ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
It's time for our science news roundup from Short Wave, NPR's science podcast. I'm joined by two of the show's reporters, Emily Kwong and Rachel Carlson. Good to have you both back here.
EMILY KWONG, BYLINE: Hey, Ari.
RACHEL CARLSON, BYLINE: Hey, Ari. Good to be with you.
SHAPIRO: As usual, you've brought us three science stories that caught your attention this week. What are they?
CARLSON: A new flower species called the wooly devil.
KWONG: How to drink lemonade in virtual reality.
CARLSON: And how early humans may have made tools from bones 1.5 million years ago.
SHAPIRO: These sound delightful. Can we start with early humans making tools out of bones? Rachel, tell us about it.
CARLSON: Let's do it. So archaeologists know early humans used stone to make tools. That usually meant knocking rocks against one another to get, like, sharp flakes for cutting animal carcasses or plants. And the Acheulean period, about 1.5 million years ago - way before Homo sapiens showed up - was known for stone hand axes. They're sort of oval- or teardrop-shaped rocks with sharp points.
KWONG: But a new study out this week in Nature suggests early humans in Eastern Africa were also using bone to make tools like this too. Ignacio de la Torre is a study author and archaeologist. He works at the Spanish National Research Council, and he says this dates the production of bone tools a million years earlier than scientists thought.
SHAPIRO: Wow, so there might be a bone age in addition to a Stone Age.
KWONG: Correct.
SHAPIRO: Wow.
CARLSON: Yeah.
SHAPIRO: Do the tools actually teach us anything about how smart these ancient human ancestors were or how they lived?
CARLSON: Well, Tom Plummer is a paleoanthropologist at Queens College in New York and wasn't involved in this research. But he says the paper suggests early humans were using mental imaging to make these tools. Which means, like, maybe they had an image in their heads of something and then used their hands to replicate that image.
KWONG: They're just like us - just puzzling along.
SHAPIRO: Just more hair.
KWONG: Yeah. That's right.
CARLSON: (Laughter).
KWONG: Ignacio thinks that this shows advancements in cognition, since early humans took what they knew about stone tools and how those were shaped and then just applied it to new materials like elephant and hippopotamus bones.
IGNACIO DE LA TORRE: Now, we have a human species here that is able to create an innovation by applying a knowledge they know they have for the working of stone. They're applying this to a new raw material.
CARLSON: But Ignacio also noted the paper opens even more questions than it solves. So he wants to know, could they find even older bones? And why was there a million-year gap between these and the previously found bone tools? So there's still a lot of questions about some of our early ancestors.
SHAPIRO: Intriguing. Well, let's shift from our ancient past to our science fiction present. Tell me about drinking lemonade in virtual reality. What does that mean?
KWONG: OK. So are you familiar with VR?
SHAPIRO: Of course.
KWONG: Have you played it?
SHAPIRO: No.
KWONG: Oh, well, you should, 'cause it's this super immersive gaming experience. You strap on a pair of goggles, and you can see or hear another world. But Ari, imagine you could also taste another world.
SHAPIRO: Calorie free...
KWONG: Yes.
SHAPIRO: ...I would imagine.
KWONG: Yes. What if, in virtual reality, you could taste lemonade served by someone in a kitchen on the other side of the country?
SHAPIRO: Not just a simulation of lemonade, but actually how sweet or sour they made it specifically?
KWONG: Yes. Yes, not the lemonade, but a simulation that matched their recipe. Researchers have been trying to do this in all kinds of ways, and Jinghua Li is one of them. She's a professor of Materials Science and Engineering at The Ohio State University. Her team invented this device called e-Taste and described it in the journal Science Advances.
SHAPIRO: How does e-Taste work?
CARLSON: So there's two parts. There's a small sensor patch that researchers dipped into store-bought lemonade, and that patch is attuned to recognize molecules like glucose and glutamate, chemicals that represent the five basic tastes of sweet, sour...
KWONG: Yum.
CARLSON: ...Salty, bitter, umami. Data from lemonade in California was sent hundreds of miles away to Jinghua's lab in Ohio.
KWONG: And then in a matter of seconds, the data was wirelessly passed to this tiny device filled with edible chemicals, which then combined into a synthetic replica of the lemonade, and that cocktail of flavors was pumped across a volunteer's tongue. And voila, someone in Ohio is tasting a glass of lemonade in California. Here's Jinghua.
JINGHUA LI: The long-term goal here is for us to establish a, like, new way for people to interact with each other.
SHAPIRO: I'm going to maintain that I would still be able to tell the difference between the chemical simulation...
KWONG: Definitely.
SHAPIRO: ...Of lemonade and actual lemon juice and sugar, But can e-Taste recreate more complicated flavors like - I don't know - beef bourguignon or something?
KWONG: So it's not real. No, unfortunately not because - and Jinghua is the first person to admit this - taste is not the same thing as flavor. You know this. You cook.
SHAPIRO: Right.
KWONG: Nimesha Ranasinghe at the University of Maine reminded me that a lot of flavor is actually aroma.
SHAPIRO: How food smells.
KWONG: Yeah, and then you also got food's temperature and texture.
NIMESHA RANASINGHE: And even the background noise and ambient lighting and our memories and experiences - there are so many other factors affecting our flavors.
CARLSON: But Nimesha finds e-Taste super interesting and is really curious about scalability. Will we see VR dining one day? Could there be medical applications? Maybe a version of e-Taste could help doctors diagnose the loss of taste from long COVID or traumatic brain injury.
SHAPIRO: Wow. OK, for our third and final story, Rachel, will you tell us about the wooly devil, which is neither made of wool nor a devil?
CARLSON: No (laughter). Yeah. The wooly devil is a new flower to science, found recently in the desert landscape of Big Bend National Park in Texas. It's called the wooly devil because it's covered in this whitish fuzzy fur with a hint of yellow in the middle. Some are no bigger than 1/2 inch in size. And these little plants were camouflaged in the rocks, which probably explains why they haven't been documented before.
SHAPIRO: Who discovered these little flowers?
KWONG: OK. So it was park volunteer Deb Manley and employee Cathy Hoyt were on a hike in the backcountry, and they spotted this star-shaped flower. They took a picture and uploaded it to iNaturalist. That's the online network for identifying plants and animals. And Isaac Lichter Marck, an evolutionary biologist, figured out that the flower didn't match any of the other images on iNaturalist. He told our colleague James Doubek about this.
ISAAC LICHTER MARCK: They took pictures, and then that kind of caused an uproar. It caused an email chain of different botanists emailing each other. And so, yeah, we called ourself Team Wooly.
SHAPIRO: OK, what did Team Wooly determine about this new flower?
CARLSON: Well, they thought it was a sunflower. And Ari, I want you to picture a sunflower in your mind's eye. It looks like...
SHAPIRO: Yeah.
CARLSON: ...A single flower to most of us, but it's actually a flower head made up of lots of tiny flowers. And then it all comes together to look like one big flower.
KWONG: This new plant had the same feature, so it was giving sunflower...
SHAPIRO: Yeah.
KWONG: ...In its own wooly way.
SHAPIRO: (Laughter).
KWONG: And after looking at the DNA and its physical features and a scanning electron microscope, researchers were surprised to find that the wooly devil was not only a new species, but it was one rank higher than that. It represents a whole new genus within the larger family that contains sunflowers.
SHAPIRO: This is major. Team Wooly must be thrilled.
KWONG: Yes. Yes.
CARLSON: They are, but, Ari, these flowers have only been found in a few places in Big Bend, which has had a drought in recent years. So the researchers say even though sunflowers are known to be resilient in lots of different kinds of climates, this new genus of plant could have a rough road ahead.
SHAPIRO: Why you got to end on a bummer?
CARLSON: I know, I'm sorry.
SHAPIRO: Rachel Carlson...
KWONG: Drink some lemonade.
SHAPIRO: OK. Rachel Carlson and Emily Kwong from NPR's science podcast, Short Wave, which you can follow for new discoveries, everyday mysteries and the science behind the headlines. Thank you both.
KWONG: Thank you, Ari.
CARLSON: Thanks, Ari.
(SOUNDBITE OF V.ALEX SONG, "SEVEN") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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