Why are killer whales ramming yachts?
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What is the opening introduction and sponsor message for this episode?
Future Proof with Jonathan McCrae
on News Talk. Proudly supported by Research Ireland.
Hello and welcome to Future Proof the Podcast. This is the show where we take a closer look at the world around us. I'm Jonathan McRae. Thank you for downloading, subscribing, and rating. Really appreciate you letting people know about the program if you like it too. Um, coming up on this week's episode, we're going to be talking about killer whales and why they're acting so weird. It've been reports uh on the internet of videos showing um these incredible animals doing weird things like uh A pod of killer whales smashing up a boat for no reason, and another sort of bullying a sunfish to death. We're trying to figure out why that is. We'll be speaking to an expert in these incredible mammals in just a bit.
If you'd like to get in touch with the show, you can email us science at newstalk.com. We get to all of those comments at the end of the pod. First, though, time to look back at the week's science stories, and we're joined by Matt Campbell, professor of genetics at Trinity College. Dublin and Kira Green, a professor in the School of Psychology at UCD. You're both very welcome. Our first story, Kira, has to do with our brains.
Yeah, so this is a piece of work that comes from um researchers in the California Institute of Technology. So the primary researcher is Ryan Jokai and was published just last week in Nature Neuroscience. So this is about the evolution of the different parts of our brain and the idea that actually they might come from two different sources. So The adult brain consists of of roughly speaking three chunks, right? There's the forebrain, the midbrain, and the hindbrain. And the forebrain and the midbrain are the parts that are sort of the thinking parts of our brain. So, you know, that's where we have our kind of our memory and our language and our reasoning and all that kind of thing. Um we also have the hindbrain, which is sometimes also called the brainstem, and and that really controls
the lizard brain.
Well, we could call it that. I don't think neuroscientists would call it that. Um so that sort of controls the the kind of autonomic functions. So like breathing and heart heartbeat regulation and like hunger and satiety and and things like that. And it was kind of always, you know, originally assumed that all of these different pieces of the brain sort of came about through a same the same evolutionary track. And that, you know, we know that the hindbrain is older than the midbrain and the forebrain, but that they kind of just all evolved along the same track. Um and what re these researchers are showing is that actually there team seem to be two different sort of populations of cells back in evolutionary history that joined together to form okay, eventually these two different brains that kind of have joined together to form the human brain.
So what we need to understand here is you so you know you'll be familiar with the concept of stem cells, right? So stem cells are cells in the very, very earliest stages of development in an embryo and they can become they're anything. So they're called they're pluripotent. I like to call them
like blank scrabble cells.
Yeah, exactly. They're like blanks blank scrabble tiles and they can become anything at all. So those then later on in development develop into what are called progenitor cells and those are a little bit more specialized and they're going to develop into the cells associated with different parts of the body. So, you know, brain cells, heart cells, skin cells and and so on. So researchers have always been able to get take these progenitor cells and then grow human brain cells. So like cells from you know the forebrain and the midbrain, but they've really struggled to be able to grow cells from the hind brain, from the the brain stem. And this is really a challenge because there are Conditions that you know affect the the brainstem.
So people who have things like ALS, for instance, or spinal muscular atrophy, those are conditions of the brainstem.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the opening introduction and sponsor message for this episode?
0:00–3:56
2
What are the latest science news stories covered before the expert interviews?
3:56–5:01
3
How does the new research on brain evolution explain two distinct cell lineages?
5:01–21:06
4
What is the UK Advanced Research and Invention Agency project about directed evolution?
21:06–39:13