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b'A Dying Planet Offers A Peek Into The Future\\nThis week, astronomers reported in the journal Nature that they had spotted a planet approximately the size of Jupiter being swallowed by a star over the course of ten days. The star, called ZTF SLRN-2020, is about 15,000 light-years away from our solar system, but still in our own galaxy. Astronomers had thought this type of planet-engulfing must happen, based on how stars evolve and certain chemical signatures they\\u2019ve spotted from inside stars. However, this is the first time the process has actually been observed. Our own sun is predicted to go through a similar expansion in about five billion years, consuming Mercury, Venus, and likely Earth.\\nTim Revell, deputy US editor at New Scientist, joins Ira to talk about the fate of the planet and other stories from the week in science, including mapping the trees of Africa, an experimental Alzheimer\\u2019s drug showing early promise, and reconstructing a short movie clip based on brain signals recorded in mice.\\n\\n\\xa0\\nSaliva: The Unsung Hero Of Taste\\nHow good are you at tasting what you eat? Not just gulping food down, but actually savoring the flavor? When you think about how taste works, you may think about your tongue and taste buds, and how they send information about your food info to your brain. But there\\u2019s an overlooked\\u2014and understudied\\u2014hero in this story: saliva. That may sound strange, since part of saliva\\u2019s job is to help us chew, swallow, talk, and even digest. But saliva is much more interesting and complicated than that. Ira talks with Chris Gorski, editor at Chemical & Engineering News, who reported this story about taste and saliva for Knowable Magazine earlier this year.\\n\\n\\xa0\\nWho Will Win The Rat Race?\\nLast fall, New York City\\u2019s Sanitation Commissioner Jessica Tisch stood in front of a microphone and announced her plan to deal with NYC\\u2019s most hated residents: rats. She went on to make a now-viral declaration: \\u201cI want to be clear, the rats are absolutely going to hate this announcement. But the rats don\\u2019t run this city: We do.\\u201d Soon after, NYC announced its search for a rat czar. Someone who is \\u201chighly motivated and somewhat bloodthirsty\\u201d with \\u201cthe drive, determination, and killer instinct needed to fight the real enemy\\u2014New York City\\u2019s relentless rat population.\\u201d\\nThis news\\u2014and the memes born from it\\u2014put rats in the forefront of city dwellers\\u2019 minds. And now, the newly appointed rat czar Kathleen Corradi\\u2019s reign has begun. But ridding cities of rats is no easy feat. It requires public participation, new policy, behavioral changes, and an all-hands-on-deck approach from several government departments. So what\\u2019s it going to take to rid cities of rats? And is it even possible? In this live call-in, Ira talks with Bethany Brookshire, science journalist and author of Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains, and Dr. Bobby Corrigan, urban rodentologist and pest consultant. They discuss the history of humans\\u2019 relationships with rats, why these critters thrive in cities, and why we\\u2019ll need to learn how to live with them.\\n\\n\\xa0\\nTranscripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.'