AILSA CHANG, HOST:
It's time now for our science news roundup from Short Wave, NPR's science podcast. I'm joined by two people from the show, Rachel Carlson and Emily Kwong. Hey to both of you.
EMILY KWONG, BYLINE: Hi.
RACHEL CARLSON, BYLINE: Hi, Ailsa.
CHANG: Hi. OK, so once again, like we always say, you have brought us three science stories that caught your attention this week. What are they?
KWONG: How fiddler crabs drum their flirty mating songs into the sand.
CHANG: Ooh.
CARLSON: How to grow chicken nuggets in the lab.
CHANG: OK.
KWONG: And a drug like LSD without the trip.
CHANG: Without the trip, what's the point? OK, OK, OK. Let's start with the fiddler crabs, which apparently don't fiddle. They drum...
KWONG: I'll explain.
CHANG: ...What (laughter)?
KWONG: So if you haven't seen a European fiddler crab before...
CHANG: Nope.
KWONG: ...It looks like a classic cartoon crab. It's about the size of your palm, but its most distinctive feature is that the males have one big claw and one little, itty-bitty claw.
CHANG: Ooh.
KWONG: And they use these claws as part of their courtship dance when they're looking to attract a mate.
BETH MORTIMER: And they do a very adorable kind of waving behavior. So the male will sit for hours on the sand waving his claw up and down. But we know from previous work on fiddler crabs that they can court even in the dark...
CHANG: Ooh.
MORTIMER: ...So we know that the visual component wasn't everything with their courtship, that there was a component moving through the ground.
CHANG: A component moving through the ground. I imagine she's talking about drumming here.
KWONG: Drum roll...
(SOUNDBITE OF DRUMMING)
KWONG: Yes, correct.
CHANG: (Laughter).
KWONG: This is Beth Mortimer. She's an associate professor of biology at the University of Oxford.
CARLSON: And Beth was part of a team that put down geophones, so little sensors to observe and record the vibrations these fiddler crabs were creating in the sand. It's super "Dune"-like sandworm-esque (ph) to me. The team published their research...
CHANG: (Laughter).
CARLSON: ...Last week in the Journal of Experimental Biology, and they saw that this dance had four different stages.
CHANG: Wait, wait, wait. OK, I just have to say, I'm taking bachata dance classes right now, and I am so intrigued by how few men have rhythm. So I'm very curious how this drumming works...
KWONG: These crabs...
CHANG: ...Among male crabs (laughter).
KWONG: ...Have rhythm.
CHANG: (Laughter) All right, what are the four stages of this courtship dance? What do they sound like?
KWONG: OK, stage one, they wave their claws in the air adorably.
CHANG: Aw.
KWONG: Then the male crab alternates waving and body dropping. Then they're waving...
CHANG: What (laughter)?
KWONG: ...And dropping it low - yeah - simultaneously, which creates this kind of thump.
(SOUNDBITE OF FIDDLER CRAB THUMP)
KWONG: And then if all of that is successful and the female crab approaches, that's when the male does this underground drumming.
(SOUNDBITE OF FIDDLER CRAB DRUMMING)
CHANG: (Laughter) That's amazing. I mean, a guy who can dance and has rhythm definitely is sexy. So...
CARLSON: Yes.
CHANG: ...I would be drawn to this drumming crab.
CARLSON: I think I would, too, honestly. And in each of these courtship steps, the crabs were increasing their seismic vibrations.
CHANG: (Laughter).
MORTIMER: So they're escalating the amount of seismic information that they're generating as they go through their courtship routine.
KWONG: Beth said, though, they still don't know how females respond to that seismic information...
CHANG: Oh, I'll tell them.
KWONG: ...Whether they're - yeah...
(LAUGHTER)
KWONG: ...Ailsa Chang fiddler crab will let them know - whether they're interested in the rhythm or the loudness of the drumming. Like, what is sexy to them? We don't really know. But now that researchers have all of these recordings, they at least understand the steps of the routine and these invisible vibrations a lot better.
CHANG: (Laughter) OK - hard transition. We're going from seismic vibrations during crab courtship...
KWONG: Yeah.
CHANG: ...To growing chicken nuggets in a laboratory. Why are people trying to grow chicken nuggets at all?
CARLSON: Lots of reasons, actually. For one, there's 8.2 billion people on the planet - more than ever - and people need to eat.
CHANG: True.
CARLSON: So there's been this massive effort in countries around the world to figure out if they can grow meat tissue in the lab.
MINGHAO NIE: So that we can reduce the pains we've generated on many of the animals, and also, we can optimize the environmental impact by growing those meat in a very controlled condition.
KWONG: Yeah. So it's good for the planet...
CHANG: Yeah.
KWONG: ...To figure this out perhaps.
CHANG: Cool.
KWONG: This is Minghao Nie at the University of Tokyo. He and a team of researchers there have successfully grown in the lab a whole cut of chicken meat - over 10 grams in weight and 1 centimeter thick - about the size of a chicken nugget.
CHANG: But the question is, is it juicy chicken meat? All right, well, first, how do they even manage to do this?
KWONG: Yeah, it's so cool. So meat is just muscle. Like, that's what you're eating when you eat chicken.
CHANG: Chicken muscle.
KWONG: Yeah. Yeah.
CHANG: I love me some chicken muscle.
KWONG: Yeah, yeah.
CHANG: Mm.
(LAUGHTER)
KWONG: And chicken muscle is made up of this rudimentary cell called a myoblast. So what Minghao and the team wanted to do is figure out how to get the myoblasts to naturally fuse together and form chicken myotubes, which give the meat its aroma and chewiness.
CHANG: So cool. How did they even figure this out?
CARLSON: Minghao and his team used this special machine called a hollow fiber bioreactor. It delivered nutrients and oxygen to the myoblast, mimicking blood vessels in the animal body. And after a few days, the myoblast started to grow and form this cultured meat. The team published their results in the Cell Press journal, Trends in Biotechnology this week.
CHANG: I mean, I feel like I've heard stuff like this elsewhere.
CARLSON: Yeah.
CHANG: I assume there are other researchers trying to grow meat in labs. What makes these particular chicken nuggets so special?
CARLSON: True. There are, but a lot of lab-grown meat on the market is artificially assembled. So the myoblasts are fused together, and this work demonstrates a way for labs to grow meat into one large tissue, thicker than a centimeter. So it does bring us closer to a world where a whole lab-grown chicken breast could be scientifically possible.
CHANG: OK. So from crab courtship to chicken muscle to drugs without the trip, such as LSD? I mean, why, Rachel, would I ever want to take a drug like LSD but not have the psychedelic effect? Like, what's the whole point?
CARLSON: I know. It sounds like an oxymoron, but you've probably heard researchers are studying psychedelic therapy for patients with depression...
CHANG: Sure.
CARLSON: ...PTSD, lots of other things. But people with conditions like schizophrenia are usually advised not to take psychedelics. So even if it turns out that these drugs do help treat certain mental health conditions, a lot of patients would be left behind.
KWONG: Yeah, so given this, researchers looked at a molecule that has a similar structure to LSD and just removed the trip, which, in theory, would make this kind of treatment accessible to more people. And their study was published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
CHANG: Wait, so I don't get it. These researchers - they just, like, chop off the trippy part of the LSD molecule?
CARLSON: Kind of - one of the researchers told me that I should think of each molecule like a car.
CHANG: OK.
CARLSON: This is David Olson. He's the director of the Institute for Psychedelics and Neurotherapeutics at the University of California, Davis.
DAVID OLSON: You could chop off the top of the car and create a convertible. You could add a spoiler, but you're fundamentally creating a new car. You are changing the shape of the car. But what we did here is we took LSD, and we essentially did a molecular tire rotation. We just moved two atoms. We swapped them.
CARLSON: And David says they named this new molecule JRT after the grad student who first synthesized it, Jeremy R. Tuck.
CHANG: Aw, good for Jeremy. OK but what are the chances people would actually start taking these drugs anytime soon?
CARLSON: Yeah, so the study published this week tested JRT on mice, not people. And another researcher I spoke to who wasn't involved in the study, Anahita Bassir Nia, says while it's a promising step in the field, we still don't know how it would translate to humans and whether it would actually be non-hallucinogenic. So there's a lot more we need to learn.
KWONG: Yeah. And if you want to hear more about new research and psychedelics, Rachel Carlson over here just reported this amazing three-part miniseries for Short Wave. Go check it out.
CHANG: Oh, so cool. That is Emily Kwong and Rachel Carlson from NPR's science podcast Short Wave. Subscribe now for new discoveries, everyday mysteries and the science behind the headlines. Thank you so much to both of you.
KWONG: Thanks, Ailsa.
CARLSON: Thanks, Ailsa.
(SOUNDBITE OF GAMECHOPS AND MIKEL DALE'S "THE GREAT SEA") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
