Buttons, Grand Canyon Maps, Mosquitoes. Feb 8, 2019, Part 2

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🗓️ 8 February 2019

⏱️ 47 minutes

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Summary

The button is everywhere. It allows us to interact with our computers and technology, alerts us when someone is at the front door, and with a tap, can have dinner delivered to your home. But buttons also are often associated with feelings of control, panic, and fear. Rachel Plotnick, author of Power Button: A History of Pleasure, Panic, and the Politics of Pushing, discusses the development of buttons and what they reveal about our interactions with technology. New research finds that the same pathways in the brain that control human hunger can shut down a mosquito’s interest in biting you. Rockefeller University professor Leslie Vosshall tells us about how this technique can potentially inhibit female mosquitoes from seeking out human blood—and stop the spread of disease. Later this month, the Grand Canyon celebrates the 100th anniversary of becoming a national park. But the natural wonder has way more than 100 years of stories to tell. The millions of years of geologic history, coupled with the massive scale of the canyon, make it challenging to create a comprehensive view of the Grand Canyon. Matthew Toro, director of maps, imagery, and geospatial data for the Arizona State University Libraries, tells us about maps of the iconic park to share its geologic and cultural stories.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankoski. Ira Flato is away.
0:04.6	Mosquito-borne illnesses infect tens of millions of people and kill more than a million people every year,
0:10.0	whether it's malaria, dengue, West Nile, or now Zika. And our war against the mosquito is a long and storied one.
0:17.2	The repellent Diet turns 75 this year. And in the age of CRISPR, we're even talking about
0:22.0	editing these critters right out of existence. But one lab at the University of Rockefeller
0:27.6	had another idea. What if we just could convince female mosquitoes, the problematic ones,
0:32.4	that they're just not hungry enough to bite us in the first place? What if we could put them on a diet?
0:36.6	Here to talk about this more is
0:38.1	Dr. Leslie Vossal, professor of neurobiology at the Rockefeller University and a Howard Hughes Medical
0:43.4	Institute investigator in New York, New York. Dr. Vossal, welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for being here.
0:50.0	Thanks. I'm so excited. So why don't you start by telling us how often female mosquitoes actually bite?
0:56.3	Because it feels like the same mosquito comes back and bites me all the time.
1:00.1	So first of all, they love us. They love to fill up on your blood.
1:04.0	And as soon as they filled up and doubled their body weight, they actually will go into seclusion for four days.
1:10.1	So the female that's just bitten you, you won't see her into seclusion for four days. So the female that's just
1:11.1	bitten you, you won't see her again for the next four days. Okay, so they bite and they go away
1:16.9	for a while. Why are they so attracted us in the first place? You say they like feasting on our blood?
1:21.8	Why? They just love how we smell. So the mosquitoes that spread these diseases are, they have specialized on humans, so they're super sensitive to our body odor.
1:32.4	Every time we exhale, we excite them with our carbon dioxide in our breath.
1:36.4	They love that we're warm-blooded.
1:38.1	But basically, these animals specialize on humans, and that's why they're so dangerous in spreading these diseases among humans.
1:44.8	So you decided to see how they would react to human diet drugs. Explain why.
	...

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