In this episode of YS, Brian braves those icy north winds to see half a million cranes on the Platte River, while Matt gets pig semen in his eye (in a manner of speaking) and comes away cancer-free (or so recent research might suggest). Also: simian civil war breaks out among the chimpanzees of Uganda. (!) And in Ourobookos, which is our ongoing YS book club, the war against TB finds both a bacterial villain and a questionable cure.
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Episode Art: Modified from Crane Photo by Brian Cross.
Theme music: “Funky Machine” (ID874) by Lobo Loco (Accessed through FreeMusicArchive.org.; CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
Production help provided by Public Radio Tulsa's Scott Gregory.
Yackety Science is recorded at the studios of Public Radio Tulsa, Kendall Hall, The University of Tulsa, and at the Center for Creativity at Tulsa Community College.
Links:
Sandhill Crane Migration and Rowe Sanctuary:
Information about Rowe Sanctuary
https://www.audubon.org/rowe
All About Birds: Sandhill Cranes
https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Sandhill_Crane/overview
Pig Semen and Cancer:
Jiansong Zhao et al. Harnessing semen-derived exosomes for noninvasive fundus drug delivery: A paradigm for exosome-based ocular fundus therapeutics. Sci. Adv.12,eadw7275(2026).
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adw7275
Scientists turn pig semen extract into eye drops that kill cancer in mice by⦁ Darren Incorvaia, Fierce Biostech Mar 27, 2026
https://www.fiercebiotech.com/research/pig-semen-extract-enables-eye-drops-kill-eye-cancer-mice
Chimp Wars:
Civil war among wild chimpanzees by James Brooks .Science392,146-147(2026).
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aeg6719
Ourobookos: A Yackety Science Book Club
"Everything Is Tuberculosis" by John Green
This description/summary appears at the Magic City Books website:
"Tuberculosis has been entwined with humanity for millennia. Once romanticized as a malady of poets, today tuberculosis is seen as a disease of poverty that walks the trails of injustice and inequity we blazed for it. In 2019, author John Green met Henry Reider, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone. John became fast friends with Henry, a boy with spindly legs and a big, goofy smile. In the years since that first visit to Lakka, Green has become a vocal advocate for increased access to treatment and wider awareness of the healthcare inequities that allow this curable, preventable, infectious disease to also be the deadliest, killing over a million people every year. In 'Everything Is Tuberculosis,' John tells Henry’s story, woven through with the scientific and social histories of how tuberculosis has shaped our world — and how our choices will shape the future of tuberculosis."