On this week’s show, science journalist Josh Sokol talks about a global cooling event sparked by space dust that lead to a huge shift in animal and plant diversity 466 million years ago. (Read the related research article in Science Advances.)

And I talk with Kenneth Rosenberg, an applied conservation scientist at Cornell University, about steep declines in bird abundance in the United States and Canada. His team estimates about 3 billion birds have gone missing since the 1970s.

This week’s episode was edited by Podigy.

Ads on this week’s show: MOVA Globes; KiwiCo.com

Download the transcript (PDF)

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[Image: Public domain; Music: Jeffrey Cook]