0:00

Science Friday is supported by Dell.

0:02

Seasons. Change when I'm at

0:04

your gaming Tech upgrade now during

0:07

Alien Were Summer Sale event. And.

0:09

Save on select next an Alien.

0:11

We're gaming pcs and more. Pair

0:14

your impressive skills with our advance

0:16

gaming systems like the Alien were

0:18

M eighty laptop. Powered. By

0:20

an Intel Core I nine

0:23

processor, featuring or inspiring visuals,

0:25

liquid cooling, three dimensional audio

0:27

with Dolby Atmos and impressive

0:30

over clocking potential. Your. Dream

0:32

set up. Exceptional prices

0:34

and free shipping await

0:37

you for a limited

0:39

time. Only at Alien

0:41

were.com/deals that Alien were.com/deals

0:43

Science Friday supported by

0:45

Dana Farber Cancer Institute.

0:48

Thanks. To Dana Farber Foundation a

0:50

work. Protein. Degradation can

0:52

target and destroy cancer

0:54

causing proteins right inside

0:57

the cell. That's. How

0:59

Dana Farber is working

1:01

to treat previously untreatable

1:03

cancers? Learn more at

1:05

Dana farber.org/everywhere. NYC

1:08

Studios is supported by MathWorks,

1:10

creators of MATLAB and Simulink,

1:13

software for technical computing and

1:15

model-based design. MathWorks, accelerating

1:17

the pace of discovery in engineering and

1:19

science. Learn more at mathworks.com.

1:26

Listener supported W N Y

1:28

C Studios. How.

1:34

Cataloging the things you see around

1:36

your neighborhood help researchers and city

1:38

manager's I didn't really understand until

1:40

having worked with these datasets, how

1:42

valuable these crowdsourced data can be

1:44

and and how they can really

1:46

advanced science. It's Friday, May thirty

1:48

first and you're listening to Science

1:50

writing. I'm sorry

1:53

for producer Do Peter Smith. If you're an

1:55

animal living in a city, there's a good

1:57

chance that factors like buildings, artificial light and

1:59

noise push. Than are going to make your

2:01

daily life kind of a pain but

2:03

a new study reveals exactly which animals

2:05

thrive and which when struggle in urban

2:07

environments thanks to crowdsource data from an

2:09

app called a Naturalist and you might

2:11

be surprised by some of the results,

2:13

will find out how researchers used as

2:15

apt to make recommendations to the City

2:17

of Los Angeles. But first here's guest

2:19

hosts Aerial Doing Ross discussing the top

2:21

news in Science this week. The.

2:24

Next few days are shaping up to be

2:26

busy in space with a long delayed test

2:28

flight carrying astronauts to the space station. Here.

2:31

Talk about that and other stories

2:33

from the weekend. Science is Charles

2:35

Bergquist size senior producer A Charles.

2:37

Aerial So tell me about this launch

2:40

were why is that important What's going

2:42

on? So this is a test flight

2:44

of Boeings Star Line or spacecraft. It's

2:46

a demonstration to certain massive that their

2:48

new spacecraft part of a program nasa

2:50

cause commercial crew. Can. Be a

2:52

practical and safe way to get people

2:55

into orbit. The spacecraft has been delayed

2:57

a lot. Most recently it was supposed

2:59

to launch on May sixth. that wants

3:01

was scrubbed to to a bad vowels

3:03

and a rocket booster. That.

3:05

Booster valve was replaced, but then

3:07

they found another leak in the

3:09

spacecraft's maneuvering system which lead to

3:11

more delays. Okay, Elite doesn't

3:14

sound good to on a spacecraft. know

3:16

it doesn't but it's not. A leak

3:18

is in, it's gonna let all the

3:20

air out of the crew capsule or

3:22

a fuel leak that could lead to

3:24

an explosion. This leak is coming from

3:26

a helium system in the service module

3:28

of the spacecraft. They sort of used

3:30

squirts of helium gas and thrusters to

3:32

do some maneuvering in orbit that doesn't

3:34

involve firing a rocket. after the

3:36

last launch was scrubbed engineers looked at

3:38

this week and figured out that the

3:41

flight should still be okay even if

3:43

the leak was a one hundred times

3:45

stronger it would also mean taking the

3:47

spacecraft back to the factory to fix

3:49

the leaks out the new man is

3:52

just to live with it and go

3:54

ahead with this launch okay so so

3:56

what's his boys plan now is they're

3:58

going ahead with the launch yes a

4:00

currently the plane its launch midday on

4:02

Saturday around 12.25 p.m. Eastern. This will

4:05

be on an Atlas V rocket from

4:07

the United Launch Alliance and it'll carry

4:09

two NASA astronauts, Butch Wilmore and SUNY

4:11

Williams, to the International Space Station. And

4:14

if the flight is successful, NASA

4:16

can then consider using this Boeing Starliner system

4:19

as a way to get into orbit, along

4:21

with the craft from SpaceX and

4:24

the Russian Soyuz craft that are

4:26

the current ISS taxis. All

4:28

right, hopefully that test flight will be successful

4:30

and there's other spaceflight news possible this weekend

4:33

as well. Yeah, this one is

4:35

exciting. A robotic lander sample return mission going

4:37

to the far side of the Moon. This

4:40

is the Chinese Chang'e 6 mission, which

4:42

was launched about four weeks ago. And

4:45

the landing attempt is supposed to happen in early

4:47

June. There have been other

4:50

missions to the Moon and scientists have

4:52

sampled moon rocks before, so

4:54

why is this particular trip significant? So

4:57

they're targeting a huge impact crater on

4:59

the far side of the Moon called

5:01

the South Pole-Eitkin Basin. This is the

5:04

Moon's oldest impact crater and also the

5:06

largest. It's more than 2500 kilometers wide,

5:08

eight kilometers

5:10

deep. And the surface features

5:13

on the far side of the Moon are a lot

5:15

different from what we see on the near side. It's

5:17

a lot rougher with less smoothing

5:20

out from lava. So researchers hope that

5:22

getting rock samples from that side of

5:24

the Moon could teach us things about

5:27

how the Moon was formed and also about

5:29

conditions in the solar system billions of years

5:31

ago. So what's the timeline for this

5:33

mission? It's something of an open

5:35

question because the Chinese space agency doesn't

5:37

tend to release a ton of information

5:39

about their operations before they happen. Early

5:42

plans called for a landing attempt June

5:44

2nd. The lander is supposed

5:46

to gather about two kilograms of material.

5:48

There'll be a scoop thing collecting dirt

5:51

and rock samples that will be collected

5:53

by a drill. And then

5:55

it'll lift off from the Moon again about two

5:57

days after landing. But we'll have to see. A

5:59

lot of stuff Scientists around the world are

6:01

really eager to see these samples. All

6:03

right. Turning from the moon

6:06

to the sun, there's a sunspot

6:08

news this week? Yeah.

6:10

You may remember a couple of weeks ago when

6:12

people all over were able to see the aurora,

6:14

and there were all those amazing pictures online. Oh,

6:16

yeah. I remember. Yeah. So

6:18

the group of sunspots that marks

6:21

the very active region of the

6:23

sun responsible for the flares and

6:25

coronal mass ejections that produce those

6:27

northern lights has rotated back around

6:29

the sun into view. And

6:31

now that we can see it again, it looks like

6:34

it's still active. Do we know if this

6:36

means that we're going to have more chances to see the

6:38

aurora? Yeah, it all depends just

6:40

when and where the flares and coronal mass

6:42

ejections take place. Earlier this month,

6:44

there were 12 super powerful

6:47

X-class solar flares across six days,

6:49

and that's when we got the

6:51

light show. Now that

6:53

this active region is back in view,

6:55

it's already produced one X1 flare on

6:57

May 29th. That could mean

6:59

that there's some auroral activity here on

7:01

Earth in the next few days, but

7:03

probably not as far south as the

7:05

last batch. But the region still

7:08

has more time to act up again while it's

7:10

in view, so people should keep an

7:12

eye on the space weather forecast. All right. Well,

7:14

that was really a treat last time, so we

7:16

can't always be that lucky. Definitely. Back

7:18

here on Earth, there's news this week

7:21

about a patient with a transparent window

7:23

implanted in his skull. What's

7:25

going on there? Yeah, this is

7:27

a report published this week in the

7:29

journal Science Translational Medicine about work with

7:32

one individual, Jared Hager. He

7:34

sustained a traumatic brain injury from a

7:36

skateboarding accident back in 2019 and

7:39

had to have about half of his

7:41

skull removed. At the height of the

7:43

pandemic, there were delays in being able

7:45

to make a prosthesis for him, so

7:47

at that point, his brain was just

7:49

covered by skin and connective tissue. During

7:52

that time, he took part in some

7:54

research studies involving brain imaging. Fast

7:57

forward, researchers have filled the hole

8:00

his skull with a

8:02

transparent plastic window, basically plexiglass.

8:05

And they're trying out an imaging

8:07

technique called functional ultrasound imaging, which

8:10

can't normally be done through a skull,

8:12

but they found that it works through

8:14

this clear window and they were

8:16

able to take images of his brain while

8:18

he was awake and performing various tests. It's

8:21

really beautiful that so much of this

8:23

story has to do with the collaboration

8:25

between this patient and this research team

8:27

and his willingness to try this

8:30

out, right? Yeah, they said that

8:32

he has been extremely generous with his

8:34

time and making use of

8:36

what otherwise would be a very

8:38

troubling situation. Right. Should

8:41

we be expecting more brain windows like this

8:43

in the future? So this

8:45

is kind of a proof of concept,

8:47

right? Seeing if this ultrasound technique can

8:49

work without the brain being essentially open.

8:52

There's still work to be done here. They

8:54

say that this ultrasound imaging technique

8:56

that they're using apparently has some

8:58

advantages over things like fMRI in

9:00

terms of resolution. Some

9:03

other imaging techniques might require you to

9:05

implant electrodes into the brain and this

9:07

doesn't, so that's another plus. But

9:10

beyond the imaging stuff, the scientists here

9:12

say that there are some advantages just

9:14

to being able to see, like

9:16

with your eyes, into the skull like this. Some

9:19

people with brain injuries can develop clots

9:22

under their prostheses and with this transparent

9:24

window you can keep an eye on

9:26

things. Huh. Well,

9:28

that's pretty clever. I like that. In

9:30

other brain news, researchers are now studying

9:33

how the human brain processes words like

9:35

not. Yeah, this is a

9:37

little weird. So if you ask

9:39

me how things are going and I say,

9:41

not bad, what do I

9:43

mean by that? Well, I think typically

9:46

you'd say good, right? Yeah,

9:48

so this is work published this week in

9:50

the journal Plos Biology and researchers were looking

9:52

at what's going on in the brain when

9:54

it interprets that kind of

9:57

negation, the nodding of

9:59

something. And they did a

10:01

few different things. First, they asked people to rank

10:04

on a scale of sort of

10:06

very bad to very, very good,

10:08

where a negated phrase like not

10:10

bad might fall on that scale.

10:14

And then they also used imaging techniques to

10:16

watch what's going on in the brain when

10:19

a person hears something like not

10:21

happy. First it apparently takes

10:23

more processing time for the brain to deal with

10:26

this than when you hear someone say sad. But

10:29

they also, this is cool, they found that

10:31

when you hear a phrase like not happy,

10:34

first they see the area in the brain

10:36

that would respond to happy gets

10:38

activated. And then it sort of

10:40

gets muted a bit. So the

10:42

word not is sort

10:44

of attenuating the word that comes

10:46

after instead of simply inverting its

10:49

meaning. So it's not an antonym. It's not, you

10:51

know, a one for one relationship. Not bad does

10:53

not equal good. There's

10:56

more nuance there. Right. Coffee

10:58

is not hot. It's not necessarily

11:00

cold. Right. That makes sense to me.

11:03

That seems, yeah, that seems right. But

11:05

it's fascinating that they were able to look at this through,

11:08

you know, these techniques. Yeah.

11:11

Different approaches to learning more about what's going on

11:13

in the brain. You know, it's one

11:15

of these interesting linguistics things. Like, why do we speak

11:18

the way we do? How do

11:20

we interpret the world, convey that to

11:22

others? But they point out that this idea

11:24

of negation shows up a lot in

11:26

technical and legal documents. Right. You've

11:28

got phrases like something is not unlike something

11:30

else. And they also

11:33

say that this concept of what negation

11:35

really means is an area that the computers

11:38

and AI have trouble dealing

11:40

with. Hmm. Interesting.

11:43

Okay. So we can learn

11:45

about a lot of things by looking at this. It's

11:49

not unusual. Okay.

11:53

You have one more strange brain

11:56

trick story about extra

11:58

digits I hear. Yeah, We

12:00

first saw the about the story three

12:02

years ago researchers who had given people

12:04

an extra prosthetic thumb on one of

12:06

their hands. It'd be sort of attached

12:08

your palm below the little finger, sort

12:10

of opposite your real thought. A new

12:13

activated it using a pressure sensor under

12:15

your big toe. In Twenty

12:17

Twenty Two, they took this device to

12:19

a science festival in the Uk and

12:21

had almost six hundred different regular people

12:23

that fairgoers from kids to senior citizens

12:26

try out using this onus prosthetic thumb.

12:28

And in the journal Science Robotics this

12:30

week they say that ninety eight percent

12:33

of the users were able to successfully

12:35

manipulate objects using that extra thumb during

12:37

the first minute of use, which is

12:39

impressive, right? Yeah, not everyone was able

12:42

to do it equally wealth of that

12:44

a bunch of different tasks for uses.

12:46

To try outs of did better than

12:48

others. Very young participants tend to doubt

12:51

the most problems, but in general it

12:53

seems your brain is surprisingly able to

12:55

make this extra thumb part of its

12:57

map of the world that's incredible. Is

13:00

this the kind of technology that people

13:02

might be able to buy in and

13:04

were in the future Is or was

13:06

this more of an art project? So

13:09

this started as a design project, but

13:11

they say that people did actually find

13:13

it pretty useful, but this research is

13:15

more about seeing how easy it is

13:18

for people's brains to adapt to all

13:20

sorts of a assist technology is or

13:22

prosthetics not just replacing something that was

13:24

lost, but maybe adding new capabilities like

13:27

what if you gave some on an

13:29

extra are more apprehensive. Tail. I

13:32

bet it is kind of get lost in

13:34

that continue than deeply deeply interest in seeing

13:36

where this goes. Ah finally some important to

13:39

an audience and looks like the national zoo

13:41

will be getting a new pandas. Yes,

13:43

This is big cute animal news for

13:45

panda fans. You might recall that the

13:47

much loved pandas left the Smithsonian National

13:50

Zoo last November, but it was announced

13:52

this week that by the end of

13:54

year there should be a new pair

13:56

of giant pandas in residence again on

13:58

loan from China. There. Both

14:00

two years old, which is

14:02

supposedly like early adolescence and

14:05

panda years, so they're very

14:07

playful, exploratory. Clumsy are they

14:09

are a male named power

14:12

Be meaning treasure and energetic

14:14

and a female Qingdao. Which.

14:16

Means green and treasure once they arrived

14:18

or be in quarantine for about thirty

14:21

days and then they'll have a few

14:23

weeks to settle in before zoo visitors

14:25

can actually see them. So don't book

14:27

your tickets to Washington just yet And

14:29

testing Use Charles Berkeley's signs. Fight a

14:32

senior producer. Science. Friday is

14:34

supported by Dell. Seasons. Change.

14:36

So why not your gaming tech

14:38

upgrade Now during the Alien were

14:41

summer sale events and save on

14:43

select Next and Alien we're pcs

14:45

and more. Spare your impressive skills

14:48

with our advance gaming systems like

14:50

the Alien were M eighty laptop

14:52

powered by Intel Core I nine

14:55

processors featuring all inspiring visuals, liquid

14:57

cooling, three dimensional audio with dolby

15:00

Atmos and impressive over clocking potential.

15:02

Build your dream set up with

15:04

great deals. On select gaming

15:06

monitors, mice and more. Must

15:09

have electronics and accessories. When

15:11

you shop online at Alien

15:13

were.com/deals you'll have access to

15:15

leading edge gaming technology to

15:17

conquer the competition. And

15:19

free shipping on everything. Exceptional

15:22

prices. Oh wait you for

15:24

a limited time only at

15:27

Alien were.com/steals. That's. Alien

15:30

were.com/deals. For

15:32

the multi city as he support about

15:34

a sonic of New York City centre

15:36

don't must be on for such as

15:38

soon as I said unless the dissented

15:40

assume his horse hum hum a little

15:42

musical since as an Ulster task into

15:44

little funny more than woman pommel and

15:47

Judy keen. understanding. Score performed

15:49

by a less. Thirty piece orchestra some

15:51

aboard the ship a serene I had

15:53

a consistently soon eleven since one third

15:55

at New York City Centre to learn

15:57

more visit and. My city centre.

16:02

WNYC Studios is supported by the

16:04

Natural Resources Defense Council. Using science,

16:07

the law, and people power, NRDC

16:09

is committed to confronting the climate

16:11

crisis, protecting public health, and

16:14

safeguarding nature. They address the

16:16

impact of fossil fuels on communities and

16:18

our environment. They help protect wildlife, public

16:20

lands, and irreplaceable ecosystems that all living

16:23

things depend on. They work to enact

16:25

policies for clean air, clean water, and

16:27

access to nature for all. You

16:30

can help NRDC safeguard the Earth

16:32

for future generations. Visit

16:34

nrdc.org/WNYC for more

16:37

information. This episode of

16:39

Science Friday is brought to you by Shark

16:41

Week, the podcast from Discovery Channel. Sharks

16:44

have been the subject of lore and legend for centuries,

16:46

and a lot of what we think is shark fact

16:48

is actually shark fiction. On

16:51

Shark Week, the podcast, uncover the scientific

16:53

explanation behind some of the weirdest shark

16:55

tales. Listen to Shark Week, the podcast,

16:58

wherever you get your podcasts. If

17:03

you live in a city, you might

17:05

assume that the animals you see every

17:07

day, like birds, bugs, or squirrels, have

17:10

adapted perfectly fine to living in an

17:12

urban environment. Unfortunately, that's not

17:14

always the case. Urbanization is

17:16

directly linked to biodiversity loss.

17:19

But researchers at UCLA wanted to

17:21

find out specifically which animals

17:23

thrive and struggle in an

17:26

urban environment. So

17:28

they turned to a large source

17:30

of readily available data, iNaturalist, the

17:33

app where people log the plants and animals they

17:35

see, along with their location and

17:37

the date. And the scientists use

17:39

this information to determine which animals were the

17:42

most tolerant of urban environments over a period

17:44

of time. And you might be surprised by

17:46

some of the results. Here

17:48

to tell us about them, as well as what

17:51

city managers can learn from the data to increase

17:53

biodiversity in urban environments, is

17:55

Joey Curti, PhD candidate in

17:57

ecology and evolutionary biology at UCLA.

18:01

They were a co-author on that study published

18:03

in plus one. Joey, welcome to

18:05

Science Friday. Hi, thank you for having me.

18:07

Thank you so much for being here. So if I'm

18:10

an animal living in a city, what

18:12

kinds of factors are going to be

18:14

stacked against me in terms of my

18:16

ability to survive and thrive? Yeah, that's a

18:18

great question. It's going to depend a lot

18:20

about your natural history. So you

18:22

can imagine if you're a flighted animal, say a

18:25

bird, there's going to be a lot of things

18:27

that you can encounter on the landscape. For example,

18:29

buildings that have reflective surfaces that might pose a

18:31

challenge to you as you're sort of navigating across

18:33

the landscape. Similarly, you know, you

18:36

can imagine if you're an upturnal flighted

18:38

animal, say a bat, so you use

18:40

echolocation to find prey and maybe

18:42

road noises are really impactful to your ability

18:45

to do so. Similarly, the way that we

18:47

light cities is really impactful for a lot

18:49

of animals. And this can impact your ability

18:51

to find your home, your ability to find

18:53

prey, for example. So there are a lot

18:55

of factors in an urban landscape that can

18:58

be really challenging for our animal species here.

19:00

And, you know, if you don't mind me

19:02

asking, why is it important for a city

19:04

to have healthy biodiversity? Yeah, so I'm a

19:06

conservation biologist and I'm absolutely in the camp

19:08

of biodiversity having an intrinsic value. And I

19:10

think that it enriches my life every day

19:12

to go outside into my yard and to

19:15

see all the native animals flourishing. But

19:17

I also know that a lot of people,

19:19

it's a more convincing argument to say biodiversity

19:21

protects your health. And so there are a

19:24

lot of studies out there, especially with birds,

19:26

that show that your exposure to

19:28

animal generated noises, for example, birdsong,

19:31

really do a lot to reduce

19:33

your stress levels and your levels

19:35

of anxiety and depression. And

19:37

so biodiversity inherently can have a

19:40

major impact on our human health

19:42

and our health span as individuals.

19:44

I want to ask you, though, I hear that you're a big fan of the

19:47

app iNaturalist. How did you use it

19:49

in this study? Yeah, so you can't

19:51

go out and measure and monitor every different

19:53

species as a group of scientists unless you

19:55

want to spend a lifetime doing so. And

19:58

so we were excited to be able to leverage the this

20:00

amazing crowdsource dataset that tons of people

20:02

use across the city on their daily

20:05

lives. So it's an incredibly vast dataset. So

20:07

it's about 189 million observations. So it's

20:11

a ton of data to work with. And

20:13

so we, we downloaded observations from across

20:16

Los Angeles, as well as 150 kilometers

20:18

surrounding the city. And that

20:20

left us with well over a million

20:22

observations to work with across a bunch

20:24

of different taxonomic groupings that we thought

20:27

were important to monitor, including mammals, birds,

20:29

amphibians, reptiles, and several different groups of

20:31

invertebrates. And after pretty strict filtering, we

20:33

were left with 511 different native species

20:35

that we felt we had good data

20:37

in order to move forward with our

20:40

analyses. We were really interested in understanding

20:42

how these species on an individual level

20:44

relate to measures of urban intensity. And

20:46

for that, we mean things like light

20:49

pollution, so artificial light at night,

20:51

sound pollution, and measures of impervious surfaces,

20:53

so our concrete or asphalt, things like

20:55

that. So what did you

20:58

find? What animals did better than

21:00

expected? Which ones did worse? And

21:02

how did you come to those conclusions?

21:05

Yeah, absolutely. So species can take on

21:07

a negative value, meaning they're have a

21:09

intolerance to our measure of urban intensity

21:11

or a positive value, which means they're

21:13

positively associated with urban intensity. And

21:15

we found that on average, species had

21:17

a negative association with urban intensity, meaning

21:19

that they were more likely to be

21:21

seen and observed in wild spaces

21:24

across the city. So you can think near Santa Monica

21:26

Mountains or your Griffith Park, for example. We

21:28

also found, though, that some

21:30

birds, for example, did have

21:32

positive associations with urban intensity.

21:34

Most had negative interactions. And

21:36

then on average, the one group that did well

21:39

seemed to be snails and slugs. Was

21:41

that something you expected to see? I mean, I

21:43

would say that all of this was pretty surprising

21:45

to me. I'm not a malacologist, but

21:48

when we sort of dig into the

21:50

literature a bit, potentially ornamental landscaping, for

21:52

example, lawns, different plants that we plant

21:54

in our yards might have an impact

21:57

on our native snails and slugs. Snails

21:59

and slugs need more. to survive. And

22:01

so if we introduce a lot of

22:03

moisture to irrigate our non-native plants that

22:05

we introduced into our lawns, potentially that's

22:07

actually creating good habitat if you're a

22:09

snail or slug. Okay,

22:11

so what about the animals that did

22:14

worse, right? The ones that were the

22:16

least tolerant of urban environments? Yeah, so

22:18

animals that tended to have negative relationships

22:21

with urbanization tend to be our habitat

22:23

specialist animals. So for example California quail,

22:25

and these birds really rely on shrub

22:27

cover and of course you know we

22:29

don't see those in downtown Los Angeles

22:31

because that habitat no longer exist. So

22:34

you know things like acorn woodpeckers or

22:36

rentant species, these are all birds, they

22:38

tend to just really stick to these

22:40

core habitat fragments that still exist within

22:42

the city. So for example Griffin Park.

22:45

So there's a component of human behavior in

22:47

this study as well, right? You were dependent

22:49

on people's logging sightings of various animals

22:51

and I would imagine that that

22:54

could introduce certain biases, maybe in the types

22:56

of animals logged or in the times

22:58

of day when people log them. How

23:01

did you control for that? Yeah, that's a

23:03

fabulous question. You know we're really lucky

23:05

to be working directly with Morgan Tingley

23:07

and his lab which do a lot

23:09

to work with these big data sets

23:11

and be able to control for these

23:13

different sort of confounding variables and proximity

23:16

to roads and trail networks is a

23:18

major source of bias for these data

23:20

sources. Similarly different areas

23:22

of the city have different amounts

23:24

of effort for example but

23:26

essentially if you're in a grid cell

23:29

in Los Angeles and any bird is

23:31

observed for example, we take that as

23:33

indication that that grid cell has had survey

23:35

effort and therefore if you know we're looking

23:37

for for example a rent in that area

23:39

and we don't see it but we see

23:42

some birds have been observed, we take that

23:44

as a sign that at least some effort

23:46

has been taken to try to find birds

23:48

in that area so it's probably a true

23:50

absence of that individual species. Not

23:52

to be too pessimistic here but is it

23:54

even possible for a huge urban landscape

23:56

like LA to have healthy

23:58

urban biodiversity? You know, I

24:00

think I have to be optimistic as

24:03

a conservation biologist. There are a lot

24:05

of initiatives here within the city to

24:07

try to address this no net loss

24:09

of biodiversity by 2050 goal that

24:11

we have. We actually have a wildlife ordinance

24:13

that's going through city council right now to

24:15

make sure that the sort of footprint of

24:17

the new development is sort of biophilic in

24:20

nature and is not hindering

24:22

our native species from moving across

24:24

the landscape, for example. And so

24:26

I'm really optimistic for our city

24:28

to really do absolutely everything that

24:31

it can to try to improve and maintain

24:33

our biodiversity. Did this research make

24:35

you look at Los Angeles any differently? You

24:37

know, I've always been a big proponent

24:39

of iNaturalist. I can actually be

24:41

kind of an insufferable hiking partner here in Los

24:43

Angeles, stopping every five seconds to

24:46

take pictures of beetles or bees

24:48

or, you know, your Western fence lizard.

24:51

But I think really I didn't really

24:53

understand until having worked with these data

24:55

sets how valuable these crowdsourced data can

24:58

be and how they can really advance

25:00

science. And so now that I've worked

25:02

with these data, I'm even more insufferable.

25:05

When I got outside, I

25:08

document everything that I possibly can because

25:10

I know that this is really feeding

25:12

directly into tools the

25:14

city is using to evaluate its nature. All

25:17

right. Thanks for taking the time to

25:19

explain all of this, Joey. I really

25:21

appreciate it. It's been an absolute pleasure.

25:23

Thank you so much for having me.

25:25

Joey Kurti is a Ph.D. candidate in

25:28

ecology and evolutionary biology at UCLA. That's

25:30

all the time we have for today. Lots of folks help

25:33

make the show happen, including Annie Nero,

25:35

Emma Gomez, Danielle Johnson. Next

25:37

time, we'll get an update on how some states

25:39

are making it easier for consumers to fix their

25:41

own devices. I'm Sci-fi producer,

25:44

DePetershmitt. See you then. This

25:50

episode of Signs Friday is brought to you

25:52

by Shark Week, the podcast from Discovery Channel.

25:55

Sharks have been the subject of lore and legend for

25:57

centuries, and a lot of what we think is shark

25:59

fact. is actually shark fiction. On

26:02

Shark Week, the podcast, uncover the scientific

26:04

explanation behind some of the weirdest shark

26:07

tales. Listen to Shark Week, the podcast,

26:09

wherever you get your podcasts. Support

26:12

for this podcast and the following

26:14

message come from Doubleday, publishers

26:16

of Lessons in Chemistry. Be

26:19

inspired. Read Lessons in

26:21

Chemistry, the number one global bestseller

26:23

with more than six million copies

26:25

sold. Meet Elizabeth Sott,

26:28

a 60s-era scientist who brings her

26:31

smart and unapologetic worldview to a

26:33

TV cooking show that has the

26:35

power to change lives. Lessons

26:38

in Chemistry is available wherever books

26:40

are sold from Doubleday.