Pod Insights Science Friday The Top Dino Discoveries Of 2024 | Can Spiking Eggnog Kill Bacteria From Raw Eggs? About this episode To wrap up 2024, science writer Riley Black shares her favorite paleontology discoveries of the year. And, if treated properly, even old-fashioned eggnog made with cream and raw eggs can be a safe holiday beverage.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:22 Speaker 02 'Tis the season for eggnog, and we ask the burning question: How much booze is enough booze? Scientifically speaking, of course.
1:31 Speaker 03 I think the initial interaction occurs when you mix the alcohol with the eggs, but then it continues to occur over the week's time.
1:39 Speaker 02 It's Wednesday, December 25th, and Merry Science Friday to you all.
1:46 Speaker 02 I'm Sci-Fry producer Rasha Iridi. A little later this episode, we'll tackle the important question of whether the alcohol in a potent eggnog can reduce the risk of salmonella from raw eggs. But first, what could be more festive than a year's worth of dinosaurs? Science writer Riley Black joins Ira to look back on a year in paleontology.
2:08 Ira Flatow? The end of the year is traditionally, you know, a time to sum up what's been happening. So why not do that for dinosaurs? Researchers learned more about T. rex. They learned about the spiky tails of the stegosaurus, how dinosaurs evolved and more. In an article for Smithsonian magazine, dinosaur enthusiast and science writer Riley Black rounded up the top dino discoveries of the year. Riley, welcome back to Science Friday.
2:39 Speaker 05 Oh, thank you so much. It's always good to be back.
2:41 Ira Flatow? All right, let's get into it. What was your favorite discovery of the year?
2:45 Speaker 05 One of my favorites is the idea that we have not yet found the biggest dinosaurs that there were. There was a study published in Ecology and Evolution using T. rex as a model, because it's always T. rex, right, saying that we found, you know, pretty much like the average largest dinosaurs out there. So for T. rex, if we think about the famous specimens like Sue, they got to be about 40 feet long, probably weighed around nine tons or so. But there could have been individuals that were up 70% more massive and like the top, you know, sort of 0.1% of dinosaur sizes, just like with people or any living thing. There's going to be small ones and large ones and everything in between.
3:26 Speaker 05 So really these largest examples of even the most well-known dinosaurs we probably have not found yet, and it might take centuries to find. And I just love that idea that there are these superlative examples that we've not yet uncovered.
3:39 Ira Flatow? Well, if they're so big, why are they so hard to find?
3:42 Speaker 05 It is difficult to bury a big body. I don't know this from experience, just from paleontology. But when you have an animal that is that big, even some of the largest dinosaurs that we know about, to bury something that big and have it be fossilized, it requires so much sediment to be moved relatively rapidly to bury that body and preserve the bones, that usually it starts decaying before that happens. So we really only get bits and pieces. There's kind of a sweet spot in terms of how large you can be to sort of prevent being just gobbled up by a scavenger, but not being so large that it takes forever for that body to be covered up.
4:18 Ira Flatow? We also learned something really cool about stegosaurs, one of my favorite dinosaurs. Those are the stocky ones with the spikes running down their backs and the giant barbs on their tails. Fill us in on what we learned here.
4:31 Speaker 05 I mean, stegosaurs are always favorites, right? They're so ostentatious. I love them. So this was not about stegosaurs itself, but a related dinosaur named Miragaia. And this one had these kind of elongate plates going over its neck and down its back, and these long spikes going over the hips, all the way to the end of the tail. It's a little bit unusual for a stegosaur. And previous studies on stegosaurus itself found that, you know, stegosaurus could swing its tail fast enough, hard enough, to pierce bone if it had to as a defensive mechanism. Its relative didn't have that same power behind it, but a lot of flexibility. So it seems that this animal was using its spiky tail to basically intimidate, to
5:13 Speaker 05 to signal. And what we've learned about dinosaur combat and interactions over the past 10 years or so is that many of these elaborate structures that we used to think of as sort of defensive weapons and things like that are actually social structures. They're for signaling to each other and competing for mates or territory or what have you. So it's kind of neat that even though it looks very stegosaurus-like, it was using its tail in a different kind of way.
5:36 Ira Flatow? Oh, that is cool. And speaking of stegosaurs, the American Museum of Natural History in New York is showing off Apex, what it claims to be the biggest stegosaur ever found.
5:47 Speaker 05 That's right. So Apex is a fossil that's currently privately owned. It has a really contentious history. It was purchased at auction for perhaps the highest price it's ever been paid for a non-avian dinosaur at auction, you know, well over $20 million. So it's currently at the AMNH. Whether scientists can study it or not is a bit up in the air because normally paleontologists cannot study privately owned specimens. That fossil needs to be in the public trust so that generations of researchers can keep going back and testing old ideas and revising previous research or not. So it's a spectacular specimen, but it really kind of gets at, you know, basically this problem that we have in modern paleontology where we're having these amazing fossils come off of private lands and going onto the commercial market.
6:32 Speaker 05 But when they arrive at museums, we're not always able to study them. It's this tension between sort of the academic and commercial aspects of paleontology that's been going on for a few decades now.
6:42 Ira Flatow? Let's talk about the little guys for a minute. Paleontologists described a tiny dinosaur related to a species called the chicken from hell. Sounds like a movie.
6:55 Speaker 05 Yes, and I love small dinosaurs because traditionally, we were talking about this a moment ago, we would find, you know, the, the big ones, things like stegosaurus and triceratops and things like that, ones that were sturdy enough to survive preservation. And the little ones, we'd usually miss out on, and sometimes museums wouldn't even go looking for them. They'd say, we need a showstopper dinosaur for our displays. And it's really just been recently that paleontology has been going back to these traditional, you know, stomping grounds, looking for the little ones. So this comes out of the Hell Creek Formation, so about 66 million years old. And it's a turkey-sized dinosaur. It would have looked kind of like a parrot with a long tail, you know, aside from living alongside two of its other relatives of different sizes, showing us that these things proliferated
7:37 Speaker 05 in their ancient habitat, you know, living at different sizes, eating different things. It really underscores that some of the probably ironically biggest dinosaur discoveries yet to come are going to be among these small species that were traditionally overlooked.
7:51 Ira Flatow? And because they're smaller, are they easier to find, like you were talking about before?
7:56 Speaker 05 So very small dinosaurs, the littlest dinosaurs, are very difficult to find because if you think about the prehistoric world, number one, a lot of things probably wanted to eat them. Larger dinosaurs probably preyed upon smaller dinosaurs pretty consistently. And even if you had a carcass of this animal, so this one's called Eoneofron, if you had a carcass of this little turkey-sized dinosaur, you know, in the ancient Hell Creek environment, it is more likely to break up, decay, be eaten by scavengers, basically destroyed before it has a chance to enter the fossil record. So this has to do with the science called taphonomy, what happens between the death of an organism and its discovery by scientists. And the odds are generally against these very fragile, bird-like, small dinosaurs.
8:41 Speaker 05 But we do find them. There are circumstances in which they can be preserved. So part of it is just going, looking for them, knowing that they're out there and, you know, thinking small rather than looking for that big femur.
8:52 Ira Flatow? Well, speaking of small, good segue you gave me because I was surprised to read that ants, ants made your list of dino discoveries. Why did you include them?
9:02 Speaker 05 That's right. This is a little bit of a personal favorite because it has to do with the world's fifth mass extinction. It has to do with the mass extinction that basically meant that we only have birds as the only living dinosaurs today, the asteroid-caused catastrophe of 66 million years ago. So our study came out this year looking at ants that farm fungus. So if you've seen leaf cutter ants on a documentary at a museum, it's these sorts of ants that basically have evolved agriculture. They tend to fungus and use that to feed. And this new analysis found that this relationship, this symbiosis, goes back to just after that asteroid impact. What was going on at the time was almost
9:42 Speaker 05 all the world's vegetation was burnt up, destroyed, dead in some way. But fungus, fungus proliferated. It was basically eating all the dead stuff that was decaying. And ants looking for a new food source basically switched to fungus for a little while, started defending it as their own food source and developed this agricultural relationship. So something that, you know, is so close in a matter of cooperation between species today started in the wake of the mass extinction. That means that we don't have T. rex and triceratops today.
10:15 Ira Flatow? Do you have any wish holiday season in the dino world that you would discover or hope to learn next year?
10:22 Speaker 05 Oh goodness, there's always so much to find. I would love to know more about dinosaur colors. Like we can figure out dinosaur colors now when we have skin or feathers that preserve some semblance of the pigmentation that they used to have, these little organelles called melanosomes. So we can work out some dinosaur colors from that. So I would love to know what colors, I'm just going to pick one of my favorites, an apatosaurus was. You know, we have the bones, we have some skin impressions. I'm sure there are fossils out there. We can learn something, whether this was brightly colored or drab, like the old illustrations or what. And I would love to know a bit more about that. What color were these really big dinosaurs shaded? Were they blending into their environments or were they so big that they're just completely ostentatious because they're too big to be
11:07 Speaker 05 bothered and didn't mind sticking out?
11:09 Ira Flatow? Well, thank you for joining us. This was fascinating.
11:11 Speaker 05 Always a pleasure.
11:12 Ira Flatow? Riley Black, science writer and amateur paleontologist, based in Salt Lake City, Utah.
11:20 Speaker 02 After the break, looking at advances in eggnogology. Stay with us.
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13:18 Ira Flatow? SciFries Charles Berkquist is here with an update on an important holiday story. Hey, Charles, what's up?
13:25 Speaker 07 Hey, Ara. This is one you probably remember. So around 15 years ago, we made a couple of videos about eggnog.
13:32 Ira Flatow? Eggnog, yeah, you know, I remember that. The question of whether or not the alcohol in the old school real cream, real egg drink, not that commercial stuff you buy at the grocery store, was the alcohol in the classic eggnog enough to protect you against germs, things like salmonella from the eggs?
13:51 Speaker 07 Yeah, it turns out there's a lab at Rockefeller University that has this tradition of mixing up a big batch of old fashioned eggnog around Thanksgiving. And then they serve it a couple of weeks later at the lab holiday party. So years ago, we asked them about this whole food safety issue and they tested their nog.
14:08 Ira Flatow? Yeah, I remember that. And didn't they follow up about a year later with an actual controlled study where they deliberately spiked samples of their eggnog with salmonella?
14:18 Speaker 07 Yeah, they were really good sports about this, but the take home is that yes, if you mix the alcohol directly with the eggs and give it a while to age, the heavily spiked eggnog does seem to protect against bacteria, at least in their small N equals one study. But as we know, time marches on, science progresses. So we wanted to check back in with them on whether there had been any updates in the field of eggnogology. Dr. Vincent Fischetti is an American microbiologist and immunologist and head of the Laboratory of Bacterial Pathogenesis and Immunology at Rockefeller University in New York. Welcome back to Science Friday.
14:52 Speaker 03 Glad to be here.
14:54 Speaker 07 So it's been a few years. Does the lab eggnog tradition continue?
14:58 Speaker 03 It does continue, yes. We had a lull over COVID, but it has continued.
15:03 Speaker 07 And have there been any follow up experiments, advances in eggnogology?
15:08 Speaker 03 No, no, I mean, we've been doing it for so many years. It's, it's an ongoing experiment, basically.
15:15 Speaker 07 And still, everybody has been healthy and fine. Nobody has succumbed to eggnog-related food poisoning.
15:23 Speaker 03 We've never had an issue except for intoxication.
15:28 Speaker 07 I mean, I should note that, as you just alluded to, this nog definitely qualifies as a potent potable.
15:34 Speaker 03 Yes, it's a very, it's a very high-alcoholic eggnog, but it's very good. It's very smooth, and it, it sort of sneaks up on you because it is so smooth.
15:44 Speaker 07 I think we can reveal the secret recipe. What's, what's the alcohol blend in there?
15:48 Speaker 03 Well, it's, um, it's eggs and cream, heavy cream, light cream, and then the alcohol is bourbon and rum, dark rum.
15:59 Speaker 07 Okay. So what is the alcohol actually doing physically to the bacteria? How does alcohol kill germs?
16:07 Speaker 03 Well, the way we make the, the, the way the recipe is, is designed is that the, the problem are the, the eggs. That's where the contamination usually occurs. So when we crack the eggs and we put them into a bowl, then we add the alcohol directly to the eggs. So the concentration of alcohol in the egg concoction is sufficient to kill the organisms that are potentially in the eggs or on the eggs. It's actually on the eggs.
16:39 Speaker 07 And how, how does it actually kill the organism? Is it breaking down the cell wall? Is it doing something else?
16:44 Speaker 03 The alcohol denatures the, the outer membrane, or the membrane of the bacteria.
16:49 Speaker 07 Gotcha. Are some bacteria more resistant to this than others? Or given time, will a good bourbon-rum blend kill just about anything?
16:56 Speaker 03 Well, if it's high enough concentration, it'll kill pretty much most bacteria, yes. It'll get into the cell membrane and, and denature the cell membrane.
17:07 Speaker 07 And if somebody didn't want to, for some reason, make their nog quite so boozy, would the sterilization still work, just take longer? Or do you really need a certain level of initial oomph for this to work?
17:20 Speaker 03 We haven't tested that directly, but it usually is the higher the concentration of alcohol, the more efficient the kill. So there's probably a fine line where there's not enough alcohol to really denature the outer membrane, and then you run into trouble. So I think this mixture of alcohol and eggs is sufficient to give enough alcohol to for denaturation. But it doesn't work immediately because we noticed in our experiment, the one that is on Science Friday, we made an experimental batch where we contaminated it with salmonella, which is usually the organism that causes the infection.
18:01 Speaker 03 And then we followed the concoction over time and found that we got better kill over a week. So it happens slowly. I think the initial interaction occurs when you mix the alcohol with the eggs, but then it continues to occur over the week's time.
18:21 Speaker 07 You mentioned COVID earlier. You know, we now live in a time where we're thinking about things like COVID, bird flu as well. Does alcohol do anything to disrupt viruses?
18:30 Speaker 03 It would to some degree, but you have to have a direct interaction with the virus itself. So, you know, you can't constantly be drinking in order for it to occur. So it's not going to, that's not going to work.
18:44 Speaker 07 I see. So when you're not celebrating, part of your lab work involves bacteriophages, viruses that hunt bacteria. Would it be possible to come up with a bacteriophage that targets salmonella or other food bacteria and dose your nog with that for protection?
18:59 Speaker 03 You could, because a bacteriophage are harmless to humans. And you could get a concoction of phage that you could add to the solution, to the eggnog, that would eventually kill the bacteria in there. That's certainly possible. But the problem with phage and bacteria is that the bacteria become resistant to phage very rapidly. You know, it's, phage and bacteria have been battling for over a billion years, and nobody wants to win that battle. Because if bacteria win, then phage, then they don't have a system by which they can acquire new genes so they can survive in the environment.
19:42 Speaker 03 And phage need bacteria in order to grow. So they've developed a balance where the bacteria sometimes become resistant and the phage can still infect those resistant ones because they're, the phage are modulating themselves, their genes during this time. So it's a nice balance back and forth, and nobody wants to win. So phage will work for a limited period of time to control any organisms that are in eggnog, but it won't work forever.
20:12 Speaker 07 I see. So you've pretty much optimized your lab's eggnog situation. Is there any further exploration in this field? Any, anything that you'd like to investigate?
20:24 Speaker 03 Eggnog research, not at the point. I think we've done it long enough and with confidence that we've never had an issue, that I think the system does work quite well.
20:36 Speaker 07 Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today, and may all your beverages be safe.
20:41 Speaker 03 Thank you. Have a nice holiday.
20:43 Speaker 07 You too, Dr. Faschetti. Dr. Vincent Faschetti is an American microbiologist and immunologist and head of the Laboratory of Bacterial Pathogenesis and Immunology at Rockefeller University.
20:54 Ira Flatow? Thank you, Charles. Charles Berkowitz. And you can check out the recipe on our website at sciencefriday.com/eggnog.
21:04 Speaker 02 That's it for today's show. Tomorrow, we'll take a tour of three community-based ecology projects. We call them tiny nature triumphs. Lots of folks helped make this show happen, including
21:15 Flora Lichtman? Kathleen Davis.
21:16 Speaker 07 George Harper. John Dankoski. Robin Casmer.
21:20 Speaker 02 And I'm Sci-Fry producer, Rasha Aridi. Happy holidays to you all, and thanks for listening.
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