27 Burst results for "Mattie Safai"
Short Wave
"mattie safai" Discussed on Short Wave
"Today. We're focusing on new brings a particularly charismatic group of sea slugs. They are remarkably diverse. They live in every ocean and most marine habitats. There are more than three thousand different species of them. Worldwide and emily people are like really into them. You remember ryan from earlier yeah. He was pretty hyped on them. Yeah yeah yeah so. He's a phd student at harvard studying evolutionary biology. But before harvard. He did his masters studying new brakes. And once you love new brings you. Don't just stop loving new to bronx. I live the passion every day. Even though like i've been working on other weird critters live in the passion. The new to bring passion. He says that some scientists who study new brings actually call themselves nerd or banks. And i love that win. The fandom has a name you know the passion real and i'll be honest emily. I was initially drawn to them because some of them are so cool looking but for me. The amazing thing about brink's is how they harnessed the powers of other organisms around them. And that's what i want to talk to you about today. Yeah this honestly fascinates me okay so earlier. You said some of these sea slugs have the ability to co-opt photosynthesis the process of using light to make food. I know that plants. Algae and some bacteria do this Like i've never heard of an animal doing that. How does that even work okay. So you're already on the right track the key for noodle brings is something you just mentioned. Algae that use photosynthesis to make food aka photosynthetic.
Short Wave
"mattie safai" Discussed on Short Wave
"You're listening to shortwave from npr. Hey everyone i'm only here with mattie safai what's up dude or you know. Hey so if you all haven't heard it's matty's last week on shortwave. And we have been sharing some of her favourite episodes and the little memories. We had making them. Yes i have been crying and laughing all week. It's been a journey emily. But today i've got a brand nudie one for you. My last reported episode on some of the most magical invertebrates in the animal kingdom. Can you guess with you. It could be anything it just needs to be. Maximally slimy and gross my close. Wow yeah closer. That i want you to be honestly. You know that But yes we are. Talking about sea slugs specifically one big group of sea slugs called noodle breaks or newbies if you will if you haven't seen one before emily google nude ab- rank. These will actually blow your mind. Here's one of the scientists. I talked to. Ryan hewlett straight up. N- earning out about them. Like when i think of these colorations and these patterns like you have polka dots. You have stripes you. Have you know all shades of colors. That i just don't see that often in other animals like honestly when i think of like very beautiful animals breaks. Well what an endorsement. I'm looking these up offering. Oh no right. These are some gorgeous technicolor. Slugs and i'm looking. I mean i mean this this purple one looks like it's going to a rave. They might be they might be an. Here's the thing. They aren't just out here looking pretty either. i do think of them as having superpowers. I think of you know some of the classical x men characters who are able to still other people superpowers so emily. Some new brakes essentially have the ability to do that eating up organisms from their environment and using their abilities for themselves. You mean absorbing the power of your pray and using it for yourself i am. I.
Short Wave
"mattie safai" Discussed on Short Wave
"Hey everybody we're bidding bon voyage and celebrating her last week on shortwave. With some of her favourite episodes. What have you chosen to play for us today. My friend so i wanted to share an episode. We made with producer brent bachman. Now be left us to go work on other. Npr projects but he really helped shape. The show and push me to follow my weird little heart wherever it took me. It took us too many weird places and we all followed you well. This episode represents a long standing tradition between us. Emily oh boy okay me bringing you critter facts that initially gross you out and then start to intrigue you and eventually i think bring you to his state of weird critter appreciation. I call it critter. Surrender just letting the science wash over me and on our one year anniversary episode. Very special the pitch that you decided to bring us was quote things that live on your face. Then you said sh just trust. It's going to be incredible. And i mean wasn't it a little bit. I've certainly never forgotten about it since it happened. So here we go. We're back tomorrow with another trip down memory lane and then a brand new episode on thursday. Okay here's the show heo. Mattie safai here with shortwave reporter emily kuang hey kwong. Hey you so first. Things first. big day are celebrating short waves one year anniversary. Happy anniversary batty. Happy anniversary call on. I'm so excited about this. It's it's been a whole year. on shortwave. Nothing really happened in science this past year but we made it work right. It's been it's been a wild ride. Let's say that. Let's say that and you promised me for our anniversary episode that i talk about whatever i wanted well. All great relationships involve compromise so curie are here. We are indeed ma'am. I thought we could celebrate with a microwave episode about how you're never truly alone. Oh okay that sounds nice You're definitely still gonna feel that way. When i tell you i okay. I knew there was the hatch. Don't make me regret this. What is it well. It's simply that you me most likely every adult out there have microscopic mites living in our skin. Oh you made me regret it. They've been found on lots of places on your body and yes one of those places. Is your face mites bugs on your face. well okay so technically. Don't worry no. They are not insects. They are arachnids. Which is different. So think more closely related to ticks or spiders. This isn't better better. let's just let's just all have an open mind here. I will point out that you and the rest of our listeners. Were living your life totally fine before. I told you this okay. We're going to talk later because this is not an anniversary press today on the show at all celebrate our one year anniversary.
Short Wave
"mattie safai" Discussed on Short Wave
"A brand new episode on thursday at a special send-off for our beloved host mattie safai on friday. We're going to pull back the curtain to talk. About what makes shortwave shortwave. And prove to you that matt. He's not really going anywhere. Her spirit is in the very dna of this show. That's right even. In the shortwave afterlife. I will haunt you. Yeah like every time. A scientists uses a superlative like the fastest though greatest thing is it though Because my job here is done honestly and as a science journalist. I believe the greatest gift you can give. Someone is fact checking them. My gosh. I'm going to miss you so much okay. So in addition to being the queen of nuance mattie is also a science communication clown safe to say bringing people in using humor connection and surprise. Of course. I didn't know she was going to one day. Use all of those tactics against me. In the name of shortwave wave referring to one of my favorite memories this was when we were all together and the before times in the studio and we were making our episode on the science of thrill seeking emily. You were talking a big game about love and bean scared. So you know producers brett hansen. Rebecca and i hatched a little plan is such a betrayal hit in the studio for. I don't know hours before. I got there days. As it was days we had to deliver food and water. I think okay. I won't spoil exactly what happened. But i saw my life flash before my eyes enjoy everybody. You're listening to shortwave from npr. Hey everybody it's emily kuang here with shortwave host. Mattie safai heo real quick before we get started we just want to say thank you so much to everybody. Who's been listening to shortwave so far. Thank you if you're enjoying the show. Do us a favor by leaving us. A review on apple podcasts. It helps us get the show in front of all kinds of new people. Which is what we want absolute all right mattie. So it's our very first listener question was owed and we're keeping it halloween one more day because we do what we want. Yeah we asked for your halloween themed questions. Yes and we got a lot of awesome questions from you guys. Y'all are weird like good weird. A bunch of you wanted to know why people seek out scary situations. We're talking haunted houses scary movies. Puppets saas gary matting. Well kwong do you like to be scared. I really enjoyed you said you like so we did plant our producer brett hansen in the corner hiding to pop up. And now we on the ground honestly. That was the best thing we've ever done all right moving on so one person who like you also love scary stuff is our listener charlotte decker. Hey shortwave so. October is my favorite time of year. And i tend to get into the halloween spirit by doing things like watching lots of horror films and going to haunted houses However it does strike me as kind of counter intuitive to willingly put myself into scary situations for fun so i was wondering if you'd be able to shed some light on what exactly's behind this psychological drive that shared by myself and others this time of year to willfully scare ourselves as a form of entertainment charlotte gray question. Every time. i've gone to a haunted corn maize. I've asked myself why am i doing. Why am i doing this. So i went hunting for answers. Okay and i spoke to. Ken carter psychologist who teaches at oxford college of emory university. And he's written a book about people who love intense experiences in my favorite thing about him.
Short Wave
"mattie safai" Discussed on Short Wave
"Okay thomas lou. Summer hater. here's a scenario. I wake up in the morning. I'm preparing to go on an afternoon bike. Ride on my hog around the city. Check my weather app for the forecast. It's hot you know. Say about eighty-five but manageable and the humidity is like fifty seven percent. Let's say does that. Mean i'm still going to have like a nice bike ride or sort of. It's a little hard to hell with just humidity. Okay but humidity is telling us how much water is in the air. Right right right so yes. Here's where it gets a little bit tricky to understand this. We need to consider a couple of things watering the air temperature and how these to interact with one another okay so i caught up someone. I thought might have some answers. I am greg jenkins. i'm a professor. In department of meteorology and atmospheric sciences at penn state university in greg explained relative humidity like this relative humidity is ratio or percentage of water vapor over a term that is related to order vapor in a saturated state. Okay okay so. I'm going to oversimplify here. But relative humidity is the moisture content in the air compared to the maximum moisture content. That could be in the air totes. That's why it's called relative humidity. It's not an absolute measure of moisture. Greg says a key factor in relative humidity is air temperature. You know the number we usually look at when describing if it's going to be hot or cold out. Dre warmer air can contain more moisture while cooler air can contain less moisture. So over the course of a day if you just had the amount of water vague bernie atmosphere sixth and you let the temperature run. Its normal course. The relative humidity would go up and down just based on
Short Wave
"mattie safai" Discussed on Short Wave
"Steps common misconceptions and the importance of finding community. Through the process. I'm mattie safai in this shortwave from. Npr this message comes from npr sponsor. Xfinity fast reliable internet from xfinity can help people stay connected. Head to xfinity dot com. Where you'll find plans to fit any budget with speeds up to a gig. Xfinity will ship you or free self. Install kit that makes setup quick safe and easy no tech visit required and you can manage your account online or with the finnity. My account app xfinity is committed to keeping you connected restrictions apply actual speeds are not guaranteed. Today we're talking with james tora. 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're lucky enough to have a primary care provider that you like entrust you can ask them for a referral to someone who specializes in h. r. t. Another option is to go directly to an under chronologies or other. Hr 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. James says talking with other people in your local trans community is really important. A big theme here is kind of you know talking with your local trans community whether that's online or you know just like among your friends you know it's good to know who people who you now have had good experiences with who they might not have had good experiences with and like any number of lake needs you specifically might have because not all. Hr 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 general or leak with somebody who shares your identity if you are a trans massacre transfrom or don't identify like those things. Are you familiar with treating. Non binary folks slake. What's your familiarity like with intersex patients. Ask about what. The different options are that they can prescribe you so basically like you just wanna 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 h. r. T. in general timeline of changes. You can expect in your body. This model also requires psychosocial assessment and referral by a mental health practitioner before prescribing h. Rt basically that just means that whoever is conducting this assessment will ask you about your identity. And how you experience as fauria and how long you've experienced as fauria and what the impact of your gender presentation has had on your mental health specifically like 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 r. T. and the options. That might be best for you. But here's the big difference. A psychosocial assessment is not required instead the focus is on personal autonomy so basically like the informed consent model kind of takes away all of those barriers and really centers. The patience needs and desires and trusts trans folks to be the authority on their own body and like what they want and what they need and helping people understand what their options are and providing them basically like with all of the information that they need in order to make and informed decision and then letting them make informed decision all right with next up. I want to get into something. That is very complicated and that is insurance. I don't want to spend a lot of time on it Because you covered it really well in your piece and there's a lot of resources there you know. Some states have made it illegal to exclude trans health services. Some have not medicaid coverage is similarly variable. And i'm wondering james if you can talk about what people can do if they don't have insurance. Yeah yeah totally. So if you don't have insurance or if you find yourself in the unfortunate situation where you have insurance by your tonight coverage you can pay for it out of pocket. One study that. I cited found that out of pocket that can cost anywhere from nine hundred seventy dollars to thirty one hundred dollars a year. It really depends on like what you're a delivery. Method is you know whether you're on estrogen testosterone. The like ti gel for example tends to be more expensive than the shot. You know there are also some startups. Virtually which i think can be a good option if you live in a state where you can't acce us care in real life. It's worth noting that testosterone for whatever reason is a schedule three controlled substance and. That can kind of complicate your access to hormones if you decide to go that route and it's also worth noting that can be a little more expensive than just the baseline cost of hormones out of pocket. So you know like whether it's planned parenthood or like a community health clinic it's worth looking into whether you have places in your area that can work with you on a sliding scale basis Based on what you're able to pay when it comes to the actual physical health effects of each rt. We should say that this therapy like many therapies woobie. Different for everyone. Some people might see changes immediately. Others won't games highlights a number of these effects in their piece. But says there's one area in particular where there's some big misconceptions and that's reproductive capability historically. There's been this misconception. That going on hormones whether that's Know saas thrown or estrogen. Totally totally nukes your reproductive.
Short Wave
"mattie safai" Discussed on Short Wave
"The us healthcare system can be extremely difficult for trans folks. A lot of transpeople 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 it's 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 says people and this isn't always the case but a lot of the times that means like from the get go. It's kind of being portrayed in this light. That isn't actually geared towards transpeople. But is really more about centering. Says people that's james factoria a trance 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 each. Rt 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.
Short Wave
"mattie safai" Discussed on Short Wave
"We're beginning with a giant pile of dirt. Okay i'll go with it. i'll go with it. okay. It's not just any pile of dirt. It happens to be right outside of facebook's campus in the san francisco bay area where we're standing right. Now is the outboard levy of the facebook campus in menlo park. That's kevin murray. He works for the san francisco creek joint powers authority which is an agency that works on flood protection in the area. We're walking on top of that levee which surrounds the tech companies brightly colored buildings. So why does facebook need a levy. Well the company's headquarters is right on the shoreline of san francisco bay and over the last decade. They've built huge state of the art buildings on the waterfront. So the levy is protection from the bay. But kevin told me levy isn't exactly the right way to describe it because a levee is designed to protect people at has to meet engineering standards that ensure it holds up these don't those structures that are providing flood barrier now are not adequate and are subject to failure if we have a really big tide or a big wind event or a big storm surge so lauren did facebook know that when they built their they did and now the risk is getting even bigger because sea levels are rising in a hotter climate so the region is looking at building a bigger levee. Sixteen feet tall. It will cost more than one hundred million dollars and the federal government. Just preliminarily awarded about half that money. But that's raising questions about who should be footing. The bill for adapt into the consequences of climate change. Coastal cities are going to need billions of dollars to protect their shorelines from rising
Short Wave
"mattie safai" Discussed on Short Wave
"I did not know all firefly's regardless of color glow or flash using bioluminescence and we're not going to get all the way into this only because i want to do an entire episode about it but basically bioluminescence is when leaving things turned chemical energy into radiant energy. We see as light and the coolest thing about this. I think is that this form of light is extremely efficient. Almost one hundred percent of chemical energy is converted into light if you compare that to like an old tiny incandescent light bulb. That's only about ten percent efficient because ninety percent of that energy is lost as heat. Firefly's aren't out here producing heat. Just sweet sweet light so neat your came up with this very efficient and literally cool way to light stuff up absolutely absolutely and because bioluminescence plays a huge part in the lives of most firefly's they are particularly threatened by light pollution. Yeah i'm familiar with this. Human made light messes with the firefly's ability to see each other and to know where they can find a mate exactly and while scientists have been rightly very focused on habitat. Loss and urbanization as far as what threatens firefly's more and more are looking into light pollution as well and that actually includes our scientists stephanie. She was part of this big multi year study in brazil in the atlantic forest looking at the interplay between habitat change and light pollution in an area. Home to a firefly's species called the tracker ghost. Basically they wanted to see whether late pollution urbanization deforestation are increasing overtime in this area. That's an interesting study premise. Because i feel like maybe the damage. From deforestation and urbanization would be more obvious like easier to study than light pollution right in the paper. They call light pollution a more silent threat and the we saw debts delights positions the fast growing potential threats to firefly's hello so even though the threat from deforestation might be more devastating. Light pollution is the fastest growing threat. Got it okay and even more. Interestingly and to be honest more sad there are protected areas in brazil that kind of buffer the impact of deforestation and even climate change but seventies group found that light pollution from humans is making its way into those protected areas. The most surprising thing i learned is that the light pollution is growing. Not only over. Fields are rural areas and towns but also within protected areas on the atlantic forest in other words They're protected areas are not able to both her. These lights in thanks is now. Those areas are still darker of course and they are still havens for biodiversity but scientists are concerned that artificial night light from neighboring areas can disrupt some of those conservation efforts so matty. I know that an alarming amount of insects are in decline some species of firefly's included so what needs to happen that we get to continue to see them well. It won't really surprise you. So habitat loss is considered the most serious threat to firefly's another problem pesticides in one study. Pesticides were rated as the third most serious threat to firefly's globally so reducing pesticides and residential gardens. Lawns public parks. Those are things you could do to help or advocate for from a light pollution perspective. A big one is trying to maintain some of those protected. Dark areas also artificial lights have gotten more abundant and brighter over time. So there's a couple things they're designing these lights so that they point down to the ground can help and also just decreasing. The intensity is going to help to all right. Well thank you so much for bringing this episode lighting up our lives with firefly science. Very cool you got. This episode was produced by brit. Hansen edited by giselle grayson and fact checked by indie. Cara i mattie safai. And
Short Wave
"mattie safai" Discussed on Short Wave
"All right. Mattie you are here to talk about lightning bugs or as you point out beatles with flashlight butts yes the family of beetles. We call firefly's lamb. Purity are extremely diverse. There are more than two thousand species in that family and they live on every continent except antarctica. So emily they can look and behave very differently. one type can grow to be the length of your palm. There are firefly's that live most of their lives in water. Emily some place don't even fly and some don't flash for that matter so you know not everything. We'll be talking about today. Holds true for every species. So what you're saying is you couldn't just stick to one species because you've got excited and distracted by all the facts about all the species is that right. Maybe i did. Maybe i didn't. You'll be happy for it. I'll say that so. Who did you talk to about. This constellation of creatures. I called up. Stephanie vice a phd student in rio de janeiro. She's an entomologist who studies firefly's and just like us her love of firefly's started in childhood. I have a great memory of my childhood summer trips with my family and also i love to say they shining the forest when i do my field words. She says that there's one thing that applies to all firefly's and that's that firefly's have different lay stages and the larval stage in my opinion is by far the coolest firefly's spend most of their lives in the a lot of ro stage in when she says most she means like almost all of their lives are spent as larvae. I mean some spend one to two years just being voracious low babies. So the adult. Firefly's that i see flying around on the east coast china flash and find a mate. That's like a short period of their lives. Yeah yeah i mean. Some only live as adults for like a few weeks total. They're just out here. Trying to find a mate fertilize some eggs and die.
Short Wave
"mattie safai" Discussed on Short Wave
"And they're going to go for it. That's right and if you look at nursing homes where about sixty one percent of employees have been vaccinated there have been reports of outbreaks linked to unvaccinated workers. So there's a big push right now for mandates in nursing homes too and at this point we have enough data to prove that. It's worth it right to get as many people protected as possible. Absolutely i mean. There's new evidence from israel published in the new england journal healthcare workers who have been vaccinated have been about ninety eight percent protected against breakthrough infections. Okay allison before you go real quick. I want to return to this new mass guidance. And how we should be thinking about all of this. I mean to me. This is the cdc recognizing that things have and will continue to change and that we have to change with it so. I'm very glad that the cdc has updated their guidance here because of the surge in also because we can't just vaccinate our way out of this pandemic you know. I think it's fair to say that this guidance will result in more masking for everyone in high risk areas right now and that's good because we need to be using multiple forms of prevention masking increasing ventilation testing. We know how to do all this now and we have to keep doing all of it especially as we go up against more dangerous variants you know. Mattie i think the big point here is that as much as we all would have wished and hoped the pandemic is not over yet. And we're going to have to stay flexible. We're not back to square one. I mean no one is suggesting that we need to lock down but we do need to be cautious as delta sweeps through the country all right. Alison aubrey as usual. Thank you so much and we appreciate you for coming on the show ray to be here. This episode was produced by brett. Hansen edited by giselle grayson. In fact checked by indicator i mattie safai. Thanks for listening to
Short Wave
"mattie safai" Discussed on Short Wave
"Right alison just two little months ago. You and i were on the show talking about how the cdc said vaccinated people should feel free to lose their masks in almost all settings including indoors. Yeah i mean this guy was basically based on the honor system in most places you just kind of had to take someone's word for it whether they were vaccinated and every member matter. You and i shared some concerns about vaccine equity rates. Vaccinations still being low. And how this might affect people who are most vulnerable now here. We are today amid a surge of cases here to talk about how the cdc is now modifying some of that guidance. Can you tell us more about how the cdc made this decision. Sure it really comes down to two main factors. I mean the delta variant and slowing vaccinations about thirty percent of adults remain unvaccinated in the us. Meaning there's this huge group of people who are still vulnerable to the virus kids under twelve can't be vaccinated people with compromised. Immune systems don't always get full protection from the vaccine. So they're vulnerable to and there's something more here mattie new data suggests that vaccinated people who get infected with the delta variant could transmit it to others here. Cdc director rochelle wolinsky back fascinated. People infected with the delta variants after vaccination may be page and spread the virus to others. This new science is worrisome. And unfortunately warrants an update to our recommendation and she really points out that this is different from previous variants unlike the alpha variant that we had back in may where we didn't believe that if you were vaccinated you could transmit further. I'm this is different now with the delta variant and alison. We should be clear here right. The vaccines are still doing their job. Against the delta variant these vaccines are designed to prevent vaccinated people from getting really sick or dying and they are still doing a stellar job of
Short Wave
"mattie safai" Discussed on Short Wave
"I mattie safai. In you're listening to shortwave daily science podcast from npr this message comes from npr sponsor ford introducing the mustang mach. Here's the global brand director of electric vehicles jayson castro iota on the challenge of creating an all electric suv. That drives like a mustang. The normal challenge of making suv go fast. Is the higher center. Gravity the beauty of the battery electric vehicle platform is that all of the weight was down low on the floor. Because that's where the batteries housed. And that's where the electric motors are to learn more about the new all electric pony in the mustang stable goto ford dot com all right alison just two little months ago. You and i were on the show talking about how the cdc said vaccinated people should feel free to lose their masks in almost all settings including indoors. Yeah i mean this guy was basically based on the honor system in most places you just kind of had to take someone's word for it whether they were vaccinated and every member matter. You and i shared some concerns about vaccine equity rates. Vaccinations still being low. And how this might affect people who are most vulnerable now here. We are today amid a surge of cases here to talk about how the cdc is now modifying some of that guidance. Can you tell us more about how the cdc made this decision. Sure it really comes down to two main factors. I mean the delta variant and slowing vaccinations about thirty percent of adults remain unvaccinated in the us. Meaning there's this huge group of people who are still vulnerable to the virus kids under twelve can't be vaccinated people with compromised. Immune systems don't.
Short Wave
"mattie safai" Discussed on Short Wave
"From npr. Mattie safai here with lauryn freyre first time on the show lauren. Welcome hey thanks for having me absolutely okay. So you cover south asia for npr. What do you have for us sumati. Today i have for you a number the number itself. Twenty nine thousand twenty nine. It just becomes something that you. I guess fixate on it becomes just this special number in your mind you hear it and you just know immediately what it means matty before he tell you who this person is. I want to ask you your climber. I bet you know what this number means. Yeah climbers strong word. For what i do out there lauren. But yeah i totally know what the number is. But why don't you tell our audience who might not know what it is okay. So it is the height of mount everest. The world's highest peak is on the border of nepal and china height. That roxanne vogel who's voice. You just heard there. She knows every single foot of and that's because last year she set a speed record there. I became the first person to successfully climb everest from my home in san francisco all the way to the top and return home in fourteen days. We called it a lightning ascent. That's that's fast. That's too fast. Yeah total underachiever that roxanne there but how can a person even do that. Lauren will so to prepare for this. Lightning ascent roxanne trained like mad and she was constantly focused on that number. Twenty nine thousand twenty nine twenty nine having never been that high one eight nine thousand twenty nine. It was certainly something that focused my training. Nine thousand twenty nine and so she kept plugging in that number doing calculations. Twenty nine thousand twenty nine like okay. Here's how many thousand feet sleeping at and then to finally stand there. Twenty nine thousand twenty nine at that altitude. That's the closest to heaven or the closest outer space that i will ever get on this earth and it's kind of life changing when you're out there. But.
Short Wave
"mattie safai" Discussed on Short Wave
"On the show today. Migration there are many hundreds if not thousands of species of birds that migrate. there's caribou across canada wildebeest in africa. There are migratory fish like salmon and also a lot of marine animals migrate long distances like sea turtles and whales. But right now. Let's turn our attention to the humble but tenacious monarch butterfly. I think of monarchs is the tanks of the butterfly world. so they're small they way only a half a gram but they can travel thousands of kilometers in the wild. This is sonia. All tyzzer many colleges at the university of georgia so i study the ecology of animal migration and sonya says monarch butterflies are different because their migration is multi generational so the same monarch never makes the journey twice. It's their grand offspring and great grand offspring of the migratory generation that will migrate again the following year sonya's specifically talking about a migration path east of the rocky mountains. These monarchs travel thousands of miles across international borders every year. Ecologists think they're looking for the precious milkweed clamped in arguably the most important driver for them is food and especially milkweed plants where the females can lay their eggs. Another reason why they migrate is to ride out the winter in the sierra madre mountains near mexico city
Short Wave
"mattie safai" Discussed on Short Wave
"All right so the story begins in this time of crisis were in vienna. It's eighteen forty four and we're at the largest maternity hospital in the world. Vienna general as you can imagine hospitals really really different back. Then they didn't know about germs and there were so crowded really wasn't unusual to have more than one patient in the same bed on the bed. Linens smites are by our standards. There would be filthy so the conditions for healing weren't exactly great from perspective and unsurprisingly on metality rates we really really high one especially deadly disease was called child bed fever women would notice symptoms just a few days after birth and now we know that it was caused by a bacterial infection but remember. They didn't even know about germs yet. Childhood fever really was quite a dramatic disease. Partly because you're supposed to be so happy about your new child but then things could go bad very very quickly for the mother who they would be screaming because of the pain they would be delirious and she would die this horrible horrible death. It was terrible in vienna general so crowded that they actually had to split the maternity ward into two clinics was run by doctors and the other one was run by midwives but the wild thing was is that way more women were dying child bed fever in the doctor's clinic than in the midwives clinic and nobody could figure out why and of course there's really seem intuitive to people because the doctors was supposed to know a lot more than the midwives so this was a big puzzle. That's where some vice comes in at vienna general. He worked in a doctor's clinic and semis. Like lots of others just wanted to figure out what was going on there. Why is the mortality rate. So high in the first clinic. And how could they reduce it. So what were some of the things. He tested try to figure out what was going on. So the first thing he did was to look at some of the existing explanations about what might be causing the difference and some of these. He could just exclude right away. So for example the idea that childhood fever was in fact caused by overcrowding because that was the same in both the clinic so that could have explained the difference but ignatz does notice some differences between the two clinics so he does what good scientists would do. He sets up some carefully controlled experiments. I test in one clinic. Women gave birth on their sides and in the other they gave birth on their back so we switched those up so everybody was giving birth in the same position. That didn't make a difference. Second test in the doctor run clinic. A priest would walk the floor ringing a bell. As he passed the patients in their beds he was bring last sacramento. The dying women and similize thought well maybe psychological terror plays a role here but that one didn't pan out either. He still was not any closer to solving the mystery of child fever but then in eighteen forty seven. He had a breakthrough but it came at a terrible cost. Has pathologist colleague. Calexico was injured with a scalpel during an autopsy and developed an infection and died and with some of us noticed was that the post mortem results of go would just like those of the women who had child had fever. And so i thought okay. Maybe they actually all killed by the same thing so i thought that his friend died after getting infected by something from an autopsy. That's exactly right so his hypothesis was that it was the cadaveric matter from the scalpel. That's little pieces of dead people. By the way that had entered college kaz blood and caused the infection and that very same material could then be transferred to the women on the hands of the doctors. Because what the doctors were doing autopsies in one room and then go straight to examine the women who had given birth in the next room without washing their hands without changing clothes. Without basically taking any hygiene ic measures at
Short Wave
"mattie safai" Discussed on Short Wave
"Twenty twenty was a year like no other especially for science during twenty twenty alone have been more papers written about covid nineteen than the have been on many other diseases that we've known about for a much longer time. Things like polio and ebola. And that astonishing ed young is a staff writer for the atlantic and in recent peace he explores the massive shift. The pandemic has caused in scientific research in a. We have only known about this disease for a year or so and yet it has totally consumed the attention of the world. Scientists many many scientists have pivoted from whatever they were previously focused on to study covid. Nineteen he says. Take jennifer dowden for example. She's twenty twenty nobel prize winner and a pioneer of crisper gene editing technology. And she told me about how in february she was on a plane headed to a conference crammed into the middle seat and she realized like this is. This is crazy. This doesn't feel safe and this is probably the last time on going to travel for a while like she had the sense for her life was about to change and change. It did the next month. Her university shutdown her son's school closed jennifer and her colleagues realized the wanted to switch focus so they started testing in their own institution to serve the local community because they realized that testing wasn't sufficient they developed new ways of diagnosing the virus using crisper. And this is a clear example. I think of a scientist moved to studying covid nineteen because she saw this massive pressing. Societal need for science to rise to the occasion but in view goodwill pivots like the one that down to made. Don't tell the whole story about what changed in twenty twenty scientists not just a march towards the greater good to very human endeavor and as a human endeavor it has both good and bad sides at its best. Scientists are self-correcting march towards greater knowledge for the betterment of humanity but at its worst it is a self interested pursuit of greater prestige at the cost of truth and rigor and both sides of science were very much on display this year so today on the show we talk with ed young about some of the ways cope with nineteen could change science forever. I'm mattie safai in this is short way from npr this message comes from npr sponsor. Bank of america. You finally decided to learn how to ice skate. So you ordered the essentials. Every ice skater needs a pair of blades. And you helmet and a good set of kneepads and you used your bank of america. Cash rewards credit card choosing to earn three percent cash back online shopping rewards that you put towards the cost of an essential piece of plo skating recovery. A heating pad visit bank of america dot com slash more warding to apply now copyright twenty twenty bank of america corporation. This message comes from. Npr sponsor ibm a smarter. Hybrid cloud approach with ibm telcos. Rollout innovations with watson. Ai without losing speed. The world going hybrid with ibm visit ibm dot com slash breed cloud. Okay so today. We're talking about how the pandemic changed scientific research. Let's let's start with one of the core foundations of science publishing data. Something that in my experience doesn't traditionally happen very quickly. Yeah so traditionally <hes>. The process of publishing is often very slow. It takes a lot of time for scientists to write up the results for that results to then pass through gone through. The peer review process can take many months. Is ill suited to a crisis. That is as fast moving as the covy pandemic has been but for many years now. Biomedical researchers have pushed for innovations that will speed up the process of science so they have started increasingly using pre-printed servers where they can upload early drafts of the papers so that their peers can discuss and build upon those results even before it goes through the peer review. Gauntlets and it really took off in the middle of the pandemic p- reprints were a major part of how science was disseminated over the course of this year and i think for both good and they meant that as intended. The pace of science was much quicker but in an environment where the entire world was hungry for more information about this new disease. A lot of very bad reprints were also circulated very quickly gained international attention and led to the spreading of misleading information. That hindered the controller cove. Nineteen rather
Short Wave
How COVID-19 Has Changed Science
"Twenty twenty was a year like no other especially for science during twenty twenty alone have been more papers written about covid nineteen than the have been on many other diseases that we've known about for a much longer time. Things like polio and ebola. And that astonishing ed young is a staff writer for the atlantic and in recent peace he explores the massive shift. The pandemic has caused in scientific research in a. We have only known about this disease for a year or so and yet it has totally consumed the attention of the world. Scientists many many scientists have pivoted from whatever they were previously focused on to study covid. Nineteen he says. Take jennifer dowden for example. She's twenty twenty nobel prize winner and a pioneer of crisper gene editing technology. And she told me about how in february she was on a plane headed to a conference crammed into the middle seat and she realized like this is. This is crazy. This doesn't feel safe and this is probably the last time on going to travel for a while like she had the sense for her life was about to change and change. It did the next month. Her university shutdown her son's school closed jennifer and her colleagues realized the wanted to switch focus so they started testing in their own institution to serve the local community because they realized that testing wasn't sufficient they developed new ways of diagnosing the virus using crisper. And this is a clear example. I think of a scientist moved to studying covid nineteen because she saw this massive pressing. Societal need for science to rise to the occasion but in view goodwill pivots like the one that down to made. Don't tell the whole story about what changed in twenty twenty scientists not just a march towards the greater good to very human endeavor and as a human endeavor it has both good and bad sides at its best. Scientists are self-correcting march towards greater knowledge for the betterment of humanity but at its worst it is a self interested pursuit of greater prestige at the cost of truth and rigor and both sides of science were very much on display this year so today on the show we talk with ed young about some of the ways cope with nineteen could change science forever. I'm mattie safai in this is short way from npr this message comes from npr sponsor. Bank of america. You finally decided to learn how to ice skate. So you ordered the essentials. Every ice skater needs a pair of blades. And you helmet and a good set of kneepads and you used your bank of america. Cash rewards credit card choosing to earn three percent cash back online shopping rewards that you put towards the cost of an essential piece of plo skating recovery. A heating pad visit bank of america dot com slash more warding to apply now copyright twenty twenty bank of america corporation. This message comes from. Npr sponsor ibm a smarter. Hybrid cloud approach with ibm telcos. Rollout innovations with watson. Ai without losing speed. The world going hybrid with ibm visit ibm dot com slash breed cloud. Okay so today. We're talking about how the pandemic changed scientific research. Let's let's start with one of the core foundations of science publishing data. Something that in my experience doesn't traditionally happen very quickly. Yeah so traditionally The process of publishing is often very slow. It takes a lot of time for scientists to write up the results for that results to then pass through gone through. The peer review process can take many months. Is ill suited to a crisis. That is as fast moving as the covy pandemic has been but for many years now. Biomedical researchers have pushed for innovations that will speed up the process of science so they have started increasingly using pre-printed servers where they can upload early drafts of the papers so that their peers can discuss and build upon those results even before it goes through the peer review. Gauntlets and it really took off in the middle of the pandemic p- reprints were a major part of how science was disseminated over the course of this year and i think for both good and they meant that as intended. The pace of science was much quicker but in an environment where the entire world was hungry for more information about this new disease. A lot of very bad reprints were also circulated very quickly gained international attention and led to the spreading of misleading information. That hindered the controller cove. Nineteen rather
Short Wave
The CDC Doesn't Know Enough About Coronavirus In Tribal Nations
"In August more than five months into the pandemic Jordan. Bennett. was about to see some data she'd waiting for for a long time. Yeah. No a truly I was really excited because there hasn't been any data on American Indians or Alaska natives since the start of the pandemic from the CDC that's right. Until last month while universities had released a good bit of data about Covid and its effect on some. Native, American and Alaskan natives. The CDC really hadn't Jordan would know she's a reporter and editor with the Public Media News organization Indian country today she's also a citizen of the Navajo nation and she's been covering the pandemic since the beginning as well as a twenty twenty census and all of Indian, country no big deal just all of Indian country Yeah. The whole. That data that she'd been waiting to? was released by the government as part of a weekly CDC report in mid August the title of the top red. COVID nineteen among American Indian and Alaska Native Persons in twenty three states and when i read it, it was Kinda already something that I knew and a lot of native public health experts already knew and what I was really looking for is you know what is new that they gave to us the report said because of existing inequities, native Americans and Alaskan natives are three point five times more likely to get the corona virus than white people but anyone who'd been looking at tribal nations as closely as Jordan had could have told you that they were. Being hit especially hard for example, at one point earlier this year, the Navajo nation, which spans parts of Arizona New Mexico and Utah The nation's now reporting nearly four thousand in nineteen cases in a population of one hundred, seventy, five thousand had an infection rate greater the New York State. Eight PM curfews on weekdays and on weekends a fifty seven hour lockdown, not even the gas stations are open. That was just one tribal nation that got a lot of attention. Many others had infection rates that were also higher than the hard hit states in the northeast like the Colorado River Indian tribes in Arizona and California the Yakima in Washington state or the White Mountain Apache tribe in Arizona. And data from the states where many of those reservations are located weren't included in the CDC report, which gets it a larger problem. If there's data had you know where the impact is, how do you know where you could send testing to where there's a lack testing? You have to have that data in order to create policies into also figured out how to distribute vaccines. This episode was the CDC does and doesn't know about Covid in native American and Alaskan. Native tribal nations and how Jordan is working to get more data to the people who need it most I mattie Safai and you're listening to shortwave from NPR. This report from the CDC which linked to in our episode notes does say two important things. The fact that native Americans and Alaskan natives are more likely to get the virus. That's one. The second thing is that compared to white people young folks in those communities people under eighteen tested positive at higher rates. When it comes to these findings, the CDC did make one thing clear. Here's one of the researchers on the study, Sarah Hatcher it really important that the. This disproportionate impact. Likely driven by versus stinks social and economic inequity not because of some biological or genetic. Persisting social and economic inequities we're talking about access to healthy food housing income levels, stuff like that. Here's Jordan again the and other just like public health infrastructure or in like the lack of investment in the public health infrastructures in native communities and you have over credit households, anders a number of inequities that this pandemic is bringing out. More on that in a bit. But first Jordan says that the CDC report is notable for what it does not include this report did leave out tons of cases right now it only looked at twenty three states and it didn't include Arizona. Is One of the hot spots in Indian country. And they account for at least a third of all the cove nineteen cases according to the report. They also left out states like Oklahoma Washington. California Colorado thousands and thousands of cases. And researchers from the CDC were up front about leaving all that data out. Here's Sara Hatcher. Again, our announcement is really not generalize beyond those twenty three state overall. And we're not really able to speculate whether we expect the overall rate to be higher or lower we. The reason some states got left out was because the they recorded about race and ethnicity including that for native, American, and Alaskan Native Cova Cases was incomplete and that was really at least surprising to me because. I like how can you not capture this data right here you have Arizona where you know again, the Salt River Pima, Maricopa Indian community Healer River, ending community, White Mountain Apache their cases are thousands You had the tone, nation and Navajo Nation and the possibly Yawkey tribe. There's just thousands of cases in this one St. So many gaps like in this data as well. I think just points to how the CDC doesn't really know tribal communities and know that Indian health system and how it's built instead up. So, let's talk about that. Now. It's much more complicated than this. But basically, when tribal nation signed treaties giving up their land, the federal government promised to provide them with healthcare and set up the Indian Health Service, a government funded network of hospitals and clinics. To deliver adequate healthcare to tribal nations but that's not what's happening right now and what the pandemic is very much highlighting. For years the IHS has been way underfunded per person the federal government spends about half the amount of money on the IHS. Medicaid. And that's part of the reason a lot of tribes over time have step to establish their own privately run tribal health clinics. So throw history. They all IHS. But then tribes wanted to you know take hold and own and operate their own healthcare. So that's how these tribal health clinics came about. At this point, the large majority of healthcare facilities are operated by tribes about eighty percent in those facilities are encouraged but not required to share data that they collect on the virus but Jordan says, that's something a lot of them do not want to do not with the federal government or even with reporters like her even now as a Navajo WOM-. In as a Navajo reporter, it's also difficult for me to try to get the data. Because then I understand that like I grew up around my background is in health and so I I know you know it's because of settler colonialism but also research to a lot of times and medical research you have researchers going in parachuting in parachuting out and they don't give back that data it at least from everything that I've seen the past several months trust is like the main factor in this That's one thing trust. There's also the reality that doctors can get race or ethnicity wrong in California where it's pretty prevalent from what sources tell me some doctors will just check a box on native people because of their surname, their surnames, more likely to be coming from like a Hispanic or line next or origin like Dominguez or Garcia or you know today's assumed there Um Latin x but they're not, and if those people wind up dying that seem incorrect data can wind up on their death certificate right? You don't know what's going on or the pact of the pandemic if you don't have that data if you don't know what the person died from. How are you going to prevent it and prevent more from dying from it? These factors lack of trust underfunded public health infrastructure, racial classification all add up to a picture of the pandemic that isn't complete. For example, there's an alarming lack of covid hospitalizations data for native American or Alaskan native folks stuff like if somebody was admitted to the hospital, the ICU or even died compared to white people, CDC only has about a third of that information for Alaskan natives and native Americans and I think that's just again it just goes back to how well you know the state health department or even like the CDC or the public health experts they're not these tribal communities
Short Wave
What 'Arrival' Gets Right — and Wrong — About Linguistics
"Jessica con was a teenager when she first learned that linguistics is a thing. She stumbled upon story of Your Life, a science fiction novella by Ted Chiang. It's all about linguist- trying to figure out how to communicate with well aliens I. Think it was actually probably the first time I heard about the field of linguistics. And then I started college the year I saw an introduction to linguistics curson signed up for it. These days Jessica's field linguist at McGill University in particular I work on. Syntax. Basically the way words combine to make sentences in a few years ago. She got an email to be a consultant on a movie, a movie that was coincidentally based on the exact novella she read as a teenager. I'm not trying to draw any connections that aren't there, but you read about linguistics for the first time in a book that became a movie that you became the the person they consulted with. It's amazing right? It's pretty wild I mean when I first got the email that asks me to work on this film I was really ready to push spam because it sounded very strange and then at some point I saw the story of your life and I wait a minute I haven't thought about that in years and then I responded That Film Twenty Sixteen Sifi hit a rival. So real quick. In case you haven't seen it. Here's the gist. This is Davy arrived. All of a sudden twelve spaceships land all over earth trouble saying. And we don't know why they're not doing anything after landing there. Still no signs of first contact or just the sitting there are at least and so governments around the world are panicking trying to figure out why are these alien spaceship sitting here and different teams are going into try to understand why they're here what they want. And we are following one of these spaceships that I think is somewhere in Wyoming and the. Amy Adams who is a linguist? Production. And her job is to decipher the alien language and figuring out what they want. So today in the show another installment of the Shortwave Science Movie Club what the movie arrival got wrong about linguistics what it got. and. Whether or not Field Linguists Jessica coon has actually communicated with aliens. Honestly it's a tossup. I mattie Safai you're listening to shortwave NPR's Daily Science podcast. So Jessica you were the linguist who consulted on the movie arrival. So give me a big picture sense of what that means like. What did they actually have you do? Yeah. So the first thing I did was I got to read drafts of the screenplay which was really fun because it's a very common thing to do and academia we read things and we give feedback on them but usually not this fund of a scale committee meeting ever exactly yeah. It was very funds so I got to read the screenplay and they especially wanted. Feedback on how linguistics and linguists were represented in the film. So there were lots of places where I gave feedback and they incorporated it into the film. There were other places where they would say, okay just, Kinda yes. Yes. Thanks for your help but really in the end linguists are not Hollywood's primary audience and we're not going to get everything right here and now linguists just get to join like all the other fields of people who get really annoyed when science misrepresented onscreen. So welcome to the club. Sorry, we're not GONNA change that. The movie makers also put Jessica through some exercises, basically giving her a whiteboard and asking her would you do if aliens showed up and those exercises actually informed one of the most famous scenes in the movie when the main character we spanks played by Amy Adams. Schools the guy in charge of the mission about the fundamentals of linguistics. He asks her for a list of vocab words. Essentially, the keywords she was planning on teaching the aliens, that day. Cavaliers responding. Lock. help you understand. So Amy. Adams walks over to the whiteboard and scribbles what is your purpose on earth? This is where you want to get to. The question. Okay. So first, we need to make sure that they understand what a questions. The nature of A. Request for information along with the response then. We need to clarify the difference between a specific you. And a collective you because we don't want to know why Joe Alien is here we want to know why they all landed. In purpose requires an understanding of intent we need to find out. Do they make conscious choices or is their motivation? So instinctive that they don't understand a why question at all and and biggest of all, we need to have enough vocabulary with them that we understand their answer. I love that scene Yes that is one of the great triumphs of of linguistics in the film. I mean this was. So this was one of the most interesting parts of the movie for me because I'm you know this idea of building a base for understanding of a new language is like really interesting and and like the first steps in trying to communicate, which is you know like your thing right? So but it's something that I think we. Just, don't think about into see it in kind of in practice was so fascinating and I'm glad to hear it was like pretty well done your eyes question Mark Yeah I. Think I. Think it was really well done. I. Mean I think one thing that is really neat about this movie and what makes it such? You know interesting and intellectual Sifi is. They're not just typical humanoid creatures. We don't already have some kind of magical universal translator in place, and so we have to figure out how how do they even communicate and will we be able to communicate with them given how advanced they are that they've made these spaceships have arrived on earth I, think it's safe to assume that they have some advanced form of. Communication and that that form of communication should have patterns in it that we could eventually decipher. But thinking about you know, is it audible or is it written or could creatures communicate with smells or we just have no idea what could be out there if it's audible is in a sound frequency that human
Short Wave
How Gene Therapy Helped Conner Run
"Mattie. SAFAI NPR science correspondent. John Hamilton Hi John Hi Mary so John, where would you like to begin I? Think we should start with the scientist. Okay. Let's do it. Okay. So obviously many many scientists have worked to understand this disorder. But today we're gonNA focus on Jude Samal ski back in Nineteen eighty-four and I'll ski was still a graduate student at the University of Florida and he was part of this team that cloned a virus called A V. and those are group of viruses that can infect people but they don't cause diseases. Yeah. I remember I learning about this in Grad School John that discovery was a big deal because basically we can turn these viruses in tools and and that's because viruses on their own are pros at getting into ourselves and getting up close and personal with our DNA, which is exactly where you need to get to treat a lot of genetic disorders at. Their source exactly, and he was one of the scientists who figure that out. So as you these viruses have just revolutionized gene therapy right and after some Oh ski and his team Clone Davie, they wanted to try to use the virus to treat descend muscular dystrophy. That's the genetic disorder you were talking about earlier. Got It. So a lot of these therapies work by kind of targeting gene or genes that are the root of a disorder. So what's The deal with to Sheng muscular dystrophy John Kids who have Sharon. Lack a functional version of gene called D. M. D., and this gene makes a protein called destroyed often that helps muscles stay healthy. Got It. Okay. The idea is if the problem is that someone lack a working gene, you could just give them a working copy of that gene and what's the most wanted to do was packed some of the genetic code from a disrobing gene inside. Right and then once the virus got into the body, it would infect muscle cells, and then that faulty code is replaced with a functional version. Right? smokey says a Aviv, this harmless virus would work. Station service it's a molecular Fedex truck. Carries a genetic payload and it's delivering to its target right but it turns out bring a gene is a little bit harder. Then delivering a package and destroyed gene is especially challenging. One reason is it's is the a the virus are Fedex truck is incredibly tiny even among viruses. It's so small. You need an electron microscope just to see it, and then you have the destroyed gene, which is huge. It's the largest known human gene it contains about five. Hundred Times more genetic code than a so fitting that specific gene into that specific virus would be like trying to get a football stadium into a fedex truck something like that. Yeah, and most he has some other challenges to One is that do sheng affects billions of muscle cells all over the body. So this a delivery truck would have to be programmed to find all of these cells recognize them, and then infect them with this new genetic code. Yeah and some spent fifteen years tackling these challenges he was going along you is making progress he said, but it was coming one small step at a time. This is very challenging. It was mount ever said the gene therapy community in each one of these steps was setting up base camp, but then in nineteen, ninety, nine so mulcahy's work for that matter all gene therapy research pretty much came to a stop. The reason was that a teenager named Jesse. Gelsinger had died in the gene therapy experiment, right? I. Mean I. Remember Learning about that in graduate school in genetics. It was horrible. It was really sad the experiment he was part of had nothing to do with muscular dystrophy or the virus nothing to do with some all skis work, but it didn't matter right gene therapy trials were postponed or abandoned investors disappeared and so did research funding it stopped everything everyone got supercautious everyone except the muscular dystrophy association. The Jerry Lewis Telethon people they continue to push for the advancement of gene
Short Wave
Fat Phobia and It's Racist Past and Present
"As a teen Sabrina strings loved getting to hang out with her grandma even when her grandma was obsessing over one of her soap operas I remember one time. She called me into the living room and she's like Sabrina look at Victoria. McCoy's kept on young and the restless. Victoria is killing herself to him. Why are white women dying to be thin? Fast forward to one three adult Sabrina was working at an HIV medication adherence clinic in San, Francisco, where she witnessed real life, examples of women sacrificing their health to be thin nights, spoken to a couple of women both HIV positive who refused to take their HIV medications for fear of gaining weight, and that blew my mind, and immediately took me back to conversations I've been having with my grandma like gosh onto something so important you know when she was talking about it, she saw it as largely a white phenomenon, but the women I interviewed that day. We're both color. Why were these women dying to be thin and did race have anything to do with? Him. Sabrina went on to become a sociologist at the University of California Irvine and wrote a whole book investigating these questions. If you're like me, you might have assumed that. There was some moment in between Marilyn Monroe. TWIGGY EH in which. Suddenly we'll. We suddenly became fat-phobic in those three years, but Sabrina started digging looking at nineteenth century magazines like Harper's bazaar in what she found was troubling articles warning American women well middle class and upper class white women. They needed to watch what they eat, and they were unapologetic, and stating that this was the proper form for. Jackson Protestant women, and so it was important that women eight as little as necessary in order to show their Christian nature and also their racial superiority. Today on the show we go all the way back to the transatlantic slave trade to understand the racial origins of fat phobia, and how black people are still dealing with the consequences today? I mattie Safai and this is shortwave the daily science podcast from NPR. So Sabrina. Let's let's get into what you discovered about the history of fat phobia a little bit you. You did a ton of research and you started the story several centuries back in Europe definitely in the ethos that like Renaissance Women. you know we're full figured. And that was absolutely a thing that was valued, and then there was a big shift explain what was going on back then so it turns out that the growth of the slave trade, especially by the eighteenth century led to new articulations of what types of appearance we could expect of people by different races, and also what types of behaviors. Such that by the middle of Eighteenth Century, a lot of French philosophers in particular were arguing that you know what when we're in the colonies, we're noticing that Africans are sensuous. They love sex and they love food, and for this reason they tend to be too fat. Europeans have rational self control. This is what makes us the premier race of the world, so in terms of body. Body size, we should be slender, and we should watch what we eat so okay Sabrina. Are you telling me that? When the slave trade started and European saw that African women were essentially curvy much like European women at the time at that point, they decided that being fat being thicker wasn't ideal anymore, and they built a system of oppression around this idea of needing to be. Thinned to prove racial superiority is at eight am I close. It's not quite as intentional as that. Effectively what they determined was that. You know we want it to be able to have a mechanism for ensuring that we could recognize who was slave, and it was free right, and it was easy in the beginning of the was simply skin color. What did you might imagine? After two hundred years of living in close proximity skin color really no longer works has a mechanism right, because now we have all of these people who are We would consider them today to be by racial, and so what they did was they decided to articulate new aspects of racial identity and so eating and body size became of the characteristics that were being used to suggest that these are people who do not deserve freedom. The trans, Atlantic slave trade eventually ended, but argues that we are still absolutely living with these racist attitudes about body size today. And in her book, she also traces how these anti-fat attitudes worked their way into modern medicine for somewhat arbitrarily, reasons for example take BMI or body mass index. That equation actually wasn't intended to be used to measure individual fatness. Though of course doctors did and still do today, can you? Can you explain the problem with using am I as a measure for obesity especially when it comes to black women, who I know have been told that they have the highest rates of obesity according to that measurement to be am I. Yes, so am. I is a measure of the ratio of a person's weight to their height. And what this does not account for is bone density. Muscular already any other type of genetic influences in your way or cultural environmental influences in your weight, and so, what ended up happening? As many people pointed out is that you might have to people with the same BMI, but vastly different life experiences embody compositions outside of the simple reality of their weight to height ratio, right, and the problem of applying this to them in particular, is that African American populations as studies have shown for literal decades since at least the eighties tends to be healthier at heavier weights than white populations. And so that already is an indication that cross racially. This is not a very useful tool, not to mention the fact that even within race there are going to be vastly different experiences, of an individual body between like their weight and their health profile so surreal this message from the medical establishment that excess weight is the biggest you know reason for black women's health problems or a very central of it. Why do you see it as so damaging? For Black Women, ultimately, the main advice that people are given when they so called obese is to lose weight, and there are so many problems with this. We have been telling people to lose weight for decades. What ends up happening is that they either don't lose the weight or they sometimes do lose the weight, and then frequently gain it back so first off. It could be more harmful to tell people to lose weight in the long run, and then in addition to that there are the psychological effects of telling people that their bodies are wrong. Right at their bodies are inherently unhealthy This type of fat stigma also leads to health outcomes right right right, so let's talk about this. In the context of covid nineteen I'm thinking about the recent New York Times op Ed you wrote about how cove nineteen is disproportionately impacting. Impacting people of Color specifically black people, and how you took issue with obesity, gaining traction as a leading explanation for that disparity, so talked me a little bit about that. This piece was actually motivated by something that I felt was very troubling, which was I had been seeing so many report, suggesting that the disparities in Colbert outcomes between white populations and black populations. They would say things like well. You know there's already the pre existing factor of obesity, and somehow that was one of the first things that come up and I thought there is very little evidence that disparities in quote unquote obesity are what's contributing to these negative outcomes, but there's plenty of evidence to suggest that Kobe. Fatalities or maybe even serious complications with Kobe nineteen are being influenced by people's environments. Are they essential workers? Do they have access to enough soap and water hand sanitizer, and so of course might imagine that the ability to socially distance to shelter in place to have access to healthy foods under Corinthian, all of this is very much being structured by a person's social location and black people tend to live in communities without access. Access to a lot of different healthy and life giving resources. Yeah, in in Sabrina, I'll tell you that as a person that reads a lot of the literature on Kovin prisoner biologists I am seeing a lot of papers coming out that are associating with the obesity without with health outcomes of COVID, but those links tend to be correlated right, but even if we were to find out that there's absolutely a causal link. Link between covert and obesity which I think you're arguing. There isn't one especially right now. At least the rates of obesity and white and black populations aren't actually that different right like it wouldn't necessarily be the thing that made it. So can you tell me a little bit about those rates versus the actual percentage of disparities? We're seeing so according to the CDC, the Obesity Twain. African, American and white populations are. Are Forty two point, two percent for white populations and forty nine point, seven percents for black populations are about that and so we're looking at effectively a seven percentage point disparity between white and black populations in terms of rates of obesity, however, when we're looking at serious complications with covert nineteen. What we're seeing is that black people are dying at rates of two point four to seven times that of white populations. How that's seven percentage point differential is leading to two point four to seven times the disparity in serious complications. Death. No one's really being able to explain that. This is the problem with the kind of cords of studies, which is that they lead people to believe that somehow. Is One of the drivers when in fact it could simply be a confounding in these studies, but we're so used to studying obesity and treating these correlations as if they are evidence of causal link that people are frequently not being very critical when they're seeing studies that show these relationships. Sabrina, you've obviously spent years by now working to understand this issue and to educate folks about it I'm wondering you know like why why this. Why have you specifically taken this on one of the reasons? Why continue to do it? Is I've seen what a difference? It's made to people's lives. I mean I've had so many people reach out and tell me that they felt for the longest time like something was wrong, but no one was talking about it or that I have spoken to their personal experience. I couldn't have imagined when I started doing this work. That could have possibly had the impact that it's had you know I'm standing on the shoulders of giants people who have been feminist scholars medical scholars journalists who've been doing this work at least since the nineteen seventies, but we're at a moment right now where there's a critical mass of people who are aware that the discourse surrounding fatness that we've long accepted really is baseless, and we think about a new way of allowing people to have a positive relationship to their bodies, and to cultivate health within themselves and their communities that does not rely on that stigma. Okay Sabrina I appreciate you. Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your life and your work with us. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. Sabrina strings. Her book is called fearing the black body the racial origins
Short Wave
Science Movie Club: 'Contact'
"Summer. I just re watched contact last night and I feel like it held up. You know I feel like I was still really happy. With what is your. What are your thoughts? I was very pleased. Yeah and I feel like I need to watch it more. Regularly summer ash knows a thing or two about making contact if you will with space. She's a real life radio astronomer. Who Works at the. Va a telescope facility. In New Mexico. Be L. A. Stands for very large array basically a group of radio antennas working together to Observe Space. And it just happens to be where lots of the movie takes place so it is very large. That does not align the telescope itself is made up of twenty seven separate dishes there each roughly one hundred feet tall and eighty feet in diameter weigh two hundred thirty tonnes and they all act as one. So they're all pointing at the same thing and they are just a super powerful instrument could call it the most scientifically productive ground based telescope in the world. So it's pretty awesome as where your it's pretty frequent. Contact isn't just about the search for extraterrestrial life. It also touches on stuff like academic culture and scientific funding all stuff worth digging into so stick around. I'm Mattie Safai. And this is shortwave. The daily science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
Service Animals In The Lab: Who Decides?
"If you're a scientist say a biologist or a chemist and you have to work in a lab. You're super familiar with the term p. p. e. personal protective equipment which is P P is outer garments goggles brutes and gloves. That's Joey Ramp. She works at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science Technology at the University of Illinois at her Bana on a champagne. And Yeah basically anybody who sets foot in a lab needs some form of even if you have four feet beat see. Joey has a service dog. Can you hear how little like Greg Sampson okay. He was getting up all right. Here we go Samson. A golden retriever is trained not to bark and he's a very good boy when he's in the lab With Joey he wears goggles worn military. Canine and buy police canine and law enforcement. He wears rubber boots on each paw and he also wears a lab coat underneath his harness and that keeps them safe. Samson intern keeps joey safe in the lab and out hoped years ago. Joey suffered traumatic brain injury. She also has. PTSD Samson senses when she's in a stressful situation that could trigger her PTSD. He picks things up. Because you can't over that well and he helps her balance embrace when she's moving around. It's it's a cliche to say that the dog saved my life but A service does that every single day but there was a time when Joey was told that she couldn't have her dog with her at least not if she also wanted to be in the warm they immediately said. Oh my gosh. You can't possibly bring a service dog into this environment. It's too dangerous so sadly there are a lot of science science faculty that are reluctant to allow anyone with a disability into stem or science and When you have a service dog UGH That that makes it an even bigger problem from the moment you walk in. You have a service dog. It's very visible. It's very different. And they have the power to say. No this episode. Why Joey is trying to change that? And why it's not just an uphill battle for her before a stem workforce force striving to be more inclusive I mattie Safai and this is shortwave the daily science podcast from NPR
Short Wave
Sepsis Is A Global Killer. Can Vitamin C Be The Cure?
"Mattie Safai in the House with Richard Harris yet another one of my favorite science correspondence must be all your favorite special. That's what my mother always said. You're all my favorite Richard. You have some serious business to discuss today. Indeed indeed I do yes. I'm GonNa Talk to you about sepsis right so for anybody who might not know. Sepsis is actually caused by the body's reaction to an infection basically the immune system overreacts causing this huge inflammatory response. Blood vessels get a leaky which messes up. How blood flows throughout the body body? In severe cases. Septic shock can set in. And that's when your blood pressure drops to dangerously low levels sometimes leading to multiple organ failure and in death doctors treat that initial infection and they can try to manage the dangerous symptoms of Sepsis. But there's no cure for it that's right and as a result assault is the single most expensive condition in. US hospitals best estimate is that it strikes one point seven million people a year in the United States and kills more than a quarter million. Wow so it's a huge toll right and one of the reasons. It's so common is because a lot of different types of infections can result in sepsis many roads into sepsis but even though it's a huge deal we don't really talk about it that much in. That's kind of weird isn't it is such a common condition but it isn't even bigger problem. Globally thirty thousand people die of it every single day. That's why it's a huge number. It's truly under appreciated disease. And why I'm telling you the story today is because the results have been published important new study on the treatment of Sepsis with the transfusion of simple mixture really vitamin C.. And Fireman thion which is vitamin B. One that's right and also some corticosteroids. These are all cheap and readily available drugs so today in the show the journey to find a cure for sepsis. Yes we hear the latest on this wild claim about a potential cure of vitamin C drug cocktail. Okay Okay Richard. When you were first telling me about this you said you actually got to talk to somebody a few years ago? Who received this newfangled treatment right? I was interested in really following how this evolved volve this this audacious idea and seeing where it would go and actually a number of doctors immediately started picking up and started using it at least on their most desperately ill patients and talked to one of them. This guy with an incredible story in Christopher Kelly who had this horrid logging accident this is out in Seattle I was cutting for a logging outfit up on these rock cliffs and fell about one hundred and fifty foot for tree into these maple trees. They add a bunch of dead tops we call them widow makers mhm tree came down the butt of it bounce toward him crushing him. I heard the bones crunch when it got me. It was pretty precarity Yell for a minute. And then I'd pass out and I guess my ribs were ripping. My lungs is the reason I I was only you know in and out of consciousness. And Amazingly he was there for a couple of hours before a couple of other men working in the area found him and got him on a Medevac helicopter to harborview medical center in Seattle in the Wendy says he wound up with a shattered pelvis all of his ribs. Broken twenty two bones and Dane. The day I met him. He developed a very high fever along with shock. That's one of Kelly's doctors at David car-bomb who realized that Sepsis was beginning to set in so sepsis is one of the big risks and injuries like this because infections sometimes time start on the wounds on the skin or from inside the lungs or internal injuries or whatever and the infection of course can turn into septic shock which is the nastiest form of this condition. When Oregon's start to fail that often leads to death and as we mentioned earlier? There's no known cure for SEPSIS. That's right car-bomb could treat the underlying infection with antibiotics Roddick's but he was also one of a set of doctors who had actually started experimenting with his new treatment of vitamin C and firemen and steroids and discuss it with his son and his son and was very amenable. We talked about The fact that it's a new therapy that there really wasn't very strong evidence but I felt that it was not a ton of risk and that this could be beneficial. How did it work Richard? Well hold on how quickly to respond. Usually patients very sick for a few days before responding antibiotics and him it took about a day his fever head cleared and he was off the medicines to support his blood pressure and looked remarkably better. But this is not actually a totally new new idea at all. I mean vitamin CS. Curative Properties have been batted around for decades and decades. A lot of. It's kind of Kooky so that actually works against this argument people initially and understandably skeptical about it but that said it is true that people who have sepsis have surprisingly low levels of vitamin C in their blood. So there's some biological logical plausibility to doing this right.
Short Wave
A Decade of Dzud: Lessons From Mongolia's Deadly Winters
"So for people. Who Don't know I totally know where is Mongolia? Mongolia is in Central Asia right between Russia and China. The landscape to me looks a little bit like a mixture between Montana and Mars if you can picture that delightful so this this time last year before you were short waves reporter. You don't like to think about that time. You went to Mongolia it's true. Why would one go to Mongolian winter all the travel guides discourage discourage it? I might discourage it but I purposely went there then because winter is at the heart of this whole story. So how cold are we talking here. It's super cold. uh-huh freeze your nose. Harris cold I actually had to tape. Hand warmers all over my microphone so it wouldn't freeze. Wow it is cold. Oh I found this piece of tape tape of me complaining about it minus eighteen degrees right now. This is really cool. I could tell me what you say. Cool coach it wasn't acting but some types of winters are so extreme matty that they actually have an official name so in Mongolian. It's called a zoo would that's when a winter tur- is so bad. It kills significant number of livestock in Mongolia or one out of four people make their living hurting. That has huge consequences. I mattie Safai and I'm Emily Kouanga today in the show. We had to Mongolia to learn about the brutal winters known as and how these natural disasters have changed enjoyed countries way of life okay so Mongolia is periodically affected by this extreme weather event. That happens in the winter called. What does this look like? Yeah so tender standard. I wanted to meet someone directly impacted. Divide it this man named Roy Eaton Gacek. He's a father of four super good bad Santa could do prates daughter's hair getting get somebody for school and everything. He was born a herder in eastern Mongolia and in January. Two Thousand Oilman as he tells it woke up at sunrise to check on his animals. Snow had fallen in the night about a foot. They were writing out a bad winter storm and he was really worried about is heard so how he cracked the door of his gear. Those are these circular felt cover tents that herders living and it was eerily quiet outside blindingly finding Lee white from all this snow. What did you see when he opens the door? Do not with this new household off. He's Carcass Saas new. Shut us a dozen of his sheep. Goats had died in the night. Those still alive yet about one hundred animals at the time. We're trying to find grassy but the land was literally locked in by snow. The hotel does ndas and it was really difficult to see this. He Sang. It was horrifying and it happened. Every few days boyens animals would succumb to starvation. Illness exposure and by the end of the winter he essentially lost his entire heard the type of food that came to his doorstep. It's called Saga which Mongolian means white death. While I think a loss at this level I imagine it's not purely financial absolutely I mean this. This isn't the same but there are dairy farmers in my family and you kind of like build relationship with your cows you literally like have them from birth to death so I have imagine it would be devastating like on multiple levels if you just slowly lose them over time right. They're not just economic assets and the loss of those animals is a social loss. It's spiritual loss experts. I spoke to in Mongolia. Described as a slow onset natural disaster different from a rapid rapid onset natural disaster like a hurricane or earthquake. So how many other herders were affected by the white death that year that year the two thousand six it claimed claimed about three and a half million livestock. Wow quite a bit law. It's eleven percent of the national hurt. And when you consider that at the time one out of every two households made their living hurting. It's significant begin. Animals represent wealth. So it would be as if your life savings were too slowly disintegrate. So what did the herders actually do in response Some rebuilt their heard those who could but others who lost everything they left gave up hurting fled the countryside seeking jobs in in urban areas uprooting. Their lives are good hurting Dad Johansen hair braided guy. He was one of those who left. Almost your short could the mother oh well many migrated. He's saying because it was impossible to make a living and it shows in the population and barter that's Mongolia's capital it has has tripled in the past thirty years exploded. Zid is one of the many migration drivers bringing people to the city. And I could see this when I lived there. I was reporting reporting and living in his apartment building and I looked off my balcony window. The hills were just covered in Gares. Those felt covered tents that herders live in. It was a picture. Sure of all of these people who had moved to the city and settled there and the city. Just couldn't contain all the new arrivals or does it still happening as it. On this scale that hits every corner of the country not that common prior to two thousand had happened about once a decade but was weird about two thousand is. It happened the next year and the next year and again again in two thousand ten so by the end of the decade there were forces and twenty one million livestock died in that period it totally overwhelmed Mongolian people that government tens of thousands of families packed up and left. That's that is horrifying of what is going on. Like what is causing US okay. So it's tempting to blame climate change and that is in fact the biggest culprit in this whole affair. Mongolia is indeed a warmer drier. Replace than it was eight years ago. But what I found is that zoot is actually caused by cocktail of other factors like over-grazing and deforestation. Basically quickly anything that destroys. The grassland is bad for animals. You need that grassland lending food it's a goat's buffet table and to not have it sets them up for good because this summer is a time when they fatten up. And if the grass is gone from drought or other things they're even more vulnerable when the winter is bad. Oh little bit of science here yes. The drought okay. Means less grassland and in Mongolia less grassland creates even more drought vicious cycle. Yeah because Mongolia. It's land locked all right. So the vast majority of precipitation rain snow. It comes from the land it comes from the grass. Water is transpired by plants into the atmosphere so so without grass Mongolia is even drier so given all of this is hurting still considered a good way to make a living in Mongolia. I think Mongolians are trying to figure that out. There's fewer herders but they're better prepared and trying to manage the Paschel and more sustainably local communities training herders to brace for a bad winter. Do things like make extra. Hey for their animals to eat. Purchase Livestock Insurance and pool there resources so the individual costs aren't so high all right so that that sounds great but are herders still kind of on edge. Are they like Shariq. Dowd anticipating the next. You know so I used to report in Rural Alaska inefficient community and herders. They kind of remind me of fishermen they know they're at the mercy of the weather but they're very tough and resourceful within their own lives and herders are doing the same. They're trying to make the most of what they have. They're kind of cultural heroes for practicing this way of life. That's become increasingly less common in the state. Broadcaster actually gives these awards to the best herders in in the nation. Please tell me you went to a best herder award ceremony absolutely went to a buzzer award ceremony. The championship herder. Who I met in the province was this man named near Goo Davidoff and I talked to him right after he got his award? Lord of host was also he was practical. Nature is unpredictable. It's harder there's less rain. Animals can't get fat but if we prepare extra hey. We can overcome such natural disasters. We don't have to be afraid this spring their animal's gave birth to hundreds of babies. I went back to visit during the birthing season in March. This pen is just full like a hundred lambs. Just these tiny little cotton balls near to make us feel better about this. Do you mind no. I just don't appreciate being manipulated. I wanted to show you the opposite right so not death life and what it signals for the next generation of herders. Who are continuing to do this? I'm picking up what you're putting down on. Thank you all right. I'm Lequan thank you for bringing us the story.
Short Wave
Introducing Short Wave
"Mattie Safai here the host of shortwave NPR's new daily science podcast. We're coming you Tuesday October fifteenth we'll explore groundbreaking discoveries is that are in the news some scientists brought back brain activity in some really dead pigs really picks I mean these pigs were dead for like four all right that all wait harder but like not that much harder