Johnathan Walker:To woo a cockatoo, make sure the beat is right

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Today on the show, All Things Considered co-host Mary Louise Kelly joins Regina G. Barber and Maria Godoy for our bi-weekly science roundup. They talk through some of the latest eye-catching science news, including the percussion-intensive mating life of cockatoos, what pink diamonds today tell us about the breakup of the ancient supercontinent Nuna and the latest on the Nipah outbreak in India.

Setting the beat to woo your fellow cockatoo

Wild palm cockatoos live in remote parts of far northern Australia, lowland New Guinea and some offshore islands. Females lay a single egg every two years. Given all this, the females are pretty picky about which male they mate with.

Enter the spectacle that is the male palm cockatoo mating display.

The display begins with a whistle and a puff of the chest. There are many calls that ensue and along the way, "he's blushing his red cheeks and he's bobbing and dancing on the branch, twirling—doing everything he can to get her attention," says Rob Heinsohn, a conservation biologist at Australian National University. For the big finale: a drum solo using a freshly fashioned drumstick.

Heinsohn has been studying parrots like the cockatoo for decades. Over the years, Heinsohn has noticed that individuals seem to have a signature drumming style. Not only that, in a study recently published by the Royal Society, Heinsohn and his colleagues found that each male has a preferred style of drumstick—ranging from the long and skinny to the squat seed pod.

Heinsohn suspects male parrots come up with their own signature sound in an attempt to signal both brains and creativity to their potential mates.

The ancient, massive breakup that spewed pink diamonds

For decades, the Argyle diamond mine in Western Australia enjoyed a bounty of pink diamonds. Until it closed in 2020, Argyle was the leading global supplier of the material. But the whole time, geologists have been stumped by how the diamonds got there and when.

Geologists do know the broad strokes of how diamonds are created. They form around 150 km below the Earth's surface. Historically, they formed billions of years ago, with the formation of supercontinents. Colorless diamonds form when pure carbon is under extreme pressure. By contrast, pink diamonds are damaged says Hugo Olierook, a geologist at Curtin University.

"You can actually take that diamond and twist and bend it a little. Like if you bend it and twist it just the right amount, it turns pink," he explains.

When the structures inside the diamond get compressed, the light traveling through the diamond makes it look pink.

Scientists think these pink diamonds were created during the formation of a supercontinent called Nuna, 1.8 billion years ago.

This week, Olierook and his colleagues published their finding that the pink diamonds spewed from deep inside the earth some 500 million years after the formation of Nuna in the journal Nature Communications.

Updates on the Nipah outbreak in southern India

Reporter Kamala Thiagarajan has been following an ongoing outbreak of the Nipah virus in Kerala, India for NPR's Goats and Soda blog. So far, there have been six cases, two of which have resulted in deaths.

In humans, Nipah can cause severe respiratory problems and encephalitis, or brain inflammation, which can bring fevers, headaches—and even disorientation or coma.

Scientists aren't yet sure how the current outbreak in Kerala started. But they do know the virus jumps from animals to people. Fruit bats are thought to be the primary hosts, spreading Nipah to humans after contaminating things people eat or drink. In previous outbreaks in Bangladesh, scientists think fruit bats drank the sap of date palm trees, and people contracted the virus after drinking the sap. From there, the virus can be transmitted from human to human through direct contact with the bodily fluids of an infected person or infected food. It is not airborne.

Researchers think several of the cases that spread between humans are linked to a hospital where the first person who died during the outbreak sought treatment.

While Nipah is a deadly virus—it can have a fatality rate as high as 75%—doctors in Kerala say they're optimistic about the trajectory of the current outbreak. After identifying the first case, health authorities created dozens of containment zones, closed some schools and public transit networks and isolated health workers. No other states have reported any cases, so Kerala has begun to ease up on those restrictions.

Science headlines keeping you up at night or monologuing at your friends? Email us at [email protected]—we'd love to know!

Listen to Short Wave on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts.

This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson and Noah Caldwell. It was edited by Christopher Intagliata and Rebecca Ramirez. Our fact checker was Anil Oza, and our audio engineer was Maggie Luthar.