ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
For our science news roundup from Short Wave, NPR's science podcast, I'm joined by Emily Kwong and Jessica Yung. Hey there.
EMILY KWONG, BYLINE: Hi, Ari.
JESSICA YUNG, BYLINE: Hi.
SHAPIRO: All right, as usual, you've brought us three science stories that caught your attention this week. What have you got?
KWONG: How genetics is proving Indigenous hazelnut cultivation in Canada...
YUNG: How an ancient piece of meteorite from Mars points to a possibly habitable past...
KWONG: And, Ari, we have for you a very large fish mysteriously washing up on the coast of California.
SHAPIRO: Amazing. All right. I want to start with hazelnuts 'cause I grew up in the state of Oregon...
KWONG: Ah, yes.
SHAPIRO: ...Which produces more than 90% of the U.S. hazelnut crop. But we're talking about hazelnuts in Canada. What's going on?
KWONG: Yeah. So the star of the science show today is the beaked hazelnut.
SHAPIRO: Beaked?
KWONG: They are related to those commercial hazelnuts you are familiar with - the ones that flavor Nutella and the like - but beaked hazelnuts are actually a wild food native to North America.
SHAPIRO: Cool. What do they taste like?
YUNG: OK, so they're said to be a little sweeter, more buttery and nestled in this fuzzy, green husk that extends outward, like the beak of a bird. And for generations, the Indigenous people of British Columbia passed down stories of these hazelnuts as a vital food source they actively planted and cultivated.
CHELSEY GERALDA ARMSTRONG: Marion Dixon Wal'ceckwu, who is an Nlaka'pamux elder I worked with, said it was her job in the summer to transplant hazelnuts. She would go around and just take out little cuttings with her uncle. This was in the '50s.
KWONG: Chelsey Geralda Armstrong of Simon Fraser University wanted to look at hazelnut genetics to determine just how widely the hazelnut was cultivated. So her team visited the archaeological remains of village sites throughout British Columbia and sampled over 200 hazelnuts nearby.
SHAPIRO: And what did they find?
KWONG: All these genetic subgroups - many hazelnuts traced to the far reaches of British Columbia, some 800 kilometers - or 500 miles - away, which is way too far to have traveled primarily via a bird or a squirrel just, like, dropping the hazelnut.
YUNG: Meaning it had to be the ancestors of First Nations tribes who deliberately brought beaked hazelnuts with them.
KWONG: And, Ari, this genetic detective work - it verifies First Nations oral history, showing that beaked hazelnut cultivation is a many-thousand-year practice and that First Nations people changed the forest in long-lasting ways. Chelsey published these results in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this month.
SHAPIRO: That's cool. How does it change our understanding of agricultural history?
KWONG: Yeah, well, it really challenges this idea that First Nations people had a passive relationship to the land. Indigenous rights attorney Jack Woodward hopes research like this can make a difference in the Land Back movement, providing evidence that land once considered wilderness by European settler colonists was actually being carefully managed by tribes.
JACK WOODWARD: Crab apples and hazelnuts and certain other species that have edible fruit and nuts - they weren't just accidentally found in the edges of the forest. Those were deliberately planted.
KWONG: Jack told me he plans to refer to Chelsey's research in future court cases while he argues for First Nation aboriginal title over certain Canadian lands.
SHAPIRO: Cool. All right. Let's go to Mars next. You're telling me it was habitable long ago?
YUNG: Well, possibly. We've at least learned that some of the conditions necessary for life could have been present a long time ago because scientists have found more evidence that there might have been hydrothermal vents on Mars.
SHAPIRO: Wait - hydrothermal vents, like hot springs on the sea floor?
KWONG: Yeah.
YUNG: Yes, exactly. They spew out hot liquid mixed with gases and minerals. Hydrothermal vents are discussed a lot as a theoretical origin point for life on Earth. You can actually hear a lot about it in a Short Wave episode Gina did a few weeks ago. But, yeah, we could talk about that forever, so we shouldn't get to into it.
SHAPIRO: OK. So back to the new discovery - how did scientists find out that there might be hydrothermal vents on Mars?
KWONG: So basically, it's an amazing story. Around 10 years ago, a rock was found in the Sahara Desert, and it turned out to be a meteorite from Mars. So some scientists at Curtin University in Australia have been studying this rock in the last few years.
YUNG: Yeah. So something that is really important to note about this rock is that the meteorite has zircon in it, which is a mineral that is very nice to have if you're a geologist because you can date when it was formed. Scientists use zircon all the time to date rocks on Earth.
KWONG: And this team found that some of this small hunk of Mars was formed - get this - 4.5 billion years ago.
SHAPIRO: That's not long after the solar system was formed, right?
KWONG: Yes. This rock originates from perhaps the beginning chapters of Mars' history.
YUNG: One of the researchers who's been studying this, geologist Aaron Cavosie, explained to me that they tried to get as much information as they could out of this rare bit of ancient zircon despite its tiny size.
AARON CAVOSIE: The zircon is half the width of a human hair, and we have tools to extract little slices of it that kind of are shaped like a little, tiny slice of bread and then subject them to a variety of different analyses where we can look at the individual atoms and see what's going on.
SHAPIRO: OK, so you've got these tiny bread slices thinner than half a human hair - and what did they learn from it?
KWONG: Not what they expected - here is Aaron again.
CAVOSIE: The zircon had these elements preserved in its structure in arrangements that are kind of like the layers of an onion.
YUNG: So what Aaron and his team did next was look at zircons on Earth - zircons from all kinds of different environments, trying to figure out what conditions could make zircon look like this. And he found an example of a zircon with this onion-like pattern that was found in a hydrothermal vent on Earth.
SHAPIRO: Oh, so that's why the researchers connected hydrothermal vents to this sample from Mars.
KWONG: Exactly. And they wrote about that connection in their paper out this month in the journal Science Advances.
YUNG: Yeah, and while liquid water on Mars may not be new news exactly, this research suggests Mars once had this hot liquid crust, maybe even way back at the beginning. But talking to other researchers in the field, more evidence is needed before we can say that this is likely the case.
SHAPIRO: All right, from planets, let's go to fish - oarfish. That's O-A-R...
KWONG: Yes.
SHAPIRO: ...Fish. What's this story?
YUNG: So earlier this month, an oarfish washed up along the Southern California coast. Generally, oarfish are long and slender, kind of like giant eels. They can grow to be longer than a school bus. They have big eyes, but no scales or teeth. And as our colleague, James Doubek, reported, this was the third to show up since August. Now, this is pretty interesting because, in the last 120-plus years, scientists have only spotted 22 of these oarfish on the California coast.
SHAPIRO: Twenty-two in more than a century...
KWONG: Yeah.
SHAPIRO: ...But three since August?
KWONG: Yeah. It's kind of, like, a good time for oarfish research, you could say. Now, this fish - it lives pretty deep in the ocean, swims anywhere from 300 to 3,000 feet deep. It rarely comes to the surface. They generally show up on beaches, like, when they're injured or disoriented.
YUNG: Given how rare it is to see them, it's really no surprise that these fish are more of a thing of folklore.
SHAPIRO: Ooh, are you going to tell me a folk tale?
YUNG: Well, occasionally, in history, some Japanese media has linked deep-sea fish like the oarfish with earthquakes - as bad omens that warn people an earthquake is coming within the next several weeks.
KWONG: Though, we should immediately say, in 2019, Japanese researchers looked into this link and didn't find any relationship at all between oarfish sightings and earthquakes - so no one panic.
SHAPIRO: I don't know if they were looking hard enough.
KWONG: (Laughter).
SHAPIRO: But anyway, why might some of these orfish be washing up now?
YUNG: Honestly, we're seemingly mid-mystery at this point. Scientists said that it may have to do with changes in ocean condition, like the El Nino or La Nina cycle or red tides, for example.
KWONG: But in the meantime, it is an oarfish mystery.
SHAPIRO: OK. That is Jessica Yung and Emily Kwong of NPR's science podcast, Short Wave, which you can subscribe to for the latest scientific discoveries, everyday mysteries and the science behind the headlines. Thank you both.
KWONG: Thank you, Ari.
YUNG: Thank you.
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