Jonathan Lambert
Appearances
FloodCast
S10E19 - Gaule de Crocodile
On Sunday at noon Eastern, the NSF said that the agency will resume distributing funds to scientists who had received grants. They have been unable to access their funds since Tuesday when the agency froze payments as they reviewed how their grants complied with new executive orders, especially those targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion.
FloodCast
S10E19 - Gaule de Crocodile
The freeze left hundreds of people unable to access money allocated for their salary and their research. On Friday, a court issued a temporary restraining order that required the NSF and other agencies that froze funds to resume payment. On Sunday, the NSF complied with that order.
FloodCast
S10E19 - Gaule de Crocodile
While it is still reviewing existing grants for compliance with Trump's executive orders, NSF clarified that it cannot stop payments because of this review. Jonathan Lambert, NPR News.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 04-16-2025 3PM EDT
About 41,000 years ago, the magnetic North Pole started drifting. This weakened Earth's magnetic field to as little as 10% of its current strength in parts of Europe and the Middle East. That would have exposed those regions to higher levels of harmful solar radiation, according to new research in the journal Science Advances.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 04-16-2025 3PM EDT
Around that time, people in those regions began more frequently tailoring clothes to more fully cover their bodies and using ochre, a mineral-based pigment with sun-protective properties. Neanderthals didn't use these technologies. The researchers suggest that difference might, in part, explain Neanderthals' downfall. Jonathan Lambert, NPR News.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 12-31-2024 7PM EST
In Australia, a biologist discovered a fluffy longhorn beetle covered in spindly white hairs. Researchers in Madagascar described an orchid with a foot-long nectar spur. And divers in Japan discovered a new species of sea squirt that looks like a panda bear wearing a skeleton Halloween costume. There was even a frog who lives its whole life in a tree leaf.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 12-31-2024 7PM EST
Many of these new species are relatively rare, and amid the planet's ongoing biodiversity crisis, researchers are racing to describe them before it's too late. Jonathan Lambert, NPR News.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 03-18-2025 4PM EDT
How iguanas got to Fiji from the Americas has long been a mystery. The lizards could have walked over many generations across ancient land bridges, or they could have floated there on a raft of tangled vegetation. New genetic analyses published in the journal PNAS point to the raft idea.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 03-18-2025 4PM EDT
The study says Fijian iguanas are likely too young, evolutionarily speaking, to have crossed the ancient land bridges. And that suggests that these lizards floated around 5,000 miles to reach the island. Jonathan Lambert, NPR News.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 12-12-2024 6PM EST
Humpback whales are known for migrating long distances between feeding and breeding grounds. But these migrations are usually confined to the same ocean basin.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 12-12-2024 6PM EST
In the journal Royal Society Open Science, researchers report that the same whale, identified by its distinctive tail markings, was spotted off South America's northwestern coast in 2017 and then again along Africa's southeastern shores in 2022. Scientists don't know the exact route this whale took, nor why it traveled so far. But the whale beat the previous record by nearly 2,000 miles.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 01-02-2025 4PM EST
Studying bat migration is tricky since bats are small and fly only at night. A new study published in Science used special trackers, essentially tiny bat backpacks, that connect to wireless networks. The trackers allowed researchers to watch the migrations of a species called the noctual bat across Central Europe and measure climate data.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 01-02-2025 4PM EST
The study found that bats time their departure to leave just before a storm comes through. Surfing storm tailwinds can make the bat's migration, which can span hundreds of miles, a little bit easier. Jonathan Lambert, NPR News.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 01-25-2025 7PM EST
The lives of pterosaurs are still somewhat mysterious. Despite their gargantuan size, pterosaur bones were actually quite fragile, and so fossils are rare. But one fossil that popped up in Alberta, Canada, the neck vertebrae of a juvenile pterosaur, is giving researchers a window into these flying reptiles' ancient lives.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 01-25-2025 7PM EST
The bone had bite marks that matched the teeth of a crocodilian species that lived at the same time around 76 million years ago. The find, published in the Journal of Paleontology, might be evidence of an ancient fight or that the crocodilian ate the pterosaur after it died. Jonathan Lambert, NPR News.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 03-23-2025 4PM EDT
When humans hold their breath, the urge to breathe is driven by a buildup of carbon dioxide in our blood, not oxygen. That's the case for virtually all other mammals, but not for gray seals, according to a study published today in the journal Science.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 03-23-2025 4PM EDT
Researchers varied the amount of oxygen and carbon dioxide captive gray seals could breathe and then watched how long they stayed underwater to find food. The higher the oxygen levels, the longer seals stayed under. But carbon dioxide levels had little effect, suggesting seals evolved a new way of not drowning. Jonathan Lambert, NPR News.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 05-04-2025 2AM EDT
Instead, the agency will require foreign labs to apply directly for funding, a change it says is necessary for national security. Scientists say the move could drastically reduce research on diseases that aren't currently common in the U.S., but still pose a threat, such as malaria and untreated AIDS. Jonathan Lambert, NPR News.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 05-04-2025 2AM EDT
When a U.S. researcher gets an NIH grant, they can direct some of those funds to researchers in other countries where it makes more sense to study certain conditions. Approximately $500 million of NIH's $47 billion budget falls into this bucket. It funds a wide range of research, from vaccine trials on tuberculosis to cancer studies. Now, the NIH is stopping those kinds of grants.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 01-27-2025 6PM EST
The National Science Foundation, which has a budget of around $9 billion, funds a wide range of scientific research through grants to research institutions. Over 60 grant review panels scheduled for this week were all canceled on Monday. The pause was to ensure compliance with recent executive orders from the Trump administration, the agency said in a statement to NPR.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 01-27-2025 6PM EST
It's unclear how long the pause could last. The delays come a week after similar pauses at the National Institutes of Health. Researchers say the uncertainty caused by the pauses could slow down scientific research. Jonathan Lambert, NPR News.
Short Wave
Why These Salmon Are On Anxiety Meds
Yeah, so if researchers give fish, say, a benzodiazepine like Xanax or an SSRI like Sertraline in the lab, these fish become more antisocial and more prone to take risks. But it's hard to say how these drugs affect their behavior out in the wild.
Short Wave
Why These Salmon Are On Anxiety Meds
That's Jack Brand. He's a biologist at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. And he worked on a study that kind of did the next best thing from a scientific perspective. The study was published in the journal Science this past month.
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Why These Salmon Are On Anxiety Meds
The team implanted pharmaceuticals in Atlantic salmon in Sweden and monitored how two drugs, an anxiety med and a pain med, influenced their migration behavior.
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Why These Salmon Are On Anxiety Meds
Something kind of unexpected. The anxiety medication actually improved the migration success of the salmon.
Short Wave
Why These Salmon Are On Anxiety Meds
In this narrow sense, yeah, they did seem to help. But that's not the whole story.
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Why These Salmon Are On Anxiety Meds
Yeah, so it turns out a lot of drugs that act on our minds target parts of the brain that have a deep evolutionary history. And so they're shared by lots of different animals.
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Why These Salmon Are On Anxiety Meds
So they can work on salmon in similar ways that work on humans. Now, it's not like fish are literally popping pills like we would. What's happening is the pills are getting super diluted in rivers and entering their bodies through their gills.
Short Wave
Why These Salmon Are On Anxiety Meds
Yeah. But even with super low concentrations, like what a fish would encounter in the wild, these drugs are still altering their behavior in the lab.
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Why These Salmon Are On Anxiety Meds
So researchers put these like slow-release capsules into the bodies of over 250 juvenile hatchery-raised Atlantic salmon. The capsules released two drugs, a benzodiazepine called Clobazam, used to treat anxiety, and an opioid used for pain management called Tramadol.
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Why These Salmon Are On Anxiety Meds
In humans, these drugs can cause harmful interactions, and so the researchers wanted to see if combining them had, like, extra bad effects.
Short Wave
Why These Salmon Are On Anxiety Meds
They're also found in lots of rivers around the world, but not in the river where these particular salmon live.
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Why These Salmon Are On Anxiety Meds
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Overall, they had four different treatments. No drug, only Clobazam, only Tramadol, and both.
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Why These Salmon Are On Anxiety Meds
They also implanted these tracking devices so the scientists could follow the fish as they migrated from a release site in a Swedish river out to the Baltic Sea.
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Why These Salmon Are On Anxiety Meds
Not exactly. They were like little devices that emit a sound. And then the researchers placed a bunch of receivers along the migratory route that pick up that sound, allowing them to kind of like reconstruct the journey.
Short Wave
Why These Salmon Are On Anxiety Meds
It was a bit of a surprise. So one drug, the pain medication, didn't seem to make any difference. But it turned out that fish exposed to Clobazam were actually more successful in reaching the Baltic Sea than salmon who weren't exposed.
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Why These Salmon Are On Anxiety Meds
Yeah, the researchers aren't 100% sure, but one part of their results hints at an answer. So this route, this migration route, is not exactly like a lazy river. There are two hydropower dams, each with a series of turbines that the fish have to cross to get to their destination. Those can be pretty hairy. Here's Olivia Simons, a salmon biologist at the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research.
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Why These Salmon Are On Anxiety Meds
Yeah. So non-drugged fish really took their time navigating these dams. Like, I imagine them waiting together in a group and going, oh, not yet, wait, wait, okay. But the Clobazam-exposed fish did it two and a half to three times faster. Oh!
Short Wave
Why These Salmon Are On Anxiety Meds
Yeah. On the face of it, it kind of seems like this study is basically saying that it's good to give salmon benzos, but the authors caution against that interpretation.
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Why These Salmon Are On Anxiety Meds
Exactly. A follow-up lab experiment they did found that Clobazam made salmon less likely to shoal with other salmon. Shoaling is when fish group together for a safety in numbers kind of thing, and setting off on your own could make it easier for ocean predators to pick you off.
Short Wave
Why These Salmon Are On Anxiety Meds
Yeah. Salmon on drugs, specifically anti-anxiety drugs.
Short Wave
Why These Salmon Are On Anxiety Meds
Yeah, Clobazam essentially made them more antisocial and willing to live a bit more dangerously. Scaled up, a lot more antisocial and risk-prone salmon could ultimately shrink the population. And that could cause problems for the whole ecosystem.
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Why These Salmon Are On Anxiety Meds
Yeah, so it's honestly a little bit of a limitation of this study in that it's just looking at this kind of narrow slice of an animal's life. Showing that drugs can influence behavior in the wild was still a huge accomplishment, but there are still a lot of unknowns.
Short Wave
Why These Salmon Are On Anxiety Meds
Yeah, exactly. Here's what Karen Kidd, an ecotoxicologist at McMaster University, had to say.
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Why These Salmon Are On Anxiety Meds
Yeah, there definitely are things we can do. One way is by designing wastewater treatment plants that do a better job filtering out drugs. A study from a few years ago actually found that pharmaceutical pollution in rivers is often worse in low- to middle-income countries because wastewater management infrastructure there doesn't catch it all.
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Why These Salmon Are On Anxiety Meds
Basically through us. So when humans take medication, like for anxiety or bacterial infections, our bodies don't use all of it, and we end up peeing out some of the chemicals. That can end up in wastewater, which can get into rivers and streams, and runoff from pharmaceutical factories gets into waterways, too. Hmm.
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Why These Salmon Are On Anxiety Meds
There's also a push to design greener drugs, basically tweaking pharmaceuticals to degrade more easily in the environment, but still be just as effective in humans.
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Why These Salmon Are On Anxiety Meds
Yeah, yeah. And these solutions aren't silver bullets, but they could lessen our impact. And with climate change and habitat destruction already majorly disrupting animal lives, it's important to try to do what we can to ensure our waste isn't disrupting their behavior, too.
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Why These Salmon Are On Anxiety Meds
All told, researchers have found more than 900 different pharmaceutical ingredients in waterways around the world.
Short Wave
Why These Salmon Are On Anxiety Meds
We're not entirely sure. Scientists have been trying to figure out what all this pollution could be doing to fish, and most of that has been done in the lab. Those experiments have shown that giving fish anxiety meds, for instance, kind of messes with their behavior.
Short Wave
Is The Trump Administration Breaking Science?
And, you know, science is an international enterprise, and the U.S. is a leader internationally when it comes to scientific research. So the real concern is, where is this going to go? And is this U.S. going to be giving up that position in the world?
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Is The Trump Administration Breaking Science?
So the NIH was one of the federal health agencies that was hit by this communications blackout. You know, queries from reporters were met with silence. All travel was suddenly canceled. So a general sense of fear, confusion, and anxiety settled over the labs and offices and clinics on the sprawling NIH campus just outside Washington. And, you know, that was just the beginning.
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Is The Trump Administration Breaking Science?
Well, then a real shocker hit late on a Friday. It was February 7th. The NIH announced that the agency was capping what the NIH pays universities, medical schools, research hospitals, and other institutions for so-called indirect costs at 15%.
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Is The Trump Administration Breaking Science?
Yeah, these are essentially the overhead costs of conducting medical studies to search for new cures for everything from cancer and heart disease to addiction and Alzheimer's. You know, think about electricity to keep the lights on, janitors to clean buildings and take out the trash. Researchers said the cap would essentially cripple medical research.
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Is The Trump Administration Breaking Science?
Don't forget, with a budget of more than $48 billion, the NIH is the world's largest public funder of biomedical research. Yeah. So this was seen as an almost existential threat to the whole U.S. biomedical research enterprise.
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Is The Trump Administration Breaking Science?
They said the 15% was more in line with what other funders pay, like, you know, private foundations. and argued that institutions could cover more of these costs themselves by eliminating bloat in their budgets and by dipping into their endowments, especially big, wealthy schools like Harvard and Yale.
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Is The Trump Administration Breaking Science?
Though I should note, a federal judge in Boston has blocked the 15% cap on indirect costs from going into effect, so that came as a huge relief to researchers, as you might imagine.
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Is The Trump Administration Breaking Science?
Yeah, so we estimate that the NIH lost about 1,200 of the agency's 18,000 employees. And since the layoffs were aimed at probationary employees, they were pretty much random, hitting, you know, relatively junior scientists, but also senior investigators who had recently taken new jobs or been promoted. Plus, some top leaders started being forced out.
Short Wave
Is The Trump Administration Breaking Science?
And most recently, HHS has started offering $25,000 to employees of that agency, and that's part of HHS, if they leave. And there are also rumblings of some senior scientist contracts not being renewed.
Short Wave
Is The Trump Administration Breaking Science?
So the NIH had been blocked from reviewing new grants, but that's been partially lifted. So that whole process of reviewing grant applications has restarted to some degree. At the same time, though, a lot of existing grants have been terminated to comply with the president's executive orders, barring anything related to DEI and the LGBTQ community.
Short Wave
Is The Trump Administration Breaking Science?
Right. Trump picked Dr. Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford to take over the agency. He's a very well-respected health economist with a strong record of high-quality research. But he has also been a vocal critic of the NIH, most notably during the pandemic. He argued against measures like lockdowns.
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Is The Trump Administration Breaking Science?
During his confirmation hearing last week, he promised to create a more open environment at the NIH for what he called dissenting views. And Baudetoria is expected to be easily confirmed. So everyone's waiting to see what he does and bracing for the possibility of more cuts and possibly even a major restructuring. The question is, how radical will those reforms be and how will they be done?
Short Wave
These Rats Can Drive. What's Happening In Their Brains?
You know, I know we're not a big rat and they're not little humans, but at a basic level, they have mostly all the same brain areas. Neurochemicals like dopamine and serotonin and plasticity kind of fertilizers that we look at, all of that is in a rat brain.
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These Rats Can Drive. What's Happening In Their Brains?
We were all feeling isolated, low emotion. The students had been sent home. So I remember going in one day feeling that... low kind of feeling. And we had three rats that were our driver rats. And they ran up to the side of the cage, literally kind of jumping up and down like my dog Brody does when I say, you want to go for a walk? And he's flipping around. And they were reaching out to me.
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These Rats Can Drive. What's Happening In Their Brains?
Now, maybe they just associated me with a big fruit loop, but it made me feel accepted and good that they were excited for something.
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These Rats Can Drive. What's Happening In Their Brains?
Right now, we're in our third version of our rat car. So, we're in Rat Car 3 that we call rodent-operated vehicles. They're a little smaller than a shoebox, and they have the tires, and they have a steering mechanism that we had to figure out. And we use kind of old-fashioned...
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These Rats Can Drive. What's Happening In Their Brains?
operant behavioral conditioning with a Froot Loop as the incentive, that's the currency of my lab, to shape them behaviorally to enter the car, to stay in the car, to press the lever and keep that lever pressed to activate and to drive the car to the Froot Loop tree, which is their destination.
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These Rats Can Drive. What's Happening In Their Brains?
That's a really interesting question and probably the most popular question, frequent question that people have asked me. Do they like it? I can't give them a Qualtrics survey or something like that. So I can look at their behavior. When we bring them into the lab and to their driving arena, we transport them from their transport cage into the car, they jump in automatically.
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These Rats Can Drive. What's Happening In Their Brains?
So that suggests that they're at least approaching something and that's usually related to something they like. And as we're putting them into the driving arena before they even hit the rat road, they start activating the lever and it sounds like they're revving up the engine.
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These Rats Can Drive. What's Happening In Their Brains?
Yeah. So approach is one way that a behavioral scientist like myself could understand that. I wanted to explore it a little bit more definitively with that small group. So they had only been able to access the Froot Loop tree in their car in the past trainings.
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These Rats Can Drive. What's Happening In Their Brains?
But I asked my students to let them get into the arena without the car and just see that they could clearly just walk down to that Fruit Loop tree. So the test in this preliminary study was to put the car at one end of the arena, as we always had done. The Fruit Loop tree was in the other end, and we put the rat outside of the car just in the middle of the arena.
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These Rats Can Drive. What's Happening In Their Brains?
So the most efficient way to get to the Fruit Loop would be to simply walk or run to the Fruit Loop tree, eat all the Fruit Loops you want. One rat consistently did this. We have individual differences with rats, and I love that. That's the smart one. Yeah. Two of the rats, they hesitated.
Short Wave
These Rats Can Drive. What's Happening In Their Brains?
They turned around, saw the car, and not walked, but kind of ran to the car, jumped in, and drove to the Froot Loop tree. Not once, not twice, but day after day, they are preferring. to drive to the Froot Loop tree as opposed to walk to it. That driving increased the anticipation.
Short Wave
These Rats Can Drive. What's Happening In Their Brains?
She sent an email one night and said, Can you teach a rat to drive a car? And I consider myself a serious-minded neuroscientist, so my initial response was, why would I want to do that? But then she reconsidered. Once you start thinking about teaching a rat to drive a car, you can't not think about it. You can't stop thinking about it. Fast forward to a couple years later, guess what this is?
Short Wave
These Rats Can Drive. What's Happening In Their Brains?
Yeah, I developed a whole, and with my colleagues, a whole new protocol looking at I call it unpredictable positive experience responses. So at random times during the day, we're giving them these positive experiences so they never know when it's coming and and then they have to wait for it. So I'm really trying to ramp up anticipation for something good.
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These Rats Can Drive. What's Happening In Their Brains?
And we are starting to write up our initial data, but it's looking like we are indeed sculpting their brains differently, their behaviors, their vocalizations, whether or not they're happy or sad calls. And so if I think about my life, If we're looking forward to a vacation with a family and you're thinking and planning, it's rare that the actual event meets all those expectations.
Short Wave
These Rats Can Drive. What's Happening In Their Brains?
So maybe the anticipation is even more rewarding than the actual event sometimes. But if we deprive ourselves of all that anticipation, we're really depriving our brains of a lot of feel-good chemicals and such. So the rats may be prolonging the feel-good time, the time that they're enjoying themselves. driving or anticipating that fruit loop.
Short Wave
These Rats Can Drive. What's Happening In Their Brains?
Yeah, again, it's exploratory, but just kind of blew my mind. So we were doing another test with these, we call them upper trained or positive anticipation trained rats, where they were in an arena. And A student said, Dr. Lambert, why does the rat have its tail sticking straight up? And it was like an umbrella, you know, kind of a hook.
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These Rats Can Drive. What's Happening In Their Brains?
And sure enough, the upper trained or anticipatory trained animals had it sticking up more. And I didn't know what this meant. So I put a picture on social media. I said, has anyone seen this? Because I just hadn't. And a few people said, oh, yes, if you inject morphine into a mouse or a rodent, their tail goes up.
Short Wave
These Rats Can Drive. What's Happening In Their Brains?
And I thought, have we changed these opiates in these animals through behavioral training? So dopamine for pleasure and opiates for well-being, that's a pretty good cocktail from behavioral training. And I've introduced this word behaviorceuticals that we can change our— So it was maybe the perfect behaviorceutical, but we're still exploring.
Short Wave
These Rats Can Drive. What's Happening In Their Brains?
It's just great to watch the animals and they give you clues about what to look at next.
Short Wave
These Rats Can Drive. What's Happening In Their Brains?
Yeah, so we found that just going through the training itself, regardless if they learn to drive or not, that changed at least the hormone profiles. Oh, so it doesn't even matter if they're a good driver or not. They just like driving. It's the process. You're journey, not the destination. Yeah. Really.
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These Rats Can Drive. What's Happening In Their Brains?
there's research to suggest that stress can impair neuroplasticity or at least the healthier kind of versions of plasticity. So if this training is helping them regulate their emotions and have lower levels of stress hormones, that's going to have probably a positive impact on the brain. So if we know more about how we can intentionally and systematically change our behavior,
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These Rats Can Drive. What's Happening In Their Brains?
to change our brains in healthy ways. Most of the research is related to changing neurochemistry through pharmaceuticals, but I wanted there to be more attention on the behavior. We know that cognitive behavioral therapy is very effective with humans, but we don't have good preclinical models. We're not sure exactly what that's doing.
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These Rats Can Drive. What's Happening In Their Brains?
So I'm trying to replicate some of that with the animals so that we know more about what it's doing and that may elevate the respect. for behavioral interventions.
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These Rats Can Drive. What's Happening In Their Brains?
You got it. Yeah. And this has lots of lessons. But now I'm excited about what we can learn from other animals. Rats don't represent all mammals or all animals or all brains. More research is done on mice now. It's convenient. We know a lot about how to house them and do research. But let's look at wild animals. Let's look at different. I love raccoons.
Short Wave
These Rats Can Drive. What's Happening In Their Brains?
They're out there working the environment and they're so smart. They're so smart. Keep them in the lab, but they look like primate brains. There's a reason we can't invent or design a garbage can to keep them out. So I think there are a lot of species out there that hold a lot of secrets that may unlock some mysteries about some of the illness, psychiatric and neurological illnesses that we face.
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These Rats Can Drive. What's Happening In Their Brains?
Yes, and on so many levels. A lot of research is focused on protecting children from trauma, and that's so important. We have adverse childhood experiences. We want to minimize the stress, the trauma. Little challenges are great, but... horrible things that happen that's so impactful for the brain. And we need to keep that up. But what about if a child has something to look forward to?
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These Rats Can Drive. What's Happening In Their Brains?
While a pediatrician is asking about stressors in a child's life, I'd love to start thinking about the impact of asking, what are you looking forward to? Anticipation kicks in a lot of really healthy brain responses related to curiosity and planning and all that dopaminergic activity.
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These Rats Can Drive. What's Happening In Their Brains?
activity so we need to balance the scale and we've been a little one-sided focusing on avoiding the negative but we need to add to that to extend that anticipation like we're doing with the rats where maybe they never know when something good is going to happen or they know that they can wait and it's coming That that's that's also, I think, very healthy for brains. We're exploring it.
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These Rats Can Drive. What's Happening In Their Brains?
Almost like a playpen around the entire room and then... some kind of flooring that we put, that we roll out that's a flat surface, and it's black and white check, so it kind of has this raceway kind of idea. And we start the car on one end, and at the other end is what we call the Fruit Loop tree. And we have little straws with Fruit Loops attached via marshmallows. We do give them healthy food.
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These Rats Can Drive. What's Happening In Their Brains?
That's not the way our culture is. It's just what is the next bad thing that's going to happen?
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These Rats Can Drive. What's Happening In Their Brains?
You're welcome. I love sharing our brain stories with anyone interested in hearing them.
Short Wave
The Iguanas That Rafted To Fiji
And how iguanas might have survived such a long time at sea.
Short Wave
The Iguanas That Rafted To Fiji
So there were basically two ideas for how iguanas got to Fiji. The first is that they got there gradually. Over like 50 million years ago, iguanas might have walked over the course of lots of generations over land bridges to modern day Asia or Australia.
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The Iguanas That Rafted To Fiji
Those land bridges are now underwater, but they might once have allowed iguanas to spread in the eastern hemisphere and sort of island hop the rest of the way to Fiji.
Short Wave
The Iguanas That Rafted To Fiji
Right, right. Yeah, this idea assumes that Fijian iguanas are the sole surviving ancestors of that larger group that made this trip.
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The Iguanas That Rafted To Fiji
The second idea is that they sailed there on some kind of raft of vegetation.
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The Iguanas That Rafted To Fiji
Yeah, yeah. But until this paper, scientists hadn't really been able to confirm it either way, whether they made it there very gradually or all in one go.
Short Wave
The Iguanas That Rafted To Fiji
Yeah, yeah. So understanding what else Fijian iguanas are closely related to could give scientists clues about where they came from. And knowing how old they are could indicate how likely it is that they walked over these ancient land bridges.
Short Wave
The Iguanas That Rafted To Fiji
basically by figuring out the iguana family tree. They used genomic data from 14 different iguana species to see who was most closely related to whom, and the results surprised Scarpetta.
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The Iguanas That Rafted To Fiji
Yeah, the kind that currently lives in the southwestern U.S.
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The Iguanas That Rafted To Fiji
And they estimated that these iguanas split a little over 30 million years ago. Now, that timeline doesn't quite line up with the land bridge idea because such bridges would have been either underwater or covered in ice or just too cold for cold-blooded lizards at the time. So there would have been no way for iguanas to walk there.
Short Wave
The Iguanas That Rafted To Fiji
Yeah. So it's also around the same time that Fiji itself formed from an underwater volcano.
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The Iguanas That Rafted To Fiji
And so to Scarpetta, that all suggests that at some point in the last 30 million years, some small group of iguanas just so happened to be on some raft of vegetation. And that raft drifted all the way to Fiji.
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The Iguanas That Rafted To Fiji
Both. Biologists have long surmised that animals on islands could have gotten there by floating. But people have also actually seen it happen. In 1995, combined hurricanes hit the Caribbean. Here's a clip from the Weather Channel documenting the damage.
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The Iguanas That Rafted To Fiji
And on top of all of that, it's about iguanas. Specifically, iguanas native to the tropical island of Fiji. And how they got to this super isolated island has always been a bit of a mystery.
Short Wave
The Iguanas That Rafted To Fiji
Wrecked buildings, fallen trees, and apparently displaced animals. Because in the aftermath of these hurricanes, researchers tracked a group of iguanas that floated on a raft of downed trees over 180 miles from the Caribbean island of Guadalupe to Anguilla.
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The Iguanas That Rafted To Fiji
I talked with iguana biologist Cristina de Jesus Villanueva about the paper, and here's what she had to say.
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The Iguanas That Rafted To Fiji
Yeah, these iguanas had so much going against them. It's really, really far, like 5,000 miles of floating across the vast wasteland of the Pacific.
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The Iguanas That Rafted To Fiji
Yeah, so they don't know for sure, but some previous estimates have ranged from like two and a half months to four months or maybe even longer. And that's a really long time, but both Scarpetta and Villanueva told me that if any creature could do it, it's iguanas. And remember, it's not just any iguanas.
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The Iguanas That Rafted To Fiji
So they could have been totally fine in the sun. And they can also survive a really long time without fresh water or food.
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The Iguanas That Rafted To Fiji
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean, they are herbivorous, so they could have potentially snacked on the raft, too, if they needed to.
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The Iguanas That Rafted To Fiji
So most iguanas are native to the Americas, with some in the Caribbean and some on the Galapagos Islands. Fiji is like one-fifth of the way around the globe. And while some iguanas can swim, they can't swim that far.
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The Iguanas That Rafted To Fiji
They're not 100 percent sure, which Scarpetta and his colleagues acknowledge in the paper. They think given the available evidence, it's most likely that Fijian iguanas rafted there.
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The Iguanas That Rafted To Fiji
But if, say, some new fossil popped up in Southeast Asia that seemed more closely related to the Fijian iguanas than desert iguanas, that might change the picture because it could imply that iguanas had been in the eastern hemisphere longer.
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The Iguanas That Rafted To Fiji
They are. And I think this is just a really cool example of the resilience of some animals. And it also really shows how these events that can seem so improbable actually probably happen quite often over the span of evolutionary time. And they really shape the biological world around us.
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The Iguanas That Rafted To Fiji
Likely some big clump of downed trees and other vegetation that became a raft of sorts.
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The Iguanas That Rafted To Fiji
This new study argues that some intrepid, well, probably inadvertently intrepid, group of iguanas set off from North America to float like 5,000 miles away to reach the island of Fiji.
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The Iguanas That Rafted To Fiji
Yeah, it's wild. Biologists call this kind of journey where an animal travels to a new place and sets up permanent camp a dispersal event. And this would be the longest known trans-oceanic dispersal event of any land animal, except for humans.
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Peeing Is Contagious!
Yeah, okay. So to put this in context, have you ever heard of contagious yawning? Yeah, totally. Like if I yawn, you get the urge to yawn too? Yes.
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Peeing Is Contagious!
So this observation got Ina wondering if this behavior might be socially contagious like yawning. And to see if it was, she spent more than 600 hours watching a group of 20 chimpanzees.
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Peeing Is Contagious!
Yeah, and she said that it was easier to hear them pee than to see them pee. But so she noted when each individual chimp peed and where they were relative to each other. And looking at the data altogether, an interesting pattern emerged.
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Peeing Is Contagious!
And they don't know why this is. It could just be that lower ranking chimps are paying closer attention to higher ranking ones. But that's just one possibility.
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Peeing Is Contagious!
One idea is that doing the same thing together just kind of helps a group sync up, which could help them operate better as a unit. If this happens in the wild, it might help the chimps avoid predators who get attracted by the smell of pee by concentrating it all in one spot.
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Peeing Is Contagious!
That's about 165,000 kilometers. It's a natural phenomenon thought to be created from bunched up electrons trapped in Earth's magnetic field. And what's interesting is that these waves have been studied for almost 70 years, but Earth's chorus waves have never been found that far out until this recent study published in Nature.
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Peeing Is Contagious!
But here's the complication. This study, for the first time, found chorus waves further out, where Earth's magnetic field is much weaker and non-uniform. And yet the waves were growing and the electrons were still bunched, so the magnetic field gradient did not seem to be that important.
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Peeing Is Contagious!
And these extremely fast particles can disrupt electrical components that are aboard so many communication satellites and can damage spacecraft too. So understanding how chorus waves are created is important to our everyday lives.
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Peeing Is Contagious!
Of course. Well, regardless of how you two feel, it definitely fills a niche. But many of these cheese alternatives you can buy in stores are also lower in protein than dairy cheese and use a lot of starch. And they often just don't melt and stretch like real cheese.
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Peeing Is Contagious!
Specifically, a lot of plant-based cheeses in stores use coconut oil, but researchers found if they blended coconut oil with sunflower oil, their cheese melted and stretched even more like dairy cheese. You've got to have that melty stretch in a grilled cheese sandwich.
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Peeing Is Contagious!
So, for example, Stacy saw that big oil globules kind of spread out more in the mouth and could work well for things that need to be melty, like grilled cheese. They wrote all about it in the journal Physics of Fluids. Dare I ask how it tasted?
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Peeing Is Contagious!
Stacey said the team was working only on some aspects of these cheeses, and there's a lot of work the industry still needs to do to figure out even better ways to make them act and taste like dairy cheese.
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Peeing Is Contagious!
Contagious peeing in chimps. Need I say any more? No, please don't.
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Peeing Is Contagious!
Always. Yes. You can hear more of Ari on Consider This, NPR's afternoon podcast about what the news means for you.
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Peeing Is Contagious!
This episode was produced by Hannah Chin and Jordan Marie Smith. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez and Christopher Intagliata. Rachel Carlson contributed reporting.
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Peeing Is Contagious!
And I'm Jonathan Lambert. Thanks for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
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Peeing Is Contagious!
I love chirps. And space. And better vegan cheese. We really contain multitudes.
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All Of Life Has A Common Ancestor. What Was LUCA?
Scientists want to understand what it was like because it gets at this really fundamental question of where we, as in all life on Earth, came from. And here's a new development. A team of scientists took the biggest swing yet at trying to paint a picture of Luca through some pretty tricky detective work.
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All Of Life Has A Common Ancestor. What Was LUCA?
how it could be a bit older and more complicated than we thought, and if true, could hint that we're not the only life in the universe.
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All Of Life Has A Common Ancestor. What Was LUCA?
Evidence that it existed is hidden in every living thing. So we all share some basic fundamental machinery of life, things like a genetic code or using amino acids to build proteins.
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All Of Life Has A Common Ancestor. What Was LUCA?
Yeah, yeah, not that. And given what we know about how evolution works, that genes get passed down from generation to generation, it follows that something like LUCA must have existed.
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All Of Life Has A Common Ancestor. What Was LUCA?
No, it's not the origin of life. It's not even the first cell or the first microbe or the first of anything, really. But it is the furthest back that we can push towards the origin of life by looking at what's alive today. Greg Fournier, a biologist at MIT, put it well.
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All Of Life Has A Common Ancestor. What Was LUCA?
Yeah, and understanding the nature of the end of that story can still tell researchers a lot about early evolution.
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All Of Life Has A Common Ancestor. What Was LUCA?
So in general, all these efforts try to guess the genes and proteins that Luca had by looking for what's shared across different organisms. Like, for example, if you compare a gene that's basically the same in us and chimps, it's pretty safe to say that we inherited it from our common ancestor. That's the simplest explanation.
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All Of Life Has A Common Ancestor. What Was LUCA?
But that kind of inference gets a lot more complicated the further back in time you go.
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All Of Life Has A Common Ancestor. What Was LUCA?
Well, genes get up to a lot of shenanigans that can throw off that detective work.
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All Of Life Has A Common Ancestor. What Was LUCA?
Yeah, so there's horizontal gene transfer, which is this thing where instead of passing genes vertically from one generation to the next, some microbes can pass them horizontally to their neighbors. Like a bacterium can give its other bacteria friends antibiotic resistance, for example, when it butts up against them and shares that little bit of DNA.
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All Of Life Has A Common Ancestor. What Was LUCA?
And so that can make it seem like a bunch of species all inherited this gene from a common ancestor when in reality it just got shared a bunch.
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All Of Life Has A Common Ancestor. What Was LUCA?
No, we're talking about the ancestor of all life.
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All Of Life Has A Common Ancestor. What Was LUCA?
Yeah. And then there's the issue of genes getting lost, but only for some species. Like if genes that were in LUCA get lost down the line in certain species, it could lead researchers to falsely conclude that the genes evolved after LUCA since it's not shared by all its descendants. Right.
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All Of Life Has A Common Ancestor. What Was LUCA?
Exactly. Lots and lots of stuff that muddies the waters.
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All Of Life Has A Common Ancestor. What Was LUCA?
So one way to tune out all that noise is to be really stringent and focus only on genes that show little evidence of horizontal gene transfer. And a really prominent analysis of this sort back in 2016 painted a pretty simple picture of LUCA.
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All Of Life Has A Common Ancestor. What Was LUCA?
No, she was not a brunette. But the researchers did suggest that Luca was like half alive and relied on hydrothermal vents for energy.
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All Of Life Has A Common Ancestor. What Was LUCA?
So that's debated, and some researchers think it's probably a little too simple a picture. Phil Donoghue, a paleontologist at the University of Bristol, told me that he thinks that being too picky could lead researchers to dismiss lots of proteins that LUCA actually had, which would lead to kind of like an artificially simple picture of LUCA.
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All Of Life Has A Common Ancestor. What Was LUCA?
So basically by being less picky. So instead of trying to definitively predict whether Luca did or didn't have a given gene, they assigned a probability.
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All Of Life Has A Common Ancestor. What Was LUCA?
Yeah, so the team looked at nearly 10,000 different gene families from 350 bacteria species and 350 archaea species.
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All Of Life Has A Common Ancestor. What Was LUCA?
And from that, they did some fancy probabilistic modeling to account for horizontal gene transfer. That gene sharing we talked about earlier. And they assigned each gene a probability of having been a part of Luca's genome. This created like a fuzzier picture, but probably a more accurate one.
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All Of Life Has A Common Ancestor. What Was LUCA?
Luca was pretty complicated. They estimate this single cell, our last common ancestor, had a genome roughly the size of some modern bacteria. Whoa. It had like 2,600 proteins, so quite a bit bigger than many scientists thought.
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All Of Life Has A Common Ancestor. What Was LUCA?
Yes. So they call it LUCA, which stands for the last universal common ancestor, which is no longer alive, but it would have existed billions of years ago as some kind of single-celled organism.
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All Of Life Has A Common Ancestor. What Was LUCA?
And one of the coolest things they found was that Luca had all of these different CRISPR-Cas9 genes.
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All Of Life Has A Common Ancestor. What Was LUCA?
Yeah, yeah. So we humans hijacked it to bioengineer, but in nature, bacteria use these CRISPR genes to slice and dice viruses. And so the fact that LUCA had these genes suggests that it might have had some kind of ancient immune system.
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All Of Life Has A Common Ancestor. What Was LUCA?
Yeah. So Luca likely made its living without oxygen and converted carbon dioxide or hydrogen gas into energy. Wow. Many scientists think that life might have emerged at hydrothermal vents deep in the ocean. Yes. And this probabilistic LUCA could have lived there eating up the gas that spews from these vents. But those gases could have also come from the atmosphere too.
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All Of Life Has A Common Ancestor. What Was LUCA?
So this LUCA might have lived closer to the ocean's surface too.
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All Of Life Has A Common Ancestor. What Was LUCA?
Totally, totally. And another theory is that Luca might have dined on the waste of other organisms.
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All Of Life Has A Common Ancestor. What Was LUCA?
Phil and his colleagues argue no. Those researchers think that Luca was actually part of a complex ecosystem of microbes that have since gone extinct. They don't have evidence for this since any traces of those lineages are long gone, but essentially they argue that something as complicated as their version of Luca couldn't have evolved in isolation.
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All Of Life Has A Common Ancestor. What Was LUCA?
Yeah, it's really hard. And so they turned to genes. So all genes mutate over time. And the tick, tick, tick of those mutations can serve kind of like a molecular clock. And the researchers calibrated their clock with fossils.
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All Of Life Has A Common Ancestor. What Was LUCA?
Right, right. And so then they estimated when Luca lived by looking at all the genetic differences that its descendants racked up. And their clock put Luca living about 4.2 billion years ago.
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All Of Life Has A Common Ancestor. What Was LUCA?
It was really rough. So about four and a half billion years ago, a Mars-sized planet collided with Earth to form the moon. And scientists think it likely would have taken like one or 200 million years after that for the planet to settle down enough to support life. Hmm. And in the years following, scientists think the Earth was getting continually bombarded with asteroids.
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All Of Life Has A Common Ancestor. What Was LUCA?
So imagine for a second the tree of life.
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All Of Life Has A Common Ancestor. What Was LUCA?
So in general, this period was once thought probably like too harsh for life to emerge.
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All Of Life Has A Common Ancestor. What Was LUCA?
Yeah. So everything. Yeah. So let's start at the branches. Every living thing on Earth is represented as a tip on the branch of that tree.
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All Of Life Has A Common Ancestor. What Was LUCA?
Yeah, it really isn't. And that makes some researchers skeptical that this dating was accurate.
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All Of Life Has A Common Ancestor. What Was LUCA?
Right, right, right. But other researchers think that it makes a lot of sense. And if it's true, it has some pretty profound implications.
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All Of Life Has A Common Ancestor. What Was LUCA?
So it could mean that those early steps of evolution might be kind of easy. Yeah, and that on Earth, it didn't take all that long to go from some self-replicating thing snapping into being to a Luca like the one painted here.
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All Of Life Has A Common Ancestor. What Was LUCA?
And if it wasn't so hard for complex life to evolve here on Earth, that might mean that it's not so hard on other planets either.
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All Of Life Has A Common Ancestor. What Was LUCA?
This episode was produced by Burleigh McCoy, who we're so happy to have back from parental leave. It was edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. The audio engineer was Gilly Moon.
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All Of Life Has A Common Ancestor. What Was LUCA?
And if you follow any two branches back in time, they converge on their most recent common ancestor. So like chimps and humans, for instance, converge on a common ancestor that lived like less than 10 million years ago.
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All Of Life Has A Common Ancestor. What Was LUCA?
If you keep tracing any path of ancestry back far enough, whether you start with gorillas or sharks or ginkgo trees or those neat bacteria that live in the bowels of the earth, you'll eventually reach the same single point. That's Luca. That's the ancestor of every living thing and every dead thing that we know about.