14 Burst results for "Emily Quang"
Short Wave
"emily quang" Discussed on Short Wave
"You're listening to shortwave. From NPR. We are headed to the deep sea today off the West Coast of Ireland. Sam affairs is one of just a handful of people who've seen what lives down there. A mile or more below the surface. And I didn't know where this big giant sponge appeared. The big giant trumpet sponge, like kinda the equivalent of a gramophone. Sticking out from the wall. It was probably two meters wide, and maybe three meters deep. Now Sam doesn't dive down to the depths himself. He fused what's below through a camera attached to a fancy robot. It reveals a part of our planet that looks like an alien world. Branching bamboo corals, the size of a tree, the corals reaching out over cliff edges, gigantic sponges, tiny little octopus called the dumba octopus because it has these little flaps beside his ears, that kind of make it look like. But Sam's not there to gawk at critters. As an underwater chemist, he's more interested in the chemicals these marine organisms make. Chemicals that can be used for drug discovery. We humans have been drawing medicinal inspiration from nature for a long time. And that's where most of our medicines come from derived or inspired by natural sources. And a lot of those come from traditional remedy type of things. Like aspirin is made from a molecule called salicylic acid and salicylic acid is found in willow bark and has been used for hundreds of years as a way to treat pain. Many remedies come from indigenous knowledge. And though a lot of today's medicines inspired by nature come from land, Sam says the deep sea has chemicals that can heal too. My favorite one that's been discovered so far is definitely the coma type. It's a painkiller that's a thousand times stronger than morphine. It doesn't have any of the addictive side effects that you associate with opioids. And it's found from a sea snail in the tropics. Anti cancer drugs made from sponge metabolites. Analgesic from Caribbean corals. These are just a few potential medicines scientists have discovered from our oceans. The challenge is getting down there. Today on the show, how the next generation of medicines may be found in the deep sea. I'm Emily quang and you're listening to shortwave. The daily science podcast from and PR. This message comes from NPR sponsor, northeastern university, turning discoveries into solutions that make our nation healthier, resilient, and more secure. Visit northeastern dot EDU. This message comes from NPR sponsor carvana in the business of driving you happy. When you're shopping for a car, there's nothing sweeter than staying within your budget sweet spot. That's why carvana has no bogus fees. So visit carvana dot com or download the app to shop for a vehicle. When Sam Apple is moved to Galway, a coastal city in western Ireland, it was to study chemistry. I started studying spider venoms and trying to make antibiotics out of them and anti cancer medicines. Well, spider venoms were for weekdays, but weekends were for scuba diving. I'd spend the night in a place called connemara, which is a big major park near here. And I'd be scuba diving the whole time. And the scuba diving got me really, really interested in the marine world. In Ireland, we've gotten rid of most of our wild ecosystems. There's very little forest left and things like that. So for us to experience true wildlife was quite hard. And it was spending time in these very different places, the chem lab and the ocean. That lets them to a revelation. He could combine these interests by looking for medicines in the deep sea. Life on land is boring in comparison to the sea. No database. And then as you go deeper, the species diverge more. More biodiversity means more chemical diversity, which is exactly the kind of thing an underwater chemist wants to see. Not that you can see much of anything outside of the robotic floodlight. Conditions down there are pretty extreme. In the deep sea, there's no light. It's around 4°C, a kind of temperatures of your fridge. And there's incredibly high pressure. It's kind of the equivalent of having 20 elephants standing, aren't you? If you were to go down that deep, so a pretty extreme environment. Deep sea creatures have had to adapt to these intense conditions. Sometimes using really interesting metabolic chemicals to do it. But first, to study it at all, Sam has to get to these inaccessible places. With the help of underwater robots and their surprisingly gentle arms. We can pick up the type of Carl that's smaller than like the straw you would get in your Coca-Cola or something like that. And we were able to pick it up from two kilometers depth. Would I kind of damaging the other animals around it? Wow, what's so cool about your research, Sam? Is you're doing something that people have been doing forever, which is looking for bioactive chemicals that could be medicinal, right? But in a place that very few people have gone before. So once you collect these kind of hard to find samples, what do you do with them? Yeah, so when we get back to land, we freeze dry all of them. So they're dry, kind of the equivalent of tea leaves. And then we extract them. Sam and his colleagues then test these deep sea extracts on different diseases in the lab. A much higher percentage of those are able to kill a disease than what you would find on shallow water reefs and compared to what you would find if you compare it to land animals or land life, whether it's mushrooms or plants. They've tried them on cancers, malaria, even brain eating amoebas. And if we're lucky, if just say we're looking for an anti cancer drug, one of these extracts will be able to kill that specific type of cancer. And that lets us know that this extract, which is a mixture of maybe a hundred molecules, maybe a thousand molecules from that sponge or that Carl. Contains at least one molecule with the potential to be turned into a medicine. And once you've identified that individual molecule, that has the potential to be a medicine. It can't be as simple as then just saying to the pharmaceutical industry here. And they get it right to the shelf. Exactly. What's required to actually move a medicine from C to shelf? Yeah, so it can be quite a task. The first approach in the most traditional approach would have been to take it from nature, but we now know that there's no way that that's sustainable. You'd be destroying these super complex and intricate ecosystems. The second approach is to make it in a lab to synthesize it. But this is really, really difficult, really, really expensive and uses a lot of things like heavy metals that aren't good for the environment and end up producing a lot of chemical waste. But the most recent technique that everybody's kind of pushing towards as our kind of goal standard is by taking the biological recipe. So the gene and insert them into something we can grow really easily, like yeast or E. coli, grow them up in a bioreactor, the same way you might fear and instead of the yeast producing less beer, it's producing us our next generation of medicines. Genetics, amazing. Sam, what is the most interesting thing you've found while looking for medicines in the deep sea? So the bubble gum Carl is probably one of the my favorite car that we found so far in the deep sea. So it's called a bubble gum Carl because it bright pink like kids bubblegum, but there's also the polyps which are kind of the living part of the coral when you kind of go up to it and disturb it with the ROV. They retract into themselves and it looks like the bubble gum that somebody left on the bottom of your school bus but it's surprisingly beautiful as a Carl. And that particular Carl showed that the tea we made from it showed that it was
Short Wave
"emily quang" Discussed on Short Wave
"Hey Friends, Emily quang here. Today I want to revisit a weird chapter in science history. All about the basic building block of life, DNA. The story involves some pus and lots of fish sperm, and I don't want to give too much away, but let's just say the history of DNA is both awesome and gooey. All right, I'm gonna kick it over to Burley and Maria. Enjoy. You're listening to shortwave. From NPR. Hi short waivers, Maria doy here with producer Burley McCoy. Hi, Maria. All right, burly, what do you have for the pod today? I want to talk about the beautiful, extraordinary substance that is responsible for all of life as we know it. Nuclei, say what? You don't know about nucleon? Not so much. It's got beauty. It's got mystique and it's got a really long history. Really? Yeah, the first article about it was published back in 1871, which was a 150 years ago this year. It was found by a Swiss scientist named Friedrich miescher in Germany. And back then, we didn't know much about cells, so he was literally just trying to figure out what was on the insides of cells. What did he do? How do you find this? The only logical way with pus, he got from off of used surgical bandages of burly, that's pretty gross. The things we do for science. Indeed. And so Friedrich is doing his experiments and he keeps getting a mysterious clump of goo that's definitely not proteins. So he eventually realizes it's a whole new thing and undiscovered molecule. Oh, that sounds exciting and did he find it in the nucleus? Is that why it's called nucleon? Yes, but these days, nuclei has got a new name, and I think if I tell you about his later experiments, you might be able to guess its new name. See, later, miescher started experimenting with fish sperm. Oh my God. First plus now fish sperm? Are you kidding me? I know, I know. So that's when he started guessing nucleon had something to do with fertilization and inheritance. Oh my God, is it DNA? Did I win ding ding? Yeah. It turns out sperm have a lot of DNA in them, right? Which makes sense, since it's kind of their purpose in life, literally. I see what you did there. Today on the show, we're talking about the myth, the molecule, the legend, DNA. And how that nice long double helical shape you might have learned about is not what you would see if you could peek inside yourselves right now. I'm Maria godoy, and I'm burly McCoy, you're listening to shortwave, the daily science podcast from NPR. This message comes from NPR sponsor, northeastern university, turning discoveries into solutions that make our nation healthier, resilient, and more secure. Visit northeastern dot EDU. Okay, burly. So we're talking all about DNA, deoxyribonucleic acid, a freaking mouthful to say. It definitely is. And as molecules go, it's a pretty big one. Well, it's got a big job that made you and me, you know? It does make up you and me. DNA is the blueprint that our cells use to make all of the proteins that we need to function from digestion enzymes to keratin proteins that make up our hair nails. I talked to prov ru ramen about all this. She's a researcher at the Fred Hutchinson cancer research center, and she says that even though we are really complex, our DNA is impressively simple. It's just four chemical letters. It's just different combinations of at GC. That is essentially what makes up DNA, which is kind of cool. It's just for nucleotides, and that's all it takes to make up all of the DNA. So if you remember learning about DNA structure, all those nucleotides are basically like rungs on a ladder where the sides of the ladder are two long strands of alternating sugar and phosphate molecules. Then those two strands wrap around each other to make the iconic double helix shape. Okay, but burly just a little bit ago, you told me that if I could take the magic school bus and go into my cell nucleus right now, I would not see a long strand of double helices of DNA. So what gives? I know I know mines are being blown, but there's a good reason for it. If you took all of the DNA from just one of your cells and stretched it out, it would be more than 6 feet tall. I don't think 5 foot four on a good day. Like, how am I getting 6 feet of DNA inside me? And not even just your body in an individual cell. Wow. That's a lot of DNA in an itty bitty living space. So how are we cramming that much information? Something like that long into a tiny individual cell. Maria, very precisely. Because we still need to be able to use it all the time. Packing our DNA is actually a super organized, complicated process. And it's what the studies. How DNA is packed down into the nucleus of our cells. Which is only about ten micrometers across. That's somewhere on the order of a hundred times smaller than a grain of sand, and all of my 6 feet of DNA is packed into that. Like, what does that even look like? I asked proved that the same thing. So the double helix is actually packaged much more tightly in a cell. So there are proteins that we have around which this DNA is packaged. And it was very beautifully called beads on a string. And every bead is made up of these histone proteins and then the string that's wrapped around the beads are between the beads is the DNA double helix. It's been years since I've been in bio class. So remind me, these beads, these histone proteins, what are they? Yeah, essentially their whole job is to help organize the DNA. And really, as proteins go, histones are ancient. However, they told me we basically have the same histone proteins as yeast, which we parted ways with on the evolutionary tree more than a billion years ago. Wow. So if evolution hasn't changed them in all this time, I'm guessing that must mean that they're really, really important, right? They definitely are. These proteins are absolutely essential. You can't remove them. If you lose histones all cells are dead, wow. So basically these histone proteins serve as kind of a spool for thread, which in this case is the DNA. And because our DNA has a negative charge and these histone proteins hold a positive charge, they attract each other, which helps compact the DNA down. And those beads can then be really close to each other, or further away from each other, which helps with more type or more loose packaging. And then the beaded strings have even more levels of organization that Peru that says scientists are still trying to understand. That's really kind of clever and sort of amazing that it can all fit in there. Yeah. Okay, but here's my question. If DNA is a blueprint and our cells need to read that blueprint to make us, then how do our cells read our DNA if it's all packed away like that? This is where it gets really interesting Maria, probably told me that the different kinds of packaging change how accessible the DNA is to ourselves. So like really tightly packaged DNA isn't accessible. And that's where our star protein, the histone
Short Wave
"emily quang" Discussed on Short Wave
"Hey, short waivers, Emily quang here. It is day three of pride week on shortwave and today we're taking a closer look at healthcare for trans folks. Trans people confront some specific barriers in the U.S. healthcare system, and often from the very people who are supposed to be giving them care. So here is a conversation with James factoria, who wrote a piece called a beginner's guide to hormone replacement therapy. They talked with former shortwave host, Maddie. You're listening to shortwave. From NPR. Navigating the U.S. healthcare system can be extremely difficult for trans folks. A lot of trans people face medical discrimination, a lot of trans people can live in places where they don't have access to affirming providers or might not have insurance. Some trans people might have insurance, but might not be able to get procedures covered, even if they have, quote unquote, good insurance, and that's an unfortunate reality. Even finding information about trans healthcare can be a challenge. You know, just a lot of reporting on trans stuff tends to be by cis people. And this isn't always the case, but a lot of the times that means from the get go, it's kind of being portrayed in this light. That isn't actually geared towards trans people, but is really more about centering cis people. That's James factoria, a trans journalist who covers queer and trans news, culture, and health. And they recently wrote a piece for vice called a beginner's guide to hormone replacement therapy. Gender affirming hormone therapy or hormone replacement therapy or HRT is basically just when you take hormones by any variety of delivery methods that can mean a shot or like a pill or a gel, for example, to align what you look like, what you sound like to be more aligned with who you already know you are and more colloquially a lot of trans people refer to it as a second puberty. Medical transition related treatments, like HRT, are associated with overwhelmingly positive outcomes for both physical and mental health. But it can be hard to know exactly how to get started. And that's why James wrote this guide. I wanted to talk about questions that I hadn't really seen being answered. You know, because people deserve to read information about their health in ways that is conversational and accessible and doesn't just make you feel like you're a lab rat. So James peace and this episode are geared towards folks who are interested in starting HRT or already have. We'll talk about first steps, common misconceptions, and the importance of finding community through the process. I'm Maddie safiya and this is shortwave from NPR. Support for this NPR podcast and the following message come from with secure. There are only two cybersecurity options for your business. Secure your critical infrastructure with resilience or take your chances without it. For proven cybersecurity outcomes with secure, more at with secure dot com. This message comes from NPR sponsor CarMax. If you're selling a car, CarMax is buying, get a real offer a CarMax dot com in two minutes or less and take up to 7 days to think it over. That's car selling, reimagined, at CarMax. Today we're talking with James factoria. They wrote a great piece for vice called a beginner's guide to hormone replacement therapy. It is incredible and very thorough, and we won't have time to get into everything, so please make sure to click the link in the episode notes for more. So James says the first step is finding a provider who can prescribe hormone replacement therapy. If you are lucky enough to have a primary care provider that you like and trust, you can ask them for a referral to someone who specializes in HRT. Another option is to go directly to an endocrinologist or other HRT providers like Planned Parenthood, which not all Planned Parenthood's provide hormone replacement therapy. But a lot of them do and for a lot of people, that might be their most accessible option for a number of reasons. Regardless of the route you take to finding a provider, Jane says talking with other people in your local trans community is really important. A big theme here is kind of talking with your local trans community, whether that's online or just among your Friends. You know, it's good to know who people who you know have had good experiences with, who they might not have had good experiences with and any number of needs that you specifically might have because not all HRT providers are created equal. Before your first appointment, it's helpful to prepare some interview questions for a potential provider to help you determine whether they're the right choice for you. So that can mean asking any of the things that you need to know, like how much experience they have. Either in general or like with somebody who shares your identity, if you are a trans mask, you're trans femme, or don't identify what those two things. Are you familiar with treating non binary folks, like what's your familiarity with intersex patients, ask about what the different options are, that they can prescribe you, so basically you just want to make sure that you're working with somebody who like caters to your needs. I feel like the most important thing to look for probably is what model the provider uses James says that providers usually use one of two models or approaches when prescribing hormones. One is the standard of care model. In this model, your medical practitioner will talk with you about the effects of HRT in a general timeline of changes you can expect in your body. This model also requires a psychosocial assessment and a referral by a mental health practitioner before prescribing HRT. Basically, that just means that whoever is conducting this assessment will ask you about your identity and how you experience dysphoria and how long you've experienced dysphoria and what the impact of your gender presentation has had on your mental health, specifically the stigma attached to that gender presentation. And what kind of support that you might have from people in your life. There's another model that James says is gaining more widespread use, and that's the informed consent model. In this framework, much like the standards of care model, you're informed about the effects of HRT and the options that might be best for you. But here's the big difference. A psychosocial assessment is not.
Short Wave
"emily quang" Discussed on Short Wave
"You're listening to shortwave. From NPR. Hey, shortwaves, Emily quang here. We're picking up our conversation with Liza Fuentes, a senior research scientist at the gut mocker institute. Go back and listen to part one if you missed it. Where we discussed how abortion fits into healthcare and public health. In part two, we're going to discuss what that actually looks like in practice. A practice that's likely to shift in communities across the U.S.. Depending on the outcome of a Supreme Court case, Dobbs versus Jackson women's health organization. It deals with the Mississippi law that shortened the window for abortion from 20 weeks to 15. The Jackson clinic is the only abortion provider in the state. And currently, under the 1973 ruling known as roe V wade, women are guaranteed the right to have an abortion up until fetal viability. The time when a fetus can survive outside the womb, which and if the court upholds the 15 week Mississippi abortion ban, it erodes the constitutional right to abortion that was established by roe. Then each state would decide for itself how to regulate abortion access. Liza says this would have an immediate impact on families throughout the U.S.. The ability to decide if when and how to have a child is integral to people being able to have not just realized their health, but that of their families, right? A denied abortion at the very least could be economically devastating for a family that's already struggling to make ends meet, Liza's conclusion is supported by research. A 5 year study led by doctor Diana Greene foster called the turnaway study. Track the health and economic outcomes of nearly 1000 women who saw it and were denied abortions. People who become pregnant and are unable to get a safe legal abortion in their state, those that carry the pregnancy to term will experience long-term physical health and economic harm. Today on the show, the reality of what it means to treat abortion as healthcare. And how those states moving toward stricter abortion laws invest the least in women and children's health. You're listening to.
Short Wave
"emily quang" Discussed on Short Wave
"You're listening to shortwave. From NPR. Hey, shortwave, Emily quang here. So it is Monday, may 16th, as I'm recording this, and the U.S. is close to officially declaring that COVID-19 has claimed the lives of a million people in this country. A figure substantiated by several counts from the CDC and from Johns Hopkins University. But this official number is academic. Researchers say it's likely we passed the million death Mark a while ago. I'm recording this from NPR headquarters, then two years ago, sitting in this booth, 1 million deaths was unthinkable to me. And now, the office is empty with the producers and editors and hosts who make short way of every day working remotely. We're marking this moment together, but apart. As cases and hospitalizations are again on the rise. I want to take a moment to honor and think about those who were here with us in 2020, who are not anymore. And if your grieving someone, we grieve with you. From a public health standpoint, it's hard to accept the fact that many of these COVID-19 deaths were preventable. According to a study from the Brown school of public health and Microsoft AI for health, shared exclusively with NPR, nearly 319,000 COVID-19 deaths could have been averted if all adults in the U.S. had been vaccinated. So today, we're going to hand it over to correspondent Allison opry, talking to our colleagues at morning edition about misinformation, featuring the voices of two doctors trying to make sense of how misinformation got a foothold in the world of parenting and what can be done to counter it. You're listening to shortwave. The daily science podcast from.
Short Wave
"emily quang" Discussed on Short Wave
"You're listening to shortwave. From NPR. Hey, short waivers, Emily quang here with a voice that should be very familiar to you. We have Dan Charles here. He's a longtime correspondent for NPR, now freelance reporter. Dan, how's life as a self made story machine? I wish I felt like a machine, Emily, it's more like a distracted dog chasing squirrel. You know, the squirrels being stories. There's a lot of story acorns out there to gather. And one of them is this kind of time capsule moment you've found. From when the world was first coming to grips with climate change. Right. What happened was I was sitting in Glasgow, Scotland, November 2021, in the press center at this big international climate summit organized by the UN. Yeah, you called us from Glasgow. I did. There were thousands of people at this meeting, diplomats from all over the world were haggling over global goals for cutting greenhouse emissions. These meetings happen almost every year actually, they've been going on for the last 30 years. 30 years. So international actors have been trying to solve this problem for basically my entire life. Yeah, I'm just half of my life, Emily. Well, here we are. Anyway, this whole process started with the mother of all climate change agreements. The UN framework convention on climate change, which was adopted in 1992. I'm sitting in Scotland, and I think I should actually take a look at this treaty. So I pulled it up on my computer. And I read this section right at the top that kind of stunned me. Article two. What did it say? The ultimate goal of this treaty, it said, is to stabilize concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. At levels that would prevent any dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system. Anthropogenic interference anthropogenic meaning human caused this sounds pretty clear. And sensible. It does. But you know, they failed, right? We are now seeing the effects of heat waves, droughts, rising sea levels. And it got me thinking, what was going on in the minds of the diplomats when they drafted this language? Did they really intend to reach the skull? Was there a chance back then that the world could have avoided the global warming that's happening right now? Or were the seeds of failure already there? In 1992. Sounds like you need a little time machine to go find out. Well, I did the next best thing. I got tapes of some of those UN negotiating sessions. Oh, cool. Thank you, mister chairman. I heard the negotiator from India, for instance, Chandra shekhar dus Gupta. We are disappointed that the convention does not provide for a time bound program of stabilization of emissions from developed countries. That was ambassador dasgupta in 1992. I tracked him down at his home outside New Delhi to see what he thinks about it today. I'm sorry for the delay. It's a murderously hot day here. It's a 114°F. Who says a lot? Yeah. I tracked down a few other folks, too. And I think I found some answers. So today on the show, Dan Charles brings us a time capsule from the dawn of the world's fight against climate change. How bunch of scientists and diplomats, 30 years ago, wrote a clear and very ambitious goal that even they didn't fully understand. And why the United States almost by itself, vetoed the idea of binding commitments to cut greenhouse emissions. You're listening to shortwave. The daily science podcast from NPR. The following message comes from NPR sponsor, aspiration. After over a decade working in climate action, Andre churney started a personal finance company to help people use their dollars as a force for positive change. Today, a lot of people want to be part of the fight against climate change, but they don't know where to start. And with aspiration, we're able to give people ways to have easy automated climate impact built into what they're already doing every day. Visit aspiration dot com today to learn more. Okay, Dan, we have time travel back to 1992. There was no World Wide Web yet, the first George Bush was president, I wasn't even in kindergarten yet. Remind us, what did we know about climate change at that point? We knew that greenhouse gases were building up in the atmosphere. There was solid evidence that they were going to warm the planet. There was a lot of talk about it, even in the U.S. presidential campaign in 1988. But the way Bill hare describes it, he was part of the Australian negotiating delegation at the time, and later worked for Greenpeace. He says the consequences hadn't yet come into focus. We all felt an oncoming thread. I guess none of us felt that it was an imminent threat like it is today. There's a moment that illustrates this feeling of, yeah, this has happening, but maybe it won't be so bad. It was right at the end when the head of the New Zealand delegation, Suzanne bloom Hart, was making some final remarks, thanking the chairman and so forth. Mister chairman, I just wanted to add one small personal note here. I did buy a house while I was here, and it is actually directly at sea level. So this I suppose indicates some faith I had in the process we're involved in at the moment. It's a very nice house. Wow. I asked the delegate from India Chandra shekhar dus Gupta about this. There is much, much greater public awareness of the dimensions of the problem now. So if it was all kind of theoretical back then, why did anyone feel the urgency to develop a whole international treaty about it? Yeah. It actually started with something that I had almost forgotten about. Emily remember the ozone hole? I do. I remember learning about it in middle school science. There's an ozone layer way up in the stratosphere that protects us from cancer causing radiation from the sun, and some chemicals were basically eating away at the protective ozone layer back in the day. Exactly. Exactly. So the world's atmospheric scientists had sounded the alarm about this in the 1980s and governments reacted in 1987. They all signed this treaty to phase out most of those chemicals and now today the ozone layer is slowly recovering. Just hearing you spell it out like that, it's kind of an amazing success story, isn't it? Yeah, it really is. And Bill hare, the Australian scientist says, this was a moment when the community of atmospheric scientists felt.
Short Wave
"emily quang" Discussed on Short Wave
"Hey, shortwaves, Emily quang here, with reto Chatterjee and Pierre's mental health correspondent. Reto, you have been looking into the mental health toll of this pandemic. I have? Yeah, and specifically, the toll, these last two years has taken on the mental health and well-being of nurses. Yes, in hi, Emily. So, you know, I have been following the impact of the pandemic on various groups of people, including frontline healthcare workers, who have kept working without a break, surge after surge through countless deaths, endless staffing shortages, which reach crisis levels in the past year, and you might remember that last year I did an episode on this pod on how many of these frontline providers are burned out and exhausted, but after two years of this pandemic, they are more than burnt out. They are experiencing psychiatric symptoms, a recent study found that a majority of American healthcare workers report symptoms that include depression and thoughts of suicide and a note to listeners is that we will be talking about suicide in this episode. You and I have talked about suicide prevention on this show before it's something everyone on our team on the science desk cares very much about and we want to say outright that if you or someone you know is considering suicide, call the national suicide prevention lifeline at one 802 7 three 8 two 5 5 or text the word home to 7 four one 7 four one. Because we know that people who do reach out for help and connect to somebody, feel better. Yeah. You know, mental health crises, they can build slowly and then reveal themselves all at once. And when they do it can be really hard to talk about, especially if you're the person struggling. So how did you find nurses willing to be open and discuss this? Yeah, so it is hard to talk about and we know that doctors and nurses can be particularly reluctant to talk openly about their mental health and often they don't get the care they need to address their symptoms. Something happened this January, which changed that, a.
Short Wave
"emily quang" Discussed on Short Wave
"Hey dude are you guys? Emily quang here. So yesterday, some of us shortwave celebrated pi day. March 14th, 3.14, the only way we know how. Eating some yummy pie, obviously, and thinking math thoughts, like how the new decade starts on the one, not on the zero, which some of us realized, only when there was a massive debate about it in 2020. I digress. My point is is that here on the show, many of us are math enthusiasts, none of us is a math perfectionist. We think there's at least as much joy and insight in the mistakes as there is in what we get right. A lesson we discussed in today's episode, all about Matt Parker's book, humble pie. Now, this is an oldie from the shortwave archives, but a goodie. We hope it inspires you to continue to celebrate pi and math every day. Enjoy. You're listening to shortwave. From NPR. Maddy safai here with a math problem. Don't be scared. Say you're trying to build a fence 50 feet long. And you need to post every ten feet. How many posts do you need? Got your answer? Okay, just hold that in your head for a second while we introduce Matt Parker. Oh, hey, can you hear me coming through? Yeah. Matt's kind of like, can you hear me? Part comedian. Hey Marty, yes I can. Part math nerd. Matt, how should we describe what you do? That's a great question. I go with you sound like my accountant. I go with stand up mathematician. So I'm probably a mathematician first in a comedian's second. Matt's got a big YouTube channel. He's an author. He works with schools, all trying to blend math and comedy. Here is a timely example. So I've done stuff like I've used a pendulum. In fact, I swung up, I swung a baked pie from a piece of string. And the way you calculate how long something takes to swing backwards and forwards, that calculation has the mathematical number pi in it. Pi, of course, is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, which calculates two 3.141592 6 5 three 5 8 9. We love it because it appears in unexpected places. You'll be doing some completely unrelated mathematics and suddenly pies there. And we celebrate pi day every year on March 14th. But the kind of pie we're focused on today is humble pie. The kind you eat when you make a mistake, which brings us back to that math problem, in a 50 foot fence, a post every ten feet, how many posts. And people listening and now thinking, oh, okay, 50 feet, one every ten foot, then there must be 5. Because we can all divide 50 by ten, but actually you need 6. Because you need the first one. And so it's actually the number of stretches of fence plus one. If you guessed 5, no shame, you made a classic math mistake called an off by one error. It's one of a bunch of math mistakes that Matt unspools in a new book called humble pie when math goes wrong in the real world. I always enjoy a pie pun. So humble pie is kind of admitting that you got things horribly wrong. And then bringing that approach to math and saying, look, sometimes we make mistakes and math is not all about always getting the right answer. It's about giving it a go. This episode to honor pi day and the importance of giving it a go with math. Matt Parker helps us puzzle more off by one errors and what happens when math goes awry. Support for this NPR podcast and the following message come from hungry harvest grocery delivery. Go greener with your grocery when you order from hungry harvest. Every delivery helps build a healthier future for the planet by fighting food waste and conserving all the precious resources used to grow that food. Boxes started just $15 and are available in a variety of options, including organic, save 50% on your first delivery of farm fresh fruits, vegetables, and must have grocery items with code NPR 50 at hungry harvest dot net. So you said you wanted to write a book for anybody who ever sat in a math class and asked when am I ever going to need this in real life? Yes, and I was that teacher. So I taught high school math for four years. I was in Australia for a while and then I taught in London over in the UK and that questions like the staple of math teaching, right? Yes, and I want to give you an opportunity right now to defend every high school math teacher in the world. Go ahead. Good. I mean, that's no pressure. Excellent. It's interesting because you can threaten students with all sorts of you're going to need to know this in the future because you're going to get a mortgage or a loan or you're going to have salary negotiations. All the reasons why you're going to need math in the future. But it's a little bit hypothetical and it's hard to get kids attention. So I thought, you know what? Things going wrong. People love things going wrong. And so I thought I would focus on what happened when someone didn't remember their math. And in it are all sorts of stories. When students say, why do I need to know about rounding? They can find a story. Here's what happened when someone didn't get the rounding right. Right. It's kind of a fear based approach. I appreciate it. A little bit of that. I'm just kidding. Okay. So we're going to focus on the off by one error. So first, can you kind of define what that means before we jump into it? I mean, off by one era is it comes kind of from programming. Lots of things encountering can have you unexpectedly off by one. And often it comes down to defining where you start and stop counting and using zero. So my favorite example is if you ask people what number they can count to on their fingers, the standard answer is ten. Right. So you count to ten. You got ten fingers. Well, actually, you can count to 11 because you've also got zero fingers. Right. So if you start from zero fingers and then one and then to all the way up to ten, there's actually 11 different numbers you can count on your fingers. And so often people forget about zero or these sorts of situations where it's very easy to be just off by one. Right, and you've said that they're kind of counting from zero breaks that link between what you've counted to what the total is. So even if you're counting two ten, technically, you're counting 11 distinct numbers when you're starting with zero. And that's why we don't use it in normal life. So the reason it comes up in programming so much is if you want to get everything out of your computer code, you've got to start from zero. And if your numbering things in a list in a computer, you always start with the zeroth item. So item number zero is the first item, an item. Number one is the second item. And I, as far as I could find, this was the earliest mathematical mistake I could find documented was vitruvius, who the vitruvian man is named after, so from way back classic contemporary. Da Vinci guy, the davinci guy. Okay. That's the one. So he was writing about math and architecture way back in the day. And he pointed out that if you want to make a temple, which is twice as long as it is white, because apparently that's quite a nice ratio, you can't just double the number of columns on the front to get the number of columns on the side because you will have an off by one error. And if people know an earlier documented warning against a classic math error,.
Short Wave
"emily quang" Discussed on Short Wave
"From NPR. Sub nerds, Emily quang here with news from the shortwave cosmos. Our universe is expanding and we are welcoming to the fam are very first scientist in residence. That's right. She is astrophysicist and all around incredible human. Regina, barber. Regina we are so excited you're here the whole team at shortwave all of our listeners. We welcome you. Tell us about yourself. I'm super excited to be here too. I'm a trained astrophysicist. I've been in academia my whole adult life until now. I taught for over a decade physics and astronomy, and as a female scientist who is Asian and Mexican American, I noticed I see the world a little differently from a lot of my colleagues and peers whose identities are more common in the sciences. One thing I love about you is you were doing shortwave way before shortwave ever existed in that you created your very own science podcast years ago called spark science. Which was about this very thing how your identity can inform the way you do science. Yeah, it's literally true. We all see things differently. And desiree whitmore says that's pretty typical. I realized that when I was back in graduate school, when I was teaching kids about rainbows and optics and light, I was realizing that some kids are colorblind and they don't even see the colors the way I see them. Some kids don't see shapes the way I see them. And even some adults. And so I realized that people are coming into every situation with a totally different viewpoint. Desiree's a physics educator at the exploratorium out in San Francisco, and she says how we humans perceive the world around us is different from person to person. Yeah, I heard you called up desiree recently to demonstrate this very thing. I did and I was joined by Stephanie O'Neill and Rebecca Ramirez our editor and producer for this episode. And we had desiree walk us through a demonstration that listeners can actually do at home. Amazing. Yeah, all they need is some string or maybe a phone charger, whatever they have on hand, that's at least as long as their arm. So the idea is you put one right at your nose right in between your eyeballs. And then you hold it out with your other arm as far out as you can go. I have short arms, so it's not very far. Yeah, me too. Yeah. And I just want you to tell me, like, what do you notice? What do you see when you look at the string? When we did it, we had a whole range of answers. I see a V you see a V I see a V two. However, however, if I focus closer to my nose on the string, I see an X but if I look down to my fingers, I see a V oh, okay. I see like an X where they're really? Yeah, and they're kind of like ghosts. This is classic shortwave length has to be this. And so the beautiful thing about that is that I just asked you what you notice. And you all gave me honest answers, hopefully. Right. I'm a compulsive liar. And that's a lie. That itself is a way to speak the truth. Totally. And this parallel between everyone's different lived experiences and their different eyesight is exactly what desiree teaches. She runs workshops designed to help science teachers be more attuned to their students and to ask them more open ended questions. If I ask you what do you notice, you don't have to know the answer. The answer is whatever it is that you notice. And it's different. Everyone sees something different. And how they describe that experience is going to be different. From the words that they use all the time. Exactly. And so that's a beautiful part about education,.
Short Wave
"emily quang" Discussed on Short Wave
"This message comes from NPR sponsor, USA facts, chief product officer Richard coffin believes that easier access to government data can help combat misinformation and build trust in our country. There's a lot of places to say where people get a lot of information. Like social media, where they also don't trust the information. And we hope that if we can help people take numbers and data to these places, they can be more factual in the long term and we can improve discourse and trust in our country. To learn more and explore our nation and numbers, go to USA facts dot org. All right, Emily quang, today we're talking about wingspan, a board game steeped in bird science. And bird art. And you got to meet the designer. I did. Hi. How are you, Elizabeth? Nice to meet you. I'm Emily quad. Elizabeth hargrave lives in Maryland in a house festooned by the natural world inside and out. There's blueberry bushes out front, a vegetable garden out back and right where a giant oak tree once stood before it was toppled by hurricane Irene is a bird bath, the size of a kiddie pool. And planted about like tiki torches are bird feeders. We'll get Downey woodpeckers and Caroline irans and things like that on them. We gave up and seed because the squirrels eat it before. The birds can. So Elizabeth is a career health policy consultant and her husband mat Cohen is a landscape designer, and they got seriously into bird watching after a trip to Costa Rica. They now track the birds they've seen using E bird, a massive online database, and they even plan their vacations around seeing native birds in particular places like flamingos in the Yucatan or puffins in New England. I love all the water birds I grew up in Florida. So I like the big waiting birds and they're easy to see. And a lot of birders participate in science, like pretty regularly. You know what I'm saying? Like there's those big community projects where they help catalog where birds are and where they aren't. It's kind of awesome. They are. And this is not their only hobby. When you go into Elizabeth and Matt's house, there is this huge bookcase on the wall, but it's not filled with books. It's filled with board games. And there's an empty table, ready to go for game night, Matt laid out and everything. So in 2014, Elizabeth scheme group had a conversation that changed her life. They were talking about how much they loved the mechanics of many board games, dice rolling, collecting items, but the themes were somewhat repetitive. There's a lot of games about castles and about trains and about space. And I'm just not excited about those things. There's a lot that are and Matt said, you know, there should be a board game about birds. And my brain just sort of latched onto them and started thinking about it and I was like, I can make that game. So Elizabeth broke out her trusted sibly field guides. And started making bird cards. And she started to think about how to represent the rules of ecology as board game mechanics. In the same way, let's say you build settlements in catan. Most word games have resources in them that are like wood and or stone and I was like, what would the resources be if this wasn't a game about humans? It was like a game about birds instead. And so the researchers are the things that the birds eat. So in wingspan, you are a bird enthusiast and to attract birds to your network of wildlife preserves, you have to offer them food. Seeds and fruit and mammals and fish and insects invertebrates. Broadly represented by 5 colorful tokens. We got invertebrate tokens. We do. I'm into this game. What are we talking? What are we doing? Caterpillars. Fine. All right, fine. But it exists. Invertebrates. They made it into a game. And you know, from this first lightbulb moment, creating the mechanic around bird food came other ideas. What if dice were rolled in a bird feeder type tower? And what if points were, I don't know, acquired by laying eggs. And what if the bird powers in the game mirrored bird behavior in real life? So take, for example, the acorn woodpecker, they drill holes in trees, store those acorns in those tree cubbies. That's right. In nature, that's called food caching. And in the game, if you acquire seed tokens, you store them on that card and they're worth points at the end of the game. So the game is resembling how birds behave in nature. Another example predation. So the Cooper's hawk if you draw that card and then you get another card with a smaller bird, you can tuck it beneath the hawk card symbolizing that the hawk has. Yeah. And when we played one person really embraced this strategy. It's very on brand that Duncan's is murdering other birds. And Emily is including more in her block. Wow, I feel like that. Where's the lie Duncan? We're like, you don't even know what my brand is. Honestly, smack talk is the best part about competing in my experience. So, okay, if I was going to win and I would. What would be the best strategy for the game? Well, there are multiple paths to victory in wingspan. And a variety of cards, like the bald eagle is an inherently more powerful than the backyard chickadee. It's all in how you use it. And most importantly for Elizabeth, the cards are factual. So in making them, she drew from E birds, the Cornell lab of ornithology is all about birds website, the Audubon guide to North American birds, and of course her sibly field guides. Sounds like a lot of data gathering. Yes, your favorite. And the spreadsheet, Elizabeth made for wingspan after harvesting all this data is 596 rows long. She showed it to me. This is the inside architecture of Woods. I feel like a spy. All right. A spot. That's pretty excited. Remember, Elizabeth that she spent most of her career as a health policy analyst. So this is by no means her biggest spreadsheet. No, she's very good at gathering data and organizing it. But this is her very first game. And while she's not a scientist, her game is kind of a quiet lesson in ecology. At least that was Angela chuang's impression. She's a lecture at the university of Tennessee Knoxville, and while reviewing the game for science magazine, noticed something about how the bird cards complimented one another. You kind of start off with a completely blank nature preserve and you're trying to attract these birds into your preserved one at a time. You're like, you know, the order actually really matters. And you might get a different community depending on who gets their first. So the first bird cards you place in your nature preserve impacts other bird cards in the future. And that is a real concept in ecology known as the priority effect. That states like the order in which species arrive to a new habitat can actually dictate.
Short Wave
"emily quang" Discussed on Short Wave
"Just a heads up. We do talk about suicidal thoughts in this episode about mental health. Thanks you're listening. To shortwave from npr. Since it began one thing is certain. The pandemic has taken a toll on people's mental health and re to you want to talk about a group that has been hit especially hard by this. And that's yes. We're talking about unpaid caregivers specifically parents of little ones. We've seen or read stories of how they've struggled during the pandemic and there's another group of caregivers we perhaps heard a little less about those taking care of adult loved. Ones people like amy adams of seneca illinois in december. My mom had a heart attack. While i was out in colorado on vacation. She ended up having to have cardiac bypass surgery and over the next several months. Amy's mother battled one complication after another going in and out of hospitals and nursing. Homes and amy as mother's primary advocate and caregiver developed severe anxiety. Yeah so caregivers. Like amy there the subject of a recent. Cdc study re to. What did that study find. Yeah so at this. Recent report found that about forty percent of. Us adults surveyed identified themselves as unpaid caregivers. So people taking care of kids younger than eighteen and or adult loved ones and two thirds of that group said they were struggling with adverse mental health symptoms like anxiety depression. Ptsd in the month before the survey. That's a big number and it's much higher than those. Without caregiving roles said it in the show we talk about caregiving how the pandemic has made that crucial role more difficult and this new data which shows how this past year has affected caregivers mental health and will also explore what the healthcare system can do to help them. I'm emily quang. And i'm read through.
Short Wave
A Mathematician's Manifesto For Rethinking Gender
"So, one of the things I most remember from elementary school is all of the math word problems. You know what? I'm talking about the ones that say things like, okay. If Alex has seven cookies and Sam has read cookies, how many cookies do we need to give some to make sure they have the same number of cookies? I would get so excited every time I got the right answer to one of these problems. Anyway. One is actually pretty easy. Well, we could give four more cookies to Sam all we could take four cookies from Alex. We could make Alex give to cookies to Sam in any of these four Eugenia Chang, a mathematician. The better answer is actually to ask a different question. What if some doesn't even like cookies and would rob have pools? See Eugeniusz Studies. This kind of high level math never heard of to be honest called category theory. Category Theory is very abstract pods of math and so abstract that sometimes even all the pure mathematicians think it's too abstract. But for me, it's about the core of what makes math tick and because math for me is about the core of what makes the tick cats theories like the cool coal of what makes the wilted because category theory is about understanding why things work the way they do intrinsic characteristics don't really matter what matters is how things relate to one another it started in around the middle of the twentieth century and in A. Way It's only very small small new idea but like great ideas, a small shift in perspective opens up an absolutely vast array of possibilities because it's like turning on a light, which is why in her most recent book x Plus Y, Eugenia uses category to turn the light on something that I might seem surprising for a mathematician something deeply ingrained in many of us gender it suddenly eliminates everything and you can see all sorts of things you didn't see before and so in the same way that we stop focusing on cookies which not everyone wants. What happens if we also stop focusing on gender constructs which might not be relevant. Category theory invites us to stop asking if men women and non binary people are equal and to look beyond the single dimension, of gender. Today on the show in abstract. Mathematicians approach to rethinking gender. I'm Emily Quang and you're listening to shortwave from NPR. Okay. So back to Alex Sam and their cookie dilemma, the Metaphor serves a larger point that are thinking about gender is one dimensional and doesn't characterize how people really are. Even when we think about gender as a spectrum between masculine and feminine behavior that's already a problem because it makes it sound wrong. So it makes it sound like menace supposed masculine and if a woman is masculine, then she somehow going against her nature and then if men are seen as being feminine, that sounds like that's something wrong with them as well. Whereas in fact, there's no reason to associate. Gender with character and everyone can be all sorts of things if type of character and behavior is something we valley. Then why wouldn't we value it from everybody of all genders? So Eugenia started to think about character as a dimension separate from gender asking how much our society value certain character traits over others, and she came up with her own way of categorizing behavior. One that deals with two new traits. She invented ingress give and Congress have, and the idea is that ingress of traits are more about individualism and single track been king and. Congress is about bringing things together, bringing people together, bringing ideas together and thinking about broader communities and society as a whole rather than individuals, and it's not trying to be a new dichotomy. It's trying to be a wave thinking about behavior and having woods because if you don't have woods to think about things, then it's much harder to think about them reflecting on her own career Eugenia realized early on that, she forced herself to be engrossing. That is individualistic and single-minded and she did land prestigious jobs in academia I'm ashamed of it now. Because I don't like that kind of behavior but I definitely. Latched onto the idea that in academia, it's important to make kind of aggressive arguments and show how clever you are and be able to talk yourself up because ultimately she says, the academic environment was inconclusive and relentless. It was such a kind of ongoing treadmill in my tenure job because it was a very all year thing and I remember one August getting ready for the new academic year and feel like had been about one minute since the previous academic year and I thought Oh just going to be like this until I retire now and then. Honestly, what happened was I started looking around at the people around me who were close to retirement. and. I thought. Oh. No, I'm becoming like them. And I didn't want to. And I thought I have to get out of this before I become sort of fossilized into this kind of behavior that I don't like. So she left the traditional tenure track and became a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as their scientists in residence. That's right. Eugenia began to teach math to art students. She wanted to make math more relevant to them, and then came the two thousand sixteen election a moment that brought issues of gender and race into focus and it was like I flipped a switch in my mind and I thought you know silence is complicity if I don't talk about these things and. Am I complicit with these things it's too important not to talk about it and I thought actually every academic discipline is there to help us understand the world and what is the most important thing in the world that we need to understand right now it is this social and political situation that we're getting ourselves into, and so then I felt like I really had to talk about it all the time. So the question for her became, how do I get my students to unlearn all of the aggressive competitive answered driven math they've taught for so many years especially when there are so many concepts to learn and so little time. And Eugenia. kind of figured it out by making sure that everyone in the class learns together AK congressionally take for example, this hands on activities she does to teach them about platonic solids. Am I don't tell them what the platonic solids all, and so in case you can't remember or never knew the platonic solids are the three dimensional shapes that have maximally symmetric and some of. Them are built out two triangles, and so they sit down and they build things together and they talk to each other while they're doing it and it's therapeutic because it's cutting and sticking visa, and some of them build platonic solids and some of them build things that are almost platonic solids but have a lot of symmetry on quite Tony solids and then someone will build a dinosaur. Is that You build a down right field a dinosaur. then. What you discover is that Pentagon's are really terrible shape for building a dinosaur off whereas triangles are fantastic shape for building a dinosaur you can build practically anything with triangles and that's profound mathematical fat try and relations are really really important tool in high level research and so whatever they do they will learn something and when we pool everything we've built as close. We will get all of these things even if not every. Individual person built every individual platonic solid, and so that is one way that we can do congressional explorations than sitting down and sort of memorizing. These are the platonic solids visa, the properties they have. This one is called this and it has many faces many this many edges and her villainous classes. Yeah. In this way, like you're holding the dinosaur and you're discovering something together about platonic solids through this joint exercise right and. In her class, she uses concepts from math to probe the relationships between people and the thing about aggressive classroom that students are able to probe back ask how all of this applies to say different types of privilege in society, and that moment was something that my i would never have come up with that idea about privilege and factors of numbers and the geometry. If my student had asked me these questions push things further. And further because when you teach in Congress I think it's important to find what motivates the students and tap into that. When you're teaching Ingram you try and bend their will to yours to try and show them. This is the right way of thinking. This is the way instead of meeting them somewhere, which is Congress if way the Keever Eugenia is to make Matha process of mutual discovery one that's truly inclusive and not competitive. Her classroom is a place where in the same breath that students are learning math they can have frank conversations about the role of race and gender in society if you ask them to stop thinking about it when they come into the math classroom, then they won't be interested in anything I say, and the people who think that we should stop talking about in math for them. It's not part of their life all the time because they're part of a group that doesn't have to think about it all. The time and so that's the reaction I get mostly it's amazement from people who really really resonate with these issues but you might be wondering what about people who are more aggressive? Aren't they getting lost in the shuffle some people worry the I'm now making it known inclusive towards ingress if people and I've had this query sometimes it's an interesting one because the thing is I do think I do value Congress behavior more than ingress behavior but if you think of it as for example in aggressive people. obstructive towards others in the classroom. So then what we're saying is that I am not going to be inclusive towards obstructive behaviour in the classroom and I think that's okay. I don't feel any reason to include obstructive behaviour in my classroom and so inclusivity is subtle. I don't think it means that we need to include all things. I don't need to include violence in my classroom I don't need to include. Intellectual violence and I don't need to include behavior that obstructs squashes of either and I don't think that means I'm not being inclusive I think it means that I'm valuing things are helpful to our community and I am not valuing things are obstructive to our community Eugenia. We have talked about everything this conversation I'm just I'm just I showed up. We're GONNA talk about math and we're talking about. We're talking about relationships are talking about how we learn we teach. How communities work I mean it's just it kind of encompasses. So much of actually what's really going on right now in society around recent gender too so I guess the only other thing I want to ask you is. What is like the single? Most Powerful thing that listeners can take to become more aggressive in their lives and create congressional situations at home. In Yeah. I think. To notice when we're fabricating competition that doesn't have to be a competition. Competition comes from scarcity of resources and we do not live in a world of scarcity of resources. At the moment it has been fabricated to have guessed resources, and then we fabricate competitions like music competitions. Music of all things is a thing that doesn't need to be a competition education doesn't need to be a competition because what we're learning is understanding knowledge and wisdom, and there isn't a limit on that resource. We can all have it. We don't have to prevent somebody else from having to have ourselves and conversations end up being competitive where the idea seems to be to win an argument was why we trying to win an argument and if we try and iron out. Contrived Ingram of situations in individual personal interruptions. Then we can build up from that because the world is made of little interactions that build up into big ones and I really think that even if we start small, we can build up to change the whole wall to be a better place for everybody of all genders.
Short Wave
The First Dog With COVID-19 Has Died, And There's A Lot We Still Don't Know
"April when buddies family I started to notice that something was a bright buddy started breathing really heavily, any hadn't mucus knows, and this was the first thing is family notice that you know the first sign that he was not himself. That's Natasha daily a wildlife reporter with National Geographic. Buddy was a German shepherd who Natasha says by his family's account was a very, very good boy. He loved running through sprinklers, Keitel's love like running and diving right into the lake. His family loved address them up for Halloween, is also photos of him in a bunny costume and you know he's just it looks like he's just grinning at the camera and so when buddies started getting sick this spring, just before his seventh birthday, his family, Robert Allison Mahoney and their daughter Juliana. While, they were worried I mean he'd be completely healthy, and then all of a sudden in the sprain he. started. Struggling to breathe and the first thing. I thought was he has the virus. Meaning the corona virus in the reason they thought that. They had also been sick. So specifically, Robert Mahoney, the husband had tested positive Alison Mahoney. Robert's wife had not been tested, but she was showing symptoms. So she had it to. The daughter Juliana who's thirteen tested negative. But when it came to getting buddy attest, that was a lot harder. But he's regular vet wasn't seeing patients. The Vet significantly said, there's no, he has like just you know there's no way and he prescribed the antibiotics over the phone. Another vets gave buddy ultrasound and x rays. But also didn't think he could have the krona virus remember no dog had yet tested positive in the US. And many vets didn't have the tests for animals anyway. But one day. Robert, Mahoney sister saw facebook post about a vet where they lived on. Staten. Island that had just gotten some test kits. Robert. was like great like let me call right now. Get down there, make an appointment, and so he was able to make an appointment for ten PM on a Friday. So it was a very strange time, but it was the clinic was really busy, and so it was the the first law they had available. That was Friday. May Fifteenth a full month after he started showing symptoms a few days later, but he finally got test that revealed. He was positive. This was a huge deal. Buddy was the first dog in the US known to have the virus and the USDA announced the news in a press release on June second. Buddy wasn't named in that press release. The government only identified his breed. In fact, we only know the details of his story because of Natasha's reporting. The USDA said in. June, that quote the dog is expected to make a full recovery. But Buddy didn't get better. He got more and more sick in June. It. All came to a head one weekend in July. And a warning that the details coming up are pretty tough to hear. So Allison. Came downstairs the morning of July eleventh and found buddy in the kitchen in a pool of modeled flood He was throwing up blood. It was coming from his nose. It was just horrific and devastating for the family, and at that point, they brought him into the vet and the decision was made to euthanize him which was obviously really really difficult on top of two and a half months of stress and confusion that the family had already been through thirteen dogs and eleven cats have tested positive in the US for cove nineteen according to public. Records and while those numbers sound small, they raise big questions about how virus can affect people and their pets. Today's episode. Natasha. Daily on why. Some of those questions are still so hard to answer. Allison Mooney said to me that you tell someone that your dog tested positive for Cova. Did they'd look at you like you had ten heads. You know there's no rubric for navigating covert in your pet. I'm Emily Quang and you're listening to shortwave the daily science podcast from NPR. First off the current CDC guidance that there is no evidence that pets can transmit the coronavirus to humans, and that's partially why testing for animals isn't more widespread. We do need to say to that test for animals are different than the test used to detect the virus in humans. All animal tests are processed in different labs are processed in veterinary labs. Not, there's no overlap between human testing and animal testing. So. While some of the mechanics of the tests may be the same. It's not at all taking resources away from humans. But because a covid positive animal isn't seen as a danger to humans, there's been very little scientific study of how the virus can affect those pets or even how it can interact with other diseases are pets may have. That's where we're going to pick up buddy story with an Tasha daily. Yes. So new blood work was taken on July tenth the day before a buddy died, and it was on July eleventh when the Mahoney's brought buddy in. To essentially be euthanized that they found the results of that blood work on and the blood work indicated that he very very likely had lymphoma, which is kind of cancer, right? Yes. Lymphoma is a type of cancer So I I asked a couple of veterinarians who were not involved in buddies case at all to review his full records and they said that, yes, every single one of the symptoms he had could be explained by lymphoma, you know A. A big open question is deity SARS Yovany to present clinically in buddies body, and what that means is did the virus cause any symptoms? For example, the trouble breathing was, and so I think it's it's tough and we'll never have an answer to this was every single. One of his symptoms are the lymph, Oma? Or was some of it, the COVID and the breakdown of fat isn't something that we have an answer to, and you also pose the question. Will. We won't know whether the cancer made them more susceptible to contracting the coronavirus exactly, and that's sort of a big takeaway from his case You know our dogs or cats with underlying conditions like cancer as it turns out. More likely to contract the virus because we know humans are humans It's thought that humans that have suppressed immune systems maybe more likely to contract the virus, but not only that maybe the virus may be more likely to present in ways that are more significant in their bodies if if they're already immuno-compromised. So the same question remains for animals and we just have so little data to investigate it.
Short Wave
How Tear Gas Affects The Body And Why It's Dangerous During This Pandemic
"Tear gas. I started seeing all the reports of law enforcement using tear-gas all over the country all. Julius protest after protest. I saw the photos of the the white smoke coming up. Videos of protesters, desperately washing out there is. People are choking gasping for air. Volga. tear-gas clearly makes it hard to breathe. Very Soul what bench march from whatever was an I just thought. What exactly's tear-gas. It doesn't seem like a good idea to us in the middle of a respiratory pandemic. Back streets as protesters picking up some of those canisters. Throw them back at police. Unprecedented Street. We actually have any science about whether it's safe or not. So Lisa set out to answer those questions. That's when I started talking to researchers and scientists and really getting a sense that. The combination of the way that tear gas is being used in these protests, the huge quantities the frequency with which it's used the way police are using Ed is really a cause for concern. Today on the show why using tear-gas could be especially dangerous right now during a respiratory pandemic, and how some law enforcement tactics could be making its impact, even worse I'm reporter Emily Quang, and this is short wave, the daily science podcast from NPR. So as far as I understand, tear gas is a term that's broadly applied to describe a set of chemicals right, and these are liquid chemicals in. It's not actually a gas right, so the term tear gas is confusing because different people use them in different ways, scientifically speaking tear-gas refers to several different chemicals that make your skin burn that make it hard to breathe. It's really painful stinging. The way that the CDC refers to tear gas and the way that law enforcement refers to tear gas sometimes they're referring to a broader set of chemicals, but in general, yes, tear gas is actually a tiny liquid droplets, and my story focused on the most common type of tear gas used by law enforcement in the US, and that is a chemical called. See US and see us. How is it designed? How does it work so it's designed to cause pain and. The description I got from a scientist. WAS THAT CIS? Gas triggers a particular pain receptor in your body. It's the same receptor that's triggered when you eat with Sabi, but it's much more powerful. If you take that stinging sensation from eating with Sabi and multiply it by up to a hundred thousand fold that is how much more powerful CS is. It sounds incredibly disorienting. How of those you've interviewed described hit by tear gas. What that experience was like? Yeah? I I mean I. Personally am very lucky and have never been exposed to tear gas, but the various protesters I interviewed. They describe this incredible feeling of fear and helplessness. Your eyes are burning. Your nose is running. Your mouth hurts, and you have trouble breathing, so you can't see you're in pain, and you're having trouble catching a breath and you feel like you're choking. This one protester I interviewed was part of this protest in Philadelphia that got a lot of media coverage, and at one point she was in a part of this highway that ran partially underground, so what was the stark semi-enclosed space and with tear-gas got in there? Everyone panicked. You know they couldn't see everything hurt and they were trying to run away, but there was really nowhere to run, and she said that she actually feared for her life. She feared that in the panic she would get trampled and she did actually get bruised all over because people were stopping her as they were running away. So as you look to tear gas from a medical standpoint, what it does to the body and one of the things that you discovered is that tear? Gas has a big impact on the lungs. Can you tell me about that? Right so one of the things scientists told me is that when you inhaled tear gas? You're going to start wheezing and coughing and that means that your lungs are working hard to try and get rid of this. Tear gas, so it doesn't have the same amount of strength or the same reserve to fight off any additional infections you might get and that could make people who've inhaled tear gas more susceptible to getting the corona virus. Particularly, if they already have asthma or some other respiratory condition, because they are already at higher risk to catching infections, like influenza or the common cold, and so the fear is that tear? Gas could trigger an asthma attack, or further weakened the body's ability to fight off Covid, nineteen rights and the tear gas. It also weakens the demonstrators protections against the krona virus, because it changes the way people are moving around in a crowd, it creates chaos. Yes, and this is one of the things that public health professionals are worried about is a lot of protesters are doing the responsible thing by wearing masks during the protest, but as As soon as you hit with tear gas, you're trying to breathe as much as possible because you're gasping for air and at that point instinctively you're gonNA. Take off the mask to try and get some fresh air and when you do that, you're going to be coughing because you're trying to get rid of the tear gas in your lungs, and we all know that coughing is one of the things that spreads cove it, so there's a lot of fear that people who have the corona virus spider as dramatic as they're coughing while trying to deal with tear-gas that they're spreading the disease among other protesters in the crowd From your reporting looking at protests around the country I'm wondering to what patterns you've seen with. How tear gas is being used by law enforcement. We've seen it used in different ways, but a pattern that we've seen is that. The police are often using a lot of tear gas. They are using it in quick succession, and it's that combination of the sheer volume of tear gas, and sometimes it's being used in situations when the protesters are trapped in an area and can't get away like we've seen in Philadelphia and that really compounds the dangers and risks of tear gas right, so it's not just that it's being used. It's how it's being used, and how often right so? Tear gas comes in a variety of forms, and there are different tactics and tools that police can use. They can spray it from cans. They can shoot canisters filled with tear gas, and there are some manufacturers for example that will sell grenades that not only does it expel tear-gas there's also bright lights, loud noise to further cause confusion and make the protesters tried to disperse. There's also a type of product called a triple