Featured image: An aerial view of the Jebel Irhoud excavation in Morocco, worksite of anthropologists hunting for hominid fossils. Scientists have used these digs as excuses to travel the world for well over a century. (Courtesy Pulse Headlines and Shannon McPherron)

Dr. Emily Kern is a recent graduate of Princeton’s Department of History, and she visits us this week to show us the twists and turns of paleoanthropology over time. That is, how have scientists understood humanity’s evolution as we learned more and more about the world? Hear how, until very recently, most everyone thought humans evolved out of Asia–an idea borne by tracing Indoeuropean languages to their roots and assuming humans came from the same place as language does. The international endeavor to trace our evolution back to Africa has taken both explorers (the avid and the methodical) and better methods for dating fossils to 100,000 – 1 million years. Like many fields of science, paleoanthropology has become increasingly complicated the more we discover.

Earlier in the show, news and an explanation of a process you thought you understood:

• Scientists in China have cloned two primates, moving us closer to cloning humans (though we’re still quite far from doing that).
• We’ve lost a hero of computer science, Mary Lee Berners-Lee, who worked on the first comercially-sold computer and fought for gender equality amid programmers.
• When does water boil? At or around 100 C, but it’s more complicated then you think. This makes obtaining a good reference temperature expensive!

As for the music, our playlist can be found on WPRB.com or below.

 

Featured image: A New World inhabitant riding an armadillo, one of the most unbelievable animals Europeans found when they sailed to the Americas. (Courtesy Canadian Library and Archives)

This episode, we interview Florencia Pierri, graduate student in Princeton’s Department of History and historian of science, to learn about reconciling the taxonomy of the Old World with the new discoveries of European explorers. How did mythical creatures–unicorns, dragons, mermaids–come into popular consciousness? How did sailors and merchants comprehend the new creatures they met in the Americas and on the seas? Turns out the absorption of a whole new evolutionary tree is a difficult undertaking for a culture that thought it already knew every animal! Join us to learn why armadillos and hummingbirds were so prized by Europeans, how the Jesuits felt about skunks, and how unicorns gradually receded from maps of the world.

In other 🐢 news:

• A pianist’s brain uses different circuits for playing jazz versus classical music, neuroscientists have found.
• Sea turtles are being scouted from the air: a new study counts them using drones, find that there are far more near the shore at a given time than previously thought!
• Because sea turtles’ genders are determined based on temperature, there are now 116 females for every male in one Australian population.

The playlist is available on WPRB.com or below.

Featured image: Carl Sagan, science populist and advocate of education against pseudoscience, in conversation with Immanuel Velikovsky, author of Worlds in Collision. (Courtesy Everything’s Electric)

Today we hosted Dr. Michael Gordin, Princeton science historian and expert on fringe scientific theories. Central tenets of science are widely regarded as mainstream, but newer or more radical theories sit further away from consensus. These fringe topics supply science with new ideas, but they also spawn even further removed theories—everything from Bigfoot to UFOs to self-help quantum mechanics. In this undefined range between established and untested research, scientists need to establish what sets the bar for “real” science. In a remarkable perspective, Dr. Gordin connects Scientology with a cataclysmic Venus encounter that supposedly occurred in 1500 BCE, and shows us how appreciation for science drives the many kooky theories that bother scientists.

In other news:

• High-resolution satellite images are being used for Afghan archeology, giving artifact hunters access to sites in dangerous places without having to set foot there.
• Scientists have estimated the human casualties of severe asteroid impacts, with terrifying results—even though tidal waves may not be as bad as the shock wave itself.
• The white nose fungal disease that plagues bats appears to be damaged by UV light, so that shining lightbulbs in hibernation caves may be all it takes to sanitize bats against the epidemic.

The playlist can be found below or on WPRB.com.