Not all birds can fly. Penguins, ostriches, and kiwis are some famous examples.
It’s pretty easy to figure out if a living bird can fly. But it’s a bit tricker when it comes to extinct birds or bird ancestors, like dinosaurs. Remember, all birds are dinosaurs, but not all dinosaurs evolved into birds.
Scientists at Chicago’s Field Museum wanted to figure out if there was a way to tell if a dinosaur could fly or not. They found that the number and symmetry of flight feathers are reliable indicators of whether a bird or dinosaur could lift off the ground.
Ira talks with two of the study’s co-authors about their research and how it might help us understand how dinosaur flight evolved. Dr. Yosef Kiat is a postdoctoral researcher and Dr. Jingmai O’Connor is the associate curator of fossil reptiles at The Field Museum in Chicago.
Sacre Bleu! Some French Cheeses At Risk Of ExtinctionThere’s bad news for the Camembert and brie lovers out there: According to the French National Center for Scientific Research, some beloved soft cheeses are at risk of extinction. The culprit? A lack of microbial diversity in the mold strains used to make Camemberts and bries.
As with many foods, consumers expect the cheese they buy to be consistent over time. We want the brie we buy today to look and taste like the brie we bought three months ago. But there’s a downside to this uniformity—the strain of Penicillium microbes used to make these cheeses can’t reproduce sexually, meaning it must be cloned. That means these microbes are not resilient, and susceptible to errors in the genome. Over the years, P. camemberti has picked up mutations that make it much harder to clone, meaning it’s getting harder to create the bries we know and love.
Joining Ira to talk about this is Benji Jones, senior environmental reporter at Vox based in New York City.
Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com
Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.
714: How Trivia Experts Recall Facts | One Ant Species Sent Ripples Through A Food Web
716: OpenAI’s New Product Makes Incredibly Realistic Fake Videos
715: Private Spacecraft Makes Historic Moon Landing | New Cloud Seeding Technique
713: Making Chemistry More Accessible To Blind And Low-Vision People
712: Understanding And Curbing Generative AI’s Energy Consumption
710: Climate Scientist Michael Mann Wins Defamation Case
709: Odysseus Lander Heads To The Moon | Ohio Chemical Spill, One Year Later
708: One Crisis After Another: Designing Cities For Resiliency
707: Using Sound To Unpack The History Of Astronomy
706: Colorectal Cancer Rates Rising In Young People | What An AI Learns From A Baby
705: A Black Physician’s Analysis Of The Legacy Of Racism In Medicine
704: Faraway Planets With Oceans Of Magma | The Art And Science Of Trash Talk
701: Is Each Fingerprint On Your Hand Unique? | In This Computer Component, Data Slides Through Honey
700: The FDA Approved The First CRISPR-Based Therapy. What’s Next?
703: Protecting The ‘Satan’ Tarantula | If Termites Wore Stripes, Would Spiders Still Eat Them?
699: Scientists Are Uncovering A World Of ‘Dark Matter’ Carcinogens
702: Syphilis Cases Up 80% Since 2018 | The Largest Deep-Sea Coral Reef In The World
698: Expanding Our Umwelt: Understanding Animal Experiences
695: How Signing Characters Help Deaf Children Learn Language
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
The Daily
Just Dumb Enough Podcast
Voices of Misery Podcast
House of Whimsical Terror
Stuff You Should Know