Immunotherapy, The Evolution Of Eyebrows, Unconventional Bird Calls. April 13, 2018, Part 2

Science Friday

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Natural Sciences, Wnyc, Science, Friday, Life Sciences

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🗓️ 13 April 2018

⏱️ 47 minutes

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Summary

Tumors are masters of disguise. The field of immunotherapy—teaching our immune system to recognize cancer—is burgeoning with solutions to this problem. The eyes may be the window to the soul, but it’s our eyebrows that are doing all the talking. The ability to wiggle those two hairy features around isn’t just some party trick, it’s almost like a secret language—one that even our ancient ancestors used to their advantage. One of the first signs of spring are the sounds of birds chirping in search of food, nesting grounds, and a potential mate. But sometimes those bird calls aren’t coming from the source you’d expect. In some species, female birds also use calls, and a group of hummingbirds creates calls with their tail feathers.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. The eyes may be the window into the soul,
0:05.8	but you might argue that it's our eyebrows that are doing all the talking. Let me tell you what I mean.
0:11.8	Like if you see someone you recognize, you give them the eyebrow flash, you want to convey sympathy or concern,
0:19.5	a furrowed brow is best for that. And nothing says, I'm skeptical of you
0:24.7	like a single arched eyebrow. Yes, the ability to wiggle those two hairy highlights isn't just some
0:31.4	party trick. It's almost like a secret language, one that even our ancient ancestors used to their advantage. Some people make a
0:39.6	living out of studying arching eyebrows. Penny Spikens is one of them. Dr. Spikens is a senior lecturer
0:45.6	in the Archaeology of Human Origin at the University of York. Dr. Spikens, welcome to the show.
0:51.6	Hello. So what did our ancient ancestors' eyebrows look like?
0:57.1	Well, actually, the story about eyebrows goes back a little bit before people had eyebrows like our own.
1:04.0	Because if you go back like 200,000,000 years ago and you see some early human, actually their face looks really different from ours
1:13.0	because they had huge brow ridges a big bony protrusion that went above their eye and for a long
1:20.2	time we've not known what that's for so we've really not understood what's happening in people's
1:25.8	eyes that far back in time there's been an idea it's to do with, you know, maybe buttressing the face or supporting chewing muscles, all of those things.
1:34.3	So what we did in our research, Ricardo Godineo, one of the researchers here, made a model of the carbway skull, that's an archaic human, with these huge superorbital
1:47.4	ridges, and tried to test out what it could be for.
1:50.5	And what was really interesting was that there was no good functional explanation.
1:54.8	It doesn't help with chewing.
1:56.5	If you had that there or you didn't have that there, made no difference to the way in which
2:00.6	your face was working the way in which your
2:00.9	face was working really in which those muscles in the jaw was working. That was really interesting
2:06.1	because that suggested that this bony ridge had a kind of social function. And of course, if we look
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