Sleep and the Immune System, Measuring Carbon, Specimens of Hair. Feb 1, 2019, Part 2

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🗓️ 1 February 2019

⏱️ 47 minutes

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Summary

Some citizen scientists collect minerals or plants. But 19th-century lawyer Peter A. Browne collected hair—lots and lots of hair. His collection started innocently enough. Browne decided to make a scientific study of wool with the hope of jumpstarting American agriculture, but his collector’s impulse took over. By the time of his death, Browne’s hair collection had grown to include elephant chin hair, raccoon whiskers, hair from mummies, hair from humans from all around the world, hair from 13 of the first 14 U.S. presidents, and more. Bob Peck of Drexel University’s Academy of Natural Sciences explains what Browne hoped to learn from all these tufts. See more images from Browne's collection. Whether you’re a night owl or an early riser, we all sleep. But for something so universal, we don’t understand much about what makes us sleep. Researchers looking into this question recently found a gene called neumri that triggered sleep in Drosophila flies. That gene produced a protein that is linked to antimicrobial activity, and the results were published in the journal Science. Neuroscientist Amita Seghal, who is an author on the study, talks about the role sleep might play in sickness and keeping us healthy. It’s one of the first things you learn in elementary school science class: Trees take in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen. That may have satisfied our childhood questions about how trees work, but as adults, we understand the picture to be a lot more complex. Christopher Woodall, project leader with the USDA Forest Service joins guest host John Dankosky to crunch the numbers on carbon sequestration. And Christa Anderson, research fellow at the World Wildlife Fund, talks about how forests may be our best weapon for fighting carbon emissions.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankowski. I'm sitting in for the next few weeks while Ira Flato is away on vacation in Southeast Asia.
0:07.6	But he is still keeping an eye out for science, and he sent us this audio postcard from Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
0:14.2	I'm standing in downtown Saigon or Ho Chi Minh City in front of the old post office building, and really unusually,
0:22.6	the post office is ringed with the names of famous scientists.
0:26.6	I'm looking at Galvani, Faraday, even Franklin, Davy.
0:31.6	I could walk around the building and find all these scientists at the last place
0:35.6	I would have expected at the government post office
0:39.4	that was constructed by the French in 1886 and now is owned by the Vietnamese government.
0:48.6	And to see all of these scientists around the building with their plaques up is totally unexpected.
0:55.0	Well, there's a fun travel tip. Thank you, Ira, and have a lot of fun in your trip.
1:01.0	Up next, we're going to talk about sleep. You might be a night owl or a morning lark.
1:06.0	Wherever you fall on the scale, everyone sleeps, it's universal. You've probably had that sleepy feeling when you get sick.
1:12.6	All you want to do is take a long nap. Well, researchers were able to find a gene linked to our immune
1:17.3	system that causes sleepiness. Their results were published this week in the journal Science.
1:21.8	Let me introduce my next guest, Amita Sigel, is an author on that study. She's also professor
1:26.4	of neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania.
1:29.3	Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you.
1:33.2	Let's start by just talking about sleep, and we all do it. I don't know that most people know exactly what sleep is.
1:40.6	Maybe you can define what sleep is in your mind.
1:49.1	Yes, so the definition of sleep is something, believe it or not, that has been debated over the years. To my mind, it is a behavioral state of relative immobility that occurs with
1:57.4	a circadian, a 24-hour rhythm, and during which animals have what we called
2:05.1	an increased arousal threshold, which means that they are less sensitive to sensory
	...

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