Berly McCoy
Appearances
Short Wave
Will Bark For Science
Tariffs, recessions, how Colombian drug cartels gave us blueberries all year long. That's the kind of thing the Planet Money podcast explains. I'm Sarah Gonzalez, and on Planet Money, we help you understand the economy and how things all around you came to be the way they are. Para que sepas. So you know. Listen to the Planet Money podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
Will Bark For Science
Okay, Burleigh McCoy, shortwave producer, why is Jack the dog searching for whale poop?
Short Wave
Tornado Alley: Home Of Extreme Winds
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, short wavers, producer Burleigh McCoy in the host chair today. So every couple of years when I was growing up in the suburbs of St. Louis, Missouri, my family and I would gather in our basement, not for a party or game night, but to take cover from a potential tornado. As a kid living around Tornado Alley, I thought this was normal.
Short Wave
Tornado Alley: Home Of Extreme Winds
Technically, tornadoes can happen anywhere in the world, and have been recorded on every continent except Antarctica. But even taking into account the cold air from the Rockies and warm air from the Gulf, scientists still wondered why there were so many more tornadoes in Tornado Alley than anywhere else around the globe.
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Tornado Alley: Home Of Extreme Winds
Especially considering Tornado Alley is very similar to a section of South America, at least geographically.
Short Wave
Tornado Alley: Home Of Extreme Winds
Today on the show, new research on why the U.S. gets so many more tornadoes and what the findings might mean for reducing them in the future. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
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Tornado Alley: Home Of Extreme Winds
Okay, Sushmita, let's talk about the research you reported on. It was done by a scientist named Funing Lee when he was at MIT. And Funing and his colleagues studied tornado occurrence by using this historical data to model and simulate the interaction between land and the atmosphere. Tell me about what they found.
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Tornado Alley: Home Of Extreme Winds
Wow. So it really is like this big picture geographical reason for why there's a different amount of tornadoes in North and South America. Yeah. And so it's really just like if you have flat or you have not flat. That's the big factor. Yeah. And way upstream. Yeah. And upstream being different for North and South America?
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Tornado Alley: Home Of Extreme Winds
Okay, so is this like coming from the south in the northern hemisphere and coming from the north in this? Yes.
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Tornado Alley: Home Of Extreme Winds
If you're unfamiliar, Tornado Alley is just a seasonally shifting section of the U.S. that gets a high level of tornadoes. But I later learned that people who live outside of this area don't experience nearly the same amount of tornadoes.
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Tornado Alley: Home Of Extreme Winds
Okay. And speaking of caveats, this, I mean, this research seems like it's pretty straightforward, pretty solid.
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Tornado Alley: Home Of Extreme Winds
Okay, so it's like people hadn't thought to look this far upstream. And how far are we talking?
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Tornado Alley: Home Of Extreme Winds
Wow. So the researchers did this work, solved kind of a big mystery in why Tornado Alley gets so many tornadoes. What could be some implications of their research?
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Tornado Alley: Home Of Extreme Winds
And then I know climate change is linked to increases in extreme weather, so heavy extreme rainfall, heat, drought. And I read that last year was actually the second most active tornado season in recorded history.
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Tornado Alley: Home Of Extreme Winds
Do scientists expect instances of tornadoes to change as our climate warms?
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Tornado Alley: Home Of Extreme Winds
That's Sushmina Partak, a freelance science journalist who wrote about the science of tornadoes for the publication EOS. And she says the reason this region has at least 10 times more tornadoes than any other place in the world is clear.
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Tornado Alley: Home Of Extreme Winds
Sushmita, thank you so much for coming on the show to talk to us about tornadoes.
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Tornado Alley: Home Of Extreme Winds
Short Wavers will drop a link to Sushmita's full article in our episode notes. And if you like this episode, please follow us on the podcast platform you're listening on. It really helps our show. This episode was produced by me, Burleigh McCoy, and edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez, and by Jeff Brumfield. Tyler Jones checked the facts. And Kweisi Lee was the audio engineer.
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Tornado Alley: Home Of Extreme Winds
Beth Donovan is our senior director. And Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Burleigh McCoy. Thanks for listening to Shortwave from NPR.
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Tornado Alley: Home Of Extreme Winds
So tornadoes form from thunderstorms. And for them to do that, different types of winds need to blow at different temperatures in different directions.
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Tornado Alley: Home Of Extreme Winds
These winds moving at vastly different speeds and directions are called wind shear. And they can lead to rotation within the thunderstorm.
Short Wave
Science Can Make You More Creative!
In the two decades Zorana's been studying creativity, she's realized that even though creative people are unique, it's not because they're born with it. But that idea that some people are creative and some people aren't, what scientists call a fixed mindset, can stop creativity in its tracks.
Short Wave
Science Can Make You More Creative!
But this idea is pervasive. We can sometimes think it's only the Einsteins or Beyonces of the world who are creative.
Short Wave
Science Can Make You More Creative!
One example of mini-C might be your unique way of learning times tables.
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Science Can Make You More Creative!
Like designing new software, writing a novel, or making a science podcast. So even if you aren't big C-level like Beyonce, you and anyone can always start by opting in to being creative. Which Zorana learned the hard way, after years of limiting herself.
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Science Can Make You More Creative!
That has changed, and it culminated into a very creative thing, a book called The Creativity Choice, about how creative people can stick with an idea. So today on the show, the science of creativity. We talk about how psychologists study it and the choices people make to grow their creativity. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
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Science Can Make You More Creative!
Okay, Zorana, so now let's talk about how you go about studying and measuring something so vague and mysterious as creativity. How do scientists study it?
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Science Can Make You More Creative!
So this is the brick test. That's one way scientists can study creativity. What if they want to ask more complicated questions? What are some of those complicated questions and then how would scientists go about measuring that?
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Science Can Make You More Creative!
Interesting. And one of the ways you write that people can build their creative skills is by being aware of their emotions and working with them to problem solve and even regulate those emotions. So how does building your emotional intelligence muscles feed into creativity?
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Science Can Make You More Creative!
Okay. Can you give me an example of that, using an emotion to our advantage?
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Science Can Make You More Creative!
So the flip side of creativity is creative blocks. To illustrate this, can you tell me about the candle test?
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Science Can Make You More Creative!
Okay, so spoiler alert. If you want to try this, don't keep listening right now.
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Science Can Make You More Creative!
Okay. And so in your book, you say this is an example of reconstructing the problem. You give the example of your book, of how you got stuck and how you got unstuck. What was that like, one? And what do you think other people could learn from that example?
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Science Can Make You More Creative!
Hi Short Wavers, Burleigh McCoy filling the host chair today, and I'd like you to meet psychologist Zorana Ivcevic-Pringle. When Zorana was an undergraduate, she was searching for a thesis topic. To spark ideas, she was reading everything she could get her hands on, and she stumbled across work from the 1960s, during the space age, about creativity.
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Science Can Make You More Creative!
Zorana, thank you so much for talking to me today about creativity. Thank you. Zorana's book, The Creativity Choice, The Science of Making Decisions to Turn Ideas into Actions, is out now. And shortwavers, thank you for listening. Make sure you never miss an episode by following us on your favorite podcast platform. It really helps our show.
Short Wave
Science Can Make You More Creative!
And if you have a science question, send us an email at shortwave at npr.org. This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson, edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez, and fact-checked by Tyler Jones. The audio engineer was Robert Rodriguez. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Burleigh McCoy.
Short Wave
Science Can Make You More Creative!
Thank you for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
Science Can Make You More Creative!
She read that creative people often have personality traits that don't seem to go together.
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Moths, Owls And Fungi With Over 20,000 Sexes...Oh My!
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.
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Moths, Owls And Fungi With Over 20,000 Sexes...Oh My!
And that's what I want to do with you today, Burleigh. I want to just get real quiet and listen to the sounds of a winter's night when everything is dead or dormant. Or is it? Okay.
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Moths, Owls And Fungi With Over 20,000 Sexes...Oh My!
No idea, because it was so dark. And we don't have half of these critters' night vision.
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Moths, Owls And Fungi With Over 20,000 Sexes...Oh My!
But I know that the park, because I looked at a map, sits along the Patuxent River, which flows into Maryland's Chesapeake Bay. We were bundled in our winter coats, and the first stop along our night hike was a patch of lichen growing along a tree just off the parking lot.
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Moths, Owls And Fungi With Over 20,000 Sexes...Oh My!
Yeah, lichen is that stuff that grows on trees. It kind of looks like seaweed, but it's actually a hybrid colony of fungi and algae in a symbiotic relationship. To show us, Serenella dramatically shines her flashlight up the tree trunk.
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Moths, Owls And Fungi With Over 20,000 Sexes...Oh My!
Serenella then flips on her UV light and the patch of green lichen totally changes. And it suddenly glowed. Neon yellow. The lichen, one particular part of it was fluorescing. So absorbing the ultraviolet light from the flashlight and emitting visible light.
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Moths, Owls And Fungi With Over 20,000 Sexes...Oh My!
Yeah, it was like the Las Vegas strip. Natalie Howe, an ecologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, steps forward and shoves her face into the tree bark.
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Moths, Owls And Fungi With Over 20,000 Sexes...Oh My!
She sounds so excited. So we take a UV light and get up close to that tree to look. And pretty soon, Serenella shouts. Oh, Natalie.
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Moths, Owls And Fungi With Over 20,000 Sexes...Oh My!
Yeah, okay. So the yellow lichen is called red. Pyxene subscenaria, and the orange lichen is Pyxene syridiata, and both have chemicals in their tissues which allow them to fluoresce. Okay, but like why? Natalie explained to me that lichen fluoresce as a protective response against ultraviolet light damage from the sun.
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Moths, Owls And Fungi With Over 20,000 Sexes...Oh My!
Yep. So the group starts to branch out at this point away from the lichen depot, drifting into pockets of the forest, swinging their UV lights and headlamps up trees. Everyone's kind of getting into it now. And they're breaking up books to try to identify what they see. And suddenly it just feels weird to step on anything. Because, like, everything is alive. Yeah, except where there's trash. Oh.
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Moths, Owls And Fungi With Over 20,000 Sexes...Oh My!
So in about two minutes, we'll get started. Okay.
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Moths, Owls And Fungi With Over 20,000 Sexes...Oh My!
Well, there was this gigantic piece of fabric that one of the naturalists had hung up and lit with mercury vapor lamps. So those are lamps that emit this very broad spectrum of light and attracted all these different kinds of moths just like clinging to the fabric.
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Moths, Owls And Fungi With Over 20,000 Sexes...Oh My!
Yeah, this moth, along with all moths, use the moon and stars to navigate, so lamps are a good way to draw them out of the shadows. Then, Matt Felperin, a roving naturalist with Nova Parks, the regional park system of Northern Virginia, makes an announcement that he will be, quote, doing owl calls intermittently. Okay.
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Moths, Owls And Fungi With Over 20,000 Sexes...Oh My!
It was a tromp through Patuxent River State Park in Maryland, hosted by a group of naturalists, people trained in gathering observations and educating people about the environment. Now, naturalists lead hikes all over the world, but not all of them like this crew hand out homemade banana bread. That was pretty cool. And UV lights provided by our leader.
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Moths, Owls And Fungi With Over 20,000 Sexes...Oh My!
So what's the best way to call a barred owl?
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Moths, Owls And Fungi With Over 20,000 Sexes...Oh My!
Matt learned how to do this while prowling for owls during the Great American Campout. What is that? It's this nationwide campaign that happens every June to get people outdoors in a safe way. And this was a really common theme among the naturalists. They're all involved with some kind of community work. Anna Kahanui is the co-founder of the DC-based nonprofit Capital Nature.
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Moths, Owls And Fungi With Over 20,000 Sexes...Oh My!
I found her crouched over a log inches from the dirt taking a picture with her iPhone.
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Moths, Owls And Fungi With Over 20,000 Sexes...Oh My!
It looks like slime. So you got Matt making owl calls in the background, Anna face in the dirt showing me her iNaturalist.
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Moths, Owls And Fungi With Over 20,000 Sexes...Oh My!
Well, you have 5,107 observations. I do make a lot of observations. Wow.
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Moths, Owls And Fungi With Over 20,000 Sexes...Oh My!
Yeah. I have, I don't know, a few dozen, but I have realized that learning to identify and name and even just notice the life forms around me is one of the best ways to deepen your relationship to land and to nature. Anna says you can also look up a bird count or some other bio blitz in your area. That's what they call like these nature searches.
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Moths, Owls And Fungi With Over 20,000 Sexes...Oh My!
One of the biggest ones is the City Nature Challenge. Oh, what's that? It's basically a four-day sprint around Earth Day. Cities who enroll are tasked with identifying as many of a certain type of species as possible.
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Moths, Owls And Fungi With Over 20,000 Sexes...Oh My!
So did that owl ever show up? Never showed. Gave us the cold shoulder. But at this point in the hike, owl cameo didn't really matter. I mean, over the course of the night, just watching these grown adults act more and more like kids was so amazing. Like sticking their fingers in dirt. Rolling over wet logs, jumping and shrieking when a tiny crustacean like an isopod appears. I love it.
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Moths, Owls And Fungi With Over 20,000 Sexes...Oh My!
Oh no, it's like a little shrimp. Or a tiny fungi shaped like a fan with an incredible secret.
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Moths, Owls And Fungi With Over 20,000 Sexes...Oh My!
go so much higher than you think is possible for how many sexes an organism can have I mean 27 was the highest you know like what hundreds 20,000 this fungi has 20,000 different sexes amazing it's very successful very abundant and found almost everywhere take a look and then there were life forms that were moving quite actively like we got salamander yeah
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Moths, Owls And Fungi With Over 20,000 Sexes...Oh My!
So I got low, you know, army crawling and peering through everyone's legs, hovering beneath this like chaotic cloud of science facts. Yeah, it's like orange and black and slithering. It looks kind of like a snake.
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Moths, Owls And Fungi With Over 20,000 Sexes...Oh My!
One of the most interesting things I picked up was the fact that redback salamanders will bury themselves, sometimes a foot deep in winter, to basically be surrounded by decaying roots to stay warm and wet because the salamanders need the moisture to absorb oxygen through their skin. Yeah, and there's so many adaptations for winter when you really start to look for them.
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Moths, Owls And Fungi With Over 20,000 Sexes...Oh My!
Sometimes that looks like a change of location. Sometimes that looks like energy conservations.
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Moths, Owls And Fungi With Over 20,000 Sexes...Oh My!
Yeah, this was towards the end of the hike. I hear Serenella calling my name in the dark. All people look the same. We don't overlook the stick. The stick with the mushroom.
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Moths, Owls And Fungi With Over 20,000 Sexes...Oh My!
That's right. That's right. This is the one Serenella spent the whole hike searching for. It is a honey mushroom. Our final observation of the night. So in the summertime, honey mushrooms produce a green light known as foxfire. They glow in the dark all on their own. No flashlight required. And we call this phenomenon bioluminescence.
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Moths, Owls And Fungi With Over 20,000 Sexes...Oh My!
Okay, so Serenella is a mushroom expert? Yeah, along with other fungi. She's been leading nature walks since 2013, and tonight I really wanted to see the forest through her eyes. to know what flaps and flutters and fluoresces when the sun goes down in winter.
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Moths, Owls And Fungi With Over 20,000 Sexes...Oh My!
Yeah, I had no idea that mushrooms bioluminesce either. Scientists don't entirely know why. But as Serenella explained to me and my husband Duncan, it might be the fungi's way of attracting nocturnal creatures. You know, the glow is basically...
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Moths, Owls And Fungi With Over 20,000 Sexes...Oh My!
Like, you need a knee inside that people walking by say, oh, yummy. Hungry animals, so birds, rodents, and insects, eat the mushrooms and poop it out later, which may help with spore dispersal. But that's not what I saw, Burleigh. No? No. It was winter, and apparently the honey mushrooms will shut down all bioluminescent business. They will not glow at night in wintertime. Bummer.
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Moths, Owls And Fungi With Over 20,000 Sexes...Oh My!
You did not see the green glow. Nope. Just a stick of happy brown caps that were not bioluminescing at all, which I think provides a nice life lesson for wintertime, you know, about not spending energy when you don't have to.
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Moths, Owls And Fungi With Over 20,000 Sexes...Oh My!
Thank you so much for this night walk. Anytime, Barley. Welcome back to Shortwave. Thank you. To join the City Nature Challenge or the Great American Campout, check out the links on our website.
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Moths, Owls And Fungi With Over 20,000 Sexes...Oh My!
So I should really try to listen very closely to everything.
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Why Daylight Boosts Immunity
Yeah. So scientists have known that our immune responses are different depending on what time it is and that we're actually better at mounting an immune response in the daytime. And this makes sense since we evolve to be more active in the day and so more likely to get an injury or infection.
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Why Daylight Boosts Immunity
So by day, the immune system is primed to fight potential invaders, which it does by causing inflammation and And at night, it goes anti-inflammatory to recover.
Short Wave
Why Daylight Boosts Immunity
This is immunologist Jennifer Hurley at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She's talking about a special immune cell called a neutrophil that's really important at fighting off infections. And she says scientists hadn't really studied circadian rhythms in neutrophils because they die so fast.
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Why Daylight Boosts Immunity
The team published their work in the journal Science Immunology.
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Why Daylight Boosts Immunity
Yeah, so Chris says they're interested in seeing if they can freeze neutrophils in the daytime state. In the case, for example, you have a really bad infection and need all hands on deck.
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Why Daylight Boosts Immunity
Kind of, but with some big caveats. So right now, these prototype lenses aren't very sensitive. They can only pick up infrared light sources in the lab, so not out in the real world from a person or a car engine. But the lenses do have some advantages. They're less bulky than night vision goggles, and they can be worn in the daytime.
Short Wave
Why Daylight Boosts Immunity
And the big difference is that the contacts convert infrared into color vision instead of the mainly green or gray that night vision goggles do.
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Why Daylight Boosts Immunity
but the images they saw were blurry. And that's because the direction the infrared light was originally traveling gets lost when the contact lenses convert it to visible light. So that means making out the shape of the object also gets lost.
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Why Daylight Boosts Immunity
So the researchers coupled the contact lenses with eyeglasses, and the eyeglasses were able to focus the infrared light in a way that participants can make out letters and shapes. And they described all this in the journal Cell.
Short Wave
Why Daylight Boosts Immunity
You could also use this in like a security setting, so a concert or any other crowded place. If communication systems went down, security guards could communicate with each other quickly by shining infrared light that only they could see. Or doctors could use these to see edges of tumors that have infrared dyes.
Short Wave
Why Daylight Boosts Immunity
Right. So there's a house in New Jersey near an intersection with a big front lawn. And sometimes the family that lives there eats outside and that leads to crumbs. And the crumbs attract little birds that peck around at the leftovers. And those little birds attract this Cooper's hawk, which preys on them.
Short Wave
Why Daylight Boosts Immunity
So Vladimir spent a couple weeks watching this and saw the hawk attack six different times. And Vladimir's theory here is that the hawk just listens for the beeping sound to know when it can launch its attack. He wrote about it in the journal Frontiers in Ethology.
Short Wave
Why Daylight Boosts Immunity
Well, so people who train raptors like hawks wouldn't be surprised by this behavior.
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Why Daylight Boosts Immunity
Unfortunately, Vladimir says the crosswalk button no longer makes sounds and the family no longer leaves crumbs. So the hawk hasn't returned.
Short Wave
Why Daylight Boosts Immunity
Also, make sure you never miss an episode of our podcast, Shortwave, by following us. It really helps the show out, just like sharing it with a friend.
Short Wave
Why Daylight Boosts Immunity
All that on this episode of Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
Why Daylight Boosts Immunity
Tyler Jones checked the facts. Jimmy Keeley and Tiffany Vera Castro were the audio engineers.
Short Wave
What Experts Say About ADHD-Tok
Support for NPR and the following message come from Jarl and Pamela Moan, thanking the people who make public radio great every day and also those who listen.
Short Wave
What Experts Say About ADHD-Tok
Support for NPR and the following message come from Jarl and Pamela Moan, thanking the people who make public radio great every day and also those who listen.
Short Wave
What Experts Say About ADHD-Tok
Support for NPR and the following message come from Jarl and Pamela Moan, thanking the people who make public radio great every day and also those who listen.