This Week: I’m back from vacation, and podcasting from Boston again. We have a story about a collaboration between an indigenous villagers in Guyana and international scientists. A new study finds a correlation between weather patterns and conflict in the tropics. Also, the creationists of Galapagos islands.

Customizes Atlases of the Amazon: In the Amazon, scientists have teamed up with indigenous communities to create atlases that show how hunting and other activities affect the forest. Elsa Youngsteadt has the story from Guyana.
Read Elsa’s blog post about this research from February, 2011.

Hot Weather and Conflict in the Tropics: A new study has found a strong correlation between extreme hot and dry weather and conflict in the tropics. Host Marco Werman speaks with the study’s lead author, Solomon Hsiang, who looked back over more than 50 years of data on climate and conflict.

Creationists on the Galapagos Islands:The Galapagos Islands may have inspired Charles Darwin to develop his theory of evolution, but today they are inhabited largely by creationists. Tony Azios has the story.

Photo by nicholaslaughlin

We have lots of news from the tropics this week. Elsa brings us news about the history of coconut farming, palm plantations in the Amazon and discovery of a previously unknown indigenous group in Brazil. Then, some news about where beauty resides in the brain. Our Forum discussion with epidemiologist William Foege about conquering deadly diseases continues through July 12th. Click here to join the conversation.

Beauty Perception in the Brain: Beauty may well be in the beholder’s eyes, but it is also in the beholder’s brain. A new study by scientists in the U.K. have identified a region in the brain that is involved in the perception of beauty. The researchers put volunteers in an fMRI machine that measures the activity in people’s brains. Then, the volunteers were showed some paintings and made to listen to musical excerpts and asked to rate them as very beautiful or very ugly. Every time the volunteers felt a painting or a musical piece was beautiful, one particular region of their brain lit up in the brain scans. The region is called medial orbito-frontal cortex, and is part of the brain’s reward and pleasure center.
Guest: Semir Zeki
The study was published in the journal PLoS ONE.

Elsa’s Favorite Science Stories:

• History of Coconuts: A new genetic analysis of more than 1,000 coconuts reveals that humans invented coconut cultivation twice, independently, in two different parts of the world.
  The study.
• Oil Palms in Brazil: Oil palm plantations have been the cause of environmental destruction and greenhouse gas emission in Southeast Asia. Now Brazil plans to get in on the oil palm action, but a recent article suggests that things may go differently there.
  The full article.
  The Reuters version.
  More environmentally friendly palms.
• Uncontacted Tribes in Brazil The Brazilian government has confirmed that a previously unknown tribe of about 200 people is living in a remote reserve near the Peruvian border. Their conclusion is based on aerial photos of the people, their huts and their gardens.
  See the photos of the settlement in this article from Wired Science.
  Photos of a different uncontacted group were released in February.
  More about uncontacted tribes from Survival International.

Making Science Cool in Japanese Schools: Japan fears it may lose its edge in technology, as fewer and fewer young people pursue careers in science and engineering. Some Japanese educators are trying to reverse this trend.
Reporter: Ari Daniel Shapiro.
Get a tour of Yokohama Frontier High School.

Can We Innovate Our Way to Prosperity: President Obama says the U.S. must invest in science and technology to stay competitive in today’s global economy. The World’s Lisa Mullins speaks with Dartmouth business professor Chris Trimble about the role science plays in boosting the nation’s economic growth. Trimble is also taking your questions in our latest Science Forum.
Guest: Chirs Trimble.
Join our online conversation with Chris Trimble. He’s taking questions until March 10th.

A Place Called ‘Hell’: We’re taking you on a walk through a place called ‘Hell.’ Actually, the name is Infierno, the Spanish word for hell.  Infierno is an indigenous community in the Peruvian Amazon, an area that is especially rich in biological diversity.
Guest: Enrique Ortiz, president of the Association for the Conservation of the Amazon Basin.

Our visit to Infierno was produced by The World’s Science Editor David Baron. He traveled to Peru with help from the International Reporting Project.

The researchers recruited more than 300 members of Makushi and Wapishana groups to survey other members of their own communities about their religion, language, technology and other cultural practices. The participants also tallied the animals their communities hunted (such as the tapir at left), and monitored biodiversity in the surrounding forests.

The results revealed a fascinating connection between the communities’ spiritual beliefs and game animal abundance. Hunters from the most traditional groups refused to enter areas which they believed to house dangerous spirits or special powers, according to a study that Fragoso’s team published last year. These spiritual sites turned out to be important for the wildlife too. They served as refuges for game animals and averted over-hunting. Those results square with what other biologists and anthropologists are finding the world over: “Sacred groves” may serve as key conservation areas.

But not all indigenous hunters are traditional. Some communities have adopted the language, religion and technologies of the mainstream cultures in Brazil and Guyana, and others are somewhere in between. When I talked with Fragoso after the session, he said that the mainstream groups also seemed to have a healthy abundance of animals–perhaps because they have adopted western concepts of game management and conservation. It was the communities in cultural transition, somewhere between traditional and mainstream, that had over-hunted their forests. Fragoso thinks that might be because those groups lack either set of conservation rules.

Fragoso is still analyzing some of the results from the study, but he says some peer reviewers have taken issue with their methods, arguing that the data collected by the indigenous research assistants are unreliable. (This wouldn’t be the first time that combining elements of social and natural sciences has resulted in a complicated review process.) It’s true that the team caught some mistakes–as the data came in, they noticed that some workers were rounding off compass headings, for example. So they conducted additional training. Without the communities’ help, the group never could have conducted such an extensive study that included dozens of villages and thousands of square kilometers of forest. As with any result in science, time will tell whether further studies corroborate these conclusions.

I find it inspiring that researchers are making this kind of effort to understand the hard-to-study factors (such as cultural change) that affect the forest and its inhabitants. Indeed, Fragoso and his team plan to return the data, in atlas form, to the indigenous communities that participated in the study. He hopes the results will provide them and their countries’ governments with relevant information for planning land use and negotiating indigenous land rights.

I recorded an interview with Fragoso about this work, so you can look forward to hearing more about the project on a future podcast.

Elsa’s Favorite Time Stories:

• Redefining the Second: To most of us, a second is just a fraction of one day. But the official international second is defined in terms of the cesium atom and the frequency of the microwave radiation that it can absorb. This ultra-precise atomic clock is the basis of GPS technology, but physicists such as Patrick Gill say we could do even better. New atomic clocks could measure time with a precision in the trillionths of a second (instead of mere billionths)–but the formal definition of the second won’t change until at least 2019.
  Patrick Gill’s work on new atomic clocks.
  All about the cesium clock at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colorado.
  A brief history of timekeeping, from NIST.
• Hugs in the Present Moment: Olympic athletes hug their coaches for three seconds following a performance. That rule applies to Asians, Europeans and Americans alike, says developmental psychologist Emese Nagy. Her discovery fits in with decades’ worth of data that suggest that our perception of the present moment lasts about three seconds.
  The study.
  Related news story from ScienceNOW.
• Tricking Our Internal Clocks: Our natural sense of time is fairly mysterious–and it’s susceptible to illusions. There isn’t a pacemaker in our brains that ticks off seconds, minutes and hours; rather, our timing emerges from a variety of brain functions. And, according to a new study led by neuroscientist Maneesh Sahani* and colleagues, what we see makes a difference too. The researchers could accelerate or brake participants’ perception of a half-second by changing the rate at which random movement played on a computer screen.
  The study.
  Watch the “rolling clouds” clips that fooled peoples’ internal clocks.
  More on our sense of time from the L.A. Times and from Discover.
  *Correction: Maneesh Sahani is at University College London, not King’s College as I said on the podcast. -EY

Chevron in Ecuador: Anchor Lisa Mullins speaks with the BBC’s Irene Caselli about the latest turn in a long legal battle over the environmental legacy of oil drilling in the Ecuadorian Amazon. A court yesterday ordered the U.S. company Chevron to pay damages of roughly $9 billion in the case.
Irene Caselli’s BBC coverage.
New York Times coverage, including background on the case.
Ecuador’s plans to conserve forest by keeping some of its oil in the ground.

Northern Bird Habitat: The Great Backyard Bird Count gets under way this weekend. The idea is to report on what’s on view in your backyard. Miyoko Chu of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology explains why counting birds such as the bar-tailed godwit is important.
The Great Backyard Bird Count.

Rethinking Polio Control: In podcast no. 72, we brought you an interview with D.A. Henderson, the man who wiped out smallpox. At the time, Henderson was skeptical of aims to eradicate polio. He has since changed his mind.
Read more in this New York Times article.
‘Gates calls for final push to eradicate polio,’ in the New York Times.

Peruvian Potato Varieties Headed for Doomsday Seed Vault: Indigenous groups in Peru have announced that they’re sending some 1500 varieties of potatoes to the doomsday seed bank in Svalbard, Norway. The potatoes are currently grown in the Cusco Potato Park, located in the Sacred Valley of the Incas. Read more here.
More about potatoes from The International Potato Center.
More about potatoes in this slide show by The World’s David Baron.

This week:  It has been six months since an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico led to the biggest offshore oil spill in U.S. history. The oil spill has renewed discussion of alternative energy sources — including biofuels. Biofuels may ease America’s dependence on oil, but what are the true costs of turning crops into fuel? We explore that question in this week’s show, which is the first of two parts.


The Price of Biofuels: The Obama Administration has set a goal of more than tripling America’s biofuels production in the next 12 years. But biofuels are controversial. Some environmentalists argue that the production of biofuels actually increases pollution, and that as land use shifts in favor of biofuels, fuel crops can displace food crops. In this documentary produced for the BBC World Service, Gerry Northam delves into the debate over the true price of biofuels. He begins in Paraguay, where the soy industry has expanded to accommodate the growing global appetite for biofuels.
Reporter: Gerry Northam
This documentary was part of the PRI/BBC documentary series The Changing World.

This week: We’re taking you to Sydney where residents are getting their drinking water from a new desalination plant. Then to Europe where researchers found signs of consciousness inside the brains of seemingly unconscious people. Then a story about the discovery of an ancient civilization in the Brazilian Amazon. Elsa’s back with news about the evolution of human emotional expressions. And a researcher from Corvallis, OR tells us about his favorite music for doing science.

The Active Brains of ‘Vegetative’ Patients: A new study by British and Belgian scientists has raised provocative questions about the inner lives of patients in what doctors call a ‘vegetative state.’ They’re seemingly unaware of their surroundings. The new study finds that its possible for some of these patients to respond to simple “yes” and “no” questions with their brains.
Report by: Rhitu Chatterjee.
The study.

An Australian Water Factory: For years Sydney has been experiencing erratic rainfall. But the city may have found a solution to its water crisis. Starting this winter, Sydney’s residents will be getting their drinking water from a new desalination plant.
Story by: Phil Mercer
The Australian government on the future of its water sources.
Read a transcript of this story.

Elsa’s Favorite Science Stories:

• Insect Migration: Two new studies reveal how migratory insects have evolved for efficient long-distance flights.
  The study about Monarch butterfly wings.
  BBC coverage.
  We talked about monarch migration in Podcast #33, too.
  The study on high-flying migratory moths.
  More on the moths’ adaptations from NPR.
• Cold War Affected Bird Diversity: The Cold War didn’t just divide people of Western and Eastern Europe. It also curtailed the movement of alien bird species across the continent.
  The study.
• Expressing Emotions Across Cultures: Some vocal expressions seem to be more universal than others. When asked to interpret another culture’s non-verbal sounds, people found it easier to understand expressions of disgust and pain than those of surprise and pleasure.
  Note from Elsa: To do this study, the researchers had to find people who were not already exposed to western culture. They worked with the Himba, a semi-nomadic group in Namibia. I talked with study author Disa Sauter, and she told me that she worried about introducing remote groups of Himba to western clothes, technology, and stuff for the first time. They might want the same things and begin to devalue their own culture. But instead it turned out that the Himba pitied the poor researchers because they didn’t have any cows! As pastoralists, the Himba measure wealth and status in livestock, and were concerned for the pitiable westerners who didn’t have even a single goat.
  The study.
  BBC coverage.
  Listen to expressions of amusement, disgust, fear, sadness, surprise and achievement. In this sound file, we’ve included Western and Himba versions of each emotion, in that order. Download MP3
  Disa Sauter for provided the recordings of emotional expressions.
  Photo: A Himba woman participates in the study. Credit: Frank Eisner.

Amazon Geoglyphs: The Amazon forest covers over a billion and a half acres of South America. The forest is dense and inhospitable to humans and anthropologists have long thought that its only inhabited by small and simple societies. But that hasn’t stopped rumors about long-lost civilizations deep inside the Amazon. Could there be any truth to those rumors? Find out in this story.
Report by: The World’s Marina Giovanelli.
Report on Pre-Columbian Geometric Earthworks.
Geoglifos.com

Music in Science: Luis Valenzuela studies root growth in berry crops at Oregon State University. His work could help farmers know the best time fertilize their crops. Luis’s days in the field are often long and uncomfortable–he spends most of his time observing roots underground using a special camera and clear plastic tubes. Luis told us which music can cheer him up when he feels burned out.
Produced by: Elsa Youngsteadt

This week: Swine flu continues to spread. In today’s podcast you’ll hear from two parts of the world that are dealing with the pandemic. We also have a story about the lessons two American brothers learned while bringing renewable energy to the rural poor in Nicaragua. We follow up by talking to environmental engineer Anu Ramaswami about why technological fixes often fail. We have an update on negotiations over a new international climate change treaty. And a new twist on an old tale about a duo of man-eating lions in Kenya.

Ukraine Overreacts to Swine Flu: Ukrainians are panicking about the spreading swine flu virus. But is the hysteria justified? You’ll hear how culture and politics rather than science and good information may be causing Ukraine to react so dramatically.
Report: By Brigid McCarthy in Kiev.
Links:
Information on H1N1 flu from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
More on the upcoming Ukrainian elections from the BBC

Swine Flu in the Amazon: A thousand members of the Yanomami tribe deep in the Amazon have fallen ill with swine flu. Seven have died. Venezuela has shut off a part of the forest to help protect the tribe.
Guest: Fiona Watson, Survival International.
Links:
BBC story
More about the Yanomami people from Survival International

Fighting Poverty in Nicaragua: Two American brothers, Mathias and Guillaume Craig, have dedicated themselves to bringing renewable energy to the rural poor in Nicaragua. They returned home with some important lessons about the limits of technology in eradicating poverty.
Report: By Eliza Barclay in Nicaragua.
Links:
Website of blueEnergy, the Craigs’ organization

Re-thinking Engineering: The Craig Brothers are not alone in discovering that technological fixes often fail to produce the intended results. Some educators say engineers need more training in the social sciences, so those who work with technology can fashion their efforts to serve people better. We talk to one educator on the forefront of this movement.
Guest: Anu Ramaswami, University of Colorado.

Do you have an example of a failed technological fix? Or thoughts on how to design solutions that really work? Bring them to our online discussion with Anu Ramaswami in The World Science Forum here. Anu will be taking your questions and sharing her thoughts through November 13th.

Elsa’s Favorite Science Stories:

• Man-eaters of Tsavo: In 1898, two male lions terrorized and killed workers building a railroad over the river Tsavo, in Kenya. Legend has it that the lions killed and ate more than 140 people. Researchers have now analyzed tissues from the lions – on display at the Field Museum in Chicago – and conclude that the lions did not eat as many people as previously thought.
  The study
  Information about the Tsavo lions, then and now, from the Field Museum of Natural History
  World Wildlife Fund page on human-wildlife conflict
• Language Learning in the Womb: Babies may start their language lessons earlier than previously thought. German researchers have found evidence that fetuses  pick up elements of their mother tongue in the womb.
  The study
• Gene Therapy Shows New Promise: Two new gene therapy studies have reported promising results. One treated ADL, a neurodegenerative disease that causes nerves to lose their protective sheath. The other cured hereditary blindness.
  The ADL study
  The blindness study
  Notes on bioethics and gene therapy from Georgetown University

Climate Negotiations: This week negotiators met in Spain to discuss the possibilities of a new international climate treaty, but chances remain slim that countries will settle on a new treaty at the climate summit in Copenhagen next month.
Report: By The World’s Marina Giovannelli.
(This story is a podcast exclusive! It is a longer version of a story that aired on The World earlier this week.)
Collection of BBC stories on the Copenhagen summit

Mysterious Bear Disease: An unknown disease is striking bears in zoos in Germany and elsewhere. It is turning spectacled bears bald.
BBC story

New Yorker writer David Grann has a new book out, about an explorer from the 1920s who became obsessed with finding the Lost City of Z in the Brazilian Amazon. Grann talks about his own obsession in writing the book.

A million and a half years ago, one of our ancestors took a walk in mud in Kenya’s Rift Valley. Last year, researchers from Rutgers University found these fossil footprints. John Harris, one of the scientists, says the footprints are the oldest ever found that look completely modern.

In Australia, paleontologist John Long of Museum Victoria in Melbourne has been studying fossil fish from the Gogo rock formation. He’s now found that some of these fish, called placoderms, were having sex 380 million years ago. It is the oldest recorded evidence of such behavior.

And a hundred years ago, an Italian millionaire launched a movement called futurism. The basic idea: the past was dead, and the future was all about science and technology. We look at the history of futurism.

And, according to a new study from the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, infidelity may be a function of hormone levels—at least for women. The study found that women with higher levels of the hormone estradiol were more likely to flirt or have an affair.

Music:
Marvin Gaye, Let’s Get It On

download

See Rutgers’ John Harris talk about the old footprints.