The human cost of the decline of nature’s carcass cleaners

大自然尸体清洁工的减少给人类造成的损失

Science In Action

科学

2024-07-26

31 分钟
PDF

单集简介 ...

The near extinction of vultures in India may be responsible for an additional half a million human deaths between 2000 and 2005. The widespread use of the painkiller diclofenac in herds of cattle, starting in 1994, led to a massive decline in vulture populations in India, as the drug is poisonous to them. We hear from environmental economist Anant Sudarshan of Warwick University. Cooking like a Neanderthal - Mariana Nabais of the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution has been replicating ancient butchering methods to learn how Neanderthals ate birds. A faster test for sepsis – we hear from Sunghoon Kwon of Seoul National University about a new method for identifying the pathogens involved in sepsis cases. The test has the potential to reduce the turnaround times normally associated with developing treatments for infections and may improve patient outcomes. And it seems we may have inherited some conversational habits from chimps – or rather from whatever came before us and chimps 6 million years ago. Cat Hobaiter of the School of Psychology and Neuroscience of St Andrews University and her colleagues have found that like humans, wild chimps engage in snappy, turn-taking conversations. Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Jonathan Blackwell Production Coordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth (Image: World Wildlife Day - Gyps fulvus feeding on a buffalo carcass at Kaziranga National Park in Assam, India. Credit: Anuwar Hazarika/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

单集文稿 ...

  • I'm Rory Stewart and I want to talk about ignorance.

  • I will die without having read everything.

  • That was written in classical Latin, because.

  • Ignorance isn't simply the opposite of knowledge.

  • It'S part of what it means to be human.

  • Just about every game I can think of involves ignorance.

  • There's no adventure without ignorance.

  • There's no narrative.

  • The long history of ignorance from Confucius to QAnon.

  • With me, Rory Stewart.

  • Listen on BBC Sounds welcome to science and action from the BBC World Service.

  • With me, Roland Pease.

  • Later in the program, the human approach that chimps take to conversation.

  • Cooking pigeons, neanderthal style.

  • We started by defeating the birds.

  • And then with the flint flakes, similar to the ones we find in archaeological sites, we started to cut them open so we can see the marks the flint flake would leave on the bones.

  • And nanotechnology helps in the fight against the scourge of sepsis.

  • Sepsis have fatality up to 30% to 40% in 30 days.

  • Mortality is pretty high.

  • The reason is that basically we need to fight with the time, so the every hour counts.