Dung Microbes, Gun Research, Airplane Germs, Kepler Mission. March 23, 2018, Part 2

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🗓️ 23 March 2018

⏱️ 47 minutes

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Summary

Guns kill more people in the United States than alcohol—from homicides and suicides, to mass shootings like the one that left dead 17 high school students in Parkland, Florida last month. But public health researchers will tell you that studying alcohol-related deaths is much easier. Gun research is so fraught politically that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention doesn’t fund it (though the National Institutes of Health did for three years during the Obama presidency), and a pair of Congressional amendments continue to throw red tape on funding and access to certain kinds of data. Could private foundations, universities, and state governments fill the gap? Most zoo visitors go to see the animals. U.C. Santa Barbara chemical engineer Michelle O'Malley visits for their poop. That's because the dung of grazers like sheep, giraffes, and elephants is rich in cellulose-chomping fungi and bacteria. She joins Ira to talk about the bacterial and fungal communities within poop. When you fly on an airplane, you’re trapped inside a metal tube for a few hours with hundreds of other passengers, sharing the overhead compartments, lavatories, and air. It feels like there’s a good chance for disease to spread in flight—but just how likely is it? New research maps out the risks. Plus, NASA launched the Kepler space telescope in 2009, with plans for it to operate for about three and a half years. Now, nine years later, the telescope is close to running out of fuel.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato.
0:02.8	Later in the hour, we'll check in on the state of firearms research in the U.S.
0:07.3	and we'll look back on NASA's planet hunting Kepler mission, soon coming to an end.
0:12.2	But first, most people visit the zoo to see the animals, right?
0:16.0	But my next guest visits for their poop.
0:19.9	Now, before you get to a gross doubt, you need to know that the dung of elephants and
0:23.0	giraffes and sheep and other grazers is a veritable treasure trove for microbe hunters,
0:29.3	full of hungry bacteria and fungi involved in all sorts of complicated friendships or rivalries.
0:35.4	Some are even frenemies.
0:37.4	And untangling all that could be key to better
0:40.1	biotech, perhaps a way to unlock energy from cornstalks and grass clippings and agricultural
0:46.1	waste or develop new drugs. Chemical engineer and Dung Detective Michelle O'Malley of UC
0:52.5	Santa Barbara presented that work this week at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in New Orleans.
0:57.7	She's here now to explain.
0:59.3	Welcome to Science Friday.
1:01.2	Thanks very much.
1:02.5	I just got to ask the question of, you know, what's so interesting about poop?
1:07.1	Yeah, that's a question I get a lot.
1:09.0	It's, you know, poop has, for really everything, that's a question I get a lot. It's, you know, poop has for really everything, a mixture of microbes that help whatever, wherever the poop came from to degrade food material into products.
1:25.0	And by looking at the poop of animals in this case, we get a clue on how those
1:30.4	animals have unlocked the energy contained in fibrous plant biomass, which we typically think of
1:38.1	as fiber that we couldn't get any sort of nutrition from. So animals can, and that's why we want
	...

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