Test 7 Transcript
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Anastasia ShabardinaTest 7 Transcript
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Anastasia Shabardina1.
OK, so we’ve been looking at how man-made changes in our environment can affect wildlife. Now I’ll
discuss a particular example. Let’s take a look at mercury. Mercury’s one of the 120 or so elements
that make up all matter, and it has the symbol Hg. It’s a shiny, silvery substance. You may have
seen it in old-fashioned thermometers, but it’s not used much for domestic purposes now because
it’s highly toxic.
But the problem is that the amount of mercury in the environment's increasing. The main reason for
this is the power plants used to produce electricity. The main source of energy that most of them use
is still coal, and when it’s burned it releases mercury into the atmosphere. Some of this gets
deposited into lakes and rivers, and if it’s ingested by a fish it’s not excreted, it stays in the fish’s
body and it enters the food chain. So it’s been known for some time that birds which eat fish may be
affected, but what wasn’t known until quite recently is that those that eat insects can also be
affected.
So a woman called Claire Varian-Ramos is doing some research on how this is affecting birds.
And rather than looking at how many birds are actually killed by mercury poisoning, she’s looking for
more subtle sub-effects. And these may be to do with the behaviour of the birds, or with the effect
of mercury on the way their brain works, so whether it leads to problems with memory, for example.
And she’s particularly focusing on the effects of mercury on bird song. Now. the process of song
learning happens at a particular stage in the birds’ development, and what you may not know is that
a young bird seems to acquire this skill by listening to the songs produced by its father, rather than
by any other bird.
And Varian-Ramos has already found in her research that if young male birds are exposed to
mercury, if they eat food contaminated with mercury, then the songs they produce aren’t as complex
as those produced by other birds. So quite low-level exposure to mercury is likely to have an impact
on male birds in a natural situation, because it can mean that they’re less attractive to female birds,
and so it can affect their chances of reproduction.
Now the way she’s carrying out this research is worth thinking about. She’s using a mixture of
studies using birds kept in laboratories, and studies carried out outdoors in the wild. The lab-based
studies have the advantage that you don’t get all the variables you would in a natural setting, so the
experimenter has a much higher level of control, and that means they can be more confident about
their results in some ways. And of course they don’t have to worry about going out and finding the
birds in order to observe them.
So what are the implications here for humans? Well, because many birds are migratory, they may be
transporting mercury far from contaminated sites. For example, it’s been found that ducks who’d
been feeding at a contaminated site were later shot by hunters over a thousand kilometres away,
and presumably eaten. But these birds likely had mercury levels high enough to warrant concern for
human consumption.
In addition, going back to song learning by birds, we saw that this may be affected by mercury
contamination. Well, we also know that in humans, mercury causes developmental delays in the
acquisition of language, and in fact this process is very similar in the brain regions it involves and
even the genes that are involved. But mercury contamination has other important implications for
humans as well. It’s now known that an unborn child can be affected if the food eaten by its mother
contains high levels of mercury, and these effects can be quite substantial.
In the end, it comes down to whether more value is placed on human economic wellbeing or
environmental wellbeing. It’s true there are new regulations for mercury emissions from power
plants, but these will need billions of dollars to implement, and increase costs for everyone. Some
argue that’s too much to pay to protect wildlife. But as we’ve seen, the issues go beyond that, and I
think it’s an issue we need to consider very carefully.
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ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST: We are used to leading busy lives. But if things get too busy, too hectic, we can
feel overwhelmed. That is stress. Stress can hurt our bodies in ways that scientists are just beginning to
understand. A new study suggests it can even reduce the benefits of a good diet. NPR's Allison Aubrey
reports.
ALLISON AUBREY, BYLINE: If you're curious about how stress influences your body and what you can do
to handle it better, there's a lot to be learned from the research of Janice Kiecolt-Glaser. She's been
studying this a long time.
The Ohio State professor has demonstrated that stress can alter metabolism, leading people to burn
fewer calories. She's also shown that stress makes wounds heal more slowly.
JANICE KIECOLT-GLASER: My major theme has been the effects that stress has on your body.
AUBREY: In her latest study, she's looking at the interactions between stress and diet. And she wants to
know if a certain kind of meal could counter the effects of stress on the body. To answer this, she got
about 60 women who were experiencing different kinds of stress in their lives to participate in what she
calls a meal challenge.
KIECOLT-GLASER: You're giving people a meal - in this case, two different meals. And you're looking to
see how the two different meals might have different kinds of effects.
AUBREY: Now, one meal was very high in saturated fat, the type of fat most linked to heart disease. The
other meal was made with fat similar to olive oil, which is considered better for health. The idea is that
the healthier of the two meals would protect against the harmful effects of stress, specifically
inflammation levels in the body. And here's what she found.
KIECOLT-GLASER: When women were not stressed, and they got the healthier meal, their inflammatory
responses were lower than when they had the high-saturated-fat meal.
AUBREY: Not really a surprise - but on days when women were stressed, experiencing things like a child
care scramble, an unmet deadline or caring for an elderly, sick parent, eating the healthier meal did not
help.
KIECOLT-GLASER: The stress appeared to boost inflammation.
AUBREY: Meaning when the women ate the healthier meal, their inflammation was just as high. Kiecolt-
Glaser says over time, higher inflammation in the body can increase the risk of a range of diseases.
KIECOLT-GLASER: Cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, arthritis, some cancers - it's an ugly list of
possibilities.
AUBREY: The findings may seem like a bummer. It's easy to interpret as, hey, maybe a good diet doesn't
really matter. But Aric Prather of UC, San Francisco, who studies how lifestyles influence health, says this
would be the wrong conclusion.
ARIC PRATHER: No, I don't think this study shows of how you eat doesn't matter.
AUBREY: What it does suggest is that, in some cases, the power of stress can overwhelm diet choices.
But if you combine a good diet with other effective strategies, Prather says, you can protect the body
against the effects of stress - for instance, exercise.
MARINA SMITH: Like, I really enjoy exercising when I'm stressed because it gives you some sort of outlet
to distract from all of the stress.
AUBREY: That's law student Marina Smith (ph). I caught up with her and a group of friends as they were
taking a study break. They agreed that one of their top stress relievers is just hanging out together.
SMITH: Friends are great because when you're able to talk with them, you're able to get the stress out
so it's not bottled up inside of you.
AUBREY: UC, San Francisco's Aric Prather says Smith's strategies are two of the best.
PRATHER: Yeah, absolutely. Exercise and social connectedness are effective in kind of improving
people's well-being and their ability to cope with stressors during the day.
AUBREY: Since we can't just wish stress away, Prather says the more of these habits we have to unwind,
the better. Allison Aubrey, NPR News.