Ari Daniel
Appearances
NPR News Now
NPR News: 03-04-2025 3PM EST
The machine is about the size of a water bottle, and it was built to detect different elements, including the chemical signatures of life. Yusuf Salam is a PhD student at the University of Bern.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 03-04-2025 3PM EST
Salam used the instrument on a piece of gypsum he harvested from northern Algeria, gypsum that he knew contained fossilized microbes.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 03-04-2025 3PM EST
Since gypsum is present on Mars as well, perhaps one day the instrument could be used to look for ancient microbes on the red planet, too. The study highlights the intimate interconnection between minerals and microbes on our planet, and perhaps beyond. For NPR News, I'm Ari Daniel.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 01-15-2025 8PM EST
For much of human history, societies have been centered around kinship, so couples have had to decide whose community they're going to live with. Most of the time, it's been the man's, which is why researchers were surprised when they sequenced the ancient DNA of a burial site of a Celtic tribe dating from 100 BCE to 100 CE in what's now southern England.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 01-15-2025 8PM EST
The group was related along the female line, meaning that the men had left their families to live with their wives' community. Laura Cassidy is a geneticist at Trinity College Dublin.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 01-15-2025 8PM EST
The same thing was true among hundreds of Iron Age genomes from cemeteries across Britain, suggesting it's a custom dating back centuries. For NPR News, I'm Ari Daniel.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 01-09-2025 8PM EST
Sam Arman took a detailed look at the teeth of more than 900 kangaroos from both fossils and modern animals.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 01-09-2025 8PM EST
Armin, who's a paleontologist at a natural history museum in central Australia, used those scratches to figure out what the ancient kangaroos ate. His answer, a mix of shrubs and grasses, suggesting that a changing climate that wiped out a single group of plants likely wasn't behind the extinctions. Rather, he thinks humans who arrived in Australia around this time had something to do with it.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 01-09-2025 8PM EST
Other paleontologists disagree, citing evidence that climate change did play more of a role. For NPR News, I'm Ari Daniel.
Short Wave
New Antivenom, Thanks To 200 Intentional Snake Bites
Ooh, that's really, really cool. Yes, that does help quite a bit.
Short Wave
New Antivenom, Thanks To 200 Intentional Snake Bites
Oh, gosh. Okay. Tell me more. Tell me more.
Short Wave
New Antivenom, Thanks To 200 Intentional Snake Bites
Wow, wow. Okay, but all of this biting, it's to help people, right?
Short Wave
New Antivenom, Thanks To 200 Intentional Snake Bites
Yes, this is what I thought of as soon as you told me about this story.
Short Wave
New Antivenom, Thanks To 200 Intentional Snake Bites
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, Shore Wavers, Regina Barber here. And today I'm joined by reporter Ari Daniel, who's going to talk to us about snakes. Hey, Ari.
Short Wave
New Antivenom, Thanks To 200 Intentional Snake Bites
So today on the show, the anti-venom man. We're talking about a different approach to developing a treatment to venomous snake bites and the researchers who use Tim Friede's antibodies to do it. Antibodies developed over a nearly quarter century of self-inflicted bites. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
New Antivenom, Thanks To 200 Intentional Snake Bites
OK, Ari, I think the first thing I want to understand is, like, what is antivenom? Like, what is it made out of exactly?
Short Wave
New Antivenom, Thanks To 200 Intentional Snake Bites
Right, right. I kind of know about this. Like even after the toxin has left your body, you retain like immune memory of it, right?
Short Wave
New Antivenom, Thanks To 200 Intentional Snake Bites
So that if you like encounter this like foreign substance again, your body will recognize it and ideally mobilize against it more quickly. Like some vaccines work like this.
Short Wave
New Antivenom, Thanks To 200 Intentional Snake Bites
Wait, clumsy like somebody who's been bitten a lot?
Short Wave
New Antivenom, Thanks To 200 Intentional Snake Bites
Wow. So, like, what happens next? Like, were the researchers able to, like, synthesize something from Tim that, like, maybe could work as an antivitam?
Short Wave
New Antivenom, Thanks To 200 Intentional Snake Bites
A working cocktail of more than just one antibody?
Short Wave
New Antivenom, Thanks To 200 Intentional Snake Bites
Wow, that is really, really cool. Is this the biggest number of snakes targeted by an antivenom, like, until now?
Short Wave
New Antivenom, Thanks To 200 Intentional Snake Bites
Wow. Okay, so what's the next step here?
Short Wave
New Antivenom, Thanks To 200 Intentional Snake Bites
OK, that makes sense. But let me ask you, Ari, like what happened to that like snake bite dude like Tim Freedy?
Short Wave
New Antivenom, Thanks To 200 Intentional Snake Bites
Oh, so is he still like letting snakes bite him?
Short Wave
New Antivenom, Thanks To 200 Intentional Snake Bites
Wow. Okay. Well, I'm glad he sees it this way. I could not do this.
Short Wave
New Antivenom, Thanks To 200 Intentional Snake Bites
Message received. Don't learn from TV. It's fantasy for a reason. Ari, thank you so much for bringing us this story. I had a great time.
Short Wave
New Antivenom, Thanks To 200 Intentional Snake Bites
This episode was produced by Hannah Chin and edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Jimmy Keeley was the audio engineer. Special thanks to Johannes Dergi. Beth Donovan is our senior director and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barber. Thanks for listening to Shortwave from NPR.
Short Wave
New Antivenom, Thanks To 200 Intentional Snake Bites
Okay, this is not helping my fear of snakes.
Short Wave
Extracting Brains ... For Science
So Camila grabs her scalpel and saw and swims to shore.
Short Wave
Extracting Brains ... For Science
She swims. She really wants that brain. Wow. She gets to the beach, and she's totally soaked. But she whips out her tools, and after a couple of hours, she manages to extract the fresh, intact brain from the recently deceased whale.
Short Wave
Extracting Brains ... For Science
Camila brings it back to her lab where it joins the ranks of what she says has become the largest collection of whale and dolphin brains in all of Latin America.
Short Wave
Extracting Brains ... For Science
And how she's recruiting a new generation of Brazilian researchers to roll up their sleeves to join her.
Short Wave
Extracting Brains ... For Science
No. Usually the brains come to her at the Orca Institute. That was where I met up with Camila in mid-December. She was bedecked in marine mammal jewelry, dolphin earrings, a whale bracelet. You get the idea.
Short Wave
Extracting Brains ... For Science
The Orca Institute is a conservation organization outside of Vitoria in southeastern Brazil, where before recently taking time off for a short fellowship at Oxford, Camila worked as the scientific director. The morning I was there, a van had just pulled in. So there's a van with a special delivery?
Short Wave
Extracting Brains ... For Science
The Orca Institute tends to any marine mammal that strands itself along its section of the coast and either rehabilitates and returns it to the water if it's alive, or, as is the case with this recently deceased Guiana dolphin being hoisted into the air, brings it back to their facility to figure out what might have gone wrong.
Short Wave
Extracting Brains ... For Science
with an eye towards preventing similar deaths in the future.
Short Wave
Extracting Brains ... For Science
Well, one of the vets told me that often the animals become entangled with fishing gear, or they suspect loud underwater noises might cause the animals to surface too quickly. The staff here rotates through a daily on-call schedule because an animal can strand pretty much any time. But for Camila, these animals are a means to an end.
Short Wave
Extracting Brains ... For Science
You think about the brain. It's something she's been fascinated by ever since she was little. And here's why she thinks brains are so important to study.
Short Wave
Extracting Brains ... For Science
True to my word. Camila says there's actually very little known about the brains of whales and dolphins living in the waters off Central and South America. But mapping how those brains are wired up can teach scientists about the inner workings of these animals, about their behavior, and how they're adapted to living underwater.
Short Wave
Extracting Brains ... For Science
It's still early days of confirming the disease, Regina. But yes, there have been signs of the hallmarks of Alzheimer's in certain dolphins. So for all these reasons, Camila's intent on gathering and studying the brains of cetaceans.
Short Wave
Extracting Brains ... For Science
I do what I can. So back to Camila. She's collecting and gathering cetacean brains from this part of the world and is making real progress. She points to the 200-pound suspended guiana dolphin, a coastal species that lives in the Atlantic off Central and South America.
Short Wave
Extracting Brains ... For Science
Right, okay. So that's when this Brazilian neuroscientist I met named Camila Souza gets the call she's been waiting for. A baby humpback whale is adrift just offshore in the waters off southeastern Brazil. It's just died. And she wants its brain.
Short Wave
Extracting Brains ... For Science
Yeah, well, a few years back, Camila and her colleagues used an MRI to describe the neuroanatomy and internal brain structure of a Guiana dolphin that washed ashore west of Rio de Janeiro, which was a real achievement.
Short Wave
Extracting Brains ... For Science
Bingo. And that becomes super clear when Camila takes me to the necropsy room.
Short Wave
Extracting Brains ... For Science
That, Gina, is the sound of knives being sharpened. The vets are dissecting another dolphin, a female that recently stranded, and a parade of organs appears on the table before me to be measured and photographed.
Short Wave
Extracting Brains ... For Science
I did. I saw the heart. I saw a kidney. Wow. The uterus.
Short Wave
Extracting Brains ... For Science
Right, and that's a challenge in a big country like Brazil. The heat accelerates decomposition, so minutes matter, which means that sometimes Sousa has to extract the brain from an animal right on the beach and put it in preservative.
Short Wave
Extracting Brains ... For Science
But Camila's relentless, Daniela Telles told me. Daniela's one of the Orca Institute vets.
Short Wave
Extracting Brains ... For Science
So whenever the conditions do conspire in her favor, Camila gets herself another brain.
Short Wave
Extracting Brains ... For Science
I did. What do you think I've been building up to, Gina? Ha ha!
Short Wave
Extracting Brains ... For Science
I follow her next door to her office. This is definitely a refrigerator filled with brains. In this fridge alone, she's got a brain from a pygmy sperm whale, various dolphin species, and more. She lifts a brain out of the largest plastic container. It's from that baby humpback she swam ashore to dissect. And it's twice the size of a human brain.
Short Wave
Extracting Brains ... For Science
Wow. Wow. There before me is arguably the convoluted essence of a humpback whale, the thing that lets it swim and sing and so much more.
Short Wave
Extracting Brains ... For Science
Well, Camila says she'd likely be able to work abroad. She's got all this expertise. She has access to these understudied species. She's even done stints abroad. But there's only one place she wants to be, and that's Brazil.
Short Wave
Extracting Brains ... For Science
People like Hector Mincing, a PhD student in the lab who's developing a fancy tool to model the cetacean brain in 3D. He too wants to contribute to the field from Brazil.
Short Wave
Extracting Brains ... For Science
My last stop on my trip is a nearby stretch of beach. Camila looks out at the ocean and she considers the trajectory that brought her to this moment.
Short Wave
Extracting Brains ... For Science
Camila says that little girl she used to be would be happy.
Short Wave
Extracting Brains ... For Science
I know. I know. But there are some really important reasons to study the brains of whales and dolphins. And I will get to that.
Short Wave
Extracting Brains ... For Science
You got it. Cetacean brains. Of course. My pleasure, Gina.
Short Wave
Extracting Brains ... For Science
Great. I'm glad. But first, let me finish telling you what happened to that baby humpback.
Short Wave
Extracting Brains ... For Science
By the time Camila and her colleagues arrive on the scene by boat, the whale has washed ashore on a tiny island. And they have a problem. They can only get so close without running aground.