Beaked hazelnuts are a wild food native to North America. Indigenous peoples in British Columbia have passed down stories of these hazelnuts as a vital food source their ancestors planted and cultivated. These stories motivated Chelsea Geralda Armstrong of Simon Fraser University to look more deeply at the genetics of the beaked hazelnut and determine just how widely it was cultivated. Indigenous rights attorney Jack Woodward hopes research like this can make a difference in the Land Back movement, providing evidence that land once considered wilderness by European settler colonists was actually being carefully managed by tribes.Another science story in the news catch your eye? Let us know by emailing [email protected] — we'd love to hear from you!Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey Shortwavers, Emily Kwong here. And Jessica Young. With our bi-weekly Science News Roundup Thanksgiving edition. Featuring the hosts of All Things Considered, today we have Ari Shapiro.
It's so honored to be here.
Oh, thanks for stopping by. So combing through all the headlines, all of the embargo journals, we found some pretty interesting stuff.
Yes. Today we have a Thanksgiving buffet for you of one. Genetics. That's proving indigenous hazelnut cultivation in Canada.
How an ancient piece of meteorite from Mars points to a possibly habitable past.
And a very large fish mysteriously washing up on the coast of California.
We've got hazelnuts. We've got fish. It sounds like a Thanksgiving feast.
Delicious. All that on this episode of Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Hey, shortwavers, Emily Kwong here. Before we get back to the show, let's talk about what makes shortwave possible. Shortwave is possible because of you. Because we work for NPR, and NPR is public media. We exist not to make money, but to create a more informed public. You can think of public media like a public sidewalk or a public park. It's infrastructure that we all use. It's free.
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Chapter 5: What other science stories are discussed in this episode?
And this team found that some of this small hunk of Mars was formed, get this, 4.5 billion years ago.
That's not long after the solar system was formed, right?
Yes, this rock originates from perhaps the beginning chapters of Mars' history.
One of the researchers who's been studying this, geologist Aaron Kavosi, explained to me that they tried to get as much information as they could out of this rare bit of ancient zircon, despite its tiny size.
The zircon is half the width of a human hair, and we have tools to extract little slices of it that kind of are shaped like a little tiny slice of bread and then subject them to a variety of different analyses where we can look at the individual atoms and see what's going on.
Okay, so you've got these tiny bread slices thinner than half a human hair, and what did they learn from it?
Not what they expected. Here's Aaron again.
The zircon had these elements preserved in its structure, in arrangements that are kind of like the layers of an onion.
So what Aaron and his team did next was look at zircons on Earth, zircons from all kinds of different environments, trying to figure out what conditions could make zircon look like this. And they found an example of a zircon with this onion-like pattern that was found in a hydrothermal vent on Earth.
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