Morgan State University, a Baltimore, Maryland Carnegie R2 doctoral research institution,

offers more than 100 academic programs and awards degrees at the Baccliorate, Masters, and Doctoral Levels,

is furthering their mission of growing the future leading the world.

Morgan continues to address the needs and challenges of the modern urban environment.

With a four-year quadrupling of research, more than a dozen new doctoral programs,

and eight new National Centers of Excellence, Morgan is positioned to achieve Carnegie R1 designation in the next five years.

To learn more about Morgan and their ascension to R1, visit morgan.edu slash research.

Welcome to the science podcast for May 3rd, 2019. I'm Sarah Crespi. In this week's show, we're back with the latest stories from science.

First up, I'm going to talk with contributing correspondent Kai Kupershmet about how humans

have been trying for millennia to make the color blue and about some recent successes.

And Megan Cantwell talks with Andrew Whitehead about how a small fish in the Gulf of Mexico,

the Gulf killy fish, has adapted to pollution with the help of its Atlantic cousins genes.

First up, we have contributing correspondent Kai Cooper Schmidt. He's here to talk to us about

the pursuit of blue. Hi, Kai. Hi, Sarah. So how long have humans been on the hunt for a blue

color? That's already where the difficulty begins, I guess. Yeah. There's pretty good evidence

from a cave in South Africa, the Blombus Cave, that 100,000 years ago,

humans already were making pigments, so more like red ochre and yellow ochre and using charcoal for

black. They were making pigments, but there's no evidence at all of any blue pigments. And for a

very, very long time, that stays the same. I mean, there's some recent evidence from a grave site in

Turkey that about 9,000 years ago, there were some burials of women and children where they had

ground down azurite, which is a blue mineral. And even when it's ground down, it's kind of a nice

blue pigment. They were buried with this. Possibly it was used for cosmetics.

...