Point of Discovery University of Texas at Austin, College of Natural Sciences, Marc Airhart

Astronomers and physicists aren’t freaking out. Okay, well maybe just a little. New data from the James Webb Space Telescope is making them question just about everything.

Here in the U.S., many of us are eagerly awaiting the April 8th, 2024 total solar eclipse, the last of its kind to cross our paths (at least in the contiguous U.S.) until the year 2045. Austin, Texas, where we produce Point of Discovery, is right in the path of totality. And this eclipse feels even more special because the last total solar eclipse in Austin happened before there was an Austin, in the year 1397.

On today’s show, we talk to bird biologist Peter English about the strange ways that animals respond to solar eclipses; biologist David Ledesma about the plants and animals that lived in Central Texas 600 years ago; and archaeologist Fred Valdez about what Native Americans might have made of that last solar eclipse.

On today’s show we talk with Philip Souza, a Ph.D. student in the lab of Simon Brandl at the Marine Science Institute, and a Stengl-Wyer fellow. His research is focused on the sounds that fish along the Texas Gulf Coast make to attract mates or defend territory. He works in the Mission-Aransas Estuary near Port Aransas, whose oyster reefs and other habitats support rich communities of fish, many of which have a big impact on the Texas economy — including spotted sea trout, catfish, red drum and black drum. He’s developing ways to continuously record sound in the water to monitor the health of the ecosystem. As fate would have it, two years ago, his approach was put to the test.

On today’s show we talk with Alex Huth, assistant professor of neuroscience and computer science at The University of Texas at Austin, and Ph.D. student Jerry Tang about a new system that can read a person’s thoughts in real time and produce a stream of continuous text. The system they developed, called a semantic decoder, relies in part on the kind of AI model behind ChatGPT. It might one day help people who are mentally conscious yet unable to physically speak, such as those debilitated by strokes, to communicate intelligibly again. The scientists behind it are also wrestling with thorny issues this technology brings up, concerning privacy and the ethical use of AI.

For graduate student Olivia Cooper, the successful launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, comes at the perfect time to help launch her career studying galaxy evolution. Cooper works with University of Texas at Austin associate professor Caitlin Casey on the biggest project in JWST’s first year—COSMOS-Web—which is designed to take the deepest images of the universe to date and reveal some of the earliest galaxies to form after the Big Bang. We talk with Cooper about the breathtaking images JWST is collecting, the complicated legacy of the telescope’s namesake, why her fellow scientists are just as inspiring as JWST itself and what this moment means to her.

Over the past 15 years or so, tawny crazy ants from South America have been popping up across the southeastern U.S. like paratroopers dropping in from an invading army. Where they take hold, they’re like an ecological wrecking ball and they cause headaches for homeowners. Podcast host Marc Airhart joined biologist Edward LeBrun in the Texas Hill Country to test a new weapon in the battle against the destructive tawny crazy ant.