Microplastics on the Mind, Superstrong Shrimp and Bird Flu Transmission

Science Quickly

Scientific American

Science

4.4 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 10 February 2025

⏱️ 8 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A subtype of H5N1 bird flu that has been found in cattle for the first time suggests that the virus jumped from birds to the animals twice. A headline-making study estimates that we have a spoon’s worth of microplastics in our brain. Streams of rock from a cosmic impact created the moon’s two deep canyons, Vallis Schrödinger and Vallis Planck. A large study shows that people feel their best in the morning and their worst at midnight. Bonobos can tell when humans don’t know something—and try to help us. Recommended reading: The U.S. Is Not Ready for Bird Flu in Humans Bonobos Can Tell When a Human Doesn’t Know Something Is Snoozing the Alarm Good or Bad for Your Health? E-mail us at sciencequickly@sciam.com if you have any questions, comments or ideas for stories we should cover! Discover something new every day: subscribe to Scientific American and sign up for Today in Science, our daily newsletter. Science Quickly is produced by Rachel Feltman, Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Madison Goldberg, Naeem Amarsy and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was hosted by Rachel Feltman. Our show is edited by Naeem Amarsy with fact-checking by Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck. The theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:27.8	slash UK slash AI for people.
0:32.8	Happy Monday listeners. For Scientific American Science Quickly, I'm Rachel Feldman.
0:38.6	Let's kick off the week by catching up on some of the science news you may have missed.
0:46.5	First, a quick bird flu update.
0:48.7	If you're a regular listener, you already know that H5N1 bird flu has been circulating in
0:53.2	U.S. cattle for almost a year.
0:55.0	That's been thanks to a type called B3.13.
0:58.0	Now, a different variant of H5N1 that had been circulating in birds, known as the D1.1 genotype,
1:05.0	has shown up in six herds in Nevada.
1:07.0	This suggests that our current outbreak involved more than one spillover event, or an instance
1:12.6	when a bird transmitted H5N1 to a cow.
1:16.3	We don't know when the D1.1 variant hopped over to cattle or how widely it's circulating.
1:22.2	People have previously been infected with D1.1, including two severe cases, and NPR reports
1:27.2	that scientists have speculated that this genotype might be more dangerous to humans.
	...

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