AILSA CHANG, HOST:
It's time now for our regular science news roundup with our friends at NPR's Short Wave podcast, Regina Barber and Emily Kwong. Hi to both of you.
REGINA BARBER, BYLINE: Hey.
EMILY KWONG, BYLINE: Hi.
CHANG: Hi. OK, so how this works - I love that we explain this all the time - is that you have brought us three science stories that caught your attention this week. What are they?
KWONG: All right, drumroll - so we have for you...
(SOUNDBITE OF HANDS TAPPING ON TABLE)
KWONG: ...Very nice. We have for you what chimpanzee gestures reveal about communication...
CHANG: Ooh.
BARBER: How oxygen is being created at the bottom of the ocean...
KWONG: And how a computer program may warn people before a huge rogue wave hits.
CHANG: I love it. OK. I definitely want to start with the chimps because, if they gesticulate, I want to know if they talk with their hands more than I do.
(LAUGHTER)
KWONG: OK, yeah. Chimps definitely do. I mean, they don't have full-blown language like we do, so gestures are really important for communication. Can I show you a clip of...
CHANG: Oh, yes.
BARBER: ...That?
CHANG: Please.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHIMPANZEE BARKING)
KWONG: OK. So these are two chimpanzees in a tree.
CHANG: Aw.
KWONG: They just had some conflict.
CHANG: (Laughter).
KWONG: And you can see that one chimp reaches for the other chimp's hand, like, I'm sorry.
CHANG: Aw.
KWONG: And after a pause, the other chimp gently taps their hand back.
CHANG: It looks so tender. I'm watching this - like, they're really making up? Is that happening?
BARBER: Yeah. I mean, maybe. So, like, gestural exchanges like this are the topic of a recent paper in the journal Current Biology. Gal Badihi is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and the lead author of this paper.
GAL BADIHI: And my part was the East African chimpanzees.
BARBER: Sweeping an enormous dataset, Gal looked at exchanges among five wild chimpanzee populations. Usually, these exchanges had, like, two parts - hand reach, hand tap back. But sometimes these exchanges had up to seven parts, which was super exciting to see.
BADIHI: Because they seem to have this back-and-forth in a face-to-face, communicative setup that kind of resembles human conversations a little bit more.
CHANG: That's so cool. And they're sure that it has nothing to do with the sounds that they're uttering towards each other? It's just the gestures that's the language?
KWONG: Well, they are making sounds, but the gestures is what they were really paying attention to because of the pacing of the gestures.
CHANG: Ah.
KWONG: Like, the back-and-forth was really similar to human conversation. The pause between a gesture and a gestural response averaged to about 120 milliseconds.
CHANG: Wow.
KWONG: It was really fast.
CHANG: OK. Well, how close is that to human response?
KWONG: Yeah. Conversational turns in humans average to about 200 milliseconds across language.
CHANG: No way.
KWONG: Again, all very rapid-fire, all very fast.
CHANG: I had no idea there was a rate. Anyway, if chimps are supposed to be, like, one of our closest living relatives - right? - like, does this reveal anything about the evolution of how humans communicate?
KWONG: It presents an intriguing possibility - yeah - that this kind of back-and-forth communication may have evolved before humans split off from great apes. We don't know for sure. But several primatologists I spoke to, who were not a part of the study, all felt this was an important contribution to understanding how turn-taking and communication dynamics evolved - no language required.
CHANG: That is so fascinating. OK. Now we're going to take a sharp turn and move to oxygen on the sea floor. I take it that that is a weird thing, right? Otherwise, we would not be talking about it.
BARBER: Yeah. So most of our oxygen is created through photosynthesis. That's when, you know, plants take in light, water and carbon dioxide, and then they make, like, sugar and oxygen.
KWONG: But for over a decade, scientists were aware of traces of oxygen at the bottom of the ocean - like, three miles down...
CHANG: Wow.
KWONG: ...Where there's no light, no photosynthesis. So where did this oxygen come from? And a new study in the journal Nature Geoscience may have an answer. It shows that oxygen produced without light - called dark oxygen - could be coming from bits of metal in the deep ocean.
CHANG: Wait, metal? What kind of metal is in the deep sea? Like, how did it get all the way down there?
KWONG: It's these clumps of metals - like nickel, manganese, cobalt, iron - that form these nodules on the sea floor. And they grow on top of stuff that falls to the bottom, like shark teeth.
CHANG: Ah.
BARBER: Yeah. I talked to physical chemist Franz Geiger about this. And he's one of the paper's co-authors, and he studied these clumps of metal in the lab. He specified it's not a rock, and these nodules grow 1 millimeter per million years. And these are a few centimeters big, so these clumps of metal accumulated over millions and millions of years.
CHANG: Whoa.
FRANZ GEIGER: Think of, like, a really, really slow game of Tetris.
CHANG: OK. So these clumps of metal grow very, very slowly. They glom together. And how are they producing oxygen? Like, I thought that is what plants do.
BARBER: Right. So preliminary experiments suggest it's partly through electrolysis of seawater. So electric current in the metal chunk splits ocean water - H2O - into hydrogen and oxygen. But the sensors they used only detect oxygen, so they need more data before they can be like, sure, this is happening.
CHANG: That's super cool.
BARBER: Yeah, it was surprising, actually, to the researchers. But there was another surprise that happened along the way.
CHANG: Oh, yeah?
BARBER: Franz almost lost the nodules.
CHANG: Oh, no.
BARBER: He got an email from Customs about the package the nodules were in, and they said that soil imports aren't allowed. And they told him...
GEIGER: The package will be destroyed.
(LAUGHTER)
GEIGER: And I was like, what? I was in a faculty meeting when that happened.
CHANG: Oh, dang Customs.
KWONG: Yeah. Well, OK, so he then, like, scoured the shipping rules and found that soil of oceanic origins can be imported without any issues, and this saved the nodule samples.
CHANG: Soil of oceanic origin - loophole (laughter).
BARBER: Yes. Yeah.
CHANG: Well, let's just keep with the oceans.
KWONG: Your legal background is coming through, Ailsa.
(LAUGHTER)
CHANG: I want to stay in the ocean. Our final story is about waves gone rogue. What the heck, guys?
BARBER: Yeah, so rogue waves are these abnormally large waves that seem to come out of nowhere, and they endanger ships at sea. Our colleague, Nell Greenfieldboyce, reported that advances in AI could someday help predict them.
CHANG: Huh. OK, so when you say abnormally large waves, like, how big are we talking?
KWONG: For a wave to be rogue...
CHANG: Yeah.
KWONG: ...It has to be over twice the size of the surrounding waves at a given time.
CHANG: OK.
KWONG: So it depends on the size of the waves in the area. For centuries, scientists thought these waves were a sailing myth until a scientific instrument managed to record one that measured 84 feet.
CHANG: Whoa.
BARBER: Yeah, and rogue waves are dangerous. They can damage ships, infrastructure, cause power failures and really hurt people. A cruise ship passenger died and others were injured when a freak wave hit the Viking Polaris in 2022.
CHANG: Oh, my God. That's terrible.
BARBER: Yeah.
KWONG: Yeah, there's no way of predicting them, but a new study suggests that, actually, it may be possible to use information from floating buoys to give people some advanced warning. So researchers have developed a computer system that correctly predicted 73% of these rogue waves 5 minutes before they occurred, which is valuable. It's like an earthquake warning, you know? With some time, oil rig workers or ship passengers can seek shelter, perform emergency shutdowns or evacuate.
CHANG: Yeah.
KWONG: If people on the ocean had a little more time, that would help.
CHANG: Wow. Well, how did these researchers figure out how to predict these waves?
BARBER: Yeah, so a researcher with the University of Maryland, Bala Balachandran, and his colleagues trained a neural network using data from 172 buoys off the coast of the Continental U.S. and the Pacific Islands.
KWONG: All of that data helped train the computer system to recognize waves that occurred right before a rogue wave happened and also to distinguish them from waves that weren't followed by a rogue wave.
BARBER: The scientists say they still have to improve the system's accuracy, but this could be the start of a powerful tool that could even lead to better forecasting for other extreme events.
CHANG: That's pretty awesome.
BARBER: Yeah.
CHANG: Also what's pretty awesome are 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. Thank you, guys.
KWONG: Thanks, Ailsa.
BARBER: Thank you.
(SOUNDBITE OF LOLA YOUNG SONG, "CONCEITED") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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