Season 7 Episode 2: Cosmic Concerns and Preventative Teaching Limits Animal Harm

This episode highlights the urgency of planetary defense against a potentially threatening asteroid while also addressing the importance of educating children about responsible pet care and empathy towards animals. The discussion emphasizes two critical areas where science and compassion converge: the efforts to monitor and understand asteroid 2024 YR4 and the promising outcomes of the Animal Guardians intervention program for children at risk of animal harm.

• Bunsen's health update emphasizing the emotional connection between pets and their owners 
• Current threat level of asteroid 2024 YR4 and NASA's response 
• Insights on the James Webb Space Telescope's role in asteroid research 
• Overview of the DART program for diverting asteroids 
• Discussion on child-animal harm and its implications 
• Key findings from the Animal Guardians program highlighting improvements in empathy and care 
• Importance of education in changing future behaviors toward animals 
• Closing thoughts on the responsibility of guardianship for both space and animals

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:09

Hello science enthusiasts. I'm Jason Zukoski. And I'm Chris Zukoski, we're the pet parents of Bunsen, beaker, bernoulli and Ginger.

Speaker 2: 0:18

The science animals on social media.

Speaker 1: 0:21

If you love science.

Speaker 2: 0:22

And you love pets.

Speaker 1: 0:24

You've come to the right spot, so put on your safety glasses and hold on to your tail.

Speaker 1: 0:29

This is the Science Podcast. Hello everybody and welcome back to the Science Podcast. This is episode two of season seven. A little Bunsen update before we get to the main show. As mentioned in pet chat, he had an MRI which showed a bulging disc or a slipped disc in his spine, kind of like in between his shoulder blades. So he's on very strict rest for a while. He's a good candidate for surgery. The hope is, with rest he won't need it. So he's been kind of sequestered in our front room to limit where he can move in the day. It's been really adorable. But Ginger, our cat, she's been spending the entire day with Bunsen, you know, in and around his pen, or she actually hops into his pen like parkouring around to get inside and she just is with him. They don't really interact, they don't play, she just sleeps in his pen, sleeps by the crate, just to be with him. It's really sweet.

Speaker 1: 1:27

On the Science Podcast this week in science news, uh-oh, there's an asteroid heading towards the earth. It's asteroid 2024 YR4. So Chris and I are going to break down that whole development and in pet science it's a rather heartbreaking topic. But there's some really good news that came out from this study. It was more of a study into an intervention technique for children that may harm animals and how to curb that. Okay, on with the show. There's no time like science time this week in science news, chris, what are you doing in 2032?

Speaker 2: 2:03

I'm really hoping that I'm avoiding being hit by an asteroid. What are you doing in 2032?

Speaker 1: 2:11

I don't know how many years is that from now? Eight years, oh, I'm going to be so old in 2032. That's so far away it's hard to think of. But yes, I'm also hoping I'm not going to get smoked by an asteroid. So this news item has been making the rounds on the the web right. I was actually going to cover this last year, like at the end of the year, in december 2024, because there was a very slim possibility that this asteroid that was that was found by astronomers would be on a collision course with earth, but the chance of it hitting the earth was effectively zero. Now the spooky thing is that I swear every day or every week, the chances of it hitting the earth has gone up.

Speaker 2: 3:05

Right now it's 1 in 43 odds.

Speaker 1: 3:07

I've heard some circles calling it a 2.5% chance. Not one month ago it was as low as a 1% chance and, as I said last year in December, it was below a 1% chance. This has got NASA so spooked that the James Webb Space Telescope has been granted emergency use to study the asteroid.

Speaker 2: 3:32

Absolutely, and this is big news, because they have basically timed their observations to the minute and every resource that they're looking at is allocated to a certain amount and they only have a few extra designations that can meet that criteria. So the James Webb Space Telescope will be observing the asteroid twice in the upcoming months, in March and May 2025.

Speaker 1: 4:01

Now the main reason why is they want to get a handle on two things 2025. Now the main reason why is they want to get a handle on two things. The first and most important is the actual size of the asteroid, because estimations have been done up to this time. It's estimated to be about 55 meters across, that's 180 feet, roughly the size of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Now, if that hit the earth, it wouldn't kill us all. Right, this is not big enough for a mass extinction, but it would cause regional devastation.

Speaker 2: 4:33

It would ruin somebody's day not somebody's day, like a good portion of a country's day if it hit Like the Tunguska Impactor, which happened in 1908, roughly the same size and it flattened 80 million trees and the other reason is they want to see if it's really on a collision course with Earth, because the actual size may be larger, because we can only test it based on the ground-based observation, and that is definitely affected by our atmosphere.

Speaker 1: 5:08

And the asteroid's actual size could be what? Chris, this is the spooky part.

Speaker 2: 5:13

It is. It could be anywhere between 40 meters or 130 feet and 90 meters, which is 295 feet in diameter. So this is where the importance of the James Webb Space Telescope comes in and the observations that it can do outside of our atmosphere.

Speaker 1: 5:34

Now we shouldn't freak anybody out, even if it had a 100% chance of hitting the Earth. We, chris or I, actually, before you're part of the team last year I covered NASA's DART program. Do you remember me talking about DART?

Speaker 2: 5:52

I do remember you talking about DART.

Speaker 1: 5:55

Yeah, so DART stands for Double Asteroid Redirection Test and DART was a kamikaze suicide probe that NASA sent as fast as it could at the asteroid Dimorphos. The probe was about the size of a refrigerator and it had one purpose and one purpose only, and that was cut to kamikaze into dimorphous and attempt to boop it off its current path. Nasa was successful Dart smoked the asteroid and moved it ever so slightly that in the big scheme and the scale of the universe, if it was on the collision course with earth, it would miss by hundreds of thousands of kilometers.

Speaker 2: 6:36

That's pretty sweet actually.

Speaker 1: 6:39

Yeah, there's a good quote. I read somewhere that it is expensive to have all this space stuff, but the dinosaurs spent zero dollars on space research and it didn't really work out for them in the long run.

Speaker 2: 6:52

You're suggesting we invest more in space exploration.

Speaker 1: 6:57

I don't think we need to call Bruce Willis and a ragtag group of oil riggers. We just need to know if it's going to hit the Earth and send a little refrigerator-sized probe to boop it.

Speaker 2: 7:09

Okay, I can agree with that. So James Webb, the space telescope is going to use infrared instruments to measure the asteroids heat. It is hoped that that will provide a more accurate size determination by measuring that emitted heat Okay, rather than the reflected light that our observation or ground based observation is using now. And the James Webb Space Telescope will give a better understanding of the surface composition, which that's cool. To know what's coming at you, knowing what's on the surface of it, and that will help refine the impact probability and potential risk assessment. Knowing what's coming at you, I think, is as important as knowing what size it is, the composition and the size.

Speaker 1: 7:54

Do you remember the summer? Both Armageddon and then Deep Impact came out.

Speaker 2: 7:58

Jason, those aren't necessarily movies that I really love to see, but I think I saw both of them with you.

Speaker 1: 8:04

Yeah, I love me a good space disaster movie. And it was just so wild that two okay, to be fair, deep Impact was about a comet and the other, armageddon, was about an asteroid, very different to movies in tone, but, yeah, both resorted to hending a spaceship at it and nuking it, so that's not something we're probably going to be looking at.

Speaker 2: 8:30

No, so I talked about earlier that there's going to be two observations one in March 2025. And that is going to happen when the asteroid is at its peak brightness. And then in May 2025, that's going to be the second observation and that's going to show the asteroid moving farther from the sun. And actually those are the last two chances to observe the 2024 YR4, which is what this is called until its next close approach in 2028. So hopefully they get a good long look at it.

Speaker 1: 9:07

So if we find out it's going to hit us in 2028, we still have four years to plan.

Speaker 2: 9:12

Do a dart.

Speaker 1: 9:14

That's right. Send dart at it. I love that they called it a dart. Isn't that what Canadian slang is for a cigarette?

Speaker 2: 9:24

Yeah, it is actually.

Speaker 1: 9:26

There you go. We got a little Canadian slang, if you're listening. That's science news for this week. This week, in pet science, we have an article from Anthro Zoo's journal that was published on February 3rd. Now, before we get into it, we are going to be talking about something that's disturbing and sad. The end result, though, of the study is really hopeful. This is all about child animal harm, and that's when children hurt animals.

Speaker 2: 9:56

And child animal harm. Cah is linked to poor psychological outcomes, delinquency and violent behavior. So this study is really great because there's actually few established interventions for child animal harm and actually no prior research evaluating the effectiveness of the interventions.

Speaker 1: 10:24

So this occurred in Scotland. The target group was primary school children and the program duration was about two and a half months, with one-to-one sessions in school settings, and they had some really like very hopeful core focus areas.

Speaker 2: 10:40

The core focus areas was understanding animal sentience and emotions. What that allowed the researchers to do was evaluate whether the Animal Guardians program improved the belief in animal sentience and tying that to knowledge of animal welfare needs, as well as assessing for empathy and care for animals, and they also wanted to focus on the correct handling and behavior towards animals.

Speaker 1: 11:09

The study had 48 kids in a matched cross sample. 24 of the kids were referred to animal guardians, so these were kids that had incidents of animal harm and 24 were the control group they were. They had no intervention. There was no incidences of animal harm in their past and there were some really hopeful key findings from the study of working with these kids for two and a half months.

Speaker 2: 11:35

The Animal Guardians Program. What they found in terms of the effectiveness of it is that there were significant improvements in animal welfare knowledge so knowledge is power and an increase and a significant increase in a child's belief in animal sentience. They also noted positive behavior towards animals, as well as cognitive and behavioral empathy expressed.

Speaker 1: 12:03

They also looked and broke down the data with gender, age and severity of harm. That means, like the kids that were referred to them based on how much they hurt the animals hard to talk about, but, good news, there are no gender differences. So the program was equally effective for boys and girls, and the youngest children showed the greatest improvement than older children. But older children generally started with more of this knowledge than the younger kids did, and the program was effective across all the levels of the severity of harm. So low, medium and high risk kids ones that did the most harm to animals or were thought to be at risk to do the most harm to the ones that were the lowest. This is a small sample size and it's a self-reported behavior. There is biases and when you have a limited sample size, of course your data might be skewed a bit. We can conclude that Animal Guardians is an effective intervention for reducing behavioral risks associated with hurting animals.

Speaker 2: 13:00

So education is power.

Speaker 1: 13:02

It's really hard to think about kids hurting animals, but I love the fact that there are intervention programs like this out there and the data seems to support as you and I know, Chris, that when you educate kids, you change behaviors for the future, so this is good news.

Speaker 2: 13:21

It is, and there are some next steps that we could also include in assessing long-term effectiveness of programs and basically seeing if, like five years down the line, if someone who went through the program still exhibits those behaviors, those positive behaviors towards animals. But then also expand the age range from three to 16 years old would be a great start. The child does have to be cognitively aware enough to answer some basic questions, but it's never too late to start, and so even having children up to the age of 16 in a study or part of a program I think is beneficial yeah, and the last thing is for any new parents out there with, like, little kids that a lot of little kids they don't just grow up knowing how to interact with animals.

Speaker 1: 14:17

I think of the the terrible but funny story of your niece when she was little, wanting to see the cats and she would put on oven mitts so she could see the cats, because they did not want to see her.

Speaker 2: 14:28

No, or when Amy had puppies and she's all be nice to the puppy and she wasn't really that nice to the puppy. So we had to definitely have supervision and teach her how to be nice to the puppies.

Speaker 1: 14:43

Yeah, and of course, that really helped, and I mean, your niece is now an absolutely wonderful person with animals. Yes, all right, that's pet science for this week. Well, that's it for this week's show. As I mentioned, we're not having an interview every single episode, so it does make the episodes a little shorter. In the future, we'll have another science item that Chris and I will talk about, but I'm presenting this week, so I'm kind of in a time crunch. I have to actually pack my bags right after recording this to to get ready to go to Calgary to present at the Calgary teachers convention Very exciting. That aside, thanks for listening, and a special shout out to our top tier patrons on the paw pack top dogs. One of the perks of being a top dog is you get your name shouted out by Chris in the podcast. Take it away, chris.

Speaker 2: 15:32

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