This week in science: Chimpanzee ‘conversations’, deep-sea oxygen and tidal waves



AILSA CHANG, HOST:

It’s time for a regular science roundup with our friends at NPR’s Short Wave podcast, Regina Barber and Emily Kwong. Hello both of you.

REGINA MOTHEBELI, ABOUT THAT: Hello.

EMILY KWANG, OUTSIDE: Hello.

CHANG: Hello. Okay, so how this works – I love when we explain this all the time – is you bring us three science fiction stories that have impressed you this week. What is it?

KWONG: Okay, drumroll – so we have you…

(SOUNDBITE OF HEADS TAPPING ON TABLE)

KONG: …very good. Here’s what chimpanzee gestures reveal about communication…

CHANG: Oh.

BIRBER: The way oxygen is made at the bottom of the ocean…

KWONG: And how a computer program can warn people before a big bad wave occurs.

CHANG: I like it. OKAY. I really want to start with the chimps because, if they behave, I want to know if they talk with their hands more than I do.

(BLUE)

KONG: Well, that’s right. Chimps certainly do. I mean they don’t have clear speech like us, so body gestures are important for communication. I can show you a clip of…

CHANG: Oh, that’s right.

BODY: … Huh?

CHANG: Please.

(SOUNDBITE OF CHIMPANZEE BARKING)

KONG: All right. So these are two chimpanzees in a tree.

CHANG: Oh.

KWONG: They just had a conflict.

CHANG: (Laughter).

KWONG: And you can see that one chimp reaches for another chimp’s hand, like, I’m sorry.

CHANG: Oh.

KWONG: And after a pause, the other chimp gently returns the hand.

CHANG: It looks simple. I’m looking at this – like, they really do? Is that happening?

WORKER: Yes. I mean, maybe. So, like, a gesture exchange like this is the subject of a recent paper in the journal Current Biology. Gal Badihi is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and lead author of this paper.

GAL BADIHI: And my part was East African chimpanzees.

DISAPPOINTMENT: While browsing through a large list of content, Gal watched an exchange between five wild chimpanzees. Often, this exchange consisted of two parts – hand reaching, hand clicking. But sometimes this exchange had seven parts, which was very exciting to see.

BADIHI: Because they seem to have this issue of going back and forth when they’re not face to face, a conversation schedule that’s more like a human conversation.

CHANG: It’s great. And are they sure that it has nothing to do with the sounds they call each other? Is it just gestures and speech?

KWONG: They’re still making sounds, but body gestures are something they really pay attention to because of the movement of body gestures.

CHANG: Ah.

KWONG: Like, the background was really like a human conversation. The pause between the gesture and the gesture response is about 120 milliseconds.

CHANG: Wow.

KWONG: It was too soon.

CHANG: All right. So, how close is that to a human response?

KONG: Go. Human communication generally lasts up to 200 milliseconds throughout the speech.

CHANG: It’s not like that.

KWONG: Again, everything is burning fast, it’s all very fast.

CHANG: I didn’t know there was a rate. However, if chimps are supposed to be, like, one of our closest living relatives – right? – like, does this reveal anything about the evolution of the way people communicate?

KWONG: It raises the incredible possibility – yes – that this kind of modern communication could have existed before humans split from the great apes. We don’t know for sure. But several primatologists I spoke with, who were not part of the study, all felt that this was an important addition to understanding how adaptation and communication processes are how did they come to be – no speech needed.

CHANG: That’s very interesting. OKAY. Now we’re going to take a drastic turn and move to oxygen on the ocean floor. I think it’s weird, right? Otherwise, we wouldn’t be talking about it.

WORKER: Yes. So most of our oxygen is created through photosynthesis. That’s when, you know, plants take in light, water and carbon dioxide, and make, like, sugar and oxygen.

KWONG: But for more than a decade, scientists knew about traces of oxygen at the bottom of the ocean – like, three miles down…

CHANG: Wow.

KWONG: …Where there is no light, there is no photosynthesis. So where does this oxygen come from? And a new study in the journal Nature Geoscience may have an answer. It shows that the oxygen produced without light – called dark oxygen – may come from metal particles in the ocean floor.

CHANG: Wait, wait? What kind of metal is in the deep sea? So, how did it get down there?

KWONG: It’s these lumps of metal – like nickel, manganese, cobalt, iron – that form these lumps on the ocean floor. And they grow on top of things that fall to the bottom, like shark teeth.

CHANG: Ah.

WORKER: Yes. I spoke to physical chemist Franz Geiger about this. And he is one of the co-authors of the paper, and he studied these metal groups in the laboratory. He explained that it is not a rock, and these nodules grow 1 millimeter in a million years. And these are a few centimeters in size, so these metals accumulated over millions and millions of years.

CHANG: Oh.

FRANZ GEIGER: Think, like, a really slow game of Tetris.

CHANG: All right. So these pieces of metal grow very slowly. They shivered together. And how do they produce oxygen? Like, I thought that’s what plants do.

TEACHER: Okay. So the first experiments suggest that it is partly through the electrolysis of sea water. So the electric current in the metal part splits the sea water – H2O – into hydrogen and oxygen. But the sensors they used only see oxygen, so they need a lot of data before they can match, of course, this is happening.

CHANG: It’s great.

WORKER: Yes, it was a surprise, actually, to the researchers. But something strange happened along the way.

CHANG: Oh, right?

WORK: Franz almost lost his lumps.

CHANG: Oh, no.

WORK: He got an email from Customs about the package that the lumps were in, and they said that importation is not allowed. And they told him…

GEIGER: The package will be destroyed.

(BLUE)

GEIGER: And what was I like? I was at a faculty meeting when that happened.

CHANG: Oh, dang Customs.

KONG: Go. Okay, so he checked the shipping laws and found that sea soil can be exported without problems, and this saved the nodule samples.

CHANG: Natural marine soil – loophole (laughter).

TEACHER: That’s right. Yes.

CHANG: Okay, let’s go with the seas.

KWONG: Your legal background is coming, Ailsa.

(BLUE)

CHANG: I want to live in the sea. Our last story is about waves that went bad. What is it, guys?

INTERVIEWER: Yes, these unusually large waves are these unusually large waves, which seem to come out of nowhere, and endanger ships at sea. Our colleague, Nell Greenfieldboyce, reported that advances in AI could one day help make predictions.

CHANG: No. Okay, so when you say abnormally large waves, like, how big are we talking?

KWONG: For the wave to be aggressive…

CHANG: That’s right.

KWONG: …It has to exceed twice the volume of the surrounding waves at a given time.

CHANG: All right.

KWONG: So it depends on the size of the waves in that area. For centuries, scientists thought these waves were a sailing myth until a scientific instrument was able to record one 84 meters long.

CHANG: Oh.

TEACHER: Yes, but the navel piercings are dangerous. They can damage ships, infrastructure, cause power outages and cause human suffering. A cruise ship passenger died and others were injured when a freak wave hit the Viking Polaris in 2022.

CHANG: Oh, my God. It’s a bad thing.

WORKER: Yes.

KWONG: Well, there’s no way to predict them, but a new study suggests that, in fact, it might be possible to use information from floating buoys to give people early warning. advanced. So the researchers created a computer system that correctly predicted 73% of these violent waves 5 minutes before they happened, which is important. It’s like an earthquake warning, you know? In time, oil rig workers or boaters may seek shelter, make emergency calls or evacuate.

CHANG: That’s right.

KWONG: If the people at sea had more time, that would help.

CHANG: Wow. So, how did these researchers know how to predict these waves?

BARBER: Yes, so University of Maryland researcher Bala Balachandran and his colleagues trained a neural network using data from 172 buoys off the coast of the Continental US and the Pacific Islands.

KWONG: All those data helped train the computer system to recognize the waves that preceded the dangerous wave and distinguish them from the waves that were not followed by the bad wave.

BARBER: Scientists say they still have to improve the system’s accuracy, but this could be the start of a powerful tool that could lead to better predictions for other extreme events.

CHANG: That’s great.

WORKER: Yes.

CHANG: Also amazing is Regina Barber and Emily Kwong from NPR’s science podcast, Short Wave, where you can learn about new discoveries, everyday mysteries and the science behind the headlines. Thanks, guys.

KWONG: Thank you, Ailsa.

TEACHER: Thank you.

(SOUNDBITE BY LOLA NYANA YA SONG, “CONCEITED”)

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