Here's how a wild hazelnut could help the Land Back movement in Canada
EMILY KWONG: You're listening to Short Wave, from NPR. Hey, Short Wavers. Emily Kwong here--
JESSICA YUNG: And Jessica Yung.
KWONG: --with our biweekly science news roundup, Thanksgiving edition, featuring the host of All Things Considered. Today, we have Ari Shapiro.
ARI SHAPIRO: So honored to be here.
KWONG: Oh, thanks for stopping by.
YUNG: So combing through all the headlines, all of the embargo journals, we found some pretty interesting stuff.
KWONG: Yes. Today, we have a Thanksgiving buffet for you of, one, genetics that's proving Indigenous hazelnut cultivation in Canada.
YUNG: How an ancient piece of meteorite from Mars points to a possibly habitable past.
KWONG: And a very large fish mysteriously washing up on the coast of California.
SHAPIRO: We've got hazelnuts. We've got fish. It sounds like a Thanksgiving feast.
KWONG: Delicious.
YUNG: All that on this episode of Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.
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KWONG: Hey, Short Wavers. Emily Kwong here. Before we get back to the show, let's talk about what makes Short Wave possible. Short Wave is possible because of you, because we work for NPR, and NPR is public media. We exist not to make money, but to create a more informed public. You can think of public media like a public sidewalk or a public park. It's infrastructure that we all use. It's free. It's for everyone. And that's why we work really hard to bring you stories about science that matter to you, no matter where you live or what community you belong to. We love doing this work. And this time of year, I want to say thank you. Thank you for listening and for your support. And if this is a mission you believe in and you have the ability to throw a few dollars our way, I want to remind you that Giving Tuesday is almost here. So it is really the perfect time to keep the Short Wave train running and free. One way to do this is by signing up for NPR+. You'll get sponsor-free episodes and all kinds of perks across more than 25 podcasts withing the NPR portfolio. Just visit plus.npr.org. That link is in our episode notes. The other way you can give is simply by making a donation at donate.npr.org. Your gifts are tax-deductible either way. All right, grateful for you. Thank you for listening. Back to the show.
SHAPIRO: All right, I want to start with hazelnuts because I grew up in the state of Oregon, which produces more than 90% of the US 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.
SHAPIRO: Mm-hm.
KWONG: 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.
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CHELSEY GERALDA ARMSTRONG: Marion Dixon, Wal'checkwu 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 is in the '50s.
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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.
SHAPIRO: Hmm.
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 longlasting 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.
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JACK WOODWARD: Crabapples 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.
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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?
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 too 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.
KWONG: Mm-hm.
YUNG: 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.
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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.
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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's Aaron again.
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CAVOSIE: The zircon had these elements preserved in its structure in arrangements that are kind of like the layers of an onion.
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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 they 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 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 fish. What's the 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: 22 in more than a century, 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 a relationship at all between oarfish sightings and earthquakes. So no one panic.
SHAPIRO: I don't know if they were looking hard enough. But anyway, why might some of these oarfish 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 conditions, like the El Niño or La Niña cycle, or red tides, for example.
KWONG: But in the meantime, it is an oarfish mystery.
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KWONG: Ari, come kick it with us any time.
SHAPIRO: It's been a delight.
KWONG: You can hear more of Ari Shapiro on Consider This, NPR's afternoon news podcast about what the news means for you. Check it out. Subscribe now.
YUNG: This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson and Jordan-Marie Smith. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez and Christopher Intagliata. Tyler Jones checked the facts.
KWONG: David Greenburg and Jimmy Keeley were the audio engineers. I'm Emily Kwong.
YUNG: And I'm Jessica Yung. Thanks for listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.
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