Speaker 1: Welcome. This is Marsha for Radio I, and today I
Speaker 1: will be reading National Geographic magazine dated November twenty twenty five,
Speaker 1: which is donated by the publisher as a reminder RADIOI
Speaker 1: as a reading service intended for people who are blind
Speaker 1: or have other disabilities that make it difficult to read
Speaker 1: printed material. Please join me now for the first article
Speaker 1: titled this Gibbon Can Do the Robot, Decoding the uncanny
Speaker 1: moves of Asia's dancing apes. Most apes don't know how
Speaker 1: to dance, but female crested gibbons of the genus Nomascus,
Speaker 1: the long limbed primates, known for their acrobatics swinging from
Speaker 1: tree to tree, regularly perform a series of boombents that
Speaker 1: can only be described as the robot. Scientists recently analyzed
Speaker 1: dozens of videos of mature, female crested gibbons living in
Speaker 1: zoos and rescue centers around the world, and interviewed researchers
Speaker 1: who had observed the dancing in the wilds of China
Speaker 1: and Vietnam. Their study, released in the journal Primates, found
Speaker 1: that the dances follow clear rhythmic patterns. In captivity, the
Speaker 1: gibbons generally direct their routines at caretakers most likely to
Speaker 1: socialize in solicit snacks in the wild, they seem to
Speaker 1: dance as a mating invitation. This is especially puzzling, says
Speaker 1: zoologists and study co author Kai Kasper of Germany's Heinrich
Speaker 1: Heina University Duzeldorff. Most crested gibbons live in small family
Speaker 1: groups that form around stable monogamous pairs, which means the
Speaker 1: females don't have to compete for the attention of their partners,
Speaker 1: says Kaspar, Dancing may just ease the tension. This by
Speaker 1: Kelsey Noah Kowski. Next. How to photograph a firestorm. Scientists
Speaker 1: say that the fires ravaging the Western United States are
Speaker 1: burning differently these days. For one's landscape photographer, documenting the
Speaker 1: aftermath requires a new approach as well. This by Brian Resnik.
Speaker 1: Today's fires are different. Blazes have scarred and scorched the
Speaker 1: Western United States for ages, but for scientists who study
Speaker 1: extreme climate events, like UCLA's Daniel Swain, the wild flowers
Speaker 1: are now defying historic precedent, moving and growing with devastating intensity.
Speaker 1: As Swain puts it, these new fires are doing seemingly
Speaker 1: impossible things. Take northern California's twenty twenty gigafire, the first
Speaker 1: in the state's modern fire tracking history to burn more
Speaker 1: than a million acres, a footprint larger than Rhode Island.
Speaker 1: Its size wasn't unprecedented. The speed of the destruction was
Speaker 1: two hundred years ago, you probably would have seen million
Speaker 1: acre fires sometimes in California. Swain says, they wouldn't have
Speaker 1: burned a million acres in a few days, It would
Speaker 1: have taken months. More recently, Swain was monitoring the twenty
Speaker 1: twenty four Bridge fire raging north of Los Angeles via
Speaker 1: satellite thermal imagery. On his screen, he could see black
Speaker 1: splotches on a map that indicated areas burning at temperatures
Speaker 1: upwards of several hundred year greeze, temperatures so hot that
Speaker 1: you're either looking at a volcanic eruption or a wildfire.
Speaker 1: In just as second day, the fire expanded like an
Speaker 1: ink stain through cotton, running across forty five thousand acres
Speaker 1: about seventy square miles. That burn rate isn't unheard of.
Speaker 1: It occurs with grass fires racing over flat plains, but
Speaker 1: this was burning forest in some of the steepest mountains
Speaker 1: of North America. The fire, Swain says, had to burn
Speaker 1: up Mount Baldy and down Mount Baldy, and then up
Speaker 1: the next mountain and down the next mountain, and up
Speaker 1: and down. Researchers have been tracking fires with precision from
Speaker 1: satellites for more than forty years, just a small slice
Speaker 1: of time geographically speaking, but the trends they see are clear.
Speaker 1: Fires are hotter, burning faster, and destroying more property. Nearly
Speaker 1: every year for the past decade, there's been at least
Speaker 1: one town in California or a large part of town
Speaker 1: completely decimated by wildfire that didn't use to happen. Swain says,
Speaker 1: the changes we're seeing in deckscades are changes that would
Speaker 1: take millennia to many millennia to unfold in a more
Speaker 1: typical geological history context. When National Geographic Explorer and photographer
Speaker 1: Matt Black saw these extraordinary changes happening so close to
Speaker 1: his home in California's Sierra Nevada, a four hundred plus
Speaker 1: mile mountain range that stretches along the interior of the state,
Speaker 1: he took on the challenge of capturing the aftermath of
Speaker 1: the fires. But as someone who shoots in black and white,
Speaker 1: he was concerned about an obvious comparison. Over the past century,
Speaker 1: no one has taken such iconic black and white images
Speaker 1: of Sierra Nevada landscapes as ansel Atoms. His work was
Speaker 1: integral to the modern conservation movement, inspiring generations of people
Speaker 1: to work together to protect precious wilderness areas, but photographing
Speaker 1: the landscape in a way reminiscent of the Atoms did
Speaker 1: not feel like it was matching the moment. Black says,
Speaker 1: Adams images convey a post guard perfect vision of imposing permanence,
Speaker 1: that such places might stay untouched if we protected them,
Speaker 1: but climate devastation has destroyed that ideal. So Black turned
Speaker 1: to an unconventional tool. An industrial thermal camera more typically
Speaker 1: used to inspect steel forging equipment. While a traditional camera
Speaker 1: uses light to make images, a thermal camera uses heat.
Speaker 1: The hottest objects in a thermal image are usually exposed
Speaker 1: in bright white, the coolest in inky black. Beyond its
Speaker 1: specialized lens and sensor, Black's hand held camera is fairly conventional,
Speaker 1: yet when it's trained on the natural world, the thermal
Speaker 1: images it produces are unexpectedly beautiful, but there's a sinister
Speaker 1: quality to them too. An ever present reminder of what
Speaker 1: made them. Our atmospheres holding more heat than it used to,
Speaker 1: and some portion of the heat could radiate in each image.
Speaker 1: They're built out of heat that came from elsewhere. That
Speaker 1: came from the co two in the skies above, that
Speaker 1: came from the exhaust pipes in the city below. Black
Speaker 1: says taking the camera on trucks through burned down forest
Speaker 1: felt like a revelation. What was amazing to me was
Speaker 1: the way it reacted to dead trees, He says, The
Speaker 1: charred black trunk's trap heat, so when you look through
Speaker 1: the thermal camera, they become the brightest points on the landscape.
Speaker 1: They appear alive again, but a ghostly kind of life,
Speaker 1: shining spectrally among the ruin. Next what do the world's
Speaker 1: oldest tattoos mean? A new breed of archaeologists wants to
Speaker 1: unravel some ancient mysteries by studying long overlooked body art.
Speaker 1: This by Sam Keane. Some years back, a man wandered
Speaker 1: into Aaron deeeder Wolf's office in Nashville at the Tennessee
Speaker 1: Division of Archaeology to hand over a two foot portion
Speaker 1: of a Macedon dusk. The man had spotted the relic
Speaker 1: poking out of a riverbank and saw it off the
Speaker 1: exposed end. Removing the tusk sullied its scientific value, so
Speaker 1: deeeder Wolf started trotting it out during talks at grade schools,
Speaker 1: until a kid dropped it and its outer layers shattered.
Speaker 1: For many archaeologists, that might have marked the end of
Speaker 1: the tusk's usefulness, but not for deeeder Wolf. He salvaged
Speaker 1: a few shorts and later transformed them into tattooed needles,
Speaker 1: carving each with flint and smoothing it on sandstone. But
Speaker 1: when he tried tattooing a colleague with one, it went poorly.
Speaker 1: Microfractures in the ivory snagged skin each time he withdrew
Speaker 1: the tip it was, he recalls a bloody mess. By day,
Speaker 1: deeterer Wolf surveys sights to assess the archaeological impacts of
Speaker 1: new construction, but in his spare hours he's among the
Speaker 1: foremost experts on ancient tattooing, a field formally discounted but
Speaker 1: increasingly recognized as offering vital insight into cultures worldwide. Once
Speaker 1: an outlier, he's now part of an emerging cohort of
Speaker 1: researchers showing the practice was more widespread than archaeologists ever
Speaker 1: knew and helping reveal new meaning in a historically suppressed art.
Speaker 1: Hostility to tattoo research has colonialist roots, with missionaries and
Speaker 1: officials having considered the practice of barbaric. As archaeologisgy emerged
Speaker 1: as a discipline in the nineteenth century, its practitioners seemed
Speaker 1: to inherit this disdain, mentioning tattoos in their work rarely
Speaker 1: and pejoratively a practice of so called savages and deviants,
Speaker 1: and as Deeeder Wolf learned early in his career, that
Speaker 1: attitude lingered into the twenty first century now forty nine.
Speaker 1: He started as a Mayanist before switching focus to the
Speaker 1: pre colonial southeastern United States, but personal fondness for tattoos
Speaker 1: he has a dozen drove his side research. After he
Speaker 1: organized his first conference session on ancient tattooing in two
Speaker 1: thousand and nine, an older attendee buttonholed him. The guy
Speaker 1: told me there are more tattoos of ancient art on
Speaker 1: graduate students than there ever were tattoos in the ancient world.
Speaker 1: Deeter Wolf says he was one hundred percent wrong, and
Speaker 1: it's not like the evidence was hidden. He just didn't
Speaker 1: care to engage with it. In that lack of engagement,
Speaker 1: Dieter Wolf says, has led archaeologists to overlook critical details
Speaker 1: about those their striving to understand. As tattoos throughout history
Speaker 1: have helped define group identity, marked rites of passage signaled
Speaker 1: spiritual power, one way to combat colleagues dismissive stance. Peter
Speaker 1: Wolf went looking for how best to identify tattoo tools
Speaker 1: in the archaeological record. Doing so is tricky, since a
Speaker 1: pointing instrument from a a dig site might have been
Speaker 1: used to apply ink to skin, or it might have
Speaker 1: been an all or a sewing needle. How to tell
Speaker 1: the difference. Dieter Wulf started by assembling other archaeologists and
Speaker 1: researchers who shared his interest, and together they launched a
Speaker 1: series of experiments carried out over the better part of
Speaker 1: a decade. Some formal and controlled, others were at hack
Speaker 1: for each. He made tattoo needles out of materials that
Speaker 1: ancient closeures may have used, feather shafts, deer bones, fish teeth,
Speaker 1: cactus thorns, and yes, gastodon tusk shards. They applied either
Speaker 1: modern tattoo ink or a mix of charcoal's soot and
Speaker 1: water what most ancient cultures would likely have used. Then
Speaker 1: he tried the tools out on volunteers and on pigskin,
Speaker 1: as well as on his own skin. The feather proved
Speaker 1: too soft, like tattooing with a sharpie. Deeeder Wolf says
Speaker 1: he suspects a historical account that mentions tattooing with feathers
Speaker 1: was mistaken. The tusk was a debacle, but thorn and
Speaker 1: bone tools worked nicely. The porous structure of bone held
Speaker 1: ink particularly well, and when Deeter Wulf and his team
Speaker 1: analyzed some of the tools microscopically, they noted distinct patterns
Speaker 1: of wear. Tattooing blunted and smoothed the tips, and drove
Speaker 1: in tiny charcoal fragments to day, The published bindings helped
Speaker 1: archaeologists distinguish what is and isn't an ancient tattoo needle,
Speaker 1: but some insight into millennia old methods can only be
Speaker 1: gleaned from ancient bodies. Enter Butzi, the fifty three hundred
Speaker 1: year old ice man discovered in the Alps in nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety one. Researchers analyzing the sixty one lines and crosses
Speaker 1: spread across his body. Initially suggested Botsi's tattoos were applied
Speaker 1: by slicing his skin with sharp stones, then rubbing soot
Speaker 1: into the wounds. Decades later, Deeter Wolf designed an experiment
Speaker 1: that would allow him to test that theory, collaborating with
Speaker 1: Maya Siluc Koch Madsten, a traditional Inuit tattoo artist from Greenland,
Speaker 1: and Daniel Ride, a tattoo artist then based in New Zealand.
Speaker 1: Using eight techniques, including poking with a needle and the
Speaker 1: slice and rubbed method, Ride gave himself eight identical tattoos
Speaker 1: of stacked triangles on his left thigh. He noted how
Speaker 1: long each took to heel, along with how much pain
Speaker 1: he felt. The work to grueling twelve hours, though time
Speaker 1: and pain weren't equally distributed, some methods took minutes. One
Speaker 1: Inuit technique executed with cock Medisene's guid guidance involved sowing
Speaker 1: his skin with ink soaked thread and lasted three agonizing hours. Afterward,
Speaker 1: Redae says his thighs looked like Swiss cheese. Dieter Wolf
Speaker 1: later compared magnified images of Otzie's tattoos with Redays. On
Speaker 1: the latter, he saw line segments for the slice and
Speaker 1: rubb tattoos tapering into wisps on the needle poked ones
Speaker 1: segments had blunt, rounded ends that matched Oatzie's. The Iceman's tattoos,
Speaker 1: Deeterwolf concluded were not sliced in, but carefully strippled with needles.
Speaker 1: The study shed light on Ossy's culture and provided the
Speaker 1: first published reference set of what differing tattoo applications looked
Speaker 1: like microscopically, now used by archaeologists to analyze tattoos in
Speaker 1: other mummies. Anne Austin, a co author of Deeeder Wolf's
Speaker 1: and an egyptologist at the University of Missouri Saint Louis,
Speaker 1: says tattoos can convey details about societies that aren't found elsewhere.
Speaker 1: The things you write down on skin, she says, are
Speaker 1: different than things you write down on paper. Egyptian texts,
Speaker 1: for example, have little to say about the role of
Speaker 1: women in the clergy. But Austin, who has found some
Speaker 1: of the most extensive evidence of tattooing on Egyptian mummies,
Speaker 1: has studied a mummified Egyptian woman whose thirty plus tattoos
Speaker 1: of hieroglyphs, musical instruments, snake deities, and more indicates she
Speaker 1: was something like a priestess. Tattoos over the mummy's voice box,
Speaker 1: Austin says, suggests she had an active speaking or singing role,
Speaker 1: her voice imbued with sacred power to coach's new information
Speaker 1: out of old mummies and tools. Tattoo archaeologists are increasingly
Speaker 1: turning to imagining to imaging technology. Deeter Wolf and a
Speaker 1: Canadian colleague, Benoi Robitale, recently used infrared sensitive cameras to
Speaker 1: find hidden ink among one of the world's largest collections
Speaker 1: of mummies from coastal Peru. Some specimens date back twenty
Speaker 1: four hundred years, their tattoos obscured by the darkening and
Speaker 1: weathering of skin over time, the pair are finding. Robitai
Speaker 1: says that religious iconography and tattoos stayed consistent over almost
Speaker 1: two millennia, suggesting the local beliefs persevered even during periods
Speaker 1: of invasion and conflict. The frontiers of the discipline likely
Speaker 1: involve applying such modern techniques to more museum collections, and
Speaker 1: as new generation of tattoo savvy scholars are reassessing what
Speaker 1: lies in tombs and sarcophagi, they're also belatedly recognizing and
Speaker 1: collaborating with indigenous stewards of ancestral tattooing techniques. As indigenous people,
Speaker 1: we've kind of been taught that there were people before
Speaker 1: and then there's us. Cock Medicine says. This science is
Speaker 1: building a bridge between the two so we can feel
Speaker 1: connected to our ancestors again. Opportunities for more discovery seem
Speaker 1: almost limitless, Geter Wolff says, noting that researchers have found
Speaker 1: more evidence of tattoos on mummies in the past five
Speaker 1: years than was documented over the previous one hundred and fifty.
Speaker 1: We've got this outrageous data set, he says, Now, what
Speaker 1: are we going to do with it next? Searching for
Speaker 1: Sleep Mode by Adam Piore. Putting humans into hibernation is
Speaker 1: a sci fi concept that could revolutionize medicine and transform
Speaker 1: space travel. It's also a lot closer to becoming real
Speaker 1: than you might think. The test subject had slipped into
Speaker 1: what physician Clinton Callaway describes as a twilight kind of
Speaker 1: sleep eighteen hours after Callaway's team at the University of
Speaker 1: Pittsburgh's Applied Physiology Lab started the man on a sedative
Speaker 1: that suppressed his body's natural shivering response. His internal temperature
Speaker 1: had sunk from ninety eight point six degrees fahrenheit to
Speaker 1: ninety five degrees fahrenheit. His heart rate and blood pressure
Speaker 1: had dropped. His metabolism and along with it, his need
Speaker 1: for food, oxygen, and carbon dioxide removal had plunged twenty percent.
Speaker 1: Yet the subject could still rise from his bed, shuffle
Speaker 1: to the bathroom to empty his bladder, and when hungry,
Speaker 1: ring a bell to ask for food or a drink,
Speaker 1: alleviating the need for a catheter or intravenous lines and
Speaker 1: ensuring he could still respond and react. The man was
Speaker 1: one of five exceedingly fit volunteers raging in age from
Speaker 1: twenty one to fifty four, who quietly doozed in the
Speaker 1: semi darkness. Pretend astronauts on a nine month journey to
Speaker 1: Mars Nassau had tasked Callaway, an expert in cardiac care
Speaker 1: and induced typothermia, with figuring out a simple way to
Speaker 1: put human beings into a state that mimics some of
Speaker 1: the key features of hibernation with out the use of
Speaker 1: a ventilator or immobilizing drugs and careful dosing of dex metodonomine.
Speaker 1: Did the trick. His subject. Callaway says now was woozy, dreamy,
Speaker 1: but still able to function in an emergency if required,
Speaker 1: just like a bear. Humans in hibernation mode are a
Speaker 1: classic staple of space travel and science fiction movies, whether
Speaker 1: it's Hal nine thousand fatally unplugging a few of his
Speaker 1: passengers in two thousand and one A Space Odyssey, or
Speaker 1: Chris Pratt waking up Jennifer Lawrence too soon because he's
Speaker 1: lonely in passengers. But NASA has grand ambitions of sending
Speaker 1: astronauts to Mars for reel as soon as the twenty thirties,
Speaker 1: and putting humans in hibernation mode for real could be
Speaker 1: the key to achieving it, which is why both NASA
Speaker 1: and the European Space Agency are supporting studies like Callaways.
Speaker 1: A bear like state of hibernation could, in theory, help
Speaker 1: astronauts snooze through the tum of extended space travel and
Speaker 1: limit crew made conflict there. Slowed metabolism could help reduce
Speaker 1: cargo missions would require less food in oxygen and consequently
Speaker 1: less fuel. Space Agency funded research is even exploring whether
Speaker 1: slowing a person's metabolism weakens the health impact of harmful radiation.
Speaker 1: This would be an encouraging boost for the viability of
Speaker 1: extended travel through space, where radiation is as much as
Speaker 1: two hundred times greater than on Earth. In fact, when
Speaker 1: it comes to achieving the dream of crew missions to Mars,
Speaker 1: says ESA's chief exploration scientists, Angelique than Omburgen, space radiation
Speaker 1: is a big showstopper. Scientists aren't studying hibernation just so
Speaker 1: we can ship astronauts ever deeper into space, though its
Speaker 1: physiological superpowers could save countless lives here on Earth. If
Speaker 1: we can unlock the secrets to the mysterious molecular level
Speaker 1: changes that shift animals in and out of a state
Speaker 1: of hibernation or torpor, a miraculously reversible state of dormancy
Speaker 1: characterized by extreme lethargy, a lowered body temperature and metabolic rate,
Speaker 1: and host of other remarkable changes. It's a well established principle.
Speaker 1: Calaua explains that at low temperatures, like in hibernating animals,
Speaker 1: you tolerate lack of oxygen lack of blood flow better
Speaker 1: and longer. But why why don't bears muscles atrophy when
Speaker 1: they sleep? How come their blood doesn't clot and what
Speaker 1: triggers the process to begin with. In their hunt for answers,
Speaker 1: scientists are now inching closer to their most ambitious discovery yet,
Speaker 1: A central switch in the brains of hibernating animals that
Speaker 1: activates the various beneficial phenomena of hibernation all at once.
Speaker 1: Mimicking the colder body temperature of bears during hibernation, for instance,
Speaker 1: could lessen the severity of reperfusion injuries, the often devastating
Speaker 1: damage that occurs after cardiac arrest when blood flow is
Speaker 1: restored to the oxygen deprived tissues of the body, setting
Speaker 1: off massive inflammation, oxid exeitative stress, and cell death. It
Speaker 1: could also help extend the narrow window of time that
Speaker 1: doctors have to provide critical care during strokes and heart attacks.
Speaker 1: A clearer understanding of how hibernating bears preserve muscle mass
Speaker 1: and turned insulin resistance on and off could have other benefits.
Speaker 1: It might help us treat chronic obesity and diabetes in humans.
Speaker 1: Ice you patients can lose more than ten percent of
Speaker 1: their muscle mass in seven days. Could an induced state
Speaker 1: of hibernation staller even stop the decline. Scientists are searching
Speaker 1: beyond bears for the answers, because, of course, bears aren't
Speaker 1: the only animals that hibernate. A team at Colorado State
Speaker 1: University is investigating how the thirteen lined ground squirrel can
Speaker 1: rapidly fatten and then switch off its appetite before hibernation
Speaker 1: for clues to combating obesity. UCLA research examining the genes
Speaker 1: of yellow bellied marmots have recently found that epigenic epigenetic
Speaker 1: aging is essentially stalled during the seven to eight months
Speaker 1: they hibernate each year. Experts in Germany are exploring how
Speaker 1: bats maintain blood circulation at low temperatures with an eye
Speaker 1: to human hibernation applications, and biologists at the University of
Speaker 1: Alaska Fairbanks are studying a squirrel that could drop its
Speaker 1: body temperature by seventy degrees and heart rate down to
Speaker 1: five beats permitted, and survive eight months in subzero temperatures.
Speaker 1: Their goal is to develop a hibernation mimetic drug that
Speaker 1: might safely allow clinicians to place humans into an immediate
Speaker 1: state of hibernation without a long prep time in a
Speaker 1: rural hospital lacking advanced equipment, or even in an ambulance
Speaker 1: racing through the streets. It would instantly dial down cellular metabolism,
Speaker 1: slow cell death, and catalyze a whole host of other
Speaker 1: biol logical processes associated with hibernation. Callaway's twilight sleep experiment
Speaker 1: provides a glimpse into what might be possible for humans,
Speaker 1: but what happens in the lab and in the wild
Speaker 1: are clearly two different things. Bears don't need drugs to
Speaker 1: settle in for the winner. They have a natural torpor switch,
Speaker 1: he says, which is flipped through some process that we
Speaker 1: don't fully understand. And though their unruly bears still offer
Speaker 1: a good comparison for our own potential, they're at least
Speaker 1: closer to us in size than a rodent, and perhaps
Speaker 1: most critically, their temperature drop during sleep deep sleep is
Speaker 1: well within the range of human survivability. One bright afternoon
Speaker 1: in late March, biologist Haiko Jansen stood outside of fence
Speaker 1: dan Pasture at the Washington State University Bear Research, Education
Speaker 1: and Conservation Center in Pullman and watched as a shaggy,
Speaker 1: three hundred pound female grizzly bear named Kiyo struggled to
Speaker 1: eat a marshmallow. Other than a serious case of BedHead
Speaker 1: than the glacier pace of quees chewing. There were few
Speaker 1: visible clothes that the dangerous, disheveled giant with the four
Speaker 1: inch claws was undergoing a profound metamorphosis. Looking from the outside,
Speaker 1: little about Hugh's metabolic process seems applicable to humans. Ten
Speaker 1: days earlier, she rose from her bed of straw and
Speaker 1: began to slowly work through a feast of bare kibble,
Speaker 1: apples and elk bones and leg meat. It was her
Speaker 1: first meal in five months. Her salverary glands were still sluggish.
Speaker 1: Then she pooped out a fecal plug composed of plants,
Speaker 1: dried feces, dead cells, and hair lodged in her glower intestine.
Speaker 1: Those three key activities rise, eat, poop out the plug
Speaker 1: seemed to have helped to flip a series of microscopic
Speaker 1: genetic switches inside her cells, catalyzing the slow motion reversal
Speaker 1: of a host of bizarre biological cycles her body had
Speaker 1: entered into over the winter. Q's metabolism, which had been
Speaker 1: operated at one quarter its normal speed, kicked into gear
Speaker 1: more than doubling by the time she was struggling with
Speaker 1: the marshmallow. Her core body temperature hovering about twelve degrees
Speaker 1: below normal, began to rise. Two of her heart's four chambers,
Speaker 1: which had all but shut down for the winter, reopened
Speaker 1: for business. Her fat cells, for months miraculously resistant to insulin,
Speaker 1: the hormone that tells the body when to absorb sugars,
Speaker 1: started to respond to it again. Her appetite, absent for months,
Speaker 1: rumbled to life five months earlier, back in November, when
Speaker 1: Ki lay down and packed it in for the winter,
Speaker 1: she stopped eating. Her gut entered stasis, her saliva glands
Speaker 1: shut down, and she began living on her own body fat.
Speaker 1: Over the following months, she burned roughly twenty percent, or
Speaker 1: seventy pounds of her body weight. To facilitate this, her
Speaker 1: body became resistant to insulin, a good thing for hibinator's.
Speaker 1: Humans who become insulin resistance often developed diabetes, clearly a
Speaker 1: bad thing. Bears can switch that resistance and on and
Speaker 1: off depending on the season, without health consequences. If we
Speaker 1: could understand how, maybe we could figure out a way
Speaker 1: for humans to do it too. The notion got a
Speaker 1: boost of confidence in twenty eighteen when a Canadian group
Speaker 1: published the first complete grizzly bear DNA sequence. A year later,
Speaker 1: Jansen headed up a team that used a technique known
Speaker 1: as RNA sequencing to identify which genes are activated in beer, muscle, fat,
Speaker 1: and liver tissue samples before, during, and after hibernation. They
Speaker 1: found seasonal changes in more than ten thousand of a
Speaker 1: grizzly's thirty thousand, seven hundred and twenty three genes. Now,
Speaker 1: in order to decode how bears switch insulin resistance on
Speaker 1: and off, Jansen has been extracting stem cells from blood
Speaker 1: samples collected from Pullman's bears at different times of year,
Speaker 1: methodically eliminating individual genes, and then growing colonies of fat
Speaker 1: cells in peatrie dishes to see what happens. We're not
Speaker 1: saying that we'll find something that can reverse diabetes, Jansen offers,
Speaker 1: but at least by looking at a model system the
Speaker 1: cells that change their sensitivity, we can begin to develop
Speaker 1: some clues as to what's going on. Q's cardiac function
Speaker 1: may also yield insights that help treat human blood clotting disorders.
Speaker 1: While Q was hibernating, her heart rate slowed from eighty
Speaker 1: to one hundred beats per minute to about ten Normally.
Speaker 1: This would cause her blood to clot into dangerous blockages
Speaker 1: and induce a stroke. If that happened to us, as Jansen,
Speaker 1: we'd be dead. But hibernating bears also experience a remarkable
Speaker 1: drop in their blood clotting platelets. It was Q's ability
Speaker 1: to maintain muscle tone, however, that particularly transfixed some of
Speaker 1: her researchers. Unlike humans, who began to lose muscle mass
Speaker 1: within a week of inactivity, Q rose from her hibernation
Speaker 1: bed as fit as if she'd spent the winter chasing chipmunks.
Speaker 1: Up in Alaska, researchers vaudem Fidu Goorov and Anna Goropashnaya
Speaker 1: are trying to unlock the mystery of how beers do
Speaker 1: this and test the hypothesis that humans might be able
Speaker 1: as well. The Russian born husband and wife teams specialized
Speaker 1: in evolutionary genetics at the University of Alaska's Institute of
Speaker 1: Arctic Biology IAB in Fairbanks. When they began analyzing gene
Speaker 1: expression patterns in tissue samples collected from captive black bears
Speaker 1: nearly twenty years ago. The results shocked them, seeing as
Speaker 1: how beers stop eating and slow their metabolism during hibernation.
Speaker 1: Federov and Gorophashnaya assumed that the gene activity involved in
Speaker 1: building new muscles would be dialed down to preserve energy. Instead,
Speaker 1: the genes were just as active and even appeared to
Speaker 1: ramp up. We checked it several times, says Goropashnaya. We
Speaker 1: couldn't believe it. The findings were illogical, but somehow correct.
Speaker 1: Scores of genes known to be part of muscle protein
Speaker 1: biosynthesis were turned up in what appear to be a
Speaker 1: coordinated and metabolically costly frenzy of activity. The two presented
Speaker 1: their first paper on the phenomenon in twenty eleven. Now,
Speaker 1: with the aid of newer DNA sequencing technologies, they're able
Speaker 1: to study twice as many genes and with far more specificity,
Speaker 1: which is what led them to the m tour pathway,
Speaker 1: a well known circular dial that also plays a key
Speaker 1: role in controlling the rate of cell division. This concludes
Speaker 1: readings from National Geographic Magazine for to day. Your reader
Speaker 1: has been Marsha. Thank you for listening, Keep on listening
Speaker 1: and have a great day.