Does Time Exist, Elephant Seismology, Produce Safety. May 11, 2018, Part 2

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🗓️ 11 May 2018

⏱️ 47 minutes

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Summary

How do you think about time? Most people experience it as Newton described it—as something that passes independent of other events, that’s the same for everyone, and moves in a straight line. Still, others have come to embrace Einstein’s view that time instead forms a matrix with space and acts like as a substance in which we are submerged. But physicist and author Carlo Rovelli has an even different approach to time. He’s working on a way to quantify gravity in which time doesn’t exist. An adult African elephant can weigh as much as two tons. Their activities—walking, playing, even bellowing—might shake the ground beneath them. But new research finds that the signals from an elephant’s walk are capable of traveling as far as three kilometers, while a male elephant might be detectable a full six kilometers away with just seismological monitoring tools. This new research could protect endangered elephants from poaching. The E. coli outbreak linked to romaine lettuce has now spread to 29 states, and it’s claiming more victims. The CDC now reports that 149 people have been infected, more than a dozen have developed kidney failure, and one victim has died. In this segment, Ira talks with Rachel Noble, a molecular biologist at the University of North Carolina, about current methods of testing farm fields for pathogens like E. coli, which can take 24 to 48 hours to show results, and a DNA test Noble has developed that could cut that to less than an hour.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato.
0:02.7	Later in the hour, we're going to talk about the growing e-coli outbreak in romaine lettuce
0:07.9	and how farm food safety tests could use a bit of an update.
0:12.6	But first, I want you to listen to a sound and guess what it is.
0:22.1	Yeah, it does sound like a heartbeat, but it is not.
0:25.5	It is the seismic sound of an elephant walking, the vibrations in the earth.
0:30.9	Let me play it again.
0:35.9	Really cool, huh?
0:37.0	That African elephant is the largest land animal still alive today, and more importantly for this story, they are the heaviest. They weigh up to two tons. So it might not surprise you to learn that we can listen to them in the shaking of the ground. And new research in the journal Current Biology this week
0:54.7	reports that earthquake monitoring tools are capable not just of detecting elephants
1:00.0	from distances up to six kilometers away, but also distinguishing what kind of behavior
1:06.5	is being heard, whether the elephant is walking quickly or even just roaring.
1:13.2	And the researchers speculate perhaps this information could help us monitor elephants at risk of poaching, among other conservation efforts.
1:21.8	Here to talk with me about that is a Beth Mortimer, research fellow in the Department of Zoology and University of Oxford in UK. Welcome, Beth.
1:29.1	Hi, thank you for having me on the show. And Taryea Nissomeyer, an associate professor of geophysics,
1:35.0	also at the University of Oxford. Welcome, Tarier. Thanks very much, also for me.
1:41.1	You're welcome. Beth, what sent you looking for elephant's seismology in the first
1:45.8	place? So I'm interested in animals that use vibrations through materials for information. So some of my
1:53.4	previous research has looked at spiders and how they use vibration through the spider web. So I have
2:00.2	obviously looked at the other end of the size spectrum, but for the elephant, their
2:05.2	spider web is basically the savannah terrain.
2:08.2	So it was interested in what the role that their physical environment plays on how they
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