Ari Daniel

The machine is about the size of a water bottle, and it was built to detect different elements, including the chemical signatures of life. Yusuf Salam is a PhD student at the University of Bern.

Salam used the instrument on a piece of gypsum he harvested from northern Algeria, gypsum that he knew contained fossilized microbes.

Since gypsum is present on Mars as well, perhaps one day the instrument could be used to look for ancient microbes on the red planet, too. The study highlights the intimate interconnection between minerals and microbes on our planet, and perhaps beyond. For NPR News, I'm Ari Daniel.

For much of human history, societies have been centered around kinship, so couples have had to decide whose community they're going to live with. Most of the time, it's been the man's, which is why researchers were surprised when they sequenced the ancient DNA of a burial site of a Celtic tribe dating from 100 BCE to 100 CE in what's now southern England.

The group was related along the female line, meaning that the men had left their families to live with their wives' community. Laura Cassidy is a geneticist at Trinity College Dublin.

The same thing was true among hundreds of Iron Age genomes from cemeteries across Britain, suggesting it's a custom dating back centuries. For NPR News, I'm Ari Daniel.

Sam Arman took a detailed look at the teeth of more than 900 kangaroos from both fossils and modern animals.

Armin, who's a paleontologist at a natural history museum in central Australia, used those scratches to figure out what the ancient kangaroos ate. His answer, a mix of shrubs and grasses, suggesting that a changing climate that wiped out a single group of plants likely wasn't behind the extinctions. Rather, he thinks humans who arrived in Australia around this time had something to do with it.

Other paleontologists disagree, citing evidence that climate change did play more of a role. For NPR News, I'm Ari Daniel.

Ooh, that's really, really cool. Yes, that does help quite a bit.

Oh, gosh. Okay. Tell me more. Tell me more.

Wow, wow. Okay, but all of this biting, it's to help people, right?

Yes, I've memorized that movie.

Yes, this is what I thought of as soon as you told me about this story.

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, Shore Wavers, Regina Barber here. And today I'm joined by reporter Ari Daniel, who's going to talk to us about snakes. Hey, Ari.

So today on the show, the anti-venom man. We're talking about a different approach to developing a treatment to venomous snake bites and the researchers who use Tim Friede's antibodies to do it. Antibodies developed over a nearly quarter century of self-inflicted bites. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.

OK, Ari, I think the first thing I want to understand is, like, what is antivenom? Like, what is it made out of exactly?

Right, right. I kind of know about this. Like even after the toxin has left your body, you retain like immune memory of it, right?

So that if you like encounter this like foreign substance again, your body will recognize it and ideally mobilize against it more quickly. Like some vaccines work like this.

Wait, clumsy like somebody who's been bitten a lot?

Wow. So, like, what happens next? Like, were the researchers able to, like, synthesize something from Tim that, like, maybe could work as an antivitam?

A working cocktail of more than just one antibody?

That is awful.

Wow, that is really, really cool. Is this the biggest number of snakes targeted by an antivenom, like, until now?

Wow. Okay, so what's the next step here?

Okay.

OK, that makes sense. But let me ask you, Ari, like what happened to that like snake bite dude like Tim Freedy?

Oh, so is he still like letting snakes bite him?

Really?

Wow. Okay. Well, I'm glad he sees it this way. I could not do this.

Message received. Don't learn from TV. It's fantasy for a reason. Ari, thank you so much for bringing us this story. I had a great time.

This episode was produced by Hannah Chin and edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Jimmy Keeley was the audio engineer. Special thanks to Johannes Dergi. Beth Donovan is our senior director and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barber. Thanks for listening to Shortwave from NPR.

Okay, this is not helping my fear of snakes.

Yes.

So Camila grabs her scalpel and saw and swims to shore.

She swims. She really wants that brain. Wow. She gets to the beach, and she's totally soaked. But she whips out her tools, and after a couple of hours, she manages to extract the fresh, intact brain from the recently deceased whale.

She is elated.

Camila brings it back to her lab where it joins the ranks of what she says has become the largest collection of whale and dolphin brains in all of Latin America.

And how she's recruiting a new generation of Brazilian researchers to roll up their sleeves to join her.

I'm Ari Daniel.

No. Usually the brains come to her at the Orca Institute. That was where I met up with Camila in mid-December. She was bedecked in marine mammal jewelry, dolphin earrings, a whale bracelet. You get the idea.

The Orca Institute is a conservation organization outside of Vitoria in southeastern Brazil, where before recently taking time off for a short fellowship at Oxford, Camila worked as the scientific director. The morning I was there, a van had just pulled in. So there's a van with a special delivery?

The Orca Institute tends to any marine mammal that strands itself along its section of the coast and either rehabilitates and returns it to the water if it's alive, or, as is the case with this recently deceased Guiana dolphin being hoisted into the air, brings it back to their facility to figure out what might have gone wrong.

though not the treasure you may be expecting.

with an eye towards preventing similar deaths in the future.

Well, one of the vets told me that often the animals become entangled with fishing gear, or they suspect loud underwater noises might cause the animals to surface too quickly. The staff here rotates through a daily on-call schedule because an animal can strand pretty much any time. But for Camila, these animals are a means to an end.

Yes.

You think about the brain. It's something she's been fascinated by ever since she was little. And here's why she thinks brains are so important to study.

True to my word. Camila says there's actually very little known about the brains of whales and dolphins living in the waters off Central and South America. But mapping how those brains are wired up can teach scientists about the inner workings of these animals, about their behavior, and how they're adapted to living underwater.

It's still early days of confirming the disease, Regina. But yes, there have been signs of the hallmarks of Alzheimer's in certain dolphins. So for all these reasons, Camila's intent on gathering and studying the brains of cetaceans.

Yes.

Yes, yes.

And now you know it.

I do what I can. So back to Camila. She's collecting and gathering cetacean brains from this part of the world and is making real progress. She points to the 200-pound suspended guiana dolphin, a coastal species that lives in the Atlantic off Central and South America.

Right, okay. So that's when this Brazilian neuroscientist I met named Camila Souza gets the call she's been waiting for. A baby humpback whale is adrift just offshore in the waters off southeastern Brazil. It's just died. And she wants its brain.

Yeah, well, a few years back, Camila and her colleagues used an MRI to describe the neuroanatomy and internal brain structure of a Guiana dolphin that washed ashore west of Rio de Janeiro, which was a real achievement.

Bingo. And that becomes super clear when Camila takes me to the necropsy room.

That, Gina, is the sound of knives being sharpened. The vets are dissecting another dolphin, a female that recently stranded, and a parade of organs appears on the table before me to be measured and photographed.

I did. I saw the heart. I saw a kidney. Wow. The uterus.

Camila brings me around to the head.

Okay, it's liquefied.

Right, and that's a challenge in a big country like Brazil. The heat accelerates decomposition, so minutes matter, which means that sometimes Sousa has to extract the brain from an animal right on the beach and put it in preservative.

Precisely.

But Camila's relentless, Daniela Telles told me. Daniela's one of the Orca Institute vets.

So whenever the conditions do conspire in her favor, Camila gets herself another brain.

I did. What do you think I've been building up to, Gina? Ha ha!

I follow her next door to her office. This is definitely a refrigerator filled with brains. In this fridge alone, she's got a brain from a pygmy sperm whale, various dolphin species, and more. She lifts a brain out of the largest plastic container. It's from that baby humpback she swam ashore to dissect. And it's twice the size of a human brain.

Wow. Wow. There before me is arguably the convoluted essence of a humpback whale, the thing that lets it swim and sing and so much more.

Well, Camila says she'd likely be able to work abroad. She's got all this expertise. She has access to these understudied species. She's even done stints abroad. But there's only one place she wants to be, and that's Brazil.

People like Hector Mincing, a PhD student in the lab who's developing a fancy tool to model the cetacean brain in 3D. He too wants to contribute to the field from Brazil.

My last stop on my trip is a nearby stretch of beach. Camila looks out at the ocean and she considers the trajectory that brought her to this moment.

Camila says that little girl she used to be would be happy.

I know. I know. But there are some really important reasons to study the brains of whales and dolphins. And I will get to that.

You got it. Cetacean brains. Of course. My pleasure, Gina.

Great. I'm glad. But first, let me finish telling you what happened to that baby humpback.

By the time Camila and her colleagues arrive on the scene by boat, the whale has washed ashore on a tiny island. And they have a problem. They can only get so close without running aground.