write to us at science podcast at ORG. You can listen to the show on the science website as science dot org slash podcast, and you can subscribe anywhere you get your podcast. The show was edited and produced by Sarah crespi, with production help from prodigy, Meg Cantwell and Joel Goldberg, special thanks to Angela saney. Transcripts or by Scripps, Jeffrey cook post the music on behalf of science magazine, and its publisher of triple AS thanks for joining us..
Science Magazine Podcast
"angela saney" Discussed on Science Magazine Podcast
"Adults. Perhaps from the point that once cannabinoids are in the body, they half life is relatively long. This long half life can be looked at two ways. One is that in the adult brain, once they engaged their receptors and once they engaged in neural circuitries, they slowly will decay and there will be a normalization of brain function or in other organs that normalization of organ function in adults. Therefore, we think and I think this is degenerate understanding. They affect and there will be no major long term imprint. Except, of course, heavy and repeated use which would be an extreme relatively simple situation. If you think that one's cannabinoids are used in developmental contexts, they can really have long term and often harmful effects on developing children, fetuses, or even adolescents. Because as you know, there are no brain development up to late adolescence early adulthood, for instance. So in the first 25 years of life, we can say that once these compounds hit the targets, then over hours or days while they linger around it by their available, they can disrupt developmental processes, which are unique directional, meaning that once there is a failure, our developing bodies can not go back and can not reset and can not prove freed these loss processes and therefore the organ or the individual will likely grow with these deficits. And therefore, it will be difficult if at all possible to correct these. So part of this is because the endocannabinoid system, the one that's in our bodies, it actually has some role in guiding development. So if you tweak it very early with external sources, you can mess up that process. Indeed, you are absolutely correct. So the endocannabinoid system is involved in defining a cell's life. And so to speak of cells life expectancy. So particularly how stem cells divide how these progenies will differentiate and how they will, for instance, the brain starts communicating with each other. This is sounding very serious, but we're not seeing this at the population level. We're not seeing epidemiologically widespread evidence of kids being harmed because there are exposed to cannabis. I've returned to this one because back in the mid 1990s the studies already in the U.S. actually showed that children prenatally exposed to during pregnancy exposed to cannabis, they had persistent deficits in academic performance that usually left school early. They are much more prone to take drugs which are kind of heavy drugs becoming heavy drug users. One point is which I think is always the constant debate is how important are these defects? If you have a fetal accord syndrome it is devastating for the child, right? When you have cannabis exposure, then that is nothing comparable to what you would see with fetal alcohol syndrome. So most people unless they go through psychological testing and so on and so forth, could say like, yes, my children are still good at university and still perform well enough. But I think when you look at a detailed studies, you know, there is more and more recognition that actually these kids are affected. This is one step. The other is that there is a lot of evidence that the earlier adolescent starts smoking cannabis, the more severe effects and long-term effects that you experience. So, for instance, the number of hospitalizations because of psychosis, the dramatically increased if you compare our 12 year old kid, did a 16 year old child. So I think that this is a growing recognition so to speak, but obviously we are genetically different from each other, right? Yeah, especially with the psychology with neurobiology. It's very hard to take environment and even the genes that are environment out of the equation and know. Exactly. So I think this is exactly why you see much more pronounced experiment data than population data, because obviously when you have mice on a shared genetic background, then you can standardize everything whereas hundreds of thousands of children on different backgrounds or different experiences on different diets on different challenges. They are definitely will give you a picture of it is much more shaded or graded than expended research. Yeah, that makes sense. As regulations have changed, as marijuana has become easier to study, do you feel like this stigma against studying this kind of thing has lesson? I think it's not the stigma that has changed. I think it's the it's the relative level of importance and the relative level of considering as mainstream research increased. But I think also that the expectations have changed because this field became so politicized that the extremes of cannabis is the Vander drug, or cannabis is the destroyer of life. Yeah. Kind of prevail and it's very, very difficult to preach these two extremes. And also very difficult or increasing the difficult to instigate an objective scientific debate on how cannabis and cannabinoids should be looked at. I think the challenge is that the legalization, the presumption is that this is harmless. And that the situation is all under control and a very much verified makes it more difficult to argue for future studies being needed. So in terms of how the field is looked at had been transformed by the societal discussion around. Really interesting. Thanks T bar. Thank you very much. T bar harkey is a Professor of molecular neuroscience in the center for brain research. At the medical university of Vienna, you can find a link to the inside article we discussed at science dot org slash podcast. Stay tuned for the last in our series of books at the intersection of race and science. This month, host Angela saney, toss with physician and science fiction author, tade Thompson. I'm Angela Saine, science journalist and host of this podcast. In the previous 5 installments we've explored how scientists have thought about race in the past and the present with scholars including London Nelson and lundy Braun. Today is different. I'm joined by tade Thompson and acclaimed science fiction writer whose 2018 novel rose water won the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke award. Born in London to Europe a parents and maintaining a day job as a doctor, Thomson's work explores not so distant futures in which humans are coexisting with alien life forms on different planes of consciousness. In his novel rose water, Nigeria is the center of focus, a site of alien engagement. India is now the world's leading robotics manufacturer, China and Russia are the two major global powers. The political order has changed. We have a radically new scientific understanding of humanity, but the legacies of race.
Science Magazine Podcast
"angela saney" Discussed on Science Magazine Podcast
"These days, talking about structural and systemic racism, unconscious bias and the subtle ways in which racism shapes human behavior feels normal. But before this, there was the work of psychologist Beverly Daniel Tatum. I'm Angela saney, science journalist and host of this series of podcasts looking at books on science and race. We're up to episode 5, and this month I'm honored to be in conversation with someone who helped first bring to light exactly how pervasive and insidious the effects of racism are on everyday lives. Beverly Daniel Tatum's internationally bestselling book, why are all the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria was published in 1997 and released in an updated edition in 2017? It's that the framework for thinking about race and education president emerita of spellman college Tatum is an expert on the psychology of racism. At the heart of her work is identity how we think about ourselves and of others and how these ideas are formed from a remarkably young age. Beverly, thank you so much for joining me. What brought you to this subject of racism and education? I was born in 1954, which was an important year in race relations in the United States. It was the year of the Brown versus port of education school board decision, which basically said legalized school segregation is unconstitutional, illegal. And I often think it significant that I was born that year. But I was born in September that court decision was in May. I was born in Tallahassee, Florida, at a time when the south was still very much ruled by a system of segregation. Jim Crow segregation as we called it, my parents were both college educated at Howard University. And my father was a professor at Florida in him, which is the historically black institution, teaching art, and he wanted to get his doctorate. He had a bachelor's degree in a master's degree, but wanted a doctorate. So he could advance in higher education and would have liked to do that in Florida. I would have been convenient, certainly he would have liked to do it at Florida state university, which was located just across town from the school where he was teaching. But unfortunately, even though the Brown versus board of education decision had been passed, the state of Florida, like a lot of southern states in the U.S., did not immediately change their policies for their practices. And he was not able to attend for the state because at that time it was a whites only institution. But the state of Florida did to accommodate his right to education was to pay his transportation out of the state. So he traveled from Florida to Pennsylvania and earned his doctorate at Penn State university. And I grew up in this small New England town of Bridgewater, Massachusetts, where my dad was teaching at the university. My mother eventually became a school teacher in the town. And we were one of the very few black families living there. At the time that I was growing up, I was often the only black child in my classroom. And so when I think about why I write about race, I think it has a lot to do with my growing up experience as an observer. Early on in your book, you describe a conversation you had with your son when he was four. Your son doesn't pay quite regularly in your work. And somebody told him at the age of four that he was black. And he was confused because he looked at his skin and saw that it was brown. And he very beautifully told him that this was, you know, just because we call people black and white, that very rarely has very much to do with actual skin color, which varies obviously enormously within these categories. And it did make me wonder when I was reading, you know, how hard societies actually have to work to instill notions of social difference based on what can quite often be quite subtle physical differences. That is quite true. And we learn about these differences from a very early age. We notice, for example, that some people are being spoken to differently than other people or treated differently. I mean, whether you see that on television or in the books that you're reading or who's even included in the books that you're reading, whose pictures do you see whose pictures are left out? And so young children starting from really Todd are able to notice and comment on these differences and start to recognize what is sometimes referred to as a racial hierarchy, recognizing that some people are seen as more valuable or more worthy or whose lives matter more than other people. And those assumptions get reinforced in ways that I think would probably horrify many parents if they gave it some thought. But in fact, it's really so much a part of everyday socialization. I sometimes refer to it as I do in my book, it's like smug in the air. You don't see it, you don't think about it necessarily, but every day you're breathing it in. And how hard was it for you to have these conversations with your children? Because I know for me, it's been very, very difficult. How well you should parents be starting? Well, I often say that children will let you know when they're ready to have these conversations because they'll start asking questions as my son did. Some of those conversations took me by surprise and I have to say it does help being a trained psychologist for the background in child development. So I wasn't completely flubbing by some of what he had to ask about. But it's not uncommon for young children to, for example, point out physical differences, you know, that white child who says to his or her mother, why is that person so dark might get us in response, but that teaches this is not something we talked about. This is not something we comment about. A more appropriate or affirming or helpful response would be to simply say because people come in different shades, just like flowers come in different colors, just like we have different hair color. Some people have light hair, some people have dark hair, some people have blue eyes, some people have brown eyes. That's the diversity of the world. And isn't that a wonderful thing? We can certainly get more specific as I did with my son when someone said to him, your skin is brown because you drink chocolate milk and he came home and asked me if it was true. And I said, no, that's not true. Your skin is brown because you have something in your skin called melanin. Everybody has some, the more you have the Brown and your skin is, it helps protect your skin from the sun. And it happens that at your school year, the kid with the most, which is why your skin is browner than everybody else's. But everybody has some. It doesn't have anything to do with the milk you drink. There are, of course, though social and political implications that come with having a certain color of skin. So how do you broach that with children? As kids are learning these categories and they do learn them, they're absorbing the information around them. We've been talking about how that information is absorbed. Not always in unconscious way, but they're observing that some people live in certain neighborhoods. Some people work in certain jobs, certain people speak with certain accents. All of this is part of what they're learning as they are trying to understand the way the world works. And when they start to learn the names of these groups, right? We have given different.
Science Magazine Podcast
"angela saney" Discussed on Science Magazine Podcast
"That this is usually seen in children and not adults? The reason for that is that the primary infection that is the first time you're infected with this virus is in childhood. The same applies to papillomaviruses that infect keratinocytes and can cause wars. However, puppy dome of ourses are slow growing slowly replicating viruses when compared with herpes simplex virus. And that comes for purpose simplex encephalitis being an acute and even hyperacute condition when compared with the treatment syndrome that we discussed earlier because warts take much more time to develop and grow. So we've talked about disease that manifests on the skin and in the brain and the last example in your review is talking about respiratory diseases and I thought that COVID-19 would be a pretty appropriate way to talk about what are the genetic reasons that underlie why some people get really severe cases of COVID-19 and others don't. The epidemiology early on during the pandemic in the spring of 2020 found that the mortality of COVID is strongly influenced by age. The risk of death and by insurance, the risk of critical or severe disease, doubles every 5 years from childhood onward. So the question that we posed is what are the molecular and cellular determinants of critical COVID that would be consistent with these age dependent pattern. The answer is that there are both inborn errors of type one interference immunity underlying critical COVID-19 and auto antibodies that are preexisting and that neutralize type one interference. How does a deficiency in type one interferons or an increase in auto antibodies cause more severe cases of COVID-19? Time point interference form a family of 17 molecules that bind the same receptor one or another of these 17 interference are produced by every known discernible cell type in the human body. They are produced upon viral infection. And their job is to stimulate cells nearby. It's a signal that tells cells near an infected cell that virus has infected a cell. And therefore, the other cells are warned and they're going to shut down a number of programs to make them to some extent resistant to the viruses that may hit them in the waves that follow the first infection of a cell and the replication of the verse and therefore the spread of new viruses. That's what type one interferons do. Some patients have mutations from birth inborn urge of immunity that disrupt the production of these type one interference or they are activity. And other patients have auto antibodies that bind to these interference. And thereby neutralize their activity. So with these two mechanisms, there's a difference in the prevalence of each depending on age. Is that correct? The inborn errors of immunity are preferentially found in patients younger than 50 or 60 years. Whereas the O two antibodies to type one interferon are preferentially found in patients older than 50, 60 or 70 years. The distribution of these auto antibodies in the general population in uninfected individuals is relatively stable until age 60, 65, around .5%. And then there's a certain sharp rise in their prevalence, reaching 7% at age 80 years. Once you've dialed in on the mechanism that's causing severe disease, how does this guide Therapeutics and potential treatments for a patient? Yes, if your inborn impairs the production of type one interference, you can prevent disease or treat disease with either type and interfront available commercially in contrast if you have an inborn error of immunity that prevents the activity of type one interferon. It's not useful to use a type one interference obviously. As per the auto antibodies that neutralize interference, they typically neutralize alpha and omega interferon and only rarely be time interval, which suggests that data interference can be used if given early in the course of disease. In both cases, I think what's really important is a to vaccinate them and B, if infected and unvaccinated or if sick despite vaccination, then they would benefit from monoclonal antibodies neutralizing the virus. For people who have these inborn errors of immunity, getting vaccinated to something like HPV or to COVID-19 is that still going to help them? Yes, absolutely. We don't have direct evidence that it does, but there's indirect evidence that it is the case because collectively these inborn errors in all 20 of these already account for almost 20% of critical cases. And we know epidemiologically that the vaccines, Pfizer vaccine or the Moderna vaccine that they're efficient at 1995%. So by inference, they likely protect at least some patients with auto antibodies in one errors. It seems like researchers have uncovered a lot of different inborn errors of immunity, tied to severe cases of disease. What is the next step in this field? Are there more to uncover more viruses to better understand? So my lab will try to stay focused on these three infections with disgust. We're going to try to identify more genetic lesions and better understand the mechanism of disease at the molecular and cellular level. As per the field, well, my hope, of course, is that all the lives other colleagues worldwide try to better understand the molecular cylinder and immunological determinants of the great many other viral illnesses that affect human beings. Yeah, looking forward to seeing that research. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. Thank you very much. Jean Laurent Casanova is the Levi family professor at the Rockefeller university, and an investigator at Howard Hughes Medical Institute. You can find a link to his review at science mag dot org slash podcasts. Stay tuned for the next installment in our series on books at the intersection of race and science. This month host Angela saney talks with psychologist Beverly Daniel Tatum about her classic. Why are all the.
Science Magazine Podcast
"angela saney" Discussed on Science Magazine Podcast
"That might yet be undetected? Our results suggest that upwards of a quarter of this group of non native species, the hemiptera species may not have been discovered at the end of our study in 2012. That's a substantial portion. It's about 250 species compared to at that point we had discovered about 700 species. One of the goals of this paper seems to be to model the relationship between trade and invasives and figure out what the main drivers are that disconnect them, what lessons can we take away from this? I think there are a couple of lessons. I think for targeting inspection efforts, this can provide some really great background information. We see that the marginal risk changes pretty dramatically over time and it changes across world regions. What this means is that we may have a relatively risky trading partner that then the risk from their imports decreases over time in contrast. Some imports may become more risky over time. The other thing that we found that was extremely interesting was thinking very carefully about how to account for some of these really important mechanisms in the discovery process was really helpful. So we have a nice proxy for search effort in here. What this means is that how hard are we looking for the bugs? It's very hard to measure. This can be done by academic institutions, governments, individuals, just about anyone can look for bugs. So it's really hard to know how much search effort is going on. So we use discoveries of native amateur species to proxy for those. And that really helped us to identify a very important part of the establishment and discovery process. And I think that this can open a lot of new avenues for thinking about how to use your existing information to answer the questions that you're looking at about non native species discoveries. Is it possible to take this approach, making a model like this, looking at the history of discovery and helping other places in the world model their invasives influx and maybe help abate that? I'll stay away from the policy implications of it. But using similar information, we could certainly study the establishment and discovery process in other contexts. There's nothing that's necessarily unique about the U.S., other than we have some great data resources that allow us to look back at trade into the mid 19th century. And that we have an abundance of species records to draw from. Thanks, Matt. Thank you, Sarah. Matthew McLaughlin is a research economist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, economic research service. You can find a link to the science advances paper we discussed at science dot org slash podcast. Stay tuned for the next installment in our series on books at the intersection of race and science. This month, host Angela saney.
Science Magazine Podcast
"angela saney" Discussed on Science Magazine Podcast
"This is the science podcast for October 29th, 2021. I'm Sarah crespi, each week we feature the most interesting news and research published in science and the sister journals. First up this week we have, why brainless animals sleep? Jellyfish, Hydra, roundworms. They all have a version of sleep. Liz ponisi is a staff writer for science. She talks about what we can learn from these simple sleepers. Next, we're gonna look at centuries of alien invasions or put more simply invasive insects moving around the planet with trade. Matthew McLaughlin is a research economist at the USDA economic research service. He wrote in science advances about how long it takes us to realize an invader is already here. Finally, a book on racism and search algorithms. Angela saney is the host for a series of interviews on race and science. This month, she talks with safiya noble about her book. Algorithms of oppression, how search engines reinforce racism. Did you know that jellyfish can sleep? Brainless creatures, like Hydra, roundworms, these things seem to need sleep, or something like sleep. This week, we have a special issue on sleep, and there are a ton of open questions in this area. Liz ponisi is a staff writer for science. She wrote about what simple sleepers can tell us about the big sleep questions. Hi Liz. Hi. I love the way you open your piece with these really existential sleep thoughts. How can something without a brain or even neuron sleep? And why do they need to sleep? My favorite, though, is this idea of sleep as the default state and that wakefulness is the evolved state. Can you expand on that? For a long time, people just thought about sleep in terms of something that you need for the brain. And now recently they've been finding sleep like or sleep behavior in ever simpler creatures. And that's led some researchers to speculate when sleep evolve and to think that it evolved in the very, very beginning of life. And so there's one idea out there that life started out as a pretty dormant thing and that wakefulness. In other words, the ability to respond to the environment and adapt to the environment is a secondary state, whether or not this is true, I have no idea. But it's an interesting way to think about it because it kind of puts the burden of wakefulness on us rather than the burden of sleep when we're trying to figure out how it evolve. Exactly. If we start with brainy creatures, maybe it's a little easier here. How do we define sleep in animals with brains? The definition of sleep has shifted over time, depending on the technology we have for measuring sleep. So of course, early on, it was just what happens when you go to sleep. You lay down. You become oblivious to the world around you. You wake up noises, but you might not wake up if someone walks by you. So what they call unresponsive to stimuli. And another key thing is if you don't get the sleep you need, you have to make up for it. So that was one definition that held sway up until the 50s or 60s. Then researchers developed ways to put electrodes, which measure electrical activity on their surface of the brain or the scalp. So, you know, you can think about those little wires attached by little adhesive tape. They attach electrodes to the surface of the head and they watch what happens in the brain and they notice that when people sleep, they have two kinds of sleep that have active sleep or rem sleep and then quiet sleep or non rem sleep. And so for a period of time, that's how researchers really knew that people were asleep and really defined sleep in that way by the electrical activity in the brain. So what happens after looking at the brainwaves? What have we done new things since then? Since then, people began to think about, well, maybe something besides mammals sleep. For the longest time we thought only mammals and maybe birds went to sleep and needed to sleep. Because they have big brains and they always brains need to rest and rejuvenate. But then at the turn of the 21st century, some researchers started looking at fruit flies and lo and behold, found they sleep. But because they didn't have electrodes to put on the scalps of these fruit flies. So they turned to the older definition of sleep, which is based on the behavior laying down, stopping moving, becoming unresponsive, needing to have makeup for deprived sleep. And using those criteria, they figured out that, yes, fruit flies sleep. And so do crayfish and octopus and roundworms and a whole bunch of other things. How can you even detect sleep in something like a jellyfish, which I think is one of the examples that you bring up in the story? They focused on a behavior and started videoing whether or not that behavior changed. So with these jellyfish, which are called upside down jellyfish because they hang out with their tentacles facing the surface of the water. They notice that they tend to spend time at the bottom of an aquarium say if you watch them in the lab where the bottom of the shallow area where they're saying. And so they realized since these jellyfish sort of stay put in are not constantly floating around. They could actually video them over a 24 hour period to see if they change what they did and what they watched is how often the jellyfish pulse and move their tentacles in a uniform way to get water to pass over them. And what in a video them over the day in the night, they noticed that the pulse rate changes from about 60 beats a minute to about 39 beats a minute. And so they thought, okay, that might be sleep. So to further test that, they then looked at whether or not the jellyfish were unresponsive. In other words, like you, when you're asleep, you don't notice when somebody walks by. This jellyfish notice when you do something that might disturb them. And the way they tested that is they made a false bottom in their aquarium and basically pulled the bottom out from underneath them. Now during the day, as soon as you do that, the jellyfish swim down to the nu bottom. No hesitation. But at night when they're posting only 39 beats and are maybe asleep, it takes them quite a long while to sort of recognize that they're not at the bottom anymore and move back down. And what if you deprive them of their slow beat time? Then what you notice the next night that they sleep the sleep more soundly. In other words, they pulse even more slowly and they pull slowly for an ever long period of time. So I want to sense they're making up for lost sleep. Can we call that sleep or is this just a circadian rhythm? Is this just syncing up with the processes of the world that are all synced up to the sun and the darkness and the light periods? Well, you know, that's a difficult question and there's some debate in the research community about whether jellyfish.
Science Magazine Podcast
"angela saney" Discussed on Science Magazine Podcast
"Welcome to the science podcast for september. Twenty four. th two thousand twenty one. I'm sarah crosby each week. We feature the most interesting news and research published in science and the sister journals first up this week. Contributing correspondent lizzie. Wait discusses preserved human footprints. That push back the date for when people first arrived in the americas by thousands of years into the last glacial. Maximum next researcher apollo caribbean. He talks about using dendrochronology. That's counting tree rings to date and authenticate valuable musical instruments. Finally in this month's installment of our series race and science guest host angela saney props with author along nelson about her book the social life of dna race reparations and reconciliation after the genome. Peopling of the americas is a long-standing puzzle. The general outlines are in place people from what is now called. Siberia came over a land bridge and moved south and the timing was sought depend on the climate would people really be scrambling over miles of ice sheets during a glacial maximum or likely. They came after the last glacial maximum. However the archaeological evidence seems to be pushing back on the idea especially over the past two decades. Could you be in correspondent lizzie. Wade is here to talk about the latest. Push against that theory. A new science paper preserved human footprints data to thousands of years before the end of the last glacial. Maximum high lizzie. Hi sarah where were these prince found. Obviously were talking about north america. where were they. They are in white sans national park in new mexico which today is really spectacular. Landscape of these white sand gypsum dunes. I mean it's truly other-worldly mars researchers go there look at things but in in the past this particular piece of white sands was kind of a lake. Wetland probably depended on like they actual climate of that time or the season. You know probably grew in trunk over time but basically we're talking about a pretty inviting lake or series of ponds that people would have come to so whitesands they've actually discovered tons and tons of animals for prince and human apprentice some of the animal for prince from now extinct mega-fauna lake camels and giant grounds loss. And may i miss but until now. They haven't really had a really great footprints site that they could get precise dates from and so they found one with the human footprints and dates. Were in fact pretty surprising. How many footprints. You talked about camels other mega-fauna. How many people have we seen snare so far this paper only about a fraction of what they actually discovered at whitesands but this paper is about sixty footprints over two thousand years. They think some of them were left by the same person. Some of them were less by different people. Sometimes you can see people the same person walking a little ways. I think it's somewhere around like eleven to fifteen people left these footprints over the course. Of course two thousand years a wiles and in these particular so prince there's also couple of mammoths footprints and things so it's a pretty interesting site. What do we know about the you. Know the indentity of these footprint levers yes so they were definitely people. I mean frankly. When i learned about this paper i was expecting to look at the photos and be like. Maybe that's a footprint. Get out the computer. Models are Human for prince. You look at the photos and you're like yes. These are people any preserved ancient human footprint. Experts that you consulted more than one of them also agree that these footprints yes they definitely agree and it's a really stunning stunning sight and again. This is just a small piece of it. But what can you tell from these footprints about the people the footprint expert. Who's on the team..
Science Magazine Podcast
"angela saney" Discussed on Science Magazine Podcast
"Algorithms with racial differences embedded in them. If there wasn't an idea that racial difference was deep biological and measurable really at the heart of your book. Is this idea that just because something can be measured. That doesn't mean. Observations are purely objective or value. Free or free of politics What lessons in that history. Modern day researches them one of the important license. I would take from this works so i had been trained in science. Also been trained in humanities and then did fellowship with nsf that allowed me to take a year off and actually look into this from another other perspectives. I think my interdisciplinary background was extraordinarily helpful. And i do think that we need to build interdisciplinary thinking into the sciences. Not just some new quick and dirty science but something that looks at the debates that kept gone on in science. What is at stake in those debates and that is what held my interest for of fourteen years or more pent hue lebron time and thank you at times listening. I'm angela saney. And i hope you'll join me for the next episode in the series in which all be interviewing a laundry nelson author of the social life of dna. That'll be one month from now. And that concludes this edition. Other science podcast. If you have any comments or suggestions for the show right to us at science podcast at a ass dot. Org you can listen to the show on the science website at science mag dot org slash podcast on the site. You'll find links to the research and news discussed in the episode. And of course you can subscribe anywhere. You get your podcast. The show was edited and produced by sarah crosby with production help from prodigy. Meghan can't will and joel goldberg transcripts. By scrubby and jeffrey cook composed the music on behalf of science magazine and its publisher trip. Bless thanks for joining us..