Emily Kwong
Appearances
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
In 2018, Sasha Luciani started a new job, AI researcher for Morgan Stanley. She was excited to learn something new in the field of AI, but she couldn't shake this worry.
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
Benjamin Lee studies computer architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. Generative AI refers to the AI that uses large language models.
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
And data center construction is only going to increase. On January 21st, the day after his second inauguration, President Trump announced a private joint venture to build 20 large data centers across the country, as heard here on NBC.
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
This new project, known as Stargate, would together consume 15 gigawatts of power. That would be like 15 new Philadelphia-sized cities consuming energy. Consider this. As much as big tech says they want to get to net zero, there are no regulations forcing them to do so. So how is the industry thinking about its future and its environmental footprint? From NPR, I'm Emily Kwong.
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
Let's consider this from NPR. OK, so the four cloud giants, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon, all have climate goals, goals for hitting net zero carbon emissions, most by 2030, Amazon by 2040. And there's a few ways they can get there. Let's start with a very popular energy source for big tech, nuclear.
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
Because Amazon, Meta, and Alphabet, which runs Google, just signed an agreement, along with other companies, that supports tripling the global nuclear supply by 2050. And along with Microsoft, these four companies have signed agreements to purchase nuclear energy, an industry that has been stagnant for years.
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
Microsoft has committed to buying power from an old nuclear plant on Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. You may remember that was the site of a partial nuclear meltdown in 1979. And NPR's Nina Totenberg talked to kids in the Harrisburg area right after. You know what evacuation is?
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
While some radioactive gas was released, thankfully, it wasn't enough to cause serious health effects. And Microsoft now wants to build this nuclear site back. In a way, AI companies are turning into energy brokers. But my science desk colleague, Jeff Brumfield, sees a discrepancy in this between the AI people and the nuclear energy people.
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
Because of accidents like Three Mile Island, Jeff says that nothing in the nuclear industry ever happens quickly. It's also extremely expensive. And while solar and wind energy combined with batteries is quicker to build and more inexpensive than nuclear or gas power plants, it still takes time to build. And there are problems hooking up new energy sources to the grid.
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
So Luciani quit her job and joined a growing movement to make AI more sustainable. Since 2022, AI has boomed and it's caused a surge in energy consumption. Tech companies are racing to build data centers to keep up these huge buildings filled with hundreds of thousands of computers that require a lot of energy.
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
So in the meantime, many data centers will continue to use fossil fuels. But there's another solution here, and that's to make data centers themselves more efficient, through better hardware, better chips, and more efficient cooling systems. One of the most innovative methods on the rise is liquid cooling.
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
Basically, running a synthetic fluid through the hottest parts of the server to take the heat away, or immersing whole servers in a cool bath. It's the same idea as running coolant through your car engine, and a much faster way to cool off a hot computer. Here's Benjamin Lee again at UPenn.
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
One of the biggest providers of liquid cooling is Isotope. David Craig is their recently retired CEO and based in the UK.
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
Craig says that the older way of cooling data centers, basically there's lots of methods, but it's a daisy chain of moving heat with air and water, is consumptive. With liquid cooling, a lot of the heat stays in the system and computers don't have these massive swings in temperature.
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
Liquid cooling, however... is expensive, which makes it hard to scale. But iZotope has announced public partnerships with Hewlett-Packard and Intel, and a spokesperson at Meta told me they anticipate some of the company's liquid cooling-enabled data centers will be up and running by 2026.
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
Throughout my many emails and seven hours of phone conversations with spokespersons at Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, too, there was one innovation they were kind of quiet about. And it's the one that scientists and engineers outside of big tech were most excited about. and that is smaller AI models.
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
One's good enough to complete a lot of the tasks we care about, but in a much less energy-intensive way. Basically, a third and final solution to AI's climate problem is using less AI. One major disruptor in this space is DeepSeek, the chatbot out of a company in China claiming to use less energy. We reached out to them for comment, but they did not reply. You see,
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
Large language models like ChatGPT are often trained using large datasets, say by feeding the model over a million hours of YouTube content. But DeepSeq was trained by data from other language models. Benjamin Lee at UPenn says this is called a mixture of experts.
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
By 2028, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory forecasts the data centers could consume as much as 12 percent of the nation's electricity. And AI is also leading a surge in water consumption. It's a concern echoed all over social media.
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
Even though DeepSeq was trained more efficiently this way. Other scientists I spoke to pointed out it's still a big model. And Sasha Luciani at Hugging Face wants to walk away from those entirely.
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
What Sasha is talking about are small language models, which have far fewer parameters and are trained for a specific task. And some tech companies are experimenting with this. Last year, Meta announced a smaller quantized version of some of their models. Microsoft announced a family of small models called PHY3.
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
A spokesperson for Amazon said they're open to considering a number of models that can meet their customers' needs. And a spokesperson for Google said they did not have a comment about small language models at this time. So meanwhile, the race to build infrastructure for large language models is very much underway. Here's Kevin Miller, who runs global infrastructure at Amazon Web Services.
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
If that is the level of computing we're headed for, Luciani has one last idea. An industry-wide score for AI models. Just like Energy Star became a widely recognized program for ranking the energy efficiency of appliances. She says that tech companies, however, are far from embracing something similar.
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
So as a science reporter for NPR, my main question is, do we really need all of this computing power when we know it could imperil climate goals? And David Craig, the recently retired CEO of Isotope, chuckled when I asked this. He said, Emily, you know, human nature is against us.
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
But here's something I think we can all think about. The AI revolution is still fairly new. Google CEO Sundar Pichai compared AI to the discovery of electricity. Except unlike the people during the industrial revolution, we know AI has a big climate cost. And there's still time to adjust how and how much of it we use.
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
This episode was produced by Avery Keatley and Megan Lim, with audio engineering by Ted Meebane. It was edited by Adam Rainey, Sarah Robbins, and Rebecca Ramirez. Our executive producer is Sammy Yannigan. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Emily Kwong. You can hear more science reporting like this on the science podcast I co-host every week, Shorewave. Check it out.
Consider This from NPR
AI and the Environment
Where will that water come from? And the four big data center operators with a growing water and carbon footprint are Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta. And to be clear, all four of those are among NPR's financial supporters and pay to distribute some of our content.
Consider This from NPR
Reporting on how America reduced the number of opioid deaths
Every month, NPR reporter Brian Mann checks a grim statistic, the federal tally of overdose deaths across the country. For years, that number only went up.
Consider This from NPR
Reporting on how America reduced the number of opioid deaths
Consider this. The recent decline in overdose deaths is an unprecedented public health victory, one that shocked even experts in the field. Today, for our Weekly Reporter's Notebook series, we're going to unravel the mystery of this rapid reversal with Brian Mann, NPR's addiction correspondent. From NPR, I'm Emily Kwong.
Consider This from NPR
Reporting on how America reduced the number of opioid deaths
It's Consider This from NPR. In 2023, when federal data started to show a decline in overdose deaths, some public health experts were skeptical.
Consider This from NPR
Reporting on how America reduced the number of opioid deaths
Maybe it was a fluke. But the next month, same thing.
Consider This from NPR
Reporting on how America reduced the number of opioid deaths
This is Nabaran Dasgupta, a leading addiction researcher at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Consider This from NPR
Reporting on how America reduced the number of opioid deaths
The skepticism is now gone. So the question is, how did this happen? All Things Considered co-host Scott Detrow picks up the conversation from here, talking with NPR's addiction correspondent Brian Mann about the reasons behind this surprising public health victory.
Consider This from NPR
Reporting on how America reduced the number of opioid deaths
Brian also started hearing the same thing from sources on the street. Like this man, Kevin Donaldson, who was using fentanyl and xylosine in Burlington, Vermont.
Consider This from NPR
Reporting on how America reduced the number of opioid deaths
Across the country, the number of overdose deaths has continued to drop to this day.
Consider This from NPR
Reporting on how America reduced the number of opioid deaths
That was NPR's addiction correspondent, Brian Mann, speaking with All Things Considered co-host, Scott Detrow. This episode was produced by Noah Caldwell and edited by Adam Rainey. Our executive producer is Sammy Yannigan. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Emily Kwong.
Short Wave
Are DOGE Cuts Making America Healthy?
OK, so today is about the first 100 days of the Trump administration. And to help me out, I've got my colleagues, Selena Simmons-Duffin, who's been covering health and human services, and Gabriela Emanuel, who's been covering global health and foreign aid. Hi, everyone. Hi. Good to be here. Hi.
Short Wave
Are DOGE Cuts Making America Healthy?
OK, so let's start with the Department of Health and Human Services, which you have been covering, Selena. Yes. HHS is responsible for a lot, like a slew of programs that support everyday Americans' health and well-being. The CDC, the FDA, the NIH, many more. At the beginning of the month, you know, there were a lot of
Short Wave
Are DOGE Cuts Making America Healthy?
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. President Trump's first 100 days in office have been defined, among many other things, by DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency.
Short Wave
Are DOGE Cuts Making America Healthy?
cuts, like reduction in force messages that were sent to thousands of federal health agency staff. Selina, how did people respond to that?
Short Wave
Are DOGE Cuts Making America Healthy?
And it's been a month since those notices went out. Do we have a better sense now of what programs have been cut and what programs remain? Kind of.
Short Wave
Are DOGE Cuts Making America Healthy?
OK, so these are. Deep cuts and they're broad cuts. Yes. Okay. And what is the potential impact long term, though, of losing these programs and these teams?
Short Wave
Are DOGE Cuts Making America Healthy?
This is all forecasting into the future, but these are the kinds of things that this cut could make possible. Exactly. Gabriella Emanuel, you are on the Global Health and Development Desk. Yes. All of these federal funding cuts are obviously making a huge splash domestically, but they're also affecting people outside of the U.S., people who rely directly or indirectly on foreign aid.
Short Wave
Are DOGE Cuts Making America Healthy?
At the direction of Elon Musk, the department has fired tens of thousands of federal employees, dismantled whole parts of different federal agencies, and made deep cuts to spending on foreign aid and scientific research. And it's hard to know which of these changes are temporary and which will ripple for years, even decades to come.
Short Wave
Are DOGE Cuts Making America Healthy?
How has the U.S. historically contributed to foreign aid and how many countries are really feeling these changes?
Short Wave
Are DOGE Cuts Making America Healthy?
Why has the U.S. historically put so many resources towards improving the health of people in other parts of the world?
Short Wave
Are DOGE Cuts Making America Healthy?
And the U.S. is pulling back from international aid efforts. At the beginning of this year, President Trump signed an executive order to take the United States out of the World Health Organization. Plus, we spoke earlier about the Department of Government Efficiency dismantling U.S. aid. So how is this loss of aid going to impact people in countries around the world?
Short Wave
Are DOGE Cuts Making America Healthy?
Because many of Doge's initiatives have been reversed or delayed by the courts or because of public backlash. That's as Musk's 130-day term as a special government employee is winding down. So we on Shortwave wanted to look around and ask, what could this all mean to science in the long term?
Short Wave
Are DOGE Cuts Making America Healthy?
And what I'm hearing from you, Gabriella, is just that a lot of these Jenga blocks were pulled out overnight.
Short Wave
Are DOGE Cuts Making America Healthy?
What I'm hearing from you both is that access is going to change, whether it's local citizens no longer knowing whether their food is safe or folks internationally, U.S. allied countries losing HIV medication. At the end of the day, what do you both think this means for everyday people?
Short Wave
Are DOGE Cuts Making America Healthy?
That's Gabriela Emanuel and Selena Simmons-Duffin. Thank you so much for joining me.
Short Wave
Are DOGE Cuts Making America Healthy?
Thank you. Short wavers, there have been massive changes to climate science, too, under the new administration. We'll cover those developments in a future episode, so keep a lookout for that. This episode was produced by Hannah Chin. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez and fact-checked by Tyler Jones. Special thanks to Rebecca Davis and Carmel Roth.
Short Wave
Are DOGE Cuts Making America Healthy?
Today, with two of my colleagues on NPR's science desk, we're going to recap the first 100 days of health and science under the current Trump administration. I'm Emily Kwong, and you're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
Are DOGE Cuts Making America Healthy?
Beth Donovan is our senior director and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Emily Kwong. Thank you for listening to Shorewave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
Farts To The Rescue
Hey shortwavers, have you ever wanted to ask a marine biologist, I don't know, anything like about sea stars or sponges or other ancient spineless creatures of the ocean? Maybe you've wondered what it's like to live underwater or how you even become a marine biologist. Well, We are talking to one soon, and we want to ask them your questions.
Short Wave
Farts To The Rescue
And to our diet. More than 40% of people worldwide are estimated to suffer from some kind of functional gut disorder. These are chronic conditions like acid reflux, heartburn, indigestion, constipation, irritable bowel syndrome, inflammatory bowel disease. They can be really painful, so understanding our gut microbiome through a fart-shaped window may help treat these conditions at the source.
Short Wave
Farts To The Rescue
If only, Claire says, we could study the gases themselves as they billow and bulge through our digestive system.
Short Wave
Farts To The Rescue
So today on the show, farts to the rescue, how gases move through our gut, and two experimental methods scientists are testing out to catch gas— to better care for the gut microbiome. I'm Emily Kwong, and you're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. Farts are made in our gut, and our gut is long, at least 15 feet.
Short Wave
Farts To The Rescue
Send them in by recording your name, location, and your question in a quiet space, and email that audio to shortwave at npr.org by the end of the day on Thursday, January 30th. Yes, I'm giving you a deadline. Thank you so much, and enjoy the show. You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Farts are funny. Depending on where you are and who you are, they might also be smelly or silly or just rude.
Short Wave
Farts To The Rescue
Those gases travel down to your stomach. through your intestines, down to your colon. And all along the way, your gut microbes are fermenting the food you eat and producing more gases, carbon dioxide, sulfur. Some even eat those gases and release others. And this is the cocktail that comes out the other end.
Short Wave
Farts To The Rescue
But before the gases come out, which is the exciting and embarrassing part, I wanted to ask Claire, what happens along the way? Like, how are the gases interacting with, say, ourselves?
Short Wave
Farts To The Rescue
So what's the end product? How is the fart different from the gases that are in the tube before it comes out?
Short Wave
Farts To The Rescue
OK, so in reporting this story, you started looking around for different methodologies to measure this slightly smelly window. And you found two very promising ones. We're going to talk about both. The first was developed by a team in Spain at the University of Barcelona. Tell me about that. What are they doing over there to try to catch farts?
Short Wave
Farts To The Rescue
Right. They fed some volunteers a high flatulence diet of bananas and white beans and other volunteers a low flatulence diet of orange juice and a sandwich. And they could tell, like through the gas sample, the difference, which is a big deal. It's a promising procedure for intestinal gas research.
Short Wave
Farts To The Rescue
Yeah, yeah. And the second potential method for getting fart data comes from a medical device company in Australia called Atmos Biosciences. And they invented an actual capsule. So something people swallow that can sniff out intestinal gases along the gut. And then, like, transmit data to be analyzed?
Short Wave
Farts To The Rescue
Claire Ainsworth got her PhD in developmental biology, and she's now a freelance science journalist based in the UK who covers things like farts.
Short Wave
Farts To The Rescue
It's like when the magic school bus gets swallowed by Arnold and they like learn all about his different systems. Yeah, it's kind of like that.
Short Wave
Farts To The Rescue
Yeah. And it's important to say, of course, this capsule is not available for sale. It's not on the market. It needs to go through a lot more regulatory approval and experimentation. But taking a step back, you know, when you think about all the reporting you did for this story and all the scientists you've talked to, has this been helpful for you and your farts?
Short Wave
Farts To The Rescue
And do you have any advice for people currently suffering from a functional gut disorder of some kind?
Short Wave
Farts To The Rescue
Claire Ainsworth, thank you so much for talking to me about this work. No problem. And before we go, we want to say a big thank you. If you are one of the listeners who answered the call in the last few months and supported our show by signing up for NPR Plus, oh my gosh, that support is so important to keep our work going. Thank you. Thank you.
Short Wave
Farts To The Rescue
And if you have heard about NPR Plus but aren't supporting us yet, it's so easy to sign up. Just go to plus.npr.org. This episode was produced by Hannah Chin. It was edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez, and fact-checked by Tyler Jones. Kweisi Lee was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy.
Short Wave
Farts To The Rescue
I'm Emily Kwong. Thanks, as always, for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. I'm not very good at doing fart noises. I didn't get that particular elementary school training. I can't believe this is my job.
Short Wave
Farts To The Rescue
Claire published a piece about all she'd learned in New Scientist, which is a science magazine, in December. She says, And yes, producing intestinal gases. But studying people's gut microbiome directly and non-invasively is difficult. Like, beyond sampling what comes out either end of the human body, how do you learn what's inside?
Short Wave
The Algae That Thrive in Arctic Darkness
In the winter of 2020, Clara embarked on an expedition into the heart of the polar night to study microalgae, these photosynthesizing microorganisms that are super small and delicate.
Short Wave
The Algae That Thrive in Arctic Darkness
Clara thought that these microalgae might be the key to understanding the limits of photosynthesis. That's the process used by plants and microalgae to turn light into food.
Short Wave
The Algae That Thrive in Arctic Darkness
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, short ravers, Emily Kwong here. And today we are headed north to Norway, the land of the midnight sun.
Short Wave
The Algae That Thrive in Arctic Darkness
photosynthesis but we don't know how low this lower limit of light actually is where photosynthesis is possible you know you describing this what immediately comes to mind is limbo like how low can you go yes it's almost like you were studying like photosynthetic limbo or something yeah but we really didn't know um how low they could really go
Short Wave
The Algae That Thrive in Arctic Darkness
So today on the show, we're headed into the polar night. How tiny microalgaes stare into the abyss, limbo for their lives, and come out more powerful than scientists ever imagined. You're listening to ShoreWave, the science podcast from NPR. Clara, thanks to your work, I have learned that microalgae are found in the Arctic. They exist up there.
Short Wave
The Algae That Thrive in Arctic Darkness
And for a long time, scientists thought that microalgae were basically dormant for much of the year. Can you tell me what the traditional thinking was about their existence?
Short Wave
The Algae That Thrive in Arctic Darkness
Yes. Were people thinking they crawled into their ice caves and just kind of went to sleep? Yeah, exactly. And then what happens when springtime comes around?
Short Wave
The Algae That Thrive in Arctic Darkness
Right. And you set out to find those microalgae that were more active to challenge this traditional view of microalgae as these wintertime sleeping beauties. So in 2015, you set out on a research trip to the Svalbard Archipelago in Norway. What did you find up there?
Short Wave
The Algae That Thrive in Arctic Darkness
Right. So, like, why were they active? So let's fast forward to 2020 and you find yourself with an opportunity to do more research on photosynthesizing microalgae as part of the Mosaic Expedition. You went far north, even further north, aboard the Polarstern, which is this ship wedged into a piece of Arctic sea ice that's just, like, floating along.
Short Wave
The Algae That Thrive in Arctic Darkness
Because Earth rotates on a tilt, there is a period of time during the summer where the North Pole always faces the sun, creating a polar day or perpetual sunlight. But in exchange, there's also a period of time during the winter of perpetual darkness. That's called the polar night.
Short Wave
The Algae That Thrive in Arctic Darkness
How did you and your team go about measuring the activity of microalgae up there?
Short Wave
The Algae That Thrive in Arctic Darkness
Science is fun. Yeah. Okay. So you're out there gathering ice, gathering seawater. Where is this all happening?
Short Wave
The Algae That Thrive in Arctic Darkness
Ocean City is like a different location on the ice where you all gathered samples.
Short Wave
The Algae That Thrive in Arctic Darkness
So what did you find within these samples? What was the biggest finding?
Short Wave
The Algae That Thrive in Arctic Darkness
Yes, they were growing. That's so cool. And just such a big deal that you found evidence of photosynthesis more north in even darker conditions than you did in Svalbard back in the day. And a key part of this... of course, was working with scientists to measure the actual levels of light under the Arctic sea ice, the levels at which this photosynthesis was happening.
Short Wave
The Algae That Thrive in Arctic Darkness
And you documented a very low level of light, about 0.04 micromoles per second per square meter. So why was that such a big deal that you caught that, that you caught Arctic microalgae photosynthesizing at that low of a level?
Short Wave
The Algae That Thrive in Arctic Darkness
So, Clara, how are microalgae able to do this? How are they able to... you know, fire up their photosynthetic engines the moment the tiniest bit of light hits.
Short Wave
The Algae That Thrive in Arctic Darkness
Oh, can you give me an example of one of those mechanisms that might give them that background energy?
Short Wave
The Algae That Thrive in Arctic Darkness
They're the ultimate survivors. Well, this is just such a paradigm shift from what has been said about Arctic life, polar nights, and what's really going on in our ocean. How has this shaped your view of the polar night and what's really going on there?
Short Wave
The Algae That Thrive in Arctic Darkness
This is Clara Hopper. She's a biogeochemist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany. But a lot of her fieldwork is based here, around the Arctic Circle. During the polar night, she says, it's like everything is in grayscale.
Short Wave
The Algae That Thrive in Arctic Darkness
Yeah. And that maybe the wintertime ocean is just far more alive than people thought. Yeah. Clara, thank you so much for coming on Shortwave to talk about this. Thank you for the interest. If you liked this episode, make sure you never miss a new one by following us on whichever podcasting platform you're listening from.
Short Wave
The Algae That Thrive in Arctic Darkness
And if you have a science question you'd like us to investigate, send us an email at shortwave at npr.org. This episode was produced by Hannah Chin and edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Robert Rodriguez was our audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Emily Kwong.
Short Wave
The Algae That Thrive in Arctic Darkness
Thank you for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
Will GMOs Bring Back The American Chestnut Tree?
Hey, shortwavers, Emily Kwong here with an episode from our holiday archives all about chestnut trees. Stick around until the end of the episode for an update on the latest science, too. You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.
Short Wave
Will GMOs Bring Back The American Chestnut Tree?
Now, Rex is one of the many people working to bring a version of the American chestnut tree back and tapping into the very genetics of the tree to do it.
Short Wave
Will GMOs Bring Back The American Chestnut Tree?
All right. Let's bring it back to Rex Mann. He's retired from the U.S. Forest Service and really knows the trees of southern Appalachia. Last year, he gave a TEDx talk that opened with this memory of sitting around the fire as his father, Howard Mann, told chestnut stories.
Short Wave
Will GMOs Bring Back The American Chestnut Tree?
It's a beloved tree, and historical accounts back this up. Chestnut trees were abundant, an estimated 20% of the Appalachian forests. They could grow over 100 feet tall, and their chestnuts coated the ground. So wildlife species from white-tailed deer to black bears, wild turkeys, and squirrels depended on them.
Short Wave
Will GMOs Bring Back The American Chestnut Tree?
Farmers could lean on chestnuts as feed for their hogs, and the nuts were so valuable that residents in the Smoky Mountains gathered bushels for trading purposes.
Short Wave
Will GMOs Bring Back The American Chestnut Tree?
But Rex, he never saw any of this. Because in 1904, a mysterious and deadly fungus was discovered on trees in New York City. It likely came from a nursery stock of Japanese chestnut trees. And this blight began to spread down the coast. So by 1950, a few decades later, most of the four billion chestnut trees were dead or infected with blight fungus. Okay, so what does this fungus look like?
Short Wave
Will GMOs Bring Back The American Chestnut Tree?
Okay, it's a parasitic fungus with a bright yellow-orange color. It can grow underneath the bark, looking like these orange gashes, or on the top creating these actively fruiting pustules.
Short Wave
Will GMOs Bring Back The American Chestnut Tree?
Yeah, it's pretty gross and pretty sad because once infected, the trees really don't stand a chance. The blight, it cuts off nutrients and water to the rest of the tree. And for America's forests to change so dramatically just when the Great Depression hit and people really relied on these chestnuts, it was devastating. Rex remembers as a kid walking through the aftermath.
Short Wave
Will GMOs Bring Back The American Chestnut Tree?
Important footnote, the blight doesn't actually kill the root system of these trees. American chestnut trees, Jared estimates there are about 400 million now, are basically shrubs sprouting from the roots and they get infected by the blight and are killed back before reaching sexual maturity. It's like the whole species has been condemned to eternal infancy.
Short Wave
Will GMOs Bring Back The American Chestnut Tree?
Yes. The Kwong family is very into chestnuts. Every Christmas season, we'd buy them roasted on the streets of New York. My dad folds them into his stuffing. And of course, you honestly can't go anywhere this time of year without hearing Nat King Cole sing about them. You know what I'm talking about.
Short Wave
Will GMOs Bring Back The American Chestnut Tree?
Exactly. Because the blight lives on, naturalized in the environment, in the leaf litter, on other trees that don't get sick from it. So that's why by 1950, the American chestnut tree was declared functionally extinct. Right.
Short Wave
Will GMOs Bring Back The American Chestnut Tree?
Yes. And Rex remembers a researcher lecturing to his forestry class basically saying, they're gone.
Short Wave
Will GMOs Bring Back The American Chestnut Tree?
But Maddie, there might be hope. Chestnut tree hope. Something like it. So in 1983, a group formed the American Chestnut Foundation. Rex Mann has been a longtime member of the Kentucky chapter. And as the science has evolved, so too has the foundation's strategies for bringing back a version of the American chestnut tree that can fend off the fungus.
Short Wave
Will GMOs Bring Back The American Chestnut Tree?
Yes. And I cannot overstate, Maddie, how far reaching this effort has been. There are 16 state chapters. And at one point, this man named Bill Owens recorded a song to help them raise money.
Short Wave
Will GMOs Bring Back The American Chestnut Tree?
Sung alongside his very famous niece. Old chestnut tree. Dolly! The one and only. Is this real? That's Dolly Parton. And she released this song a few years ago for this whole effort. The song ends with the line, Oh mighty magic chestnut tree, thank God for second chances. And it's science that's giving this tree a second chance.
Short Wave
Will GMOs Bring Back The American Chestnut Tree?
Jared is the director of science there, overseeing this three-pronged initiative to restore the tree.
Short Wave
Will GMOs Bring Back The American Chestnut Tree?
Wow. Wow. Break it down for me, Kwong. All right. Strategy number one, prong number one, is traditional breeding. So for nearly a century, scientists have been experimenting with crossbreeding the American chestnut with the Chinese chestnut tree, which does not get sick from the blight. Okay. So it's like a combo tree. Right.
Short Wave
Will GMOs Bring Back The American Chestnut Tree?
And over the decades, they've taken these offspring and performed a special kind of crossbreeding called backcrossing that reinforces the traits of the American chestnut tree. And it's been pretty successful. There's three generations of these hybrids at the foundation's research farm in Virginia.
Short Wave
Will GMOs Bring Back The American Chestnut Tree?
It's still slow going and maybe not the best strategy because Jared's realized that blight resistance is not a simply inherited trait after all.
Short Wave
Will GMOs Bring Back The American Chestnut Tree?
Chestnuts roasting on an open fire. It just sets the mood. Right. You know what time it is. But Maddie, it took years of eating chestnuts, listening to this song to ask myself, why haven't I ever seen a chestnut tree in the United States? Have you ever wondered that? Every day, Kwong. No, really. Have you ever wondered that? No, I haven't.
Short Wave
Will GMOs Bring Back The American Chestnut Tree?
So traditional breeding has its limits. The more you make these trees American chestnut-y, the less able they are, it appears, to combat the blight. Which brings us to prong number two, attacking the blight itself by infecting it with a virus. That's probably fine. I'm not worried about that at all. But it makes sense, right, to go directly to the source? Counter-strike? No?
Short Wave
Will GMOs Bring Back The American Chestnut Tree?
What happened? Well, this strategy has been effective in Europe, saving their trees from blight. But the problem in the U.S. is you'd have to go around and individually infect each spot of fungus on the tree, and that is just... Not realistic. So much work.
Short Wave
Will GMOs Bring Back The American Chestnut Tree?
So what about prong number three? What's that? Prong number three, it's the most interesting but also the most controversial for some folks because it involves transgenic organisms. So think about corn or cotton. Got it. Okay. We've added new genes to those agricultural crops to protect them from insects or allow them to tolerate certain weed killers. Yeah, sure. We got some GMOs out there. Yeah.
Short Wave
Will GMOs Bring Back The American Chestnut Tree?
And members of the New York chapter wondered, could we do something like that for the American chestnut tree? Researchers at the State University of New York, their College of Environmental Science and Forestry, tackled that question. They chose a gene naturally found in wheat and a lot of other grass plants and inserted it into American chestnut trees.
Short Wave
Will GMOs Bring Back The American Chestnut Tree?
They planted that first transgenic tree outside the lab in 2006 and And their hope is that such a tree will be planted in the wild someday.
Short Wave
Will GMOs Bring Back The American Chestnut Tree?
OK, so this gene is responsible for creating an enzyme which has the ability to combat oxalic acid. And oxalic acid is what's ultimately attacking trees that have been infected with the blight fungus, killing their cells. So this gene is essentially protecting the tree from being totally consumed by the fungus. Right.
Short Wave
Will GMOs Bring Back The American Chestnut Tree?
That's right. They're not wild American chestnut trees, but a GMO version. Researchers at SUNY call these samples darling American chestnut trees. And before they can be planted in the wild, they have to pass federal regulatory approval. The USDA, the EPA, the FDA, they all have to sign off.
Short Wave
Will GMOs Bring Back The American Chestnut Tree?
Basically, they'll want to know how these transgenic chestnuts are impacting the environment around them. The soil, nearby fungi, other plants. They'll want to know about tree growth rates and pollen flow. There are a lot of variables to consider, a lot of testing to be done on trees that are still pretty young. And that's made some people very nervous.
Short Wave
Will GMOs Bring Back The American Chestnut Tree?
Yes. For those concerned about GMOs, this tree is raising eyebrows. In March, two members of the foundation's Massachusetts Rhode Island chapter stepped down over this. A group of activists released a white paper saying this would be a, quote, massive and irreversible experiment. They're fearful this could change the ecosystem in ways we just can't predict.
Short Wave
Will GMOs Bring Back The American Chestnut Tree?
And Jared gets where these critics are coming from.
Short Wave
Will GMOs Bring Back The American Chestnut Tree?
Basically, human intervention caused the blight, so human intervention should fix it. But of course, if this happens with the chestnut tree, it could open the door for genetically engineering other trees, forest biotechnology. And there's public opposition to that idea. Big questions out there, Kwong. Yeah, this tree honestly is the poster child for raising those questions.
Short Wave
Will GMOs Bring Back The American Chestnut Tree?
What lengths are we willing to go to to bring back trees? Jared argues that because the American chestnut tree was such a keystone species in its heyday, so ecologically important that this tree is worth all the trouble.
Short Wave
Will GMOs Bring Back The American Chestnut Tree?
It's odd because by 1945, when that Christmas song was written, most of the four billion chestnut trees on the eastern seaboard had died. The chestnuts you buy these days, the ones I eat, are all imported from Europe and Asia. And if you ask people from Appalachia, where the chestnut was an important species for the ecosystem and the economy, this tree represented a way of life that was lost.
Short Wave
Will GMOs Bring Back The American Chestnut Tree?
And the public can weigh in on these decisions regarding these transgenic chestnut trees when they're up for federal review next year.
Short Wave
Will GMOs Bring Back The American Chestnut Tree?
Since this episode first published five years ago, a lot has happened. In December 2023, the American Chestnut Foundation withdrew its support for SUNY's darling transgenic chestnut project. I got in touch with Jared Westbrook again to explain why. And he said the foundation found issues with the transgenic trees in the long term, including diminished blight resistance and slow growth.
Short Wave
Will GMOs Bring Back The American Chestnut Tree?
So I reached out to SUNY for comment. Andrew Newhouse, who directs the chestnut restoration project there, told me over email that the college has made improvements to their programs since these concerns came to light. And he defended the viability of darling trees against blight in the long term. He wrote, As for the American Chestnut Foundation...
Short Wave
Will GMOs Bring Back The American Chestnut Tree?
Jared says, this is over email too, that their main strategy at the moment is an advanced version of prong one, where the foundation uses genomics to select the very best hybrid trees, crossbreed them, and ultimately create a line of progeny with blight resistance woven into their DNA at birth. That's all for me, Emily Kwong. Thanks for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
Will GMOs Bring Back The American Chestnut Tree?
Rex Mann of Kentucky says his father never got over it.
Short Wave
Why These Salmon Are On Anxiety Meds
How so? Like when researchers give fish medicine on purpose, what happens?
Short Wave
Why These Salmon Are On Anxiety Meds
Okay, so today on the show, how scientists managed to drug salmon in the wild. What pharmaceutical pollution could be doing to aquatic animals worldwide.
Short Wave
Why These Salmon Are On Anxiety Meds
You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
Why These Salmon Are On Anxiety Meds
Okay, John, so let's back up a second because pharmaceutical drugs are designed to work on human brains and bodies, right? So how do they end up affecting the brains and bodies of fish?
Short Wave
Why These Salmon Are On Anxiety Meds
This all makes sense. It sounds like a big problem. So there have been a lot of experiments to understand the problem on a deeper level, but way fewer field experiments. So how are researchers studying the effects of drug exposure in the wild?
Short Wave
Why These Salmon Are On Anxiety Meds
Hey, short wavers. Emily Kwong here. And today I am joined by NPR science reporter Jonathan Lambert. Hey, John.
Short Wave
Why These Salmon Are On Anxiety Meds
So why these two drugs, Clobazam and Tramadol in particular?
Short Wave
Why These Salmon Are On Anxiety Meds
Okay, so this sounds like a very good river in which to conduct this study.
Short Wave
Why These Salmon Are On Anxiety Meds
John, I must thank you for all the hilarious and fascinating science stories you've been bringing us lately. Like chimps contagiously peeing or iguanas sailing the high seas or this most recent banger, salmon on drugs. What's that about?
Short Wave
Why These Salmon Are On Anxiety Meds
All right, so they have these experimental conditions. They have the salmon trackers. What did they find?
Short Wave
Why These Salmon Are On Anxiety Meds
Interesting. Let's break this down a little bit. Why would an anti-anxiety drug like Clobazam... make fish better at migrating.
Short Wave
Why These Salmon Are On Anxiety Meds
Poor salmon friends. So the anti-anxiety meds made those salmon, you know, I guess, migration risk-takers, but it left those unmedicated salmon behind.
Short Wave
Why These Salmon Are On Anxiety Meds
Yeah. I imagine that taking more risks might help fish reach the Baltic Sea faster, but... It could pose problems once they get there.
Short Wave
Why These Salmon Are On Anxiety Meds
Now, John, migration is just one part of the Atlantic salmon's life cycle, right? So how else do the drugs affect them?
Short Wave
Why These Salmon Are On Anxiety Meds
Right. Clobazam is just one drug, but you said earlier that over 900 different pharmaceutical ingredients have been found in rivers and streams worldwide.
Short Wave
Why These Salmon Are On Anxiety Meds
How are salmon getting a hold of, not that they have hands, but how are they getting a hold of anti-anxiety pills?
Short Wave
Why These Salmon Are On Anxiety Meds
Yeah, absolutely. So is there anything we can do as consumers or just as a society about pharmaceutical pollution that doesn't, you know, require people to stop taking drugs that make their lives better?
Short Wave
Why These Salmon Are On Anxiety Meds
Interesting. Okay, so better filtration systems. What else, John?
Short Wave
Why These Salmon Are On Anxiety Meds
That's so interesting. Because, right, there's like greener cleaning products out there, greener makeup products. Greener medicine could totally be a thing.
Short Wave
Why These Salmon Are On Anxiety Meds
John Lambert, another incredible science story. Please come back anytime. Thank you so much.
Short Wave
Why These Salmon Are On Anxiety Meds
This episode was produced by Hannah Chin and edited by me, Emily Kwong, and Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Kweisi Lee was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director. And Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Emily Kwong.
Short Wave
Why These Salmon Are On Anxiety Meds
Thank you for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
Why These Salmon Are On Anxiety Meds
Well, how does this then affect the fish and other aquatic creatures?
Short Wave
What's In Your Personal Care Products?
that's not necessarily something that you're going to detect right away. There's not going to be like an obvious outcome like a rash.
Short Wave
What's In Your Personal Care Products?
But instead, it might mean that, you know, 20 years from now, you're at greater risk of breast cancer or 20 years from now, your child is going to have fertility problems because the reproductive system developed in just a little bit different way because of the differences in the hormonal environment. So
Short Wave
What's In Your Personal Care Products?
It's a lot trickier to kind of connect the dots between the exposure and the outcome when you think about chemicals that have like a much kind of longer lag time until the outcome emerges.
Short Wave
What's In Your Personal Care Products?
Were we to do the definitive studies on this topic, you might want to recruit people really early in life, maybe in childhood or even in utero, because we don't know kind of what the critical periods are sometimes for cancer risk. and follow them for decades and look at their cosmetic use over their entire lifetime and then see who among this cohort develops cancer.
Short Wave
What's In Your Personal Care Products?
And as you can imagine, that type of study is like impossible to do, right? So the way US research is funded, it usually is in like five year increments and you would have to apply over and over and over Not to mention, like, who wants to sign up for a study that's going to follow them for 60 years? Probably not most people.
Short Wave
What's In Your Personal Care Products?
They're just very good at holding on to fragrance and color. So they're kind of like carriers of scent and color in products. Phthalates are known hormone disruptors. So the work that we've done in particular is really looking at phthalate exposure during pregnancy and how that might impact the health of the child.
Short Wave
What's In Your Personal Care Products?
Probably one of my top recommendations for folks who are looking to potentially reduce their exposure would be to avoid products that have fragrance listed in the ingredients.
Short Wave
What's In Your Personal Care Products?
Increasingly, evidence from both the toxicological studies—so those are the ones in animal models—and then also studies in humans— shows that they interfere with hormone levels in our bodies. Our hormone levels are very tightly regulated, and so they can be disrupted pretty easily by external things like parabens coming into our system.
Short Wave
What's In Your Personal Care Products?
I don't think we have a slam dunk yet with parabens. I think the jury's still out a little bit on what are the health outcomes that they may be causing. But I would say there's enough evidence to at least make you think twice before you put something that says parabens on the label on your body.
Short Wave
What's In Your Personal Care Products?
There are a variety of different parabens, but they almost all have paraben in the name.
Short Wave
What's In Your Personal Care Products?
That's like I think one of the real challenges with this area is that, you know, right now all of the burden is sort of on the consumer to try to navigate like all of these chemicals, many of which have very long and complicated names, you know.
Short Wave
What's In Your Personal Care Products?
Wouldn't it be nice if we had a scenario where there was more regulation so that it's not up to us to figure out what we think is safe and what isn't, but it just wasn't put on the shelves if there was like potentially a risk to our health.
Short Wave
This Huge Mining Pit Is About To Be A Lake
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, Shortwavers, Emily Kwong here, and I am joined by Planet Money producer Willa Rubin. Willa, hey, what's up? Hey, Emily.
Short Wave
This Huge Mining Pit Is About To Be A Lake
Well, today on the show, how? How do you get from a Swiss cheese landscape to the largest artificial lake in Germany?
Short Wave
This Huge Mining Pit Is About To Be A Lake
All right, Willa, so let's pick up where we left off. You get off the train and caught bus to see the lake.
Short Wave
This Huge Mining Pit Is About To Be A Lake
Fascinating. Okay, walk me through this transformation process. How do you go about turning a pit mine into a lake?
Short Wave
This Huge Mining Pit Is About To Be A Lake
Well, then that's it. Bada bing, bada boom. Isn't that easy? You just, like, stop mining, and it turns into a lake?
Short Wave
This Huge Mining Pit Is About To Be A Lake
Oh, interesting. I've never heard of this. Okay, lignite.
Short Wave
This Huge Mining Pit Is About To Be A Lake
Yikes. Yeah, you do not want to be swimming in water that's sulfuric acid.
Short Wave
This Huge Mining Pit Is About To Be A Lake
When this happens, how do engineers, urban planners, scientists react? How do they treat it?
Short Wave
This Huge Mining Pit Is About To Be A Lake
I hear that. So is there a better method for addressing this acidification issue when the lakes start filling up with groundwater?
Short Wave
This Huge Mining Pit Is About To Be A Lake
The science of this is so cool, how to neutralize a lake in the making. So how does this apply to the one in Cottbus? They're obviously trying to do this on a massive scale.
Short Wave
This Huge Mining Pit Is About To Be A Lake
Because of the spray, river water can't be brought in super quickly, and that makes the shorelines not super stable, sounds like. Exactly.
Short Wave
This Huge Mining Pit Is About To Be A Lake
You know, Willa, I hope you can go back to Cottbus someday and like take a swan dive into that lake. I'm looking forward to it. Thank you so much for coming on the show. It was great to have you. Thank you so much for having me. So fun to do this with you all. This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson. It was edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts.
Short Wave
This Huge Mining Pit Is About To Be A Lake
Thanks, Alex. Thank you, Alex. Beth Donovan is our senior director and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Emily Kwong. Thank you for listening to Shorewave from NPR.
Short Wave
How Baby Bats Learn To Eavesdrop On Dinner
When it comes time to find and hunt their prey, bats will use their eyes, some rely heavily on smell, and some have evolved the ability to eavesdrop on their future meals.
Short Wave
How Baby Bats Learn To Eavesdrop On Dinner
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. In Austin, Texas, an hour or so before sunset, hundreds of people gather at this one bridge to wait for the moment when bats take flight. Every time I go to Austin, I make a point to visit the Congress Avenue Bridge, where these bats emerge to hunt all at once, clicking and squealing in a plume of wings.
Short Wave
How Baby Bats Learn To Eavesdrop On Dinner
native to Panama, where she now lives, Rachel's been studying fringe-lipped bats for over 20 years.
Short Wave
How Baby Bats Learn To Eavesdrop On Dinner
And here's the thing. The bats have gotten really good at telling frogs apart. The yummy ones from the poisonous ones based just on their calls.
Short Wave
How Baby Bats Learn To Eavesdrop On Dinner
Meaning Rachel had no idea about the young fringe-lipped bats, the juvenile bats. Could they eavesdrop too? And if so, how did they learn? Was this through learning over time?
Short Wave
How Baby Bats Learn To Eavesdrop On Dinner
Today on the show, how to hunt like a bat. We listen in on frog calls, guess which ones can kill us, and learn how baby bats gain these eavesdropping skills in the first place. I'm Emily Kwong, and you're listening to Shorewave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
How Baby Bats Learn To Eavesdrop On Dinner
Okay, Rachel, so the bats you study, fringe-lipped bats, which, you know, big ears, fringe on the lip, all the better to hear and taste, they eavesdrop in order to hunt. How do they do that? Yeah.
Short Wave
How Baby Bats Learn To Eavesdrop On Dinner
Yeah. An important thing to bring up here is that not all the frogs that these bats want to prey on are safe. Some of these frogs are toxic.
Short Wave
How Baby Bats Learn To Eavesdrop On Dinner
So if a bat were to eat that frog, it would, like, get very sick or it would die? What would happen? So...
Short Wave
How Baby Bats Learn To Eavesdrop On Dinner
Up to 1.5 million Mexican free-tailed bats take to the sky. This exodus can last 45 minutes, and it is hypnotizing.
Short Wave
How Baby Bats Learn To Eavesdrop On Dinner
So how are they ultimately able to tell the difference between which frogs are safe and which are not?
Short Wave
How Baby Bats Learn To Eavesdrop On Dinner
It's almost like these bats have developed caller ID.
Short Wave
How Baby Bats Learn To Eavesdrop On Dinner
It reminds me so much of when I pick up a spam call hoping it's a real person and then they start talking and I have this sinking feeling in my stomach of like, oh gosh, I fell for it. I fell for it.
Short Wave
How Baby Bats Learn To Eavesdrop On Dinner
So you supplied some sounds for us to listen to. Can we do that? Can you tell me which sounds to play? And then I'll guess. I'll pretend to be a bat and guess, based on eavesdropping, if this frog is safe to eat or not.
Short Wave
How Baby Bats Learn To Eavesdrop On Dinner
That frog's going to kill me. I wouldn't eat that frog. I would stay far away from that frog. Oh, no.
Short Wave
How Baby Bats Learn To Eavesdrop On Dinner
They're also numerous. Like I said, I don't think I would make it as a bat. Okay, let's play another frog sound. How about next let's go for the cane toad. See, I personally am lured to that toad.
Short Wave
How Baby Bats Learn To Eavesdrop On Dinner
Yeah, and eavesdropping, it seems, just has never been so essential. Yeah. Okay, so you and other scientists noticed, though, that... Even though this hunting strategy is very fine-tuned in adult fringe-lipped bats, baby bats, not so much. The big question you wanted to figure out was, well, how do they learn? How did you set about figuring that out?
Short Wave
How Baby Bats Learn To Eavesdrop On Dinner
Rachel Page is a behavioral ecologist and a staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. But back in the day, she was a grad student falling in love with bats for the first time because of this same colony in Texas.
Short Wave
How Baby Bats Learn To Eavesdrop On Dinner
How do you know that? What were the juvenile bats doing at this frog mating call concert that you set up for them?
Short Wave
How Baby Bats Learn To Eavesdrop On Dinner
You speak of these juvenile bats with so much care. You're so endeared by them. I love these bats.
Short Wave
How Baby Bats Learn To Eavesdrop On Dinner
Is there any last thought you'd like to add on why you think this research is important?
Short Wave
How Baby Bats Learn To Eavesdrop On Dinner
Rachel Page is a behavioral ecologist at the University. Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, and one of the study authors on this paper. Thank you so, so much for talking to me. It was a pleasure. Thank you. This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson. It was edited by Burleigh McCoy and fact-checked by Tyler Jones. The audio engineer was Kweisi Lee.
Short Wave
How Baby Bats Learn To Eavesdrop On Dinner
Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Emily Kwong. Thank you for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
How Baby Bats Learn To Eavesdrop On Dinner
There are over 1,400 different species of bats found throughout the world. And the way they navigate is hugely varied. Many use echolocation. That's where creatures emit a sound frequency that bounces off surfaces and tells them where they are in space. But echolocation is not the only sense that they use.
Short Wave
In The Club, We All ... Archaea?
It's not your fault. They are tiny. Tiny. Even under a high-powered microscope, the largest archaeans look like tiny dots. But if you zoom in closer, you'll see they possess all kinds of shapes. They're spheres, they're rods, they're spirals. They look like bacteria, but they're not. And despite having no nucleus, no organelles, I think these overlooked microbes have main character energy.
Short Wave
In The Club, We All ... Archaea?
how our microbial ancestors gave us our mighty immune system, are at the center of one of the biggest ideological battles in biology, and are connected to the legend of Thor?
Short Wave
In The Club, We All ... Archaea?
It's almost completed. It's 365 days, six hour and nine minute orbit around the sun. Those six hours add up to an extra day every fourth year. And that's why we have leap years. And 2024 was a leap year, which means we had one more day this year to bring you stories about astronomy, scuba diving, lizards, social media algorithms, the COVID endemic. Yes, not pandemic. How Rubik's cubes work.
Short Wave
In The Club, We All ... Archaea?
What happens to your brain when you sleep? Extreme brain. All of that is possible because of you. Honestly, your monetary support of our work. Either through a classic donation or by joining programs like NPR+. With NPR Plus, you know this, you donate a small amount each month and get special perks for more than 25 NPR podcasts.
Short Wave
In The Club, We All ... Archaea?
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, short wavers, it's Emily Kwong here.
Short Wave
In The Club, We All ... Archaea?
You're going to get sponsor-free listening, bonus episodes, and even exclusive and discounted items from the NPR shop. NPR Plus members, you help us continue to bring you stories about, gosh, lead water pipes, needle phobia, whale menopause, nuclear fission. If you've been sitting on this all year, maybe head into 2025 with NPR Plus in your back pocket. With your help,
Short Wave
In The Club, We All ... Archaea?
We can keep this going every week, bringing you stories you're curious about, stories you didn't know you were curious about, stories that are fun to tell your friends, stories that make you think about your place in the universe. Join today. Go to plus.npr.org, plus.npr.org. That link is in our episode notes. Thanks for listening. Back to the show.
Short Wave
In The Club, We All ... Archaea?
Yes, we're living in the archaea-sance. There's been this big debate in science, like I remember it from high school biology. For a long time, microbiologists divided the world into two domains. Eukaryotes, animals, plants, fungi, and prokaryotes, bacteria, which are single-celled organisms. And Archaea went undetected for a long time until Carl Woese came along.
Short Wave
In The Club, We All ... Archaea?
With a story that kind of picks up where Regina and I left off in November. So, John, do you remember the episode we did about hydrothermal vents and the origins of life?
Short Wave
In The Club, We All ... Archaea?
Okay, so Carl Woese was a microbiologist, most recently based at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He passed away in 2012. But I spoke with someone who's become a torchbearer of his legacy, someone who knew him. Microbiologist Rachel Whitaker, also at Urbana-Champaign, remembers Woese as someone with a big picture brain.
Short Wave
In The Club, We All ... Archaea?
Someone willing to take on a question as intimidating as the origin of life.
Short Wave
In The Club, We All ... Archaea?
And Woese said that physical properties are not a reliable way to tell those relationships. He really pushed for a molecular approach. This was back in the 1970s.
Short Wave
In The Club, We All ... Archaea?
For him, one molecule that was found all over the map was the ribosome. That's the machine that turns RNA into proteins. He began to study RNA sequences using these giant films of gel. and cataloging their differences, tracing how they evolved over time.
Short Wave
In The Club, We All ... Archaea?
And then, right down the hall, his colleague Ralph Wolf found these weird microbes at the bottom of the food web responsible for the greenhouse gases in cows. These microbes, they were single-celled. They kind of looked like bacteria, but also kind of not.
Short Wave
In The Club, We All ... Archaea?
And because Woese had developed this molecular tool for comparing RNA sequences, he could use it on these mystery microbes. And he determined they were not bacteria. They had different cell walls. Their RNA was more similar to eukaryotic RNA.
Short Wave
In The Club, We All ... Archaea?
Something new. Something never before seen by science. And he gave them a name. Archaea, which means ancient things.
Short Wave
In The Club, We All ... Archaea?
And he made this argument that there were actually three domains of life, bacteria, eukaryotes, and archaea. Now, in the decades since, more types of archaea have been found in the soil, in the ocean, and notably in some of the most extreme environments on Earth, like hydrothermal vents.
Short Wave
In The Club, We All ... Archaea?
And the story doesn't end there because, John, in the last decade or so, at these vents, scientists have discovered a special type of archaea. which really complicate the story of life. They're called Asgards.
Short Wave
In The Club, We All ... Archaea?
This is Brett Baker, a marine biologist at the University of Texas at Austin, someone who studies these Asgard archaea.
Short Wave
In The Club, We All ... Archaea?
Correct, yes. And after the discovery of these Loki archaeota in 2015, Brett says...
Short Wave
In The Club, We All ... Archaea?
Ever since, Brett's team and others have been sequencing the genes of these Asgard archaea found in hot springs, aquifers, freshwater, saltwater environments around the world. And what they found has challenged the work of Carl Woese and the story of how life began.
Short Wave
In The Club, We All ... Archaea?
Okay, so these Asgard archaea, their genes are actually really similar to eukaryotes. And then, Brett told me... which suggested something that went beyond Woese's work. It suggested that eukaryotes, like trees, mushrooms, birds, us, all the cool kids, may have in fact come from Archaea, that the eukaryotic branch in fact sprouted from some ancient Asgardian ancestor.
Short Wave
In The Club, We All ... Archaea?
And at the time, this was very controversial. But Brett and other researchers kept doing the work and standing up to the naysayers, saying, no, this is right.
Short Wave
In The Club, We All ... Archaea?
And it left me with so many questions. Like, where did life go from there? You know, what's the next chapter, the moment where that molecular bath gave rise to discrete life forms, to single-celled organisms? Perfect. And eventually to complex multicellular organisms like you and me, eukaryotes. And there's this one type of life form that I think is key to telling that story, John.
Short Wave
In The Club, We All ... Archaea?
And new research is continuing to bear this out when it comes to the story of how our immune system evolved.
Short Wave
In The Club, We All ... Archaea?
So a few years ago, another microbiologist, Pedro Leal, who's from Brazil, came to work in Brett's lab at UT Austin as a postdoc. And Pedro was reading about how certain proteins that helped our ancient immune system do its job may have come from bacteria. Yes.
Short Wave
In The Club, We All ... Archaea?
He was like, why are they not looking at archaea? Why are people always forgetting about archaea? And he wanted to look for evidence that archaea may bear clues for how our immune system evolved.
Short Wave
In The Club, We All ... Archaea?
Yeah, they're a tenacious bunch. That's true. Pedro started looking at two classes of proteins found in our ancient immune system. And these proteins basically mess with viral DNA.
Short Wave
In The Club, We All ... Archaea?
Yeah, they're really important. And Pedro started looking for similar amino acid sequences in these Asgards using an AI tool called CollabFold. He predicted what those proteins would look like, took that work to Brett, and he found those exact protein structures in nature, in those Asgards from the deep sea.
Short Wave
In The Club, We All ... Archaea?
The research he and Brad and a whole team at UT Austin did was published in the journal Nature Communications this summer. I'm going to show you one of the illustrations in the paper. Super exciting. This compares where the sequences for defense proteins show up.
Short Wave
In The Club, We All ... Archaea?
Meaning there was a symbiotic relationship between bacteria, which had these original immune systems, and Asgard's. And Pedro just did like the Ancestry.com research to prove it.
Short Wave
In The Club, We All ... Archaea?
These archaea scientists are tenacious, so I fully believe they'll get there. And this work could be beneficial to us someday, too. I mean, we are surrounded by viruses with the potential to infect us.
Short Wave
In The Club, We All ... Archaea?
Yeah, and if our immunity is thanks in part to archaea, we should be looking to them for clues about how to keep us safe and healthy in the future.
Short Wave
In The Club, We All ... Archaea?
Follow our show on Apple and Spotify. It makes a huge difference. Also, if the AI protein folding sounded cool to you too, check out our episode on AlphaFold. We'll link to it in our episode notes.
Short Wave
In The Club, We All ... Archaea?
Beth Donovan is our senior director. And Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Emily Kwong.
Short Wave
In The Club, We All ... Archaea?
And thank you for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
In The Club, We All ... Archaea?
Both pronunciations are fine. But do you know what they are?
Short Wave
Fluoride: Fact vs. Fiction
Okay. And there's a new turn in this debate. Monday, government researchers published the analysis behind that report in the medical journal JAMA Pediatrics. What did that say?
Short Wave
Fluoride: Fact vs. Fiction
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, short wavers. Emily Kuang here. I'm back again with Ping Kuang.
Short Wave
Fluoride: Fact vs. Fiction
Today on the show, we wade into the fluoride debate to separate the science and truth from fear and fiction. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
Fluoride: Fact vs. Fiction
All right, Ping, I think, oh, where to begin? We don't have time for a complete exhaustive history of fluoride in drinking water. But what are the major beats? How did this all start?
Short Wave
Fluoride: Fact vs. Fiction
And there's even more fluoride that abounds. There's fluoride in toothpaste.
Short Wave
Fluoride: Fact vs. Fiction
It also naturally occurs in all kinds of foods like spinach and seafood and tea and fruit. You'll find fluoride there.
Short Wave
Fluoride: Fact vs. Fiction
So this has been the story of fluoride for most of our lifetimes. It's a very rosy public health story. But it sounds like there's always been a little bit of pushback. Tell me about that.
Short Wave
Fluoride: Fact vs. Fiction
Okay. We could have a whole aside about IQ tests and what they measure. Sticking with the study, what does moderate confidence mean?
Short Wave
Fluoride: Fact vs. Fiction
Yeah. Okay. Moderate confidence that high levels, again, much higher than what's added to our drinking water is associated with a small decrease in IQ. Yeah. Could be associated. Could be associated.
Short Wave
Fluoride: Fact vs. Fiction
I didn't know that. Fluoride's hanging out in the rocks. Okay.
Short Wave
Fluoride: Fact vs. Fiction
Yeah, I can see why there's so much pushback, certainly among dentists, but among fluorides critics. What are their main questions?
Short Wave
Fluoride: Fact vs. Fiction
As a science reporter, what do you make of these questions and that they're being raised right now?
Short Wave
Fluoride: Fact vs. Fiction
Right. Science will always move slower than politics. Okay, so where does that leave us? Like, what are you watching for next?
Short Wave
Fluoride: Fact vs. Fiction
Ping Huang, thank you for summarizing what is a sprawling and complicated conversation right now. I admire it and I appreciate it.
Short Wave
Fluoride: Fact vs. Fiction
We recently had Ping on our show as part of a big roundup of health stories from 2024 that will flow over into 2025. You can check out that episode at the link in our notes. We'll be tracking developments in drinking water, bird flu, and more. If you like this episode, follow us.
Short Wave
Fluoride: Fact vs. Fiction
Whichever podcast app you're using, click follow right now and you can stay up to date with all the latest science news. This episode was produced by Hannah Chin. It was edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. Rebecca, Ping, and Tyler Jones checked the facts. Kweisi Lee was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director.
Short Wave
Fluoride: Fact vs. Fiction
And Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Emily Kwong. Thank you for listening to Shortwave from NPR.
Short Wave
Fluoride: Fact vs. Fiction
Yeah, I mean, growing up, fluoride was always kind of unquestioned. It was like considered one of the greatest public health achievements of the 20th century.
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
This is Sha Lairen. He's from a coal mining town in northern China... Where growing up, water was really scarce. So he learned how to make every drop count.
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
So he grew up very water conscious. And now at UC Riverside, Xiaolei studies the water footprint of the tech industry. Because as you know, Gina, as the tech industry has grown, so too have data centers.
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
Right, which is why water, you know, chilled H2O, has become an ally in keeping those computers cool. And Chalet wanted to know exactly how much water was being used. But his early research, some of the first ever studies on water efficiency in data centers... Kind of met with crickets.
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
But then in 2022, OpenAI's ChatGPT took the internet by storm and people started to look at Shale's work.
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
Just to train a large language AI model and keep a data center cool can consume hundreds of thousands of liters of fresh water. And by consume, I mean that the water evaporates and doesn't necessarily return to the local watershed.
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
It's where the water is no longer available for reuse anymore. In 2023, for example, Google's data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa, consumed nearly one billion gallons of potable water.
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
Yes. And it's because of AI infrastructure. Now, unless you live near a data center or a power plant, AI infrastructure is mostly invisible. And my goal with this reporting was just to pull back the curtain and ask what toll this is all taking on the environment.
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
Starting with the rise of data centers and how computer architecture got to the point of needing gallons of water in the first place.
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
I'm Regina Barber. And I'm Emily Kwong. And you're listening to Shortwave from NPR.
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
So data centers, they grew from these single rooms to whole buildings during the dot-com boom of the 90s and aughts. And now these big buildings contain hundreds of thousands of computers. If they get too hot, the servers can shut down or suffer damage. So what is the method of cooling down these computers?
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
Well, every data center is different, but I'll describe the basic principles of a mechanical cooling system. OK, picture a room with rows and rows of computers on racks.
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
Yes, yes. It's like a computer library, except smaller. The floor is raised, so there's this void below that allows cool air to flow up through a bunch of grills and chill the computers. Benjamin Lee is a professor who studies computer architecture at UPenn, and he explained to me how air cooling basically works.
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
And then what happens is a refrigerant takes the heat outside the building where it gets dissipated into the air.
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
But the thing about an air cooling system like this is it requires a lot of electricity. So some systems also use water to help pull heat away from the data center.
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
Well, a lot of it gets sent to a cooling tower and is evaporated. You can think of it like sweat. The data center is the brain. It needs to be cooled down because it's getting hotter and hotter in this era of AI.
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
Benjamin is talking about microprocessors. And a certain type of microprocessor known as a GPU is widely favored for running AI.
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
Now, the thing about data centers, Gina, is that some are more energy efficient than others. There's even free air cooling systems which pull in air from the outside and use no water. But the point I really want you to remember is that in order to reduce the electricity demands of data centers, some have turned to water.
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
And that has meant the overall water consumption, like the number of gallons getting evaporated away, has gone up. Because of AI? Because of AI. Getting integrated into products from the four biggest data center operators, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon.
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
And Amazon does not disclose how many gallons of water they consume. They only report their water usage effectiveness or WUE. So we don't know how much water they consume. We do not. Oh, wow. Okay. We have a better sense from Google, Microsoft, and Meta. Since 2021, all three have reported a bigger water footprint, meaning they are consuming more and more water lost to evaporation every year.
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
So who's consuming the most? Google. So in 2023, and this is according to their own report, consumption across all their data centers totaled 6.4 billion gallons. That's enough to irrigate 43 golf courses in the southwestern U.S., Although keep in mind, that is nothing compared to how much water is used by agriculture. I mean, 43 golf courses sound like still a lot of water to me.
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
It's a lot of water. Yeah. And the concern, of course, is that once the water is evaporated, it's not available for reuse.
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
So just to give you an example of how this can play out badly, the Dalles, that's a city 80 miles east of Portland, Oregon, is where Google built its first data center. And residents noticed a change to the local water supply. Maybe.
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
This is Dallas resident Don Rasmussen talking to the AP in 2021.
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
So the Oregonian, the local paper, asked Google, hey, what are your water numbers? And Google said, no way, we're not going to tell you. It's a trade secret. And after a year-long legal battle, it came to light that Google was using a quarter of all the water available in town. That is so much. Now, this surge of water use, I was like, why? Why so much water?
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
It can be directly traced to the AI renaissance. And that's because tech companies are searching for what Benjamin Lee at UPenn calls the next killer app.
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
Ben says that's why you're seeing things like AI overviews in Google Search or AI chatbots on Instagram or AI product summary reviews on Amazon.
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
Which is, you know, their prerogative. But in the meantime, there doesn't seem to be a standard for these companies to report the details of their water use.
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
Well, all four have pledged to be water positive by 2030, which means they'd put more water back into the environment than they use. And they're trying to do this through partnerships with local watersheds. In the Dalles, that city in Oregon I mentioned earlier, Google is now building a system to pump excess surface water into an existing aquifer for later use in drier months. Okay.
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
Yeah, water positive and clean energy. Google, Microsoft and Meta have all pledged to reach at least net zero carbon emissions by 2030. Amazon has set their deadline for 2040. But again, Gina, because all of their energy and water data is shared voluntarily, the public has no way to wrap its arms around the scope of AI's environmental footprint.
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
And computer scientist Sasha Luciani, climate lead at Hugging Face, thinks that is a problem.
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
So after realizing just the scope of AI, I had to ask these four tech companies, are your climate and water goals even realistic? So what did they say? Meta said they, quote, remain committed. Google said they are fully committed. Microsoft said they remain resolute and, quote, are proactively working to address resource challenges associated with the energy needs of AI.
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
And Amazon, Amazon actually sat down with me. Can Amazon meet its climate and energy goals as stated?
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
Kevin Miller is the vice president of global data centers at Amazon Web Services. And he told me all the ways Amazon is investing in green energy infrastructure. And all the tech companies are.
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
Yes, it's very ambitious. Wow. And along with Microsoft, these four companies have signed agreements to purchase nuclear energy, but that industry has been stagnant for years. It takes a long time to get nuclear up and running, so computer scientists who study climate are doubtful. Here's Benjamin at UPenn.
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
But he's lost faith now, as companies increase their energy use faster than they switch to renewables.
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
I also asked Jesse Dodge, a senior research scientist at the Allen Institute for AI at MIT. And over email, he said to me, quote, these companies are making non-binding pledges to get positive attention. And I expect that if or when they don't meet those pledges, they will simply move the goalposts. In the meantime, more data centers are being constructed.
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
All over the country. Jeffersonville, Indiana, Rosemount, Minnesota, and Abilene, Texas. On January 21st, the day after his second inauguration, President Trump announced a private joint venture to build 20 large data centers across the country, as heard here on NBC.
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
There aren't any state or federal regulations for AI or data centers. Some legislators at the state level have introduced bills to regulate AI and data centers in California, in Connecticut. And at the federal level, Senator Edward Markey of Massachusetts introduced a bipartisan bill that would set federal standards and voluntary reporting guidelines to measure AI environmental footprint.
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
But there really isn't a legal framework in place yet.
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
That is why there is a part two of this series. Next time on Shortwave, the green AI movement.
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
Hey, Em. Hi, Gina. So today, our episode starts with water. And someone who's been thinking about water for a long time. He says maybe that's because of where he grew up.
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
The chat GPT commentary you heard at the beginning of this episode came from TikTokers Dylan Page, Carter Smith, and Nikita Redkar. You also heard tape from Morning Brew and NowThis. Beth Donovan is our senior director and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Emily Kwong.
Short Wave
Will Bark For Science
And we have a piece of bumblebee nest out right now. Hmm. Bumblebee nest.
Short Wave
Microbes: It's Complicated
There is now a historic marker because a group of middle school children were assigned to look at police brutality in their community. Listen to the Code Switch podcast from the NPR network.
Short Wave
Microbes: It's Complicated
There is now a historic marker because a group of middle school children were assigned to look at police brutality in their community. Listen to the Code Switch podcast from the NPR network.
Short Wave
Microbes: It's Complicated
There is now a historic marker because a group of middle school children were assigned to look at police brutality in their community. Listen to the Code Switch podcast from the NPR network.
Short Wave
The Biggest Health Stories of 2024
Hey, Shortwavers, Emily Kwong here. Believe it or not, the year is almost over. And as we are reflecting on 2024, we're thinking about the hundreds of podcast episodes we've brought you this year. I mean, episodes about big things like climate change, nuclear energy, COVID.
Short Wave
The Biggest Health Stories of 2024
And episodes about weird and wonderful things like sea cucumbers, the biology of memory, the science of skincare trends you see on TikTok. And episodes about stuff we just can't stop obsessing over. I'm looking at you, naked mole rat succession war. Now is the time of year when we reflect on all that work and ask you to support it.
Short Wave
The Biggest Health Stories of 2024
Maybe you are already an NPR Plus supporter, and if so, I'm sorry to bother you and thank you so much. But if you have never given to public media before or not in a while, please consider doing it right now.
Short Wave
The Biggest Health Stories of 2024
NPR Plus is a recurring donation that gets you special perks for more than 25 NPR podcasts, like sponsor-free listening, bonus episodes, behind-the-scenes content, and even exclusive and discounted items from the NPR Shop and the NPR Wine Club. It only takes a few minutes to sign up. You can do it right now at plus.npr.org. Because this year, shortwave turned five years old.
Short Wave
The Biggest Health Stories of 2024
Whether you've been with us from the very start or you're listening this week for the first time, supporting public media means you're part of a community of people who are curious about the world. We're honestly so proud to have served the public media community these past five years. Let's keep it going, but it can only be done with your help. So join NPR Plus today at plus.npr.org.
Short Wave
Should Kids Be Taking Melatonin?
Every night, the pineal gland in our brain releases a bit of melatonin.
Short Wave
Should Kids Be Taking Melatonin?
Melatonin is widely considered safe for adults in low doses and for kids with certain neurological and neurodevelopmental conditions that get in the way of a good night's sleep.
Short Wave
Should Kids Be Taking Melatonin?
But some experts worry that we don't know enough about how regularly taking melatonin affects kids in the long term. So today on the show, melatonin and kids. What the research says, how melatonin is being used, and how to navigate obstacles for getting kids enough Cs. I'm Emily Kwong, and you're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
Should Kids Be Taking Melatonin?
Okay, so Michael, we are talking today about melatonin. It is a hormone that the human body naturally produces. But I want to hear more about the history of this supplement. This is synthetic melatonin that a lot of people have started taking, and some people are giving it to their kids. When did people start taking melatonin?
Short Wave
Should Kids Be Taking Melatonin?
And that's mostly for adults. When did children start to use melatonin?
Short Wave
Should Kids Be Taking Melatonin?
Hey, Shore Wavers, Emily Kwong here. Okay, so possibly my favorite thing in the entire world is a good night's sleep. I mean, nothing makes a bigger difference to my mental and physical health. Without quality sleep, we're less productive, grumpy. It can even affect our hearts. And for kids, sleep is crucial for physical, mental, and emotional development.
Short Wave
Should Kids Be Taking Melatonin?
Yeah. A lot of melatonin packaging is just very friendly looking. I mean, it's like these big bottles and the melatonin supplements come in sometimes very yummy flavors. Sometimes they're gummies. So is it really being marketed to kids in a very deliberate way?
Short Wave
Should Kids Be Taking Melatonin?
Yeah. And I want to add here. A key distinction you make throughout this reporting is that melatonin is not a vitamin. It is a hormone. Why is that distinction so important?
Short Wave
Should Kids Be Taking Melatonin?
Let's talk about the research. So obviously there's not enough, but for what is available, what do sleep scientists have to say about kids taking melatonin?
Short Wave
Should Kids Be Taking Melatonin?
Now, melatonin is considered fairly safe and benign in terms of overdose potential. But if there are side effects to melatonin, what are they?
Short Wave
Should Kids Be Taking Melatonin?
But there are a lot of things keeping us awake these days. Screens, electronics, stress. Researchers say that, like adults, kids are having problems falling asleep and staying asleep. So more and more parents are turning to a supplement called melatonin as a possible solution.
Short Wave
Should Kids Be Taking Melatonin?
Was melatonin ever supposed to be taken long term? Because it seems like it was originally designed to be a sleep aid for a short term situation. Yeah.
Short Wave
Should Kids Be Taking Melatonin?
Okay. For all the desperate parents hanging on your every word, what do experts suggest for kids who have trouble sleeping but they want to try other solutions first?
Short Wave
Should Kids Be Taking Melatonin?
Well, we want kids to have a good night's sleep for sure. And we want parents to sleep too. So Michael, thank you for dipping your toe in the melatonin research waters so that we all can get a good night's sleep.
Short Wave
Should Kids Be Taking Melatonin?
Michael Scholzen is a contributing editor at Undark Magazine, where he writes and edits stories about science. And he recently looked into why more and more people are using sleep supplements, especially with their kids. Melatonin is a hormone, and it's one that our bodies produce naturally.
Short Wave
Nature Quest: The Climate-Kid Question
And then it moves you through time. Music is architecture in time. If you engage in the moment with what you're listening to, you do lose a sense of the time around you.
Short Wave
Nature Quest: The Climate-Kid Question
When Malcolm Gladwell presented NPR's Throughline podcast with a Peabody Award, he praised it for its historical and moral clarity. On Throughline, we take you back in time to the origins of what's in the news, like presidential power, aging, and evangelicalism. Time travel with us every week on the Throughline podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
Hear Christmas Carols And Talk To Santa On Ham Radio
Hey, shortwavers. It's your favorite holiday elf, Emily Kwong, bringing you this classic episode featuring our founding host, Maddie Safaya. You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.
Short Wave
Hear Christmas Carols And Talk To Santa On Ham Radio
That transmission was from the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. Amundsen, shout out. Yeah. Here's a Christmas carol from the Italian station, Mario Zichelli, singing an Italian Christmas carol. I really like this. I firmly believe that this is cute. Nathaniel would have to agree with you.
Short Wave
Hear Christmas Carols And Talk To Santa On Ham Radio
And Nathaniel, listening at McMurdo Station in a blue penguin hoodie, I'll add, wondered if this caroling could be heard beyond Antarctica by shortwave listeners in other parts of the world. He wanted to know how far can these transmissions really travel? So how far away were people able to listen?
Short Wave
Hear Christmas Carols And Talk To Santa On Ham Radio
So, Maddie. Yes, ma'am. Last week, Britt and I connected to a radio station.
Short Wave
Hear Christmas Carols And Talk To Santa On Ham Radio
Well, before the caroling began, Nathaniel put out an alert to shortwave radio listeners saying, hey, if you can hear this, Email us and let us know. And people did. They were able to tune in. He got emails from the Netherlands, South America, places far away from Antarctica. Some people were able to catch snippets of this singing at the bottom of the world.
Short Wave
Hear Christmas Carols And Talk To Santa On Ham Radio
So today on the show, the Shortwave podcast looks at shortwave radio, how it works, how it travels. And how Nathaniel Frizzell is leveraging a community of shortwave radio listeners for science. Emily Kwong, our shortwave expert is Nathaniel Frizzell. Yes, he's an assistant professor of physics and engineering at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania.
Short Wave
Hear Christmas Carols And Talk To Santa On Ham Radio
Okay, so obviously I know of shortwave, the charming science podcast.
Short Wave
Hear Christmas Carols And Talk To Santa On Ham Radio
To have a conversation with space physicist and electrical engineer Nathaniel Frizzell.
Short Wave
Hear Christmas Carols And Talk To Santa On Ham Radio
So since the 1900s, we've been using radio waves to communicate. The waves are all different sizes. The lower the wave's frequency, the longer the wavelength.
Short Wave
Hear Christmas Carols And Talk To Santa On Ham Radio
Because they're 3 to 30 megahertz in frequency, they travel through space to this electrically charged part of our atmosphere called the ionosphere and are reflected or refracted back down to Earth.
Short Wave
Hear Christmas Carols And Talk To Santa On Ham Radio
But luckily for us, they can travel around the globe. They propagate far distances, and those with receivers on Earth are able to listen. Nathaniel loves shortwave because you don't need a lot of equipment to send and capture one of these transmissions.
Short Wave
Hear Christmas Carols And Talk To Santa On Ham Radio
This is the ultimate lo-fi form of communication I'm gathering.
Short Wave
Hear Christmas Carols And Talk To Santa On Ham Radio
And in 2014, his research took him to Antarctica.
Short Wave
Hear Christmas Carols And Talk To Santa On Ham Radio
And that communication could be anything. Broadcast, propaganda, spy stations, emergency information, weather reports, rag-chewing, which is a term to describe people just talking about their daily life. So radio, Twitter? Yeah. The transmission just has to fall within the right frequency range to count a shore wave.
Short Wave
Hear Christmas Carols And Talk To Santa On Ham Radio
And there's an international community of hobby radio operators who seek out a special license from their respective governments to do this. That's called ham radio. Ham. Yeah. That's the hobby of using this radio. So Nathaniel discovered that community on a Boy Scout jamboree. A ham radio operator had set up a station in the middle of the woods.
Short Wave
Hear Christmas Carols And Talk To Santa On Ham Radio
Yeah, home to the South Pole and a hub of scientific activity with research stations and field camps spread across the continent. New Zealand has a station down there. Several European countries do too. Scientists are asking questions you can only answer in Antarctica and the Southern Ocean this time of year. about wildlife. Like penguins. Yeah, sure. Like penguins.
Short Wave
Hear Christmas Carols And Talk To Santa On Ham Radio
And he was hooked. Got his license in 1998. Just a teenager transmitting to whoever was listening in the northern New Jersey, New York metropolitan area. So just pure Bruce Springsteen propaganda. It was mostly just his call sign.
Short Wave
Hear Christmas Carols And Talk To Santa On Ham Radio
73 means best regards. It's a pretty common ham radio sign off. Eventually, he upgraded to a better transmitter, threw a wire out the window of his bedroom and attached it to a tree in his front yard. And he managed to get a hold of a station in Hungary.
Short Wave
Hear Christmas Carols And Talk To Santa On Ham Radio
And these moments stayed with him, propelling his scientific methodology and his career. Cool.
Short Wave
Hear Christmas Carols And Talk To Santa On Ham Radio
In a lot of interesting ways, because disturbances happening in the ionosphere, space weather, solar wind conditions, all of that would affect radio waves. So in grad school, he was able to show how a solar flare caused a radio blackout.
Short Wave
Hear Christmas Carols And Talk To Santa On Ham Radio
Yeah. And during the big 2017 solar eclipse, which I missed because it was cloudy. Tragedy. So sad. But Nathaniel hosted a community science experiment through his group HAMSAI. The group measured how the eclipse affected the transmission of medium and high frequency radio waves.
Short Wave
Hear Christmas Carols And Talk To Santa On Ham Radio
And the way he's using radio for scientific inquiry is so innovative that this year, the National Science Foundation awarded him a $1.3 million grant. Dang. To do what? Well, he wants to bring universities and this network of ham radio operators together to track what's going on in the ionosphere where short waves propagate in a more day-to-day way.
Short Wave
Hear Christmas Carols And Talk To Santa On Ham Radio
Well, we as a planet are really dependent on things happening in space. And disturbances in the ionosphere do affect communication satellites, global positioning systems, which are used to land planes. All these tools we rely on to keep us safe and connected.
Short Wave
Hear Christmas Carols And Talk To Santa On Ham Radio
And in order to, you know, transmit Christmas carols around the world.
Short Wave
Hear Christmas Carols And Talk To Santa On Ham Radio
Kwong, do you think our podcast connects people all around the world? I mean, we don't have three million listeners. That's how many people listen to ham radio. Not yet. Not with that attitude. OK, I know world domination is your project. But I will say I got into radio because I enjoyed tuning in and not knowing what I was going to hear. Our podcast definitely does that. I hope so. I think so.
Short Wave
Hear Christmas Carols And Talk To Santa On Ham Radio
Microbiology, tectonics, the northern lights. Nathaniel was down there to look at the Earth's magnetic field and polar regions. I picture this whole space, Maddie, like science summer camp, but spread across a desolate, icebound landscape. What a dream. Yeah, your kind of summer camp. Yeah. And these people, they're far from home, which can be really tough during the holidays.
Short Wave
Hear Christmas Carols And Talk To Santa On Ham Radio
So from our team to whoever is out there listening in the world, happy holidays. Happy holidays. Since 2019, a lot has happened for Nathaniel. He told me that through grants from the NSF and NASA, the HAMSAI project is leading research. They're looking into how the ionosphere responded to all the recent solar eclipses, and they installed a brand new ham radio station at the University of Scranton.
Short Wave
Hear Christmas Carols And Talk To Santa On Ham Radio
They hope it will be a hub for researching the upper atmosphere. The station even lets kids talk to Santa through the SantaNet volunteer network. Click the link in our bio to read more about it. I'm Emily Kwong. Thank you, as always, for listening to Shortwave, a science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
Hear Christmas Carols And Talk To Santa On Ham Radio
So Nathaniel, when he was down there, took part in a musical tradition that queues up on this day, December 24th.
Short Wave
Hear Christmas Carols And Talk To Santa On Ham Radio
The Antarctic Christmas Carol. Basically, the different stations in Antarctica sing to each other over shortwave radio.
Short Wave
Nature Quest: Are Flowers Blooming Early?
And it's not just the warmth that he's worried about. On a walk in early January, Shai noticed that the tree at the end of his driveway, a callery pear tree, was blooming. The California poppies, too. And Shai was worried because it was only January. These flowers typically bloom in March and April.
Short Wave
Nature Quest: Are Flowers Blooming Early?
So today's nature quest, gardens. How the local changes Shai's noticed are connected to a bigger shift in the seasons. What does a warming climate mean for the timing of trees and flowers and the people who love them? You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
Nature Quest: Are Flowers Blooming Early?
Welcome to Shortwave's Nature Quest, Garden Edition. This is our kickoff episode, and I am here with producer Hannah Chin, who's going to tackle Shai's questions with me. Hey, Emily. Hi, Hannah. Okay, what did you find? What is going on?
Short Wave
Nature Quest: Are Flowers Blooming Early?
Well, okay, so I didn't know this before I started reporting this episode, but it turns out there's a whole field just devoted to studying this timing of flowers and trees, etc. It's called phenology.
Short Wave
Nature Quest: Are Flowers Blooming Early?
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hi, everyone. Emily Kwong here.
Short Wave
Nature Quest: Are Flowers Blooming Early?
That's Richard Premack. He's a professor of plant ecology at Boston University. And he runs a lab that specializes in plant phenology. So the cycles of budding and flowering and how those cycles have shifted over time.
Short Wave
Nature Quest: Are Flowers Blooming Early?
Historical records of, say, when plants flower or when birds migrate or when ponds melt in the spring. Yeah.
Short Wave
Nature Quest: Are Flowers Blooming Early?
Okay. I mean, do we have any records like that? Well, 20 or so years ago, biologists didn't know. Like, this field of phenological research was still really new. So Richard and the rest of his team in Boston were like, do records like this even exist in the United States?
Short Wave
Nature Quest: Are Flowers Blooming Early?
So they started asking everybody they knew. Like, hey, we're looking for these kinds of records. Do you know anywhere that we can find them? They were questing. They were nature questing. They were. They were nature questing.
Short Wave
Nature Quest: Are Flowers Blooming Early?
And welcome to a brand new segment that we're calling Nature Quest, where every month we'll bring you a question from a fellow short waver who's curious about how nature is changing, how to pay attention to the land around us, and how to make every day Earth Day, which sometimes looks like taking a walk around your neighborhood. Shai Soar is a social worker in Oakland, California.
Short Wave
Nature Quest: Are Flowers Blooming Early?
But Henry David Thoreau, the naturalist, the philosopher Thoreau. That's him. So when Thoreau wrote Walden, he lived in the woods in Concord, Massachusetts for a little over two years. He kept his journal. Famously, yes. And apparently, he also kept very detailed plant blooming records.
Short Wave
Nature Quest: Are Flowers Blooming Early?
Because, Emily, these tables recorded the first leaf out and flowering times of more than 500 plant species during an eight-year period in the 1850s. Jackpot. Thoreau. Who knew? The transcendentalist scientist among us. Okay, so when they compared... Thoreau's tables to what we see now, what did they find?
Short Wave
Nature Quest: Are Flowers Blooming Early?
Richard says, overall, the weather is about 4 to 6 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it was 150 years ago in Thoreau's time. And this warmth, these changes, they aren't just happening in Concord.
Short Wave
Nature Quest: Are Flowers Blooming Early?
And just to be clear, Emily, not all of these shifts can be attributed solely to climate change. The urban heat island effect, where streets and building surfaces retain and absorb heat, that also affects plant timing. Artificial light can trick plants into thinking the days are longer than they are.
Short Wave
Nature Quest: Are Flowers Blooming Early?
And both of these things make trees and plants in big cities bloom earlier and then lose their leaves later. That makes a lot of sense. The conditions in cities, city environments are such that plants are just behaving very differently than they would in the suburbs or out in countryside. Totally.
Short Wave
Nature Quest: Are Flowers Blooming Early?
Plus, there's other data that backs up the shift in overall plant timing, which, by the way, affects gardeners and farmers, too. A lot of these gardeners and farmers use something called the USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map. Yeah, I think I've seen these zones printed on the back of seed packets, right?
Short Wave
Nature Quest: Are Flowers Blooming Early?
These are the maps that help growers figure out which perennial plants will thrive in a certain location. Yeah, exactly. And this plant hardiness zone map, it's been around for a really long time. But the thing is that it's really just based on one single statistic.
Short Wave
Nature Quest: Are Flowers Blooming Early?
This is Chris Daly. He's the principal author of these plant hardiness zone maps. And he says that sometimes shifts in the map are due to better data or more updated technology. Some years are warmer than others and some are colder. Basically, any changes in the plant hardiness zone map might not be totally indicative of large scale climate change. That's a really important point.
Short Wave
Nature Quest: Are Flowers Blooming Early?
thing to understand. It means that the plant hardiness zone map, the gardening zone map, might be less good at reflecting what Shai is talking about, how the growing conditions in his area are changing overall. Yeah.
Short Wave
Nature Quest: Are Flowers Blooming Early?
But before we give up, Emily, I do want to tell you about a different set of maps, maps that are publicly accessible, that do track the weather conditions overall and show how they're changing. They're called the climate normals.
Short Wave
Nature Quest: Are Flowers Blooming Early?
Chris doesn't just do the USDA maps. He's also in charge of something called the PRISM Climate Group at Oregon State University. That group collects data from volunteers and weather stations across the country about all the average temperatures and precipitation levels every single day. And they map it all out. Okay, every gardener needs to know about this map. What is this map called?
Short Wave
Nature Quest: Are Flowers Blooming Early?
He works in the hospital system. And during the pandemic, he started doing sessions remotely.
Short Wave
Nature Quest: Are Flowers Blooming Early?
It's called the PRISM Climate Normals, and we'll link it in the show notes.
Short Wave
Nature Quest: Are Flowers Blooming Early?
Wow. Yeah, it's pretty impressive. So for each tiny half mile square, Chris and his team take the average temperatures to get daily normals, they get monthly normals, and they get these 30-year climate normals.
Short Wave
Nature Quest: Are Flowers Blooming Early?
And what does it reveal? Is there any particular trend? Chris told me, yes. He says, looking at this data and how it's changed over time, it's really clear that the area east of the Rockies is getting wetter and the southwest is getting drier. And overall, just across the board, temperatures are going up. Yeah. Okay. So now we're getting really granular.
Short Wave
Nature Quest: Are Flowers Blooming Early?
You know, I talked to some local experts about Shai's question, including Jim Farr. He's a master gardener in Alameda County, which covers Shai's area. Looking at weather data from the nearby Oakland airport, Jim said there was a combination of rain and unseasonably warm temperatures in January.
Short Wave
Nature Quest: Are Flowers Blooming Early?
And that stretch of 70 degree days that Shai was noticing was enough to trick plants like poppies and calorie pear trees to bloom early. Oh, like they thought it was later in the year than it was because it was so warm. So warm. Wait, so did your local experts have any advice for Zhai? Just to be aware of how plants are experiencing a changing climate.
Short Wave
Nature Quest: Are Flowers Blooming Early?
Through observations and things like the PRISM climate normals map you mentioned, UC Davis Arboretum and Public Garden Horticulture team actually has a climate ready gardening toolkit. And it lists plants that will do OK under climate change, you know, plants that are like locally drought resistant or climate resistant in some way. We'll link that in our episode notes, too. Yeah, that's so cool.
Short Wave
Nature Quest: Are Flowers Blooming Early?
Emily, I think the other thing that's cool is that all of these scientists are basically doing the same thing that Chai is doing intuitively, right?
Short Wave
Nature Quest: Are Flowers Blooming Early?
These local experts, these national experts, they're all keeping track of their environment and then noting changes that they see and then comparing those changes to what existed in the past. It's like everyone can do science. Even Thoreau. Even Thoreau. And if you want to go on your own nature quest, it's really easy.
Short Wave
Nature Quest: Are Flowers Blooming Early?
By documenting your local observations on apps like iNaturalist and Nature's Notebook, you're helping scientists like Richard keep track of widespread changes in the environment. Yeah. Or you can volunteer to monitor the weather and the precipitation where you live and help contribute to the data set that makes those climate normals we mentioned possible.
Short Wave
Nature Quest: Are Flowers Blooming Early?
We'll link to a few of those programs in the show notes. Sounds good. Thank you for going on this nature quest with me, Hannah. No problem, Emily. Thanks for having me.
Short Wave
Nature Quest: Are Flowers Blooming Early?
short ravers nature quest is our new monthly earth loving series and it is built around you and on the changes you're noticing in the world around you so send us a voice memo with your name where you live and your question and we might make it into a whole episode This episode was produced and reported by me, Hannah Shin.
Short Wave
Nature Quest: Are Flowers Blooming Early?
Wildflowers, plum trees, California poppies. Shai technically lives in East Oakland. So this is Northern California. And this winter has been warm.
Short Wave
Nature Quest: Are Flowers Blooming Early?
It was edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez, and fact-checked by Tyler Jones. Becky Brown was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Emily Kwong. And I'm Hannah Chin. Thanks for listening to Shortwave from NPR.
Short Wave
How Will Future Forests Survive Climate Change?
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, Shortwavers, Emily Kwong here. And today I am joined by producer Hannah Chin. Hello. For a story about forests. Okay, Hannah, you reported this story from somewhere that sounds pretty wet. Are you in a forest right now?
Short Wave
How Will Future Forests Survive Climate Change?
They're like deep sleep princess trees. Tree popsicles.
Short Wave
How Will Future Forests Survive Climate Change?
Oh, we depend on them. I mean, trees generate oxygen, they trap CO2, they absorb water to help prevent flooding, they regulate temperature, they're like critical habitat for animals.
Short Wave
How Will Future Forests Survive Climate Change?
So today on the show, reforestation reimagined. How scientists are working to change the trees we plant and where we plant them in the race against climate change. You are listening to Shortwave from NPR. Okay, Hannah, so humans have been reforesting or planting new trees to compensate for losing old ones for a long time. I mean, this was happening in ancient China as early as 1122 BCE.
Short Wave
How Will Future Forests Survive Climate Change?
Which is really cool. But large-scale reforestation, like what you're talking about, really began with the establishment of the U.S. Forest Service in the late 19th and early 20th century, more than 100 years ago. So this is kind of a new project in some way.
Short Wave
How Will Future Forests Survive Climate Change?
It sounds like she's echoing that idea that Rob brought up earlier of planting local. So keeping seeds in a certain area because they're adapted to that local environment.
Short Wave
How Will Future Forests Survive Climate Change?
Right, like it's so much warmer or drier that the seed's previous adaptation may no longer be advantageous under climate change. Exactly.
Short Wave
How Will Future Forests Survive Climate Change?
What makes E-Names so experimental, though?
Short Wave
How Will Future Forests Survive Climate Change?
All right. So it sounds like what they're doing is estimating the future of specific areas and then using this seedlot selection tool to make an educated guess about what seeds may do well in that hypothetical future.
Short Wave
How Will Future Forests Survive Climate Change?
This sounds very science fiction-y. I mean, very cool. But how can you accurately plant future seeds?
Short Wave
How Will Future Forests Survive Climate Change?
So that we have any Douglas fir trees at all in the future of my area.
Short Wave
How Will Future Forests Survive Climate Change?
And turn them into popsicles, different flavors, ponderosa, larch, and ship them around Oregon and Washington? Exactly. Exactly.
Short Wave
How Will Future Forests Survive Climate Change?
That's really smart. Okay, so where are we at in this project? It sounds like it's early stages, so do we have any…
Short Wave
How Will Future Forests Survive Climate Change?
Wow. That's pretty cool. Because you don't often hear about experiments lasting more than a decade or two. I mean, they're working on timescales of up to, I imagine, like a century. And if they are successful… You know, if this experiment goes well, these tree babies you saw earlier could grow up to outlive both of us.
Short Wave
How Will Future Forests Survive Climate Change?
But they're creating a future where perhaps forests are standing and these trees have a chance. And that's pretty cool. Gives me some hope. Yeah, me too. Hannah Chen, thank you so much for bringing us this story. Thanks for having me, Emily. Make sure you never miss an episode of Shortwave by following us on the podcasting platform you're listening to right now.
Short Wave
How Will Future Forests Survive Climate Change?
If you have a science question, send us an email at shortwave at npr.org. This episode was produced by Jessica Young, and it was edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts, and Jimmy Keeley was the audio engineer.
Short Wave
Will Trump Unleash Energy Dominance Or Damage?
So today we're going to recap these budget cuts and policy changes, focusing on three government agencies that deal with climate and the environment. The EPA, NOAA and FEMA, with an eye towards their real world impacts on the Americans that President Trump says he wants to support. I'm Emily Kwong and you're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
Will Trump Unleash Energy Dominance Or Damage?
All right, Alejandra, we're going to start with the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency. Now, historically, this agency has done a lot. It's been focused on protecting the environment and public health. It has cleaned up hazardous waste, banned certain pesticides, curbed air and water pollution, and It does seem, though, like those types of actions are no longer the primary goal.
Short Wave
Will Trump Unleash Energy Dominance Or Damage?
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Since he took office, President Trump has made sweeping changes to federal agencies that work on climate change. On April 8th of this year, he issued several new executive orders, lifting regulations on fossil fuels, allowing new coal projects on federal land, and ending what he calls, quote, woke policies that support renewable energy.
Short Wave
Will Trump Unleash Energy Dominance Or Damage?
Yeah, deregulation, it often looks like loosening federal restrictions so businesses can operate more freely.
Short Wave
Will Trump Unleash Energy Dominance Or Damage?
If they're on the chopping block, what would that mean about the science they've done? Like, would the work just go away and whatever the current science says is how it will stay?
Short Wave
Will Trump Unleash Energy Dominance Or Damage?
These cuts to the EPA are not the only indicator of a shift in the Trump administration's attitude towards climate research. Lauren, there's also been cuts at NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Remind all of us, what has NOAA historically done?
Short Wave
Will Trump Unleash Energy Dominance Or Damage?
Yeah, I pretty much consulted NOAA every day as a member station reporter in Alaska. It's where we got all of our marine forecasts to read on air so people didn't go out on the water when conditions weren't safe.
Short Wave
Will Trump Unleash Energy Dominance Or Damage?
So what is President Trump's administration planning to shift within NOAA?
Short Wave
Will Trump Unleash Energy Dominance Or Damage?
Okay, so people have been cut and the budget is going to be cut. What will the impact be there?
Short Wave
Will Trump Unleash Energy Dominance Or Damage?
Going back to what you said earlier about how if you check the weather today, you did interact with NOAA. How will this affect the accuracy of weather forecasts in the future?
Short Wave
Will Trump Unleash Energy Dominance Or Damage?
Speaking of those, weather disasters like flooding or storms or wildfires are getting worse, and a lot of the funding to prepare for those disasters comes from the federal government through FEMA. That's the last agency we're going to talk about today. What is the funding picture there?
Short Wave
Will Trump Unleash Energy Dominance Or Damage?
Interesting, because a lot of people think of FEMA as the agency that pays after a disaster hits. But this sounds like preventative support almost.
Short Wave
Will Trump Unleash Energy Dominance Or Damage?
He has slashed the budgets and shifted the directives of key government agencies, especially when it comes to funding research, regulating pollution, and responding to climate-related disasters. And again, Trump says this is all in service of everyday Americans. But what will be the impact of Trump's actions on those everyday Americans in the future?
Short Wave
Will Trump Unleash Energy Dominance Or Damage?
So is the wastewater treatment plant just not going to be relocated? Next time it floods and this sewage backup happens, they just can't do anything about it?
Short Wave
Will Trump Unleash Energy Dominance Or Damage?
And this is, of course, on the preparation side. What about FEMA's ability to respond after a disaster happens?
Short Wave
Will Trump Unleash Energy Dominance Or Damage?
Yeah. And of course, just going back to the Trump administration's statements about all of this, a lot of these changes are being made in the name of decreasing the cost of living. Alejandra and Lauren, I'd love to hear from both of you. Do you think everyday Americans will see their livelihoods improve with changes like these to the EPA, NOAA and FEMA?
Short Wave
Will Trump Unleash Energy Dominance Or Damage?
Who will pay for the reality of climate change? That is Lauren Sommer and Alejandra Barunda, both correspondents on NPR's Climate Desk. Thank you so much for coming on Shortwave.
Short Wave
Will Trump Unleash Energy Dominance Or Damage?
For answers, we brought in NPR climate reporters Alejandra Barunda and Lauren Sommer. What do you both think?
Short Wave
Will Trump Unleash Energy Dominance Or Damage?
This episode was produced by Hannah Chin and edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Robert Rodriguez was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Emily Kwong. Thank you for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
Why Big Tech Wants Nuclear Power
Hey, Shore Weavers, Emily Kwong here. Before we get back to the show, I have an update about planet Earth. It's almost completed its 365-day, six-hour, and nine-minute orbit around the sun.
Short Wave
Why Big Tech Wants Nuclear Power
Those six hours add up to an extra day every fourth year, and that's why we have leap years, and 2024 was a leap year, which means we had one more day this year to bring you stories about astronomy, scuba diving lizards, social media algorithms, the COVID endemic, yes, not pandemic, how Rubik's Cubes work, what happens to your brain when you sleep extremely All of that is possible because of you.
Short Wave
Why Big Tech Wants Nuclear Power
Honestly, your monetary support of our work. Either through a classic donation or by joining programs like NPR+. With NPR Plus, you know this, you donate a small amount each month and get special perks for more than 25 NPR podcasts. You're going to get sponsor-free listening, bonus episodes, and even exclusive and discounted items from the NPR shop.
Short Wave
Why Big Tech Wants Nuclear Power
NPR Plus members, you help us continue to bring you stories about, gosh, lead water pipes, needle phobia, whale menopause, nuclear fission. If you've been sitting on this all year, maybe head into 2025 with NPR Plus in your back pocket. With your help,
Short Wave
Why Big Tech Wants Nuclear Power
We can keep this going every week, bringing you stories you're curious about, stories you didn't know you were curious about, stories that are fun to tell your friends, stories that make you think about your place in the universe. Join today. Go to plus.npr.org, plus.npr.org. That link is in our episode notes. Thanks for listening. Back to the show.
Short Wave
Bone Marrow Cells: Key To Vaccine Longevity?
Lifetime security, like the measles vaccine.
Short Wave
Bone Marrow Cells: Key To Vaccine Longevity?
Okay, so I'm curious. Is there a way for future vaccines to recruit these bone marrow cells to spur a longer-lasting vaccine?
Short Wave
Bone Marrow Cells: Key To Vaccine Longevity?
Okay, y'all, that was pretty serious. Let's move on to something joyful and one of the purest sources of childhood joy. That is hula hooping. What a pivot. Indeed. What is the physics of keeping a hula hoop swirling around our hips?
Short Wave
Bone Marrow Cells: Key To Vaccine Longevity?
Okay, this is pretty funny. But how do you actually study this in a mathematical way?
Short Wave
Bone Marrow Cells: Key To Vaccine Longevity?
Hey, happy to be here. It's the first news roundup of the year. So tell me, what is going on in the world of science?
Short Wave
Bone Marrow Cells: Key To Vaccine Longevity?
Okay, the suspense is killing me. What shapes were the best for hula hooping?
Short Wave
Bone Marrow Cells: Key To Vaccine Longevity?
Well, now I am concerned that people will think, you know, if I don't have an hourglass figure, I can't hula hoop.
Short Wave
Bone Marrow Cells: Key To Vaccine Longevity?
I love that idea. Okay, to close us out, I am so ready to hear about all of the exciting space news that I should be looking forward to this year.
Short Wave
Bone Marrow Cells: Key To Vaccine Longevity?
All right. I love the names, but what is up with these missions?
Short Wave
Bone Marrow Cells: Key To Vaccine Longevity?
Very cool. That's a whole lot of moon information for me to download. Big year for the moon. Big year for the moon. But tell us what else is happening out there.
Short Wave
Bone Marrow Cells: Key To Vaccine Longevity?
Guys, thanks so much for keeping me up to date with all the latest science news.
Short Wave
Bone Marrow Cells: Key To Vaccine Longevity?
Okay, I want to start with vaccines because it's feeling a little germy out there, y'all. There's so much flu and COVID going around. I am very glad I'm vaccinated.
Short Wave
The Science Behind Wildfire Smoke
Support for NPR and the following message come from the Kauffman Foundation, providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, regardless of race, gender, or geography. Kauffman.org. Hey, Short Wavers. Emily Kwong here.
Short Wave
Learning A Second Language As An Adult
All year, I've been taking Mandarin classes virtually. Trying to learn this language. And in the back of my brain, I'm wondering, of course, you know, am I too old to try? Can you really learn another language as an adult? I don't know. What do you think?
Short Wave
Learning A Second Language As An Adult
Right? For real, though, it is a hard language to learn. Language itself, actually, is an incredible ability, if you think about it, that we humans have. It involves many parts of the brain, and the study of language spans across many different disciplines.
Short Wave
Learning A Second Language As An Adult
Sarah Phillips is a PhD student in the linguistics department at New York University, and exactly the person I wanted to call up to talk about language learning.
Short Wave
Learning A Second Language As An Adult
Yeah, brains and language are her jam. So her parents met in Korea while her father was serving in the Marine Corps, and they raised her bilingual here in the U.S.
Short Wave
Learning A Second Language As An Adult
She's got a really interesting backstory, and I told her about my project, about taking Mandarin class for two hours every Monday, flashcards on the other nights, watching movies I can't understand, and listen to this.
Short Wave
Learning A Second Language As An Adult
So, Maddie, you and I have known each other for a while now, and I think we're ready to take it to the next level. Oh, my God.
Short Wave
Learning A Second Language As An Adult
Mm-hmm. And Sarah says more specifically, because she's a scientist, that I am a developing sequential bilingual, meaning I'm learning a second language after acquiring a first language. But that's really different from a simultaneous bilingual like Sarah, who developed the ability to speak two or more languages in the earliest years of life. Right.
Short Wave
Learning A Second Language As An Adult
And one of the reasons I never tried to learn my heritage language, honestly, is because of something called the critical period hypothesis. Have you ever heard of this?
Short Wave
Learning A Second Language As An Adult
No. Are we doing it? No. Not today. But I have brought you something just as invigorating and just as vulnerable, a Kwong family home movie. What?
Short Wave
Learning A Second Language As An Adult
Yeah, it's a theory that dates back to the 1950s and basically argues there's a magic window for a person to learn a first language, somewhere between age two and puberty. Scientists debate the cutoff age, but the key idea is there's a biological window where language learning is the most automatic.
Short Wave
Learning A Second Language As An Adult
Okay. And Maddie, researchers found that if baby zebra finches were separated from adults for long enough, they couldn't produce the same calls as their parents. Which isn't good, right? When you think about how important these calls are for mating and socialization in zebra finch communities. Right.
Short Wave
Learning A Second Language As An Adult
Well, there have been cases where children were denied language before puberty because of abusive parents or extreme social isolation. And when many of those children tried to learn their first language past puberty, they couldn't pick up the grammar.
Short Wave
Learning A Second Language As An Adult
Yeah, this has been the big question because the critical period hypothesis has totally entered our popular consciousness as kind of this rule of second language learning, too, that you can't really learn a language fluently when you're older. Right. And scientists kind of disagree with this. Let's unpack why by looking at the developing baby brain. Ooh, neuroscience. We love it.
Short Wave
Learning A Second Language As An Adult
So little humans experience an explosive amount of language learning in the first few years of life. Our brain cells change over time. And that change is most rapid when we're little. Right. As our bodies produce neurological structures and connections we'll use throughout our lifetime.
Short Wave
Learning A Second Language As An Adult
Researchers at the Center for the Developing Child at Harvard University estimate that in the first three years of life, your brain was developing one million new neural connections per second.
Short Wave
Learning A Second Language As An Adult
You know what I mean? That's a lot. Baby brains got to grow. But here's the thing. Your brain doesn't stop building neural connections after you're pubescent, right? Right. And in the 90s and the early 2000s, researchers took note of that. They began to argue that second language learning is not bound to a biological period. How could it be?
Short Wave
Learning A Second Language As An Adult
So I'm two years old, and we're on an Easter egg hunt. I got my floral Easter dress. I got my grandparents, Huey and Edgar Kwong, and they are all about this right now.
Short Wave
Learning A Second Language As An Adult
And this idea emerged that the critical window should actually be called a sensitive window when you're most susceptible to picking up a new language.
Short Wave
Learning A Second Language As An Adult
And once you're past that window, like me, you can still become fluent in another language. It will just take way more conscious effort. That's the distinction.
Short Wave
Learning A Second Language As An Adult
Yeah, or a lot. And most scientists agree that this process becomes more difficult with age because your body, including your brain, has already developed certain habits. And habits are hard to break.
Short Wave
Learning A Second Language As An Adult
It's very comforting. I hear you that I'm going to have to fight for it. Emily Kwong, you're always fighting yourself. You're always fighting for stuff. You're a fighter. You got this. And I'm willing to fight for this one, you know? Yeah. Contemporary research shows there are a lot of factors that influence language learning beyond your age.
Short Wave
Learning A Second Language As An Adult
Which means, have you eaten? Nice. Thank you. And have you eaten is kind of a common refrain in a lot of Asian languages. It's kind of a way of saying I love you. Oh, I really love that. That's nice. So Maddie, in response, if you've eaten, you would say 吃了。 吃了。 很好。 Now, one area I'm kind of self-conscious about is pronunciation. So if you're listening, do not come for my tone. I I already know.
Short Wave
Learning A Second Language As An Adult
I already know. Mandarin is a tonal language, and some of these tones my mouth has never made before. And Sarah said that's an area where childhood speakers have a clear, unmistakable advantage.
Short Wave
Learning A Second Language As An Adult
Honestly, you still react that way to chocolate. Let's be real.
Short Wave
Learning A Second Language As An Adult
Which is why adults struggle to produce the speech sounds of another language. But when it comes to pronunciation and accents, Sarah kind of pushed back on my questions, asking me, who do you imagine as a perfectly native speaker anyway? Is it fair to compare yourself to that person?
Short Wave
Learning A Second Language As An Adult
That's my uncle, Timothy Kwong. And you'll notice, Maddie, throughout these home movies, and I've brought a few today, that there are two languages being spoken by our family, right? There's English, but there's also Mandarin Chinese. Those are my grandparents during Christmas. But for years, all I could say in Mandarin was hello, thank you, and goodbye. English was the only language I knew. Chi.
Short Wave
Learning A Second Language As An Adult
So I can let go of the idea of sounding just like my grandparents who grew up in Beijing. Because it's here, in the U.S., among my extended family and other Chinese Americans, that I long to be understood.
Short Wave
Learning A Second Language As An Adult
And I should share with you, my grandma was trying to teach me Mandarin in the years before she and my grandfather died. So I feel like I kind of owe it to them to try.
Short Wave
Learning A Second Language As An Adult
Special thanks to sociolinguist Amelia Tsang, Fluent City Language School, Dennis Yue-Yo Lee, Megan Arias, and my family, especially Christopher Kwong, Timothy Kwong, Linda Kwong, and Amanda Kwong.
Short Wave
Is The Trump Administration Breaking Science?
My sign says, diseases don't have party lines. And it also says, science is for everyone.
Short Wave
Is The Trump Administration Breaking Science?
Everyone who would have ever interfaced with us has just, like, disappeared. So it's been, like, haunting, creepy, and horrifying, I'm going to be honest.
Short Wave
Is The Trump Administration Breaking Science?
When you take your kid to a hospital with a broken arm, we know how to fix that broken arm because of basic research science, because of science that happens at universities. Every single thing that you have in your life that has been produced and put out into the world, at some point that depended a little bit on public research dollars helping fund these institutions and the work that we do.
Short Wave
What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
Underground tests can also have environmental and humanitarian impacts. You know, they're obviously not as severe as the atmospheric impacts, but they're still possible.
Short Wave
What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
The U.S. has a technical advantage locked in by this moratorium on nuclear testing because it undertook so many more tests during this Cold War period. It has loads of historical legacy data.
Short Wave
Grape Growers' Next Collaborators? Robots
When the Star Wars prequels came out, they were polarizing. Many fans of the original trilogy hated the Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith, though many younger fans loved them then and loved them still. So we're re-watching them with fresh eyes 20 years later.
Short Wave
Grape Growers' Next Collaborators? Robots
From Jar Jar Binks to the climactic Nooooo that broke the internet in half, listen on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast.
Short Wave
Science Can Make You More Creative!
Hey everyone, it's Emily Kwong. Before we start the show, you may have heard that President Trump has issued an executive order seeking to block all federal funding to NPR. This is the latest in a series of threats to media organizations across the country. Millions of people, people like you, depend on the NPR network as a vital source of news, entertainment, information, and connection.
Short Wave
Science Can Make You More Creative!
And we are proud to be here for you. Now more than ever, we need you to be here for us. It's time to join the movement to defend public media. And if you already support us via NPR Plus or another means, thank you. Your support means so much to me, to the whole team, now more than ever, because you are the reason that NPR shows are freely available to everyone.
Short Wave
Science Can Make You More Creative!
And we are proud to do this work for you and with you. Thanks so much. You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.
Short Wave
Jimmy Carter's Triumph Over The Guinea Worm
Jason, I remember when this happened. I was like, wow, this guy is like still out there, still doing things.
Short Wave
Jimmy Carter's Triumph Over The Guinea Worm
We're going to talk about that today on the show and how science was central to former President Carter's drive for a better world. I'm Emily Kwong. You're listening to Shorewave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
Jimmy Carter's Triumph Over The Guinea Worm
Okay, so Jason, former President Jimmy Carter was known for many things, including fighting disease around the world.
Short Wave
Jimmy Carter's Triumph Over The Guinea Worm
But how did he end up waging a war on guinea worms?
Short Wave
Jimmy Carter's Triumph Over The Guinea Worm
Hey, Emily Kwong here. Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter passed away Sunday at his home in Plains, Georgia. He was 100 years old. And during his lifetime, he did a lot for science and for treating one disease in particular. Here to talk about it with me is science reporter Jason Bovian. Hey, Jason. Hey, Emily. Hi. So how are you doing with the Carter news?
Short Wave
Jimmy Carter's Triumph Over The Guinea Worm
And I think he's almost done that, right? Like nearly managed to eradicate guinea worm.
Short Wave
Jimmy Carter's Triumph Over The Guinea Worm
And he was very successful in leading that. It seems like – I'm looking this up – there were only 13 cases of Guinea worm in 2023 and just three cases in the first half of last year. So from three and a half million to basically a handful, that's amazing.
Short Wave
Jimmy Carter's Triumph Over The Guinea Worm
Yeah. And you're talking of course about Paul Farmer, global health legend.
Short Wave
Jimmy Carter's Triumph Over The Guinea Worm
Let's back up a step to focus on the guinea worm itself and this disease it causes. What are these worms and how does their disease affect people?
Short Wave
Jimmy Carter's Triumph Over The Guinea Worm
Strong word choice. Chosen clearly for a reason. Why do you say that?
Short Wave
Jimmy Carter's Triumph Over The Guinea Worm
That is menacing. That is horrible. It is. And admittedly, the science person in me wants to say very clever from an evolutionary point of view. Yeah.
Short Wave
Jimmy Carter's Triumph Over The Guinea Worm
Right. Also, is it only inside humans that you get that reproductive cycle? Yeah.
Short Wave
Jimmy Carter's Triumph Over The Guinea Worm
Jason, you mentioned that one of the ways to get to the bottom of this whole disease is by improving access to drinking water. Was that the main strategy of Carter and others in trying to eradicate this disease?
Short Wave
Jimmy Carter's Triumph Over The Guinea Worm
Yeah. I mean, I wasn't alive, but it does appear that way for
Short Wave
Jimmy Carter's Triumph Over The Guinea Worm
Okay. So what was Jimmy Carter's role in all of this? Because he wasn't out there handing $100 bill bounties for each guinea worm, right? Like, why is it that Paul Farmer and others are accrediting Carter with nearly eradicating this parasite?
Short Wave
Jimmy Carter's Triumph Over The Guinea Worm
Oh, yeah. We at Shortwave, we will seize any opportunity to discuss worms. So.
Short Wave
Jimmy Carter's Triumph Over The Guinea Worm
Jason Bobian, NPR correspondent. Thank you for telling us about the public health legacy of Jimmy Carter.
Short Wave
Jimmy Carter's Triumph Over The Guinea Worm
This episode was produced by Burley McCoy. It was edited by our managing producer, Rebecca Ramirez, and fact-checked by Anil Oza. The audio engineer was Patrick Murray. I'm Emily Kwong. Thanks for listening to Shortwave from NPR.
Short Wave
Moths, Owls And Fungi With Over 20,000 Sexes...Oh My!
Today on the show, we are taking you on a night hike through the Patuxent River watershed in search of owls and salamanders and maybe, if we're lucky, a bioluminescent mushroom. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. All right, Emily. So you went on this night hike last month. Set the scene for us. What does this park look like?
Short Wave
Moths, Owls And Fungi With Over 20,000 Sexes...Oh My!
Remind me, what are lichen exactly?
Short Wave
Moths, Owls And Fungi With Over 20,000 Sexes...Oh My!
Oh, and I'm just looking at the pictures you just sent me, and this is like neon, neon yellow.
Short Wave
Moths, Owls And Fungi With Over 20,000 Sexes...Oh My!
They just sound so excited. This sounds like my kind of group. Okay, so like what do the different colors mean?
Short Wave
Moths, Owls And Fungi With Over 20,000 Sexes...Oh My!
Well, Burleigh, I was on a night hike.
Short Wave
Moths, Owls And Fungi With Over 20,000 Sexes...Oh My!
Oh my gosh, I wish we could do this. Okay, that's so cool. So like these lichens are carrying their own sunscreen.
Short Wave
Moths, Owls And Fungi With Over 20,000 Sexes...Oh My!
Oh my gosh. Okay, so what did you see next on your hike?
Short Wave
Moths, Owls And Fungi With Over 20,000 Sexes...Oh My!
Okay, so iNaturalist is that app that helps you ID things in the natural world. I use it all the time for things like flowers and trees and one time a spider in my garden. Yeah, Anna's like a prolific user of iNaturalist.
Short Wave
Moths, Owls And Fungi With Over 20,000 Sexes...Oh My!
What's up, Tutorinos? It's Emily Kwong. And Burleigh McCoy, freshly back from parental leave. And Emily, today I hear you recently embarked on some late-night reporting in the woods under the cover of darkness. Yeah. So is this your way of telling us you're a spy? Would a spy reveal that? Okay, my thoughts exactly. But seriously, what were you doing out there?
Short Wave
Moths, Owls And Fungi With Over 20,000 Sexes...Oh My!
With the mushroom. Wait, wait, wait. Is this the bioluminescent mushroom?
Short Wave
Moths, Owls And Fungi With Over 20,000 Sexes...Oh My!
I am really sad to say I've never seen bioluminescence in nature. But honestly, I usually imagine it's like a frog or some kind of plankton doing the bioluminescing, not a mushroom.
Short Wave
Moths, Owls And Fungi With Over 20,000 Sexes...Oh My!
Honestly, Emily, this hike is reminding me that that's what winter is all about, right? At least according to nature. Slow down, rest, conserve your energy. And you can consider this hike your permission slip.
Short Wave
Moths, Owls And Fungi With Over 20,000 Sexes...Oh My!
Make sure you never miss a new episode by following us on the podcasting platform you're listening from. And if you have a science question, send us an email at shortwave at npr.org. This episode was produced by Jessica Young and Hannah Chin and edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones, check the facts. Jimmy Keeley was the audio engineer.
Short Wave
Moths, Owls And Fungi With Over 20,000 Sexes...Oh My!
Beth Donovan is our senior director and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Emily Kwong. And I'm Burleigh McCoy. Thanks for listening to Shortwave from NPR.
Short Wave
The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
Regularly throughout the 16 and 1700s, this accumulation of errors through ships so off course that it resulted in shipwrecks and lost lives, and merchants and seamen began calling for a scientific solution. So the British government created the Board of Longitude, and they announced a contest to solve this problem, the longitude problem.
Short Wave
The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
And out of that contest came the Marine Chronometer, a near frictionless pendulum that doesn't need to be reset as often and was therefore more precise.
Short Wave
The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
Yes. Okay. This really made seafaring possible for the British Empire. So this clock changed world history. And I think history is repeating itself right now because many governments and companies are setting their sights on space exploration.
Short Wave
The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
Yeah. And the hurdles that were kicking around during the era of the longitude problem are repeating themselves today. To navigate far from home, you need a really good clock.
Short Wave
The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
They have a soccer league, a theater club that performs shows. But I was on shortwave duty, so I went there to see a lab. Cool.
Short Wave
The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
with Holly Leopardi, an atomic physicist with green glasses and a big grin. And two years ago, she was telling me she joined the Quest Lab. The Quest Lab is like a one-stop shop for atomic physicists to do experiments and pass along those discoveries to NASA engineers. Quantum engineering and sensing technologies. Quest. Were you like, yes, we made an acronym?
Short Wave
The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
Yes, I've noticed. OK, so the main lab of Quest is a big room with three massive tables. The tables are made of metal and they have holes in them drilled every inch on like the surface of the table. And that's to screw down different optical components.
Short Wave
The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
Right. Whatever is invented here has to survive being jettisoned into space.
Short Wave
The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
Assistant Chief for Technology Renee Reynolds has been at NASA for 25 years. And in the last few years, she's really been the person to build up the quantum program and hire scientists like Holly.
Short Wave
The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
A tale about how time tells us our place in the world. So, Gina, are you familiar with longitude?
Short Wave
The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
And one piece of technology that NASA wants to improve is the atomic clock. They want to build new atomic clocks for space.
Short Wave
The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
There are hundreds. Many of them are perched on navigation satellites. I had no idea actually like navigation uses time. It's just like in the 1600s. But here in the U.S., you know, our satellite based navigation system is GPS.
Short Wave
The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
But the atomic clock system, as it stands right now, is error prone. Yeah. GPS clocks are estimated to drift by about 10 nanoseconds a day, which I know doesn't sound like a lot. But an error of even a microsecond in space can translate to an error of 300 meters on the ground. Right.
Short Wave
The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
So to correct for clock drift, GPS clocks will send a signal a few times a day down to Earth and ask, you know, hey, am I on time?
Short Wave
The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
But this process is kind of a pain, you know, this constant like phoning home. So for years now, NASA has been searching for a clock that is capable of autonomous navigation, able to operate as its own unit with minimal updates and be even more precise. All of this reminds me of what the Board of Longitude was trying to do all those centuries ago. Holly, she calls her clock OASIC.
Short Wave
The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
Yeah. The longitude there is zero degrees and extends by 180 degrees westward and 180 degrees eastward. And back in the 1600s, it was really difficult to calculate longitude. Right. a ship leaving port would set two clocks, one for the prime meridian and another for local time. So crews would update their local time as they sailed, calculating it by using the position of the sun.
Short Wave
The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
I'm going to explain why OASIC holds such promise, what all those different words in that sentence mean. But I need to call upon the spirit of my grandfather, Bob, who was a clock repairman, and first explain how an atomic clock works. As a physicist, I still struggle with this, so let's do it. It's like the Mr. Potato Head of science. You have to smash so much tech together to make it go.
Short Wave
The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
So all you need to know about a clock, this is true of all clocks, is they are feedback loops. And there's generally three elements that talk internally to each other within the clock to keep it steadily ticking.
Short Wave
The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
Like a pendulum, which swings back and forth once per second. In modern clocks, their pendulum is actually a crystal of quartz. When jolted with electricity, the quartz will vibrate at a precise frequency. And emit electrical pulses, which can then be measured by a counter. Which counts up those swings.
Short Wave
The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
those cycles and displays them okay so you got your oscillator you got your counter what's the third thing that makes it a clock your reference so the reference ensures that the oscillator vibrates at the right frequency and doesn't cause the clock to drift and that's where the atoms come in an atomic clock is called that because it uses part of an atom as its reference and
Short Wave
The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
Atoms have this really special quality, and I'm going to turn it over to you now, Gina, to explain how atoms go from a grounded state to an excited state.
Short Wave
The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
Okay, so that. In the 1950s, scientists hacked this particular ability of an atom and forced this energy transition in the atom at a regular interval and designed a clock that would count every time energy is released as the electron goes back down. And that is the frequency of the atomic clock. Okay. And they did this with light, right? Right.
Short Wave
The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
So traditional atomic clocks, the ones used for GPS, use microwaves, which is a form of light. How the clock works is it bombards an atom with microwaves, and that forces the atom from its grounded state to its excited state. And that transition happens at a steady pulse by which the whole clock is referenced.
Short Wave
The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
Which is not good enough for Holly as an atomic physicist. I know, but microwave is not precise enough for her. She and other atomic physicists work with optical light. Optical light has a shorter wavelength, so it's a better light source by which to control an atom.
Short Wave
The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
That level of precision means the clock should be better at staying on time without needing to dial Earth nearly as much for a time check.
Short Wave
The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
Yes. And because the clock is powered by a strontium atom.
Short Wave
The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
Strontium, it's a weird, it's like in the periodic table. No one talks about it. But Holly chose strontium because it's good at withstanding temperature swings. Good for space. And also because strontium requires a very precise frequency to get excited. So she told me to think of the laser like a drum beat. Boom, boom, boom. But the atom is like a conductor.
Short Wave
The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
And if you've ever seen an orchestra, you know a conductor will only tolerate the correct drum beat. Strontium is a very strict conductor.
Short Wave
The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
Yes, the laser being precise makes the strontium atom precise, which makes the clock precise. Peter Brereton, who runs the lab, says this is the power of quantum technology, of systems that use the physics of atoms to be more accurate than systems using classical physics.
Short Wave
The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
But the clocks aboard these ships were not reliable. Like, picture pendulum clocks on rolling seas, right? Surrounded by salty air and changes in temperature or barometric pressure. The clock parts are going to warp. All of this can ultimately cause the clock to stray from the correct time. We call this clock drift. Ooh, I like that term, clock drift. Yeah, clock drift is dangerous.
Short Wave
The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
Like the Tesseract in the Marvel movies. Really? It'll be a blow. No. It will be a cube, though. It will be a cube. With all these optical systems bolted into place and a single strontium atom at its core. And I asked Holly what she ultimately hopes for these clocks, where she wants them to live.
Short Wave
The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
So if multiple OASIC clocks get installed up in space, scientists can compare how their frequencies change relative to each other. And this data will allow them to tackle some big questions like changes to Earth's gravitational field, which could tell us how sea ice is melting or groundwater is flowing.
Short Wave
The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
Holly says the team wants a prototype system done by fall 2025, and she hopes OASIC could fly within six years. Okay. She is determined to do this for timekeeping and also for the field of physics.
Short Wave
The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
Because for her, a clock's real power is as a sensor to tell us where we are and how the universe is changing around us.
Short Wave
The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
Always. Special thanks to Deva Sobel, who wrote the incredible book Longitude, all about the longitude problem and the creation of the marine chronometer. It's a great read.
Short Wave
The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
Beth Donovan is our senior director and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barber. And I'm Emily Kwong. Thank you as always for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
What Scientists Got Wrong About COVID-19
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, shortwavers, Emily Kwong here. So this month marks five years since officials at the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. And we have come a long way since then. Researchers have figured out ways to slow the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus with masking and air filtering. They've developed safe treatments and vaccines.
Short Wave
What Scientists Got Wrong About COVID-19
Meaning that in people who are immunocompromised, the virus may be able to stick around and evolve.
Short Wave
What Scientists Got Wrong About COVID-19
So today on the show, rethinking the rules of viral evolution and how scientists are racing to catch up and predict COVID's next move. I'm Emily Kwong, and you're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
What Scientists Got Wrong About COVID-19
So just to take a big step back, Sarah, why do viruses mutate and what does that do to us when we get infected?
Short Wave
What Scientists Got Wrong About COVID-19
Okay, so there's almost like one star pupil, or a few star pupils, who will prove advantageous against the army of the human immune system.
Short Wave
What Scientists Got Wrong About COVID-19
And it has. It has continued to evolve. But right now, most of the variants that are dominant in the U.S. are descendants of Omicron. Tell us about Omicron's origin story. Like, when did it appear as a variant? And what surprised scientists about it immediately?
Short Wave
What Scientists Got Wrong About COVID-19
Omicron rolled up and was like, I'm going to be something like you've never seen before.
Short Wave
What Scientists Got Wrong About COVID-19
Yeah. I remember this period as the Omicron wave of 2021. And you write that scientists think that Omicron's rapid evolution has something to do with the virus incubating and mutating in immunocompromised people. It's a super interesting idea. Can you explain why scientists suspect that?
Short Wave
What Scientists Got Wrong About COVID-19
And they've tracked hundreds of thousands of different mutations. And now we know something else, how those mutations evolved. Because if you remember, in March of 2020, a lot of scientists predicted that the coronavirus was not going to evolve very much.
Short Wave
What Scientists Got Wrong About COVID-19
What kinds of immunocompromised patients are we talking about? Do they include folks with long COVID?
Short Wave
What Scientists Got Wrong About COVID-19
So when it comes to just the rapid mutation capability of SARS-CoV-2, is it simply that it's just more powerful than other viruses? It's just better somehow? Yeah.
Short Wave
What Scientists Got Wrong About COVID-19
This phenomenon where a virus mutates more in immunocompromised patients, can that happen with any virus like HIV or bird flu?
Short Wave
What Scientists Got Wrong About COVID-19
This is Sarah Zhang, a health writer for The Atlantic. Back in 2020, some scientists thought that once vaccines arrived, they would offer years of protection.
Short Wave
What Scientists Got Wrong About COVID-19
Yeah, but part of what's cool about COVID is it's been sequenced in such depth. Like we've really been tracking its every move.
Short Wave
What Scientists Got Wrong About COVID-19
Man, so COVID really is changing how virology is done. It could change our understanding of viruses. If this tracking were to especially focus on infections within those who are immunocompromised, what would that do to disease surveillance? Yeah.
Short Wave
What Scientists Got Wrong About COVID-19
Well, in the meantime, you are following as closely as you can. Sarah Zhang, thank you so much for talking to me. Thank you for having me. This episode was produced by Hannah Chin and edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Robert Rodriguez was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director.
Short Wave
What Scientists Got Wrong About COVID-19
And Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Emily Kwong. Thanks for listening to ShoreWave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
What Scientists Got Wrong About COVID-19
Beta, Delta, Omicron. The coronavirus continued to mutate. to make these evolutionary jumps that helped it survive. And for a long time, scientists didn't know why. Sarah wrote a piece about this for The Atlantic last month, focusing on a series of studies that point to a relatively new idea that the virus could be incubating and mutating further in one specific group of people.
Short Wave
What Happens While You're Under Anesthesia?
Support for NPR and the following message come from the Kauffman Foundation, providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, regardless of race, gender, or geography.
Short Wave
How Does An Airplane Stay In The Air?
This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things and other currencies. With WISE, you can send, spend, or receive money across borders, all at a fair exchange rate. No markups or hidden fees. Join millions of customers and visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply.
Short Wave
The Science Behind The FDA Ban On Food Dye Red No. 3
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, Shortwavers. Emily Kwong here with the lovely Maria Godoy, senior editor and correspondent with the NPR Science Desk. Hey, Maria. Hey, Emily. You are here to walk me through an announcement from the Food and Drug Administration that happened Wednesday. That's like a pretty big deal.
Short Wave
The Science Behind The FDA Ban On Food Dye Red No. 3
Interesting. Okay. So red dye number three in high doses causes cancer in rats. But we've known about that for decades, right?
Short Wave
The Science Behind The FDA Ban On Food Dye Red No. 3
This is quite the saga. Okay, so this is the decades-long journey of red dye number three. Why has it taken so long for the FDA to act in this direction?
Short Wave
The Science Behind The FDA Ban On Food Dye Red No. 3
Yeah, he sounds frustrated. Okay. Well, how prevalent is Red Dye 3 in food right now?
Short Wave
The Science Behind The FDA Ban On Food Dye Red No. 3
Very official. Red dye number three, of course, is a very widely used food dye. It's been authorized for decades.
Short Wave
The Science Behind The FDA Ban On Food Dye Red No. 3
A lot. OK, so why isn't the FDA looking then at these other synthetic food dyes?
Short Wave
The Science Behind The FDA Ban On Food Dye Red No. 3
Okay, so now that the FDA has banned red number three, how soon will it be gone? Will these products just, like, disappear off the shelf overnight?
Short Wave
The Science Behind The FDA Ban On Food Dye Red No. 3
And what are some of those manufacturers replacing it with? Like, what are the alternatives to red dye number three?
Short Wave
The Science Behind The FDA Ban On Food Dye Red No. 3
I didn't know that. Yes, much more tasty than petroleum-based dyes. And slightly less bright, too.
Short Wave
The Science Behind The FDA Ban On Food Dye Red No. 3
But in the meantime, I mean, soda, candy, these are all things kids like. So while this two-year transition is underway, what should parents do? What should they feed their kids?
Short Wave
The Science Behind The FDA Ban On Food Dye Red No. 3
Maria Godoy, thank you so much for sharing this reporting with us. Oh, my pleasure, Chica. Hey, you, listening to Shorewave. Thank you, by the way, for listening. And make sure you never miss a new episode by following us on whichever podcasting platform you're listening to. And if you have a science question, send it to us at shortwave at npr.org. This episode was produced by Hannah Chin.
Short Wave
The Science Behind The FDA Ban On Food Dye Red No. 3
It was edited by Jane Greenhall and Burley McCoy. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Kweisi Lee was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director. And Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Emily Kwong. Thank you for listening to Shortwave from NPR.
Short Wave
The Science Behind The FDA Ban On Food Dye Red No. 3
And I'm Maria Godoy. And you're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
How Racism – And Silence – Could Hurt Your Health
One quick note before we begin, shortwavers. This episode talks about racial violence and references a lynching. You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, short wavers, it's Emily Kwong. And today I'm joined by one of KFF Health News' Midwest correspondents, Cara Anthony. Cara, it is really good to have you here. Great to be here.
Short Wave
How Racism – And Silence – Could Hurt Your Health
Yeah, that message within families to just keep it moving. I mean, did you experience this in your own family?
Short Wave
How Racism – And Silence – Could Hurt Your Health
Today on the show, we are headed to Sykeston with Kara Anthony as she explores how racism and violence shapes health, how that echoes throughout generations and how to break the silence within her own family, too. You are listening to Shorewave, the science podcast from NPR. Okay, Kara, so these are hard stories to tell, but you have put so much thought and care into this reporting.
Short Wave
How Racism – And Silence – Could Hurt Your Health
For a few years now, you've been reporting on how racism can make a person sick. And I think it often surprises people when we focus on racism as a health story, right?
Short Wave
How Racism – And Silence – Could Hurt Your Health
You've been working on this series for four years, and it's set in Sykeston, a town in the southeast corner of Missouri. Where do you want to start?
Short Wave
How Racism – And Silence – Could Hurt Your Health
Wow. Okay, so that was the state of things when you got to Sykeston?
Short Wave
How Racism – And Silence – Could Hurt Your Health
It literally requires you to silence yourself constantly as you're living your life.
Short Wave
How Racism – And Silence – Could Hurt Your Health
I mean, Cara, you're really connecting the dots here between like the felt experiences and the biological health realities of being a black person in America.
Short Wave
How Racism – And Silence – Could Hurt Your Health
Oh, yes. I'm familiar with this concept. I mean, this field of research came up in my reporting covering racial trauma among Asian-Americans. You're talking about epigenetics.
Short Wave
How Racism – And Silence – Could Hurt Your Health
I mean, given that, how do people move forward? What can be done to resolve this and stop these cycles?
Short Wave
How Racism – And Silence – Could Hurt Your Health
That is the thing. That's fixing the problem at its source, yes.
Short Wave
How Racism – And Silence – Could Hurt Your Health
And it sounds like in some ways your reporting in Sykeston has helped to catalyze some of those conversations.
Short Wave
How Racism – And Silence – Could Hurt Your Health
You are teaching many people, like the people who listen to your show, how to do it too. Thanks so much for coming on Shortwave. Thanks for having me. If you want to listen to Kara's excellent reporting, The podcast is called Silence in Sykeston. It's got four parts with some bonus features. There's also an hour-long documentary that's available now.
Short Wave
How Racism – And Silence – Could Hurt Your Health
Links to all of that are available in our show notes. This episode was produced by Hannah Chin and edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. Cara, Hannah, and Tyler Jones checked the vax. Patrick Murray was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. Cara is our partner at KFF Health News.
Short Wave
How Racism – And Silence – Could Hurt Your Health
We would like to say a huge thank you to the KFF Health News team behind Silence in Sykeston, including but not limited to Cara Anthony, Simone Popperl, Taylor Cook, Tanya English, and Zach Dyer. I'm Emily Kwong. Thank you for listening to Shortwave from NPR.
Short Wave
All Hail The Butt Flicker
And the illustrator, Lindsay Lee, drew it like a circus performer. So the spider is being launched out of a cannon with a cape and a crash helmet.
Short Wave
All Hail The Butt Flicker
Whee! Saad read me the whole comic. It was awesome. It's based on actual research, a paper published in the journal Current Biology in 2020 that was led by Simone Alexander. For a lot of scientists, after publishing, they just call it a day. But back in 2020, when Saad went to check if anyone had actually read the paper...
Short Wave
All Hail The Butt Flicker
So Saad decided that from that point on, for every research paper the lab published, they would also invest in creating a comic book. Today on the show, we jump into a biophysics comic book to learn how animals eject fluids and why a comic about butt-flicking insects is a valuable way to take science beyond the lab. I'm Emily Kwong, and you're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
All Hail The Butt Flicker
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Saad Bamla is a scientist and a tinkerer. At his lab at Georgia Tech, he leads a group studying the physics of life.
Short Wave
All Hail The Butt Flicker
Okay, so Saad, your comic series has a name. It's called The Curious Zoo of Extraordinary Organisms. Yes. Yeah, and your main illustrators are Lindsay Lee and Jordan Culver, so shout out to them. We're going to walk through a couple of the comics, starting with the one called Behold the Bug that Super Propels P. And this comic is all about a bug called the Glassy Wing Sharpshooter.
Short Wave
All Hail The Butt Flicker
So the co-creators of this comic, Jordan Culver and Rick Wirth, depict this sharpshooter as an outlaw in a cowboy hat with a catapult on its butt to fling away a bead of pee. And this is known as a butt flicker. How did you figure out how the butt flicker works? And how do you even measure the speed at which this glassy winged sharpshooter ejects its pee into the world?
Short Wave
All Hail The Butt Flicker
It ejects them, you write in the comic, 40 times faster than a cheetah accelerates. And the droplet moves faster than the butt flicker. And you compare it to like as if a baseball were to move faster than the arm of the baseball pitcher. Yeah. How is that even possible? How can the droplet like pick up speed in the air?
Short Wave
All Hail The Butt Flicker
The Bamla lab studies the biomechanics, so the movement of different organisms. Springtails, flamingos, worms, cicadas. A few years ago, Saad decided to turn one of his lab's research papers into a comic book.
Short Wave
All Hail The Butt Flicker
And because they're so small, surface tension, you're saying, would keep the drop stuck to them. So it'd be like if our pee just like wouldn't come off of us. So they also need the flicker to just be like, get away.
Short Wave
All Hail The Butt Flicker
Yeah, and what's cool is in the comic you say that studying super propulsion like this could help us humans design devices to fling away liquid too.
Short Wave
All Hail The Butt Flicker
And our friend, the glassy-winged sharpshooter, makes a return in the comic Captain Cicada and the Justice League. which is based on two papers about fluid ejection and nature. And I want to focus on the part in the comic that's a confrontation between our guy, the sharpshooter, and the much bigger cicada.
Short Wave
All Hail The Butt Flicker
Howdy, cousin. Word is that you're hogging all the xylem around these parts.
Short Wave
All Hail The Butt Flicker
I think we need to settle this with a good old-fashioned shootout.
Short Wave
All Hail The Butt Flicker
Yeah. Evolution is amazing because the comic then ends with all these other animals that can jet fluid, like not just pee. Yeah. Yeah, you have... The Archer for fish hunting. The Octopus for deception. Together, along with the Spitting Spider, they become the Justice League. Did Marvel sue you over this?
Short Wave
All Hail The Butt Flicker
This comic is set deep in the Amazon rainforest, and it's all about the slingshot spider. This spider has an amazing adaptation to turn its web into a high-speed trap to catch prey.
Short Wave
All Hail The Butt Flicker
This comic work has garnered quite a bit of attention, a National Science Foundation career grant. You've received so many different forms of recognition for this work. But when you step outside the scientific community, How do you see the comics in regards to, like, just people who perhaps don't know anything about science and don't trust science?
Short Wave
All Hail The Butt Flicker
This episode was produced by Burleigh McCoy and Rachel Carlson and edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez and Jeff Brumfield. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Kweisi Lee was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director. And Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Emily Kwong. See you tomorrow on Shortwave from NPR.
Short Wave
The Great Space (Clock) Race
Regularly throughout the 16 and 1700s, this accumulation of errors through ships so off course that it resulted in shipwrecks and lost lives and merchants and seamen began calling for a scientific solution. So the British government created the Board of Longitude and they announced a contest to solve this problem, the longitude problem.
Short Wave
The Great Space (Clock) Race
And out of that contest came the Marine Chronometer. a near frictionless pendulum that doesn't need to be reset as often and was therefore more precise.
Short Wave
The Great Space (Clock) Race
Yes. Okay. This really made seafaring possible for the British Empire. So this clock changed world history. And I think history is repeating itself right now because many governments and companies are setting their sights on space exploration.
Short Wave
The Great Space (Clock) Race
Yeah. And the hurdles that were kicking around during the era of the longitude problem are repeating themselves today. To navigate far from home, you need a really good clock.
Short Wave
The Great Space (Clock) Race
They have a soccer league, a theater club that performs shows. But I was on shortwave duty, so I went there to see a lab. Cool.
Short Wave
The Great Space (Clock) Race
with Holly Leopardi, an atomic physicist with green glasses and a big grin. And two years ago, she was telling me she joined the Quest Lab. The Quest Lab is like a one-stop shop for atomic physicists to do experiments and pass along those discoveries to NASA engineers. Quantum engineering and sensing technologies. Quest. Were you like, yes, we made an acronym. Yep.
Short Wave
The Great Space (Clock) Race
Yes, I've noticed. OK, so the main lab of Quest is a big room with three massive tables. The tables are made of metal and they have holes in them drilled every inch on like the surface of the table. And that's to screw down different optical components.
Short Wave
The Great Space (Clock) Race
And not only is the precise alignment important, but the system has to be really durable. Right. Whatever is invented here has to survive being jettisoned into space.
Short Wave
The Great Space (Clock) Race
Assistant Chief for Technology Renee Reynolds has been at NASA for 25 years. And in the last few years, she's really been the person to build up the quantum program and hire scientists like Holly.
Short Wave
The Great Space (Clock) Race
And one piece of technology that NASA wants to improve is the atomic clock. They want to build new atomic clocks for space.
Short Wave
The Great Space (Clock) Race
There are hundreds. Many of them are perched on navigation satellites. I had no idea, actually, like navigation uses time. It's just like in the 1600s. But here in the US, you know, our satellite based navigation system is GPS.
Short Wave
The Great Space (Clock) Race
A tale about how time tells us our place in the world. So, Gina, are you familiar with longitude?
Short Wave
The Great Space (Clock) Race
But the atomic clock system, as it stands right now, is error prone. Yeah. GPS clocks are estimated to drift by about 10 nanoseconds a day, which I know doesn't sound like a lot. But an error of even a microsecond in space can translate to an error of 300 meters on the ground. Right.
Short Wave
The Great Space (Clock) Race
So to correct for clock drift, GPS clocks will send a signal a few times a day down to Earth and ask, you know, hey, am I on time?
Short Wave
The Great Space (Clock) Race
But this process is kind of a pain, you know, this constant like phoning home. So for years now, NASA has been searching for a clock that is capable of autonomous navigation, able to operate as its own unit with minimal updates and be even more precise. All of this reminds me of what the Board of Longitude was trying to do all those centuries ago. Holly, she calls her clock OASIC.
Short Wave
The Great Space (Clock) Race
I'm going to explain why OASIC holds such promise, what all those different words in that sentence mean. But I need to call upon the spirit of my grandfather, Bob, who was a clock repairman, and first explain how an atomic clock works. As a physicist, I still like struggle with this. So let's do it. It's like the Mr. Potato Head of science. You have to smash so much tech together to make it go.
Short Wave
The Great Space (Clock) Race
So all you need to know about a clock, this is true of all clocks, is they are feedback loops. And there's generally three elements that talk internally to each other within the clock to keep it steadily ticking. Mm hmm. The first part is an oscillator.
Short Wave
The Great Space (Clock) Race
Like a pendulum, which swings back and forth once per second. In modern clocks, their pendulum is actually a crystal of quartz. When jolted with electricity, the quartz will vibrate at a precise frequency and emit electrical pulses, which can then be measured by a counter. Which counts up those swings. those cycles and displays them. Okay, so you got your oscillator, you got your counter.
Short Wave
The Great Space (Clock) Race
Yeah. The longitude there is zero degrees and extends by 180 degrees westward and 180 degrees eastward. And back in the 1600s, it was really difficult to calculate longitude. Right. A ship leaving port would set two clocks, one for the prime meridian and another for local time. So crews would update their local time as they sailed, calculating it by using the position of the sun.
Short Wave
The Great Space (Clock) Race
What's the third thing that makes it a clock? Your reference. So the reference ensures that the oscillator vibrates at the right frequency and doesn't cause the clock to drift. And that's where the atoms come in. An atomic clock is called that because it uses part of an atom as its reference.
Short Wave
The Great Space (Clock) Race
Atoms have this really special quality, and I'm going to turn it over to you now, Gina, to explain how atoms go from a grounded state to an excited state.
Short Wave
The Great Space (Clock) Race
Okay, so that. In the 1950s, scientists... hacked this particular ability of an atom and forced this energy transition in the atom at a regular interval and designed a clock that would count every time energy is released as the electron goes back down. And that is the frequency of the atomic clock. Okay, and they did this with light, right? Right.
Short Wave
The Great Space (Clock) Race
So traditional atomic clocks, the ones used for GPS, use microwaves, which is a form of light. How the clock works is it bombards an atom with microwaves, and that forces the atom from its grounded state to its excited state, and that transition happens at a steady pulse by which the whole clock is referenced.
Short Wave
The Great Space (Clock) Race
Which is not good enough for Holly as an atomic physicist. It's so precise, though. I know, but microwave is not precise enough for her. She and other atomic physicists work with optical light. Optical light has a shorter wavelength, so it's a better light source by which to control an atom.
Short Wave
The Great Space (Clock) Race
That level of precision means the clock should be better at staying on time without needing to dial Earth nearly as much for a time check.
Short Wave
The Great Space (Clock) Race
very precise frequency to get excited. So she told me to think of the laser like a drum beat. Boom, boom, boom. But the atom is like a conductor. And if you've ever seen an orchestra, you know a conductor will only tolerate the correct drum beat. Strontium is a very strict conductor.
Short Wave
The Great Space (Clock) Race
Yes, the laser being precise makes the strontium atom precise, which makes the clock precise. Peter Brereton, who runs the lab, says this is the power of quantum technology, of systems that use the physics of atoms to be more accurate than systems using classical physics.
Short Wave
The Great Space (Clock) Race
Like the Tesseract in the Marvel movies. Really? It'll be a blow. No. It will be a cube, though. It will be a cube. With all these optical systems bolted into place and a single strontium atom at its core. And I asked Holly what she ultimately hopes for these clocks, where she wants them to live.
Short Wave
The Great Space (Clock) Race
So if multiple OASIC clocks get installed up in space, scientists can compare how their frequencies change relative to each other. And this data will allow them to tackle some big questions like changes to Earth's gravitational field, which could tell us how sea ice is melting or groundwater is flowing.
Short Wave
The Great Space (Clock) Race
But the clocks aboard these ships were not reliable. Like, picture pendulum clocks on rolling seas, right? Surrounded by salty air and changes in temperature or barometric pressure. The clock parts are going to warp. All of this can ultimately cause the clock to stray from the correct time. We call this clock drift. Ooh, I like that term, clock drift. Yeah, clock drift is dangerous.
Short Wave
The Great Space (Clock) Race
Holly says the team wants a prototype system done by fall 2025, and she hopes OASIC could fly within six years. Okay. She is determined to do this for timekeeping and also for the field of physics.
Short Wave
The Great Space (Clock) Race
Because for her, a clock's real power is as a sensor to tell us where we are and how the universe is changing around us.
Short Wave
The Great Space (Clock) Race
Always. Special thanks to Deva Sobel, who wrote the incredible book Longitude, all about the longitude problem and the creation of the marine chronometer. It's a great read.
Short Wave
The Great Space (Clock) Race
Beth Donovan is our senior director and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barber. And I'm Emily Kwong. Thank you as always for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, Shortwavers, Emily Kwong here. So have you ever been on a hike, maybe in a forest in New England, and all of a sudden you see a perfectly laid row of stones and you think to yourself, what is that?
Short Wave
Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal
Wow. I thought that farmers were clearing more land and growing more crops to feed more people.
Short Wave
Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal
Okay. So focusing on abandoned land, when farmers walk away and the wilderness takes over, what happens? Like, is that good for the environment, for land to just be left alone?
Short Wave
Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal
So today on the show, what happens when humans disappear from the landscape? If we love nature, do we tend it? Or set it free. I'm Emily Kwong.
Short Wave
Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal
Well, I did grow up in Connecticut. And Dan, you recently wrote about this for Science Magazine. What are these random stone walls dotting so many northeastern forests?
Short Wave
Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal
And you are listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. Dan, you just said that this phenomenon of abandoned land is personal for Gargana. Why is that?
Short Wave
Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal
Oh, so somebody still owns the land. They just aren't doing anything with it.
Short Wave
Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal
And who better to study it than someone who knew it firsthand and kind of was a part of it?
Short Wave
Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal
The great cat delivery system. Okay, so what did Gargana want to figure out? What did she want to research upon her return?
Short Wave
Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal
Oh, this finding surprises me. So she believes that when humans disappear, at least according to her research, it's actually bad for biodiversity.
Short Wave
Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal
Yeah, right. And without them, it becomes, I don't know, like Blackberry Central or I don't know what happens.
Short Wave
Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal
Yeah. So this other point of view is saying, listen, the land has been shaped by farmers. There's been human influence. Right.
Short Wave
Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal
And it reminds me of the forest of my childhood in New England. Have forests been set free in other parts of the world?
Short Wave
Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal
Not the TV show, which I don't like. But I love the ecological concept of forests taking over.
Short Wave
Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal
I love how even in the let nature live school of thought, humans are still having a hand in bringing back some of their favorite species, even though ultimately shaping an ecosystem is a slow process.
Short Wave
Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal
Yeah, which is why it's such a great thing for scientists to study.
Short Wave
Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal
Dan, when you think about the end result of this research, how do you hope it will be used in shaping environmental stewardship in the future of land?
Short Wave
Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal
Dan Charles, science reporter. Thank you so much for bringing us this story.
Short Wave
Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal
Short Wavers, thank you for listening. Make sure you never miss a new episode by...
Short Wave
When Batteries Get A Face Lift, So Do Renewables
Oh, that's kind of small. How much power is this site creating?
Short Wave
When Batteries Get A Face Lift, So Do Renewables
Right. I mean, so much more electricity is needed these days with so many electric vehicles on the road and new data centers for artificial intelligence. Exactly.
Short Wave
When Batteries Get A Face Lift, So Do Renewables
Well, it's clearly a big topic. And you produced a three-part series all about batteries for your podcast, The Indicator from Planet Money.
Short Wave
When Batteries Get A Face Lift, So Do Renewables
Hey, Shortwavers, Emily Kwong here with Cooper Akatsumakim, a producer at The Indicator from Planet Money, as he is... Wait, what are you doing, Cooper?
Short Wave
When Batteries Get A Face Lift, So Do Renewables
Let's go on a battery-powered magic carpet ride. You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.
Short Wave
When Batteries Get A Face Lift, So Do Renewables
So grid-scale battery storage has taken off the past few years. But Cooper, a lot of different technologies have their moment. So why is this rise to the mainstream for battery tech different in some way?
Short Wave
When Batteries Get A Face Lift, So Do Renewables
These batteries, I feel like I've seen a descendant of them in my digital camera. They're the kind of boxy cube batteries that you can recharge.
Short Wave
When Batteries Get A Face Lift, So Do Renewables
We're battery hungry in the 90s and the aughts.
Short Wave
When Batteries Get A Face Lift, So Do Renewables
What's astonishing about this story is I was alive during this battery revolution, and I witnessed it from childhood to now. And I kind of just took it for granted that battery tech was like racing to keep up with our voracious need. Then, you know, I think about electric vehicles coming along. I mean, those must have bumped this development even more. EVs are everywhere.
Short Wave
When Batteries Get A Face Lift, So Do Renewables
Right. And you mentioned that earlier, that 2021 was the year there was this big jump, that battery storage capacity increased 230%. Right.
Short Wave
When Batteries Get A Face Lift, So Do Renewables
I have chills. I mean, this was a great time. And it's kind of cool to hear that the legacy of my iPod served a greater purpose.
Short Wave
When Batteries Get A Face Lift, So Do Renewables
Interesting, but in California, I'd expect energy to be coming from places like natural gas or hydro. You're telling me batteries are in the mix?
Short Wave
When Batteries Get A Face Lift, So Do Renewables
Oh, yeah, the cube battery that debuted in the 90s with the Sony camcorder?
Short Wave
When Batteries Get A Face Lift, So Do Renewables
I've always wondered this. Is there anything specific to lithium that makes this possible? Like, why is this so special?
Short Wave
When Batteries Get A Face Lift, So Do Renewables
I've made enough lemon batteries to know this.
Short Wave
When Batteries Get A Face Lift, So Do Renewables
The negative electrode is the anode. And it releases electrons. And the positive electrode is the cathode. And that absorbs the electrons. And when they are recharged, the electrons move back. It's like a cycle.
Short Wave
When Batteries Get A Face Lift, So Do Renewables
Right. So you're saying lithium ion batteries are easily allowing this electron transfer to happen.
Short Wave
When Batteries Get A Face Lift, So Do Renewables
Okay, so that's where we're at today. These cabinets of lithium iron phosphate batteries, LFPs, have become the standard for grid-scale battery storage. And it sounds like that technology is growing quickly.
Short Wave
When Batteries Get A Face Lift, So Do Renewables
Is there any reason for this momentum behind battery sales to ever stop? Like, can we forever expect batteries to keep growing at this exponential rate?
Short Wave
When Batteries Get A Face Lift, So Do Renewables
I didn't know that battery storage could be used at that level.
Short Wave
When Batteries Get A Face Lift, So Do Renewables
That's an exciting prospect that these sodium ion batteries might be a thing. Okay.
Short Wave
When Batteries Get A Face Lift, So Do Renewables
You mentioned earlier that most batteries used for grid scale storage have but a four-hour capacity. What about batteries that can last longer?
Short Wave
When Batteries Get A Face Lift, So Do Renewables
Right. And those companies historically have been using technologies at the whim of the weather. If the sun doesn't shine, solar energy isn't so great.
Short Wave
When Batteries Get A Face Lift, So Do Renewables
That's amazing to imagine a battery that could last for days. How would that work? How does this Redox Flow battery work?
Short Wave
When Batteries Get A Face Lift, So Do Renewables
Yeah, I can see that. So how batteries are made, they're changing chemistries. These are all reasons batteries have followed this upward trajectory. Cooper, I am located in D.C. Are you telling me that if I turned on the lights someday, is there a chance that power could come from a battery?
Short Wave
When Batteries Get A Face Lift, So Do Renewables
Well, we are definitely paying attention to it. Shortwave and The Indicator. Thanks to you.
Short Wave
When Batteries Get A Face Lift, So Do Renewables
Shortwave is the full battery series Cooper led for The Indicator is out now. We will link to the series in our show notes in addition to a previous episode we did on long-term battery storage and batteries of the future. Check them out. This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson and edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Kweisi Lee was the audio engineer.
Short Wave
When Batteries Get A Face Lift, So Do Renewables
Beth Donovan is our senior director. And Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Emily Kwong. Thank you for listening to ShoreWave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
When Batteries Get A Face Lift, So Do Renewables
Right, because you can store energy inside a battery somehow.
Short Wave
Flamingos: The Water-Bending Physics Masters
OK, this is a fluid dynamics story, isn't it? Yes. That's the physics part. Yes. And this question of like what's happening to the water with all this flamingo movement started years of research. It involved watching live flamingos, 3D printing flamingo beaks and feet. Nice.
Short Wave
Flamingos: The Water-Bending Physics Masters
And M, Victor and his team just recently published all their findings in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And what they found surprised them. So much of this feeding behavior, the stomping, the beak chattering, the upside down head, sometimes like skimming the water and sometimes dipping in and out. It was all in pursuit of one thing. What's that? Water vortexes.
Short Wave
Flamingos: The Water-Bending Physics Masters
Oh, like whirlpools. Basically, like they're swirling the water to hunt. Flamingos are predators? Yes, it blew my mind too. They're making water tornadoes to get shrimp and other food into their beak.
Short Wave
Flamingos: The Water-Bending Physics Masters
Today on the show, nature's waterbenders. We get into how flamingos control the water around them with their unique fashionable looks and dances, and why all of this adds up to more success in harsher environments. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
Flamingos: The Water-Bending Physics Masters
Okay, Gina, let's talk about flamingos. I understand flamingos, okay, they eat in this really odd way, and they're feeding in really salty, muddy waters where there isn't really any fish. Like, what's up with their eating behavior? Yeah, so flamingos roam in these, like, huge flocks, around, like, 70 birds on average, but they can get up to, like, over 300, and they need lots and lots of food.
Short Wave
Flamingos: The Water-Bending Physics Masters
And they're filter feeders, meaning they eat by filtering water through a mesh in their mouth. Oh, so they're like whales. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I thought, too. But also like some ducks and swans do this. And the prey of choice for flamingos are algae, tiny brine shrimp, fly larvae, like other tiny things that like fish also eat.
Short Wave
Flamingos: The Water-Bending Physics Masters
Hey, short wavers. Emily Kwong here with my co-host and our resident physicist, Regina Barber. Hey, Gina. Hey, Em. I have a really important physics question for you. Okay. What? Okay. Do you like flamingos? I love all birds, but flamingos are among the weirdest and the coolest. I think so. What does that have to do with physics? I'm going to show you a video of one feeding now. Okay.
Short Wave
Flamingos: The Water-Bending Physics Masters
So flamingos go to these places that have little or no fish so that there's more food available, like less competition. Oh, so that's why they flock to these harsher waters. Yeah, and be that salty, muddy waters or really, really hot waters. Here's Victor Ortega Jimenez again.
Short Wave
Flamingos: The Water-Bending Physics Masters
Flamingos are eating out of the hot tub. Yeah. Nature. Like this whole story, like I was I was getting so much new information. But let's go back. Let's go back to that day at the Atlanta Zoo where Victor saw like feeding flamingos, making tornadoes in the water like this prompted him to run home. and start looking through scientific papers, and he realized there wasn't a lot out there.
Short Wave
Flamingos: The Water-Bending Physics Masters
Like, there's very little research on flamingos' eating behaviors. It was mostly, like, descriptions of what they look like, and the research seemed to be really focused on flamingos' tongues. These researchers writing these papers thought that the main driver of getting the food into the beak was the tongue, like a piston bringing water in and out.
Short Wave
Flamingos: The Water-Bending Physics Masters
But Victor had a hunch that the tongue, like, it wasn't the whole story. There had to be more. Like, it can't all be the tongue. Like, why are the flamingos dipping their head upside down, like, feeding upside down, like, in the water? Yeah, and, like, why are they stomping their feet? Right, right. Why do they march? And, like, why do they chatter their beaks?
Short Wave
Flamingos: The Water-Bending Physics Masters
And, like, opening and closing it 12 times a second. Wow, that's a lot. Yeah, it's very, very fast. And all of these things are all happening at once. And Victor and his team had to break the whole process down. Like, so they looked at four different behaviors individually. Right. All right, walk us through. Which behaviors did he focus on?
Short Wave
Flamingos: The Water-Bending Physics Masters
Okay, so let's first talk about chattering, which in this study is just like flamingos rapidly opening and closing their beaks. To really drill down on this more, Victor and his team went to the Nashville Zoo to get footage of flamingos eating so that they could bring that footage back to their lab and compare that natural eating footage to experiments they ran with like two sets of beaks.
Short Wave
Flamingos: The Water-Bending Physics Masters
And one set of beaks were 3D printed, and the other set was from deceased flamingos donated after death by the Atlanta Zoo. What were they trying to figure out? They were trying to figure out, like, what is this chattering doing?
Short Wave
Flamingos: The Water-Bending Physics Masters
So it's not making the water spin? No, the tongue isn't really making that water spin. It's really the beak itself chattering. And it's also dependent on this, like, unique shape of the beak. Oh, yeah, because I guess flamingo beaks are curved, right? Yeah. More specifically, like they're asymmetric.
Short Wave
Flamingos: The Water-Bending Physics Masters
They're kind of like L-shaped and like the top of the beak is flat and it's thinner than the bottom mandible. And Victor says this asymmetry is important.
Short Wave
Flamingos: The Water-Bending Physics Masters
Yeah. So flamingos are different filter feeders than whales. They're doing a lot more. Got that. OK. What other behaviors did they study? The second behavior that they looked at was the fact that flamingos stick their head like straight in and out of the water. It's like dipping. And because of the shape of the beak, this also creates vortexes.
Short Wave
Flamingos: The Water-Bending Physics Masters
Go ahead and pull it up. Oh, this is cute. OK, so, yes, we have this the classic pink leggy flamingo, but he's eating by dipping his head in the water. Yeah, he's got this curved beak at the end of his long neck and this large tongue. And I guess I didn't know they did this. He's stomping his feet in the water, too, like pep, pep, pep, pep, pep. Yeah, yeah.
Short Wave
Flamingos: The Water-Bending Physics Masters
To study this part of eating, they trained these Chilean flamingos at the Nashville Zoo to feed in this aquarium tank. And they recorded these little water tornadoes like with each dip of their beak. And this helped the food drift up into their beaks. That sounds delicious. OK, so flamingos. Quick summary. It's the chattering of the beaks in combination with the shape of the beak.
Short Wave
Flamingos: The Water-Bending Physics Masters
Yeah, like it's all of those things working together to like co-create these vortexes. What about the foot stomping? Yeah, so like Victor and his team studied that as well. They created this like mechanical flamingo foot that was like flat when you stepped into the water.
Short Wave
Flamingos: The Water-Bending Physics Masters
And then when it came up, it kind of retracted like an umbrella.
Short Wave
Flamingos: The Water-Bending Physics Masters
And that's how flamingo feet actually work in the wild. And in the lab, they saw that, yes, this motion also created vortexes. They could stomp for food? Yep.
Short Wave
Flamingos: The Water-Bending Physics Masters
On all of this, I can kind of see all these elements working together now that flamingos aren't just passive eaters. No. They are guiding this food into their mouth. Yeah. Remember we said that they're predators, right? And that's the main idea Victor wanted to get across where, you know, they've combined all these different adaptations and behaviors into this like feasting dance.
Short Wave
Flamingos: The Water-Bending Physics Masters
I mean, even that skimming behavior I mentioned earlier, that movement helps create vortexes that bring particles of like food into their beaks that way, too. Is all of this, this dance, unique to flamingos? Are there other birds combining multiple behaviors to create a whole symphony of vortexes? There is a kind of like sandpiper, like a small shorebird, and they do create vortexes.
Short Wave
Flamingos: The Water-Bending Physics Masters
But Victor says it isn't the same as flamingos.
Short Wave
Flamingos: The Water-Bending Physics Masters
Well, let me ask you this, Gina. If flamingo feeding is so unique among birds, do scientists know anything about how flamingos evolved this way? Yeah, I mean, they know a little. They want to know more, definitely. And how they can find out more is by looking at babies. Baby flamingos. Yes, baby flamingos. They do not have curved beaks. They have straight beaks. Yes. How do they eat?
Short Wave
Flamingos: The Water-Bending Physics Masters
Well, the parents create this milk and they do feed them. But before the beaks start to curve, the juvenile flamingos do start to feed on their own. So like studying how flamingos feed when they transition from straight to curved beaks could tell scientists a lot about like the ancestors of flamingos.
Short Wave
Flamingos: The Water-Bending Physics Masters
Also, Victor said that there's like a lot of filter feeder birds and maybe scientists are missing something. Like maybe other birds right now are taking advantage of vortexes, but we just haven't looked at it enough. Right. Like maybe it's not unique among flamingos, but we'd have to do more research to find out. Well, Gina, how could this work help people?
Short Wave
Flamingos: The Water-Bending Physics Masters
And you'll notice his head is like upside down, like his eyes are going in first into the water. Yeah. And this pretty unusual feeding behavior, like, caught the eye of Victor Ortega Jimenez, and he studies biomechanics. Oh, so he studies how living things move. Yes, correct.
Short Wave
Flamingos: The Water-Bending Physics Masters
Not to be all about us, but I am curious. Yeah. I mean, I think it's a reasonable question. And that's one I asked Victor. And his answer was like really surprising.
Short Wave
Flamingos: The Water-Bending Physics Masters
The filter system that like flamingos use every day to like eat could help humans develop filters that like could clean our oceans. Oh.
Short Wave
Flamingos: The Water-Bending Physics Masters
A filter system that takes out microplastics inspired by flamingos. That's very cool. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the flamingos like feed in these muddy waters and they it doesn't really clog their system. So this might be an ideal system to like really understand and mimic. So, yeah. So flamingos can help us make these like better, more active biofilters.
Short Wave
Flamingos: The Water-Bending Physics Masters
The power of basic research or the power of flamingos, really. Yeah. Gina, thank you so much for bringing us this reporting on these birds and how they eat. My pleasure, Em. This episode was produced by Burleigh McCoy, edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez, and fact-checked by Tyler Jones. The audio engineers were Robert Rodriguez and Jimmy Keeley.
Short Wave
Flamingos: The Water-Bending Physics Masters
Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Emily Kwong. And I'm Regina Barber. And thank you for listening to Shortwave from NPR.
Short Wave
Flamingos: The Water-Bending Physics Masters
So back in 2019, during a trip to the Atlanta Zoo, Victor saw the flamingos feeding, like, opening and closing their beets, like, really, really, really quickly. And this is called chattering. And in the animal kingdom, this is, like, really bizarre. Like, animals don't really do all this. So as a scientist, Victor was like, why? Like, how?
Short Wave
This Is Your Brain On Dessert
What is your favorite kind of dessert? Key lime pie. Classy. Wait, what? I don't like it. All right. We're not going to debate that right here, right now. All desserts are considered. But I pose this exact same question to scientist Henning Fenzelau. He said gummy bears.
Short Wave
This Is Your Brain On Dessert
I'm fine with both. Which makes sense, you two, because Henning is from Bonn, Germany, the town where Haribo gummy candies began.
Short Wave
This Is Your Brain On Dessert
They say research is me-search. Okay, so now Henning is a research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Metabolism Research. And in a new study in the journal Science, his team investigates how our bodies can crave sugar even when our stomachs are full.
Short Wave
This Is Your Brain On Dessert
Yeah, to say the least. So to study how this works, Henning and his colleagues turned to mice. which have similar brains to us, and researchers fed mice to the point of fullness and then gave them sugar. And they noticed that those same neurons signaling satiety were also triggering the release of naturally occurring opiates called beta endorphins.
Short Wave
This Is Your Brain On Dessert
And this flood of opiates in the mouse brain triggered a feeling of reward.
Short Wave
This Is Your Brain On Dessert
Well, it is consistent with what we know about sugar for survival. Sugar, it signals to our brain, oh, this food is full of energy. It's easy to metabolize. Of course, excess sugar is bad for us. So Henning now wants to know how much this pathway contributes to overeating. Does it lead to the development of obesity? And can this discovery be built into weight loss drugs?
Short Wave
This Is Your Brain On Dessert
Something like that. Yeah. Because elephant seals, especially the mothers, eat a lot of fish. So how much these moms weigh can tell scientists how many fish there are that year, which has ripple effects for everything that eats those fish and everything that gets eaten by the fish.
Short Wave
This Is Your Brain On Dessert
So rude. Can you imagine coming back from dinner, dessert perhaps, and then someone's like, hop on the scale?
Short Wave
This Is Your Brain On Dessert
But anyway, using this method, scientists have weighed seals 600 times in the last two decades.
Short Wave
This Is Your Brain On Dessert
Roxanne's team published all of these details in the journal Science. So in addition to being a barometer for fish populations, seal health can also teach us about the health of the ocean in general, which is important for climate regulation, food security, and local economies.
Short Wave
This Is Your Brain On Dessert
So this study, it's very cool. It focuses on Alto Ospicio, a city of over 140,000 people in the Atacama Desert in Chile. This is one of the driest deserts in the world. So it's a prime spot to test out fog collection.
Short Wave
This Is Your Brain On Dessert
A little bit. Fog is created when large masses of warm air travel from the ocean over the land. And when that warm, wet air hits cold air in the desert, boom, you got fog. Then people can use meshes, nets, or even leaves to condense the fog, collect it in jugs or buckets, which are now full of fresh water.
Short Wave
This Is Your Brain On Dessert
The lead author of the study, Virginia Carter of Universidad Mayor in Chile, considers desert fog a sustainable water source. She pointed out that Alto Ospicio struggles in terms of infrastructure, budget, and green spaces. So ultimately, Virginia wants to take this data to city officials so they can make fog collection a reality across the city for drinking water, green spaces, and food gardens.
Short Wave
This Is Your Brain On Dessert
Tyler Jones checked the facts. Becky Brown and Jimmy Keeley were the audio engineers.
Short Wave
This Is Your Brain On Dessert
Scott, thanks so much. You ever thought about hosting a science podcast?
Short Wave
The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things and other currencies. With WISE, you can send, spend, or receive money across borders, all at a fair exchange rate. No markups or hidden fees. Join millions of customers and visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply.
Short Wave
Good Vibrations: How Fiddler Crabs Mate
And Beth was part of a team that put down geophones, so little sensors, to observe and record the vibrations these fiddler crops were creating in the sand. It's super dune-like, sandworm-esque to me. The team published their research last week in the Journal of Experimental Biology, and they saw that this dance had four different stages.
Short Wave
Good Vibrations: How Fiddler Crabs Mate
I think I would too, honestly. And in each of these courtship steps, the crabs were increasing their seismic vibrations.
Short Wave
Good Vibrations: How Fiddler Crabs Mate
Lots of reasons, actually. For one, there is 8.2 billion people on the planet, more than ever, and people need to eat. True. So there's been this massive effort in countries around the world to figure out if they can grow meat tissue in the lab.
Short Wave
Good Vibrations: How Fiddler Crabs Mate
Hey, short wavers. Rachel Carlson here. And Emily Kwong. With our biweekly science news roundup featuring the hosts of All Things Considered. And today we have Elsa Chang.
Short Wave
Good Vibrations: How Fiddler Crabs Mate
Minghao and his team used this special machine called a hollow fiber bioreactor— It delivered nutrients and oxygen to the myoblasts, mimicking blood vessels in the animal body. And after a few days, the myoblasts started to grow and form this cultured meat. The team published their results in the Cell Press Journal Trends in Biotechnology this week.
Short Wave
Good Vibrations: How Fiddler Crabs Mate
True, there are. But a lot of lab-grown meat on the market is artificially assembled. So the myoblasts are fused together. And this work demonstrates a way for labs to grow meat into one large tissue, thicker than a centimeter. Hmm. So it does bring us closer to a world where a whole lab-grown chicken breast could be scientifically possible. Okay.
Short Wave
Good Vibrations: How Fiddler Crabs Mate
I know it sounds like an oxymoron, but you've probably heard researchers are studying psychedelic therapy for patients with depression, PTSD, lots of other things. But people with conditions like schizophrenia are usually advised not to take psychedelics. So even if it turns out that these drugs do help treat certain mental health conditions, a lot of patients would be left behind.
Short Wave
Good Vibrations: How Fiddler Crabs Mate
Kind of. One of the researchers told me that I should think of each molecule like a car.
Short Wave
Good Vibrations: How Fiddler Crabs Mate
This is David Olson. He's the director of the Institute for Psychedelics and Neurotherapeutics at the University of California, Davis.
Short Wave
Good Vibrations: How Fiddler Crabs Mate
So first, how fiddler crabs drum their mating songs into the sand.
Short Wave
Good Vibrations: How Fiddler Crabs Mate
Yeah, so the study published this week tested JRT on mice, not people. And another researcher I spoke to who wasn't involved in the study, Anahita Basir-Nia, says while it's a promising step in the field, we still don't know how it would translate to humans and whether it would actually be non-hallucinogenic. So there's a lot more we need to learn.
Short Wave
Good Vibrations: How Fiddler Crabs Mate
And then we have a dinner for you, chicken nuggets, but grown in the lab. Ew.
Short Wave
Good Vibrations: How Fiddler Crabs Mate
You can hear more of Elsa on Consider This, NPR's afternoon podcast about what the news means for you. This episode was produced by Hannah Chin and Catherine Fink. It was edited by Patrick Jaron Watanane. Tyler Jones checked the facts. I'm Emily Kwong. And I'm Rachel Carlson. Thanks for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
Good Vibrations: How Fiddler Crabs Mate
Ew. Okay. And a drug like LSD without the trip. What's the point? You'll see. It's like a very elaborate date provided by science. All that on this episode of Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
All Of Life Has A Common Ancestor. What Was LUCA?
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, short ravers, Emily Kwong here with a story about your ancestors, but not your grandparents and not your great grandparents, nor your great, great, great, great, great, great grandparents.
Short Wave
Orange Cat Lovers, Rise Up!
Totally. Yeah, the greatest cats of all time. That is a fact. According to my orange tabby Zuko.
Short Wave
Orange Cat Lovers, Rise Up!
Also a boy. Okay, this is perfect because approximately 80% of orange cats are males and it's something researchers and cat enthusiasts have long noticed. Scientists suspected the reason maybe that orange color is a sex-linked trait, meaning the mutation responsible for that ginger hue is found on their sex chromosomes, specifically their X chromosome.
Short Wave
Orange Cat Lovers, Rise Up!
Yes, they found the mutation. They found its location. It's a single deletion on the X chromosome, which causes a nearby gene to be expressed in pigment cells, so cat hair color. This mutation was independently located by two teams of scientists, one led by Hiro Sasaki in Japan and another by Chris Kalin at Stanford University. Both papers were published in the journal Current Biology this week.
Short Wave
Orange Cat Lovers, Rise Up!
Proving what we always knew. Orange cats really are that special. And in case you were wondering, all orange cats do share the same mutation, meaning, Juana, there was a first orange cat.
Short Wave
Orange Cat Lovers, Rise Up!
So this bike sensor costs less than $25 to make. It attaches to the left handlebar. And in this study, these 15 cyclists took 240 rides with the sensor and recorded over 2,000 close passes, though thankfully no collisions. And the researchers presented these findings at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Japan.
Short Wave
Orange Cat Lovers, Rise Up!
Interestingly enough, Seattle has collected bike collision data for the last 20 years. And this study compared five years of that data to the research team's two months of close passes. And the data sets match pretty well. This tells us that close passes, so when a car comes close to a bike, that might be a good indicator of your chances of an actual collision in that section of the road.
Short Wave
Orange Cat Lovers, Rise Up!
Joe says the next step is to deploy these sensors in more cities on more bikes. He also wants this to be accessible to as many people as possible, perhaps by making the software and design eventually open source.
Short Wave
Orange Cat Lovers, Rise Up!
So people with gum disease could have a higher risk of heart failure or stroke, which we've known. But a recent study in the journal Circulation offers even more insight on the gum disease heart connection and specifically the link between gum disease and atrial fibrillation. I watch too many medical shows, so I know this one. That's AFib, right?
Short Wave
Orange Cat Lovers, Rise Up!
Yes, we're going to talk about orange cats. Also, a tech prototype for your bike that could help map safer routes. And the connection between gum disease and heart problems. All that on this episode of Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
Orange Cat Lovers, Rise Up!
I did not know that. So tell us, how are they connected? Well, this topic was a special interest to one of the study authors, Shunsuke Miyouchi. He's a cardiologist at Hiroshima University in Japan. Both his parents happen to be dentists. So even though Shunsuke works with hearts, He said he's always paid attention to people's oral care.
Short Wave
Orange Cat Lovers, Rise Up!
Though David Wu at the Harvard School of Dental Medicine, who wasn't involved with the study, says the way the mice were infected with the bacteria could have made it easier to spread through the bloodstream.
Short Wave
Orange Cat Lovers, Rise Up!
Everyone we spoke to hopes this study encourages greater collaboration between dentistry and and medicine to keep people's gums and hearts healthy.
Short Wave
Orange Cat Lovers, Rise Up!
Tyler Jones checked the facts. Kweisi Lee and Ted Meebane were the audio engineers. I'm Emily Kwong.
Short Wave
Love Fruit? Thank (Dinosaur) Mass Extinction
When the asteroid hit, it wiped out as much as 75% of all life on Earth. And suddenly there were no longer these big dinosaurs to knock down the trees. So the trees grew lush and tall, and the understory between the forest floor and the tree canopy got roughly 20% darker.
Short Wave
Love Fruit? Thank (Dinosaur) Mass Extinction
And paleontologists observed something weird in the fossil record around this time. Not long after the asteroid hit, seeds suddenly got bigger. Much bigger. And there was this sudden boom in fruit, the edible plant ovaries we love today. But why? And what did the death of the dinosaurs have to do with it?
Short Wave
Love Fruit? Thank (Dinosaur) Mass Extinction
Today on the show, how the mass extinction of the dinosaurs may have led to the fruit and vegetable aisle you see today. And how we're living in another time of mass extinction where the dinosaurs are us. I'm Emily Kwong and you're listening to ShoreWave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
Love Fruit? Thank (Dinosaur) Mass Extinction
Is America sliding towards authoritarianism? Hundreds of academics say yes.
Short Wave
Love Fruit? Thank (Dinosaur) Mass Extinction
Where is American democracy heading? Listen now to the Sunday story on the Up First podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
Love Fruit? Thank (Dinosaur) Mass Extinction
So Chris, let's talk about mass extinctions. The world has gone through five of them. How do you know something is a mass extinction?
Short Wave
Love Fruit? Thank (Dinosaur) Mass Extinction
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Today, we are going back in time, all the way to the Cretaceous period. Here's what it looked like.
Short Wave
Love Fruit? Thank (Dinosaur) Mass Extinction
All right. So you have this theory that the mass extinction got rid of these dinosaurs that were changing the forest and knocking down trees. And that meant that the forest understory was getting darker. How did you go about testing this idea that that dark understory then led to bigger seeds and fruits? Yeah. It's not like you can go back and check. You can't set up a wildlife camera.
Short Wave
Love Fruit? Thank (Dinosaur) Mass Extinction
Yeah, that's the same genre. You're taking all this real world data and you're putting it into a model and you're saying like, what if?
Short Wave
Love Fruit? Thank (Dinosaur) Mass Extinction
In the time immediately following the mass extinction of the dinosaurs, did that eventually give rise to the ancestors of primates?
Short Wave
Love Fruit? Thank (Dinosaur) Mass Extinction
A time that Christopher Doty loves because of this one kind of dinosaur.
Short Wave
Love Fruit? Thank (Dinosaur) Mass Extinction
Well, I feel bad for them. Okay, did the model ever show this trend happening in the other direction?
Short Wave
Love Fruit? Thank (Dinosaur) Mass Extinction
Like who? Who were the new influencers? Right.
Short Wave
Love Fruit? Thank (Dinosaur) Mass Extinction
But then, you know, boom, seed size goes up again several million years after that. Woolly mammoths, saber-toothed tigers, giant sloths. What happened to those mammals and what happened to the plants?
Short Wave
Love Fruit? Thank (Dinosaur) Mass Extinction
Chris uses big data sets to understand ecosystems. He's an associate professor of ecoinformatics at Northern Arizona University. And he told me that sauropods were so big, they acted like ecosystem engineers.
Short Wave
Love Fruit? Thank (Dinosaur) Mass Extinction
Yeah. I mean, animals are clearly such a huge factor in shaping ecosystems as engineers, as influencers in a way. And we are currently in another mass extinction, the Holocene. Who are the influencers of today?
Short Wave
Love Fruit? Thank (Dinosaur) Mass Extinction
Ah, we're quite a variable to add to the model.
Short Wave
Love Fruit? Thank (Dinosaur) Mass Extinction
And considering the way the dinosaurs went, I just I don't feel great about this. So with all this in mind, how do you hope people think about the kind of like wax and wane of the understory in relationship to mass extinctions? Because we're in one right now.
Short Wave
Love Fruit? Thank (Dinosaur) Mass Extinction
And the way sauropods move nutrients and seeds around was through their poop.
Short Wave
Love Fruit? Thank (Dinosaur) Mass Extinction
This episode was produced by Burley McCoy and edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. It was 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 Emily Kwong. Thank you for listening to Shorewave, a science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
Love Fruit? Thank (Dinosaur) Mass Extinction
Maybe there was like a Mufasa sauropod who was like, my son, you'll be the grass someday. That's right.
Short Wave
Love Fruit? Thank (Dinosaur) Mass Extinction
Those sauropods were herbivores eating plants. And the plant seeds from this time were actually kind of small, like a centimeter across. And that was fine for them because of all this light in the understory.
Short Wave
Lessons in Love From Voles
Hey, Short Wavers, some good news. You can help us shape the future of our show by completing a short, anonymous survey. It's a chance to tell us what you like, what you don't, and what you want to hear more of. It's an awesome responsibility, but I trust you. And we want to hear from everyone, whether you're a day one listener or brand new. Just go to npr.org slash shortwavesurvey.
Short Wave
Lessons in Love From Voles
I know what this is. This is just a cuddle puddle. But I guess in the case of voles, it's a huddle puddle.
Short Wave
Lessons in Love From Voles
I've heard it referred to as the potion of devotion on this very show.
Short Wave
Lessons in Love From Voles
Today on the show, love, oxytocin, and some rodent role models. John, can we call it the Volentine special?
Short Wave
Lessons in Love From Voles
We'll also put the link in our show notes. Thanks. Okay, on to the show. You're listening to Short Wave. from NPR. Hey, short wavers. Emily Kwong here. It's Valentine's Day, so seems like the perfect time to take a deep dive into the neuroscience of love, specifically rodent love. I'm here with John Hamilton, NPR's own expert on murine romance. Hello, John.
Short Wave
Lessons in Love From Voles
OK, John, before we get into the world of love research and this shakeup around oxytocin, explain to me why scientists, in an effort to understand human relationships, have been looking at voles. I've never even heard of a vole.
Short Wave
Lessons in Love From Voles
Well, decades of research sounds like a slam dunk to me. Oxytocin really is the love hormone.
Short Wave
Lessons in Love From Voles
Yeah. I mean, it sounds like a complete shock, like that they were able to form a pair bond without oxytocin, love without the love hormone. How is that possible? Yeah.
Short Wave
Lessons in Love From Voles
I'm so intrigued by one through eight. Do scientists know what these other love potions are?
Short Wave
Lessons in Love From Voles
Love finds a way. At least vole love did in this case. John, is there a life lesson for humans in all of this?
Short Wave
Lessons in Love From Voles
I certainly can't live without others, which, yeah, suggests there's a little prairie vole in all of us.
Short Wave
Lessons in Love From Voles
John Hamilton, neuroscience correspondent for the ages. Thank you so much for coming on. And yeah, deepening my appreciation for what love really is. If you have a question about those butterflies in your stomach, send us an email at shortwave at npr.org. Today's episode was produced by Thomas Liu. It was edited by Gabriel Spitzer and Giselle Grayson and fact-checked by Anil Oza.
Short Wave
Lessons in Love From Voles
The audio engineer was Josh Newell. I'm Emily Kwong. Happy Valentine's Day, everyone.
Short Wave
Conan The Bacterium's Superpower: Resisting Radiation
Well, with the help of Brian Hoffman, yes. Brian's a chemist from Northwestern University. And conveniently, he has access to a tool that allows you to see what's happening inside a living cell and study his chemistry. So he and Michael partnered up. And Brian says going into the research.
Short Wave
Conan The Bacterium's Superpower: Resisting Radiation
meaning they would just see as much radiation resistance as there was for each of those parts individually.
Short Wave
Conan The Bacterium's Superpower: Resisting Radiation
Michael says that he hopes that this can lead to innovations. For example, a medication that astronauts can take to make them more radiation resistant before, you know, long missions to Mars.
Short Wave
Conan The Bacterium's Superpower: Resisting Radiation
Yeah. And after a spike in loneliness in the first few years of the COVID pandemic, the poll found that this year it's back down to pre-pandemic levels, that 33 percent of older adults feel lonely at least some of the time.
Short Wave
Conan The Bacterium's Superpower: Resisting Radiation
Plus, why some animals can restore their hearing naturally, even though other animals, like us, cannot.
Short Wave
Conan The Bacterium's Superpower: Resisting Radiation
And to that point, a 2022 study found that being chronically lonely can make people three times more likely to develop dementia.
Short Wave
Conan The Bacterium's Superpower: Resisting Radiation
Or find community, join book clubs, faith groups. The NPR Shots blog recently profiled nonprofits that pair older adults with teens to address the loneliness crisis.
Short Wave
Conan The Bacterium's Superpower: Resisting Radiation
How do they do that? It's cool. By regenerating hair cells in their inner ears. I mean, humans have these hair cells, too, but when they're damaged, they don't come back.
Short Wave
Conan The Bacterium's Superpower: Resisting Radiation
Smart. But if you were a zebrafish, you wouldn't have to. Because I wouldn't have ears. They do have ears. Wait, zebrafish have ears? They have inner ears. Go on, Justin. Well, basically, some fish and lizards have supporting cells that can act almost like understudies. If the main hair cells die on stage, for example, the supporting cells are right there to just bring hearing back.
Short Wave
Conan The Bacterium's Superpower: Resisting Radiation
Well, according to an analysis published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week, it might have something to do with gene enhancers. Think of gene enhancers like a switch.
Short Wave
Conan The Bacterium's Superpower: Resisting Radiation
It means more research. The study's lead author, Tuo Shi, says they want to understand why enhancers close for some species and not others.
Short Wave
Conan The Bacterium's Superpower: Resisting Radiation
And if it works in mice, there's the hope that one day maybe scientists will be able to reverse deafness in humans, too. That'd be cool. Yeah, I know, right? Ari, thank you so much for being on the show today.
Short Wave
Conan The Bacterium's Superpower: Resisting Radiation
This episode was produced by Rebecca Ramirez and Jordan Marie Smith. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez and Christopher Intagliata. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Ted Meebane and Gilly Moon were the audio engineers. Shout out. And I'm Emily Kwong. And I'm Jessica Young. Thanks for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
Conan The Bacterium's Superpower: Resisting Radiation
Hey Short Wavers, Jessica Young here. And Emily Kwong. With our bi-weekly science news roundup featuring the host of All Things Considered. And today we have Ari Shapiro. Hello! Happy to be here.
Short Wave
Conan The Bacterium's Superpower: Resisting Radiation
Oh, totally. OK, so formally, this bacteria is called Deinococcus reuterans. It was discovered back in the 1950s and has been long known to withstand radiation doses thousands of times higher than what it would take to kill a human or any other living thing.
Short Wave
Conan The Bacterium's Superpower: Resisting Radiation
Yeah, definitely. Because the implications could be really huge, like helping protect astronauts from radiation in space or other kinds of medical applications. But over the years, scientists have suspected that the bacteria's radiation shield has probably something to do with these ingredients inside of its cells, like phosphate, manganese, and peptides.
Short Wave
What Are California's Santa Ana Winds?
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, shortwifers. Emily Kwong here. So you may have been hearing about how the wildfires in Los Angeles are connected to the Santa Ana winds. These winds blow every year. But meteorologists with the National Weather Service in Los Angeles anticipated this week's windstorm would, quote, likely be the most destructive in over a decade.
Short Wave
What Are California's Santa Ana Winds?
We get into the science behind the winds and the role of human-caused climate change. You're listening to ShoreWave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
What Are California's Santa Ana Winds?
All right, Alexander, let's talk about the wins themselves, because I think a lot of people outside of California don't know what the Santa Ana wins are. What are they, and where do they originate?
Short Wave
What Are California's Santa Ana Winds?
Does the geography of the region make these winds unique to Southern California? Does this effect happen anywhere else in the world?
Short Wave
What Are California's Santa Ana Winds?
The winds picked up Tuesday morning. It is completely hazy. Dark. Sparking several fires across L.A. County. We've seen palm trees on fire. We've Especially in canyon slopes, where the wind dropped the humidity.
Short Wave
What Are California's Santa Ana Winds?
So these Santa Ana winds, they blow every year. These downslope gusts, the breath of the desert, as you called them, they become drier and warmer as they descend. And yet fire officials are calling this the most destructive windstorm in over a decade. Do you know why the Santa Ana winds are blowing so hard right now, this month?
Short Wave
What Are California's Santa Ana Winds?
Now, of course, winds don't create fires. They're not matchsticks. What sparks fires? And particularly right now in California, how is the wind contributing to the fires that we're seeing now?
Short Wave
What Are California's Santa Ana Winds?
How does the addition of the wind cause this fire to spread? Because it carries the fire? Like, what's happening there?
Short Wave
What Are California's Santa Ana Winds?
Right. Of course, key to all of this is that California is already very dry to begin with. You have vegetation dried to a crisp from a summer that broke heat records and very little rainfall at the start of the rainy season. Was the dryness leading up to this winter of concern to you? Did you anticipate something like this could happen?
Short Wave
What Are California's Santa Ana Winds?
We talked to Alexander Gershnov about this. He's a research meteorologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego. And he says that last winter was really wet and vegetation flourished. But this year, the L.A. area has received very little rain for months.
Short Wave
What Are California's Santa Ana Winds?
Wildfire season typically runs from like the early start of the summer into the fall, but it's January. What can Californians expect in this region of their weather?
Short Wave
What Are California's Santa Ana Winds?
Well, Alexander, thank you so much for talking to me about the science of what's happening in the environment that's driving all this. It was really good to chat with you.
Short Wave
What Are California's Santa Ana Winds?
This episode was produced by Jessica Young. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez. Kweisi Lee was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Emily Kwong. Thank you for listening to Shorewave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
What Are California's Santa Ana Winds?
The largest and earliest of the fires was in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood. Within hours, other fires began, including the Eaton, Hearst, Lydia, and Sunset fires.
Short Wave
What Are California's Santa Ana Winds?
As of this taping Thursday afternoon, this patchwork of fires has claimed the lives of five people and leveled the homes and businesses of multiple communities. Nearly 180,000 people have been ordered to evacuate. and nearly 30,000 acres have burned. So today on the show, we talk about the chain of environmental and weather events that led to these fires.
Short Wave
Could AI Go Green?
Yes, some think exponentially. Gina, by 2028, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory forecasts that data centers could consume as much as 12% of the nation's electricity. That's 580 terawatt hours. Okay, can you give me like a different way to kind of think about how much that actually is?
Short Wave
Could AI Go Green?
So, Sasha is on a quest to find AI models that are smaller and use less energy. She is now the climate lead at Hugging Face, which is an online community for AI developers to share models and data sets.
Short Wave
Could AI Go Green?
Yes. So virtual assistants such as ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, they are all powered by what's known as large language models. And Sasha, as she made quite plain in her 2023 TED Talk, is not a fan.
Short Wave
Could AI Go Green?
Because today on the show, we're going to talk about why bigger isn't always better when it comes to generative AI. In part two of our series, we'll talk about how this big, sprawling industry is looking to shrink its environmental footprint with everything from small models, clean energy, and a back-to-the-future way of keeping data centers cool. I'm Emily Kwong.
Short Wave
Could AI Go Green?
There are three paths, as far as I can tell. But before we talk about small AI models, you know, what Sasha's describing, let's talk about two solutions to make large language model computing more green. And that is more efficient data centers and nuclear power. What do you want to start with, Gina?
Short Wave
Could AI Go Green?
Nuclear, obviously. Of course, of course. Nuclear, because Amazon Meta and Alphabet, which runs Google, made a big announcement in March, as reported by Straight Arrow News.
Short Wave
Could AI Go Green?
They're going to build new nuclear power plants and along with Microsoft, purchase nuclear energy. And Microsoft plans to get its nuclear energy by reviving a plant in Pennsylvania.
Short Wave
Could AI Go Green?
Yes. Only one of the reactors melted down, by the way. The whole site was shut down in 2019, and now Microsoft wants to bring it back.
Short Wave
Could AI Go Green?
They are turning into energy movers and shakers, for sure. But Jeff sees a discrepancy in this, you know, between the AI people and the nuclear energy people. Yeah.
Short Wave
Could AI Go Green?
Nuclear is also extremely expensive. Yes. And while solar and wind energy combined with batteries is quicker to build and more inexpensive than nuclear or gas power plants, it still takes time. I mean, like, do we need to move that quickly to grow AI? Well, it depends on who you ask. Kevin Miller, who runs global infrastructure at Amazon Web Services, says yes.
Short Wave
Could AI Go Green?
But Sasha Luciani, the computer scientist who we met earlier, feels this rush for AI is coming from industry, not from consumers.
Short Wave
Could AI Go Green?
Absolutely, yes. And until nuclear power catches up with AI's energy demand, data centers will, for the foreseeable future, continue to use fossil fuel sources.
Short Wave
Could AI Go Green?
So the question becomes, you know, is there a way to make data centers themselves more efficient? And the tech giants are trying through better hardware, better chips, and this really captured my attention, more efficient cooling systems. So that's solution number two. I love a tech solution to a tech problem. What are some of these strategies?
Short Wave
Could AI Go Green?
Well, one method that's become quite popular is to design a data center to bring in cool air from outside the facility. No chilling required. So they just like pull in this cold air. Yeah, this is what's known as a free air cooling system. And then there's a design paradigm that's getting a bit of buzz. Folks in the industry call it liquid cooling.
Short Wave
Could AI Go Green?
Okay, and this is a different kind of liquid cooling evaporation we talked about in the first episode. Yes, this does not use water. Liquid cooling uses a special synthetic fluid that runs through the hottest parts of the server to take the heat away. Okay. Or whole servers are immersed in this cool liquid bath.
Short Wave
Could AI Go Green?
You can think of this like coolant, but for computers. Okay. Benjamin Lee, who studies computer architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, said this is just a much more efficient way to cool off a hot computer.
Short Wave
Could AI Go Green?
So I wanted to talk to someone who's trying to bring liquid cooling to the market. And I found this company called Isotope. David Craig is their recently retired CEO.
Short Wave
Could AI Go Green?
David says the older way of cooling data centers, that daisy chain of moving heat with air and water, is just completely consumptive. Yeah. And while he couldn't tell me which tech companies have struck agreements with Isotope.
Short Wave
Could AI Go Green?
Isotope has announced public partnerships with Hewlett Packard and Intel. And Ashley Settle, a spokesperson at Meta, told me that Meta anticipates some of its liquid cooling enabled data centers will be up and running by 2026. Wow.
Short Wave
Could AI Go Green?
Depends on the data center. You can say that the very best liquid cooling system uses about 40% less energy than a traditional air cooling system. And it uses no water.
Short Wave
Could AI Go Green?
David is talking about something called district heating. And that's where the heat from a data center, any data center, doesn't have to be liquid cooled, is then diverted to a local neighborhood. And that is starting to happen at some data centers in Europe. Google has a data center in Finland that is providing heat to 2,000 people. That's so cool. I think I've actually read about this.
Short Wave
Could AI Go Green?
Like, I think it's called Homina data center. That's the one. Yeah. Yeah. Now, Hamana does not use liquid cooling, but it is kind of a poster child for a green data center. Hamana runs on 97% renewable energy and pumps in seawater from the Bay of Finland to keep cool. Wow, that's really cool.
Short Wave
Could AI Go Green?
Yes. And this is the challenge. Most data centers are not situated by bodies of water in northern Europe. Right. So I want to talk about a third and final innovation. And it's the one that the tech companies I spoke to were kind of quiet about. Oh, OK. But the one that scientists and engineers outside the industry could not stop mentioning. And that is smaller data. I mean, of course. Right?
Short Wave
Could AI Go Green?
One's good enough to complete a lot of the tasks we care about, but in a much less energy-intensive way. So a third and final solution to AI's climate problem is just to use less AI. One
Short Wave
Could AI Go Green?
Yes, I did reach out to DeepSeek for comment. I didn't hear back. But here's the thing, Gina. Large language models like ChatGPT are often trained with really large data sets. DeepSeek, on the other hand... appears to have been trained with fewer chips and consists of smaller models that run fewer parameters. Benjamin Lee at UPenn says this is called a mixture of experts.
Short Wave
Could AI Go Green?
But DeepSeek hears the thing about it. It's still a big general purpose model. And Sasha Luciani at Hugging Face wants to walk away from large models entirely.
Short Wave
Could AI Go Green?
Basically, Sasha wants to see companies develop small language models. Models that have far fewer parameters and are trained for a specific task.
Short Wave
Could AI Go Green?
Yes, something like that for AI models. But at least according to Sasha, tech companies are not embracing a rating system.
Short Wave
Could AI Go Green?
Hey, Em. Hi, Gina. So today I am bringing you a story of a personal crisis. It's very relatable. Go on. Okay. So in 2018, computer scientist Sasha Luciani took a new job, AI researcher for Morgan Stanley. She was excited to learn something new in the field of AI, but she couldn't shake this worry.
Short Wave
Could AI Go Green?
And as a science reporter for NPR, my question was just, do we really need all of this computing power when we don't know how much it's costing us environmentally and when it could imperil our climate goals? And David Craig, the recently retired CEO of iZotope, he chuckled when I said this and he's like, Emily, you know, human nature is against us.
Short Wave
Could AI Go Green?
In the mail. There's something I think that we as consumers can think about. The AI revolution is fairly new. Google CEO Sundar Pichai compared it to the discovery of electricity. Except, unlike the people during the Industrial Revolution, we know that this has a climate cost. Wow. Yep. And there's still time to adjust how and how much we use AI.
Short Wave
Could AI Go Green?
Special thanks also to Julia Simon on NPR's Climate Desk. Beth Donovan is our senior director. And Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy.
Short Wave
Stone Age To Bone Age?
That's right. Ignacio thinks that this shows advancements in cognition since early humans took what they knew about stone tools and how those were shaped and then just applied it to new materials like elephant and hippopotamus bones.
Short Wave
Stone Age To Bone Age?
Oh, well, you should because it's the super immersive gaming experience. You strap on a pair of goggles and you can see or hear another world. But Ari, imagine you could also taste another world.
Short Wave
Stone Age To Bone Age?
Yes, yes. What if in virtual reality you could taste lemonade served by someone in a kitchen on the other side of the country?
Short Wave
Stone Age To Bone Age?
Yes. Yes. Not the lemonade, but a simulation that matched their recipe. Researchers have been trying to do this in all kinds of ways. And Jinghua Li is one of them. She's a professor of material science and engineering at The Ohio State University. Her team invented this device called eTaste and described it in the journal Science Advances.
Short Wave
Stone Age To Bone Age?
And then in a matter of seconds, the data was wirelessly passed to this tiny device filled with edible chemicals, which then combined into a synthetic replica of the lemonade. And that cocktail of flavors was pumped across a volunteer's tongue. And voila, someone in Ohio is tasting a glass of lemonade in California. Here's Jinghua.
Short Wave
Stone Age To Bone Age?
Where we have for you a new flower, the woolly devil, found in a national park. Drinking lemonade in virtual reality.
Short Wave
Stone Age To Bone Age?
So not really, unfortunately not. Because, and Jinghua is the first person to admit this, taste is not the same thing as flavor. You know this, you cook. Nimesha Ranasinghe at the University of Maine reminded me that a lot of flavor is actually aroma.
Short Wave
Stone Age To Bone Age?
And how early humans may have made tools out of bone 1.5 million years ago.
Short Wave
Stone Age To Bone Age?
Park volunteer Deb Manley and employee Kathy Hoyt were on a hike in the backcountry, and they spotted this star-shaped flower. They took a picture and uploaded it to iNaturalist. That's the online network for identifying plants and animals. And Isaac Lichter-Mark, an evolutionary biologist, figured out that the flower didn't match any of the other images on iNaturalist.
Short Wave
Stone Age To Bone Age?
This new plant had the same feature. So it was giving sunflower in its own woolly way. And after looking at the DNA and its physical features in a scanning electron microscope, researchers were surprised to find that the woolly devil was not only a new species, but it was one rank higher than that. It represents a whole new genus within the larger family that contains sunflowers.
Short Wave
Stone Age To Bone Age?
Tyler Jones checked the facts. Patrick Murray and Jimmy Keeley were the audio engineers. I'm Emily Kwong. And I'm Rachel Carlson.
Short Wave
Stone Age To Bone Age?
But a new study out this week in Nature suggests early humans in Eastern Africa were also using bone to make tools like this. Two, Ignacio de la Torre... is a study author and archaeologist. He works at the Spanish National Research Council, and he says this dates the production of bone tools a million years earlier than scientists thought.
Short Wave
How Physics Could Make Big Crowds Safer
What we always hope for when we study the fossil record is to learn lessons about what causes life to change, to survive or to go extinct.
Short Wave
What Can Minecraft Teach Us About Learning?
Specifically, the lead researcher of the study, Charlie Wu, said he was curious about the argument that human success is not only because of individual brains.
Short Wave
What Can Minecraft Teach Us About Learning?
In some scenarios the rewards were clustered which altered how much players had to interact with each other and learn socially. And what the researchers found is that the most successful players were the most adaptive like switching between individual mining and using social learning when the situation called for it.
Short Wave
What Can Minecraft Teach Us About Learning?
Hey, short wavers. Emily Kwong here. And Regina Barber. We're here with our biweekly science news roundup featuring the host of All Things Considered and fellow gamer. Pinball wizard. Juana Sars.
Short Wave
What Can Minecraft Teach Us About Learning?
Okay, but what does he mean by that? It means that individual learning and social learning are informing each other. And like that flexibility between switching between both of them is like the key to being really successful. And that's actually new. And using Minecraft to find that is also unique.
Short Wave
What Can Minecraft Teach Us About Learning?
And it's important that research keeps up with these like modern social interactions.
Short Wave
What Can Minecraft Teach Us About Learning?
Ivan is talking about how if a home cook is not careful, he can cause proteins in the cheese to clump together, which makes for like a stringy sauce that coats the pasta unevenly.
Short Wave
What Can Minecraft Teach Us About Learning?
So there is a critical threshold of starch above which the sauce does not separate, and that's 1%. So if you go below 1% starch concentrations relative to the mass of the cheese, you get cheese clumps. And the ideal ratio is 2.5%. I am going to need a recipe. Emily, help me.
Short Wave
What Can Minecraft Teach Us About Learning?
So they were curious about what the link was. And in this study, the researchers looked at samples from almost a thousand patients around the world. And the researchers saw that the colibactin left behind DNA mutations that were over three times more common in early onset cases than when people were diagnosed after age 70.
Short Wave
What Can Minecraft Teach Us About Learning?
And they looked at the timing of these mutations and think they happen in the first 10 years of a person's life. Oh, interesting.
Short Wave
What Can Minecraft Teach Us About Learning?
And that knowledge is power. With this lead, researchers can ask the big questions, like why those changes are happening, what other factors might be important, and if there are aspects of our environment, our lifestyle, or diet, they may cause these microbes to behave differently. Juana, thank you so much for coming on.
Short Wave
What Can Minecraft Teach Us About Learning?
This episode was produced by Erica Ryan and Rachel Carlson. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez and Patrick Jaron-Watananen.
Short Wave
What Can Minecraft Teach Us About Learning?
And I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
What Can Minecraft Teach Us About Learning?
Yeah, it's got very blocky graphics, calming music, and one of the goals of the game is to collect resources around this expansive landscape of mining, building materials, gems, and food. Right.
Up First from NPR
Grading Trump's First 100 Days, Presidential Retaliation, Detained Student Speaks
But some experts worry that we don't know enough about how regularly taking melatonin affects kids in the long term. So today on the show, melatonin and kids, what the research says, how melatonin is being used, and how to navigate obstacles for getting kids enough Cs. I'm Emily Kwong, and you're listening to Shorewave, the science podcast from NPR.
Up First from NPR
Grading Trump's First 100 Days, Presidential Retaliation, Detained Student Speaks
Okay, so Michael, we are talking today about melatonin. It is a hormone that the human body naturally produces. But I want to hear more about the history of this supplement. This is synthetic melatonin that a lot of people have started taking, and some people are giving it to their kids. When did people start taking melatonin?
Up First from NPR
Grading Trump's First 100 Days, Presidential Retaliation, Detained Student Speaks
And that's mostly for adults. When did children start to use melatonin?
Up First from NPR
Grading Trump's First 100 Days, Presidential Retaliation, Detained Student Speaks
Yeah. A lot of melatonin packaging is just very friendly looking. I mean, it's like these big bottles and the melatonin supplements come in sometimes very yummy flavors. Sometimes they're gummies. So is it really being marketed to kids in a very deliberate way?
Up First from NPR
Grading Trump's First 100 Days, Presidential Retaliation, Detained Student Speaks
Yeah. And I want to add here. A key distinction you make throughout this reporting is that melatonin is not a vitamin. It is a hormone. Why is that distinction so important?
Up First from NPR
Grading Trump's First 100 Days, Presidential Retaliation, Detained Student Speaks
Yeah.
Up First from NPR
Grading Trump's First 100 Days, Presidential Retaliation, Detained Student Speaks
Let's talk about the research. So obviously there's not enough, but for what is available, what do sleep scientists have to say about kids taking melatonin?
Up First from NPR
Grading Trump's First 100 Days, Presidential Retaliation, Detained Student Speaks
It's true. We don't really know.
Up First from NPR
Grading Trump's First 100 Days, Presidential Retaliation, Detained Student Speaks
But
Up First from NPR
Grading Trump's First 100 Days, Presidential Retaliation, Detained Student Speaks
Now, melatonin is considered fairly safe and benign in terms of overdose potential. But if there are side effects to melatonin, what are they?
Up First from NPR
Grading Trump's First 100 Days, Presidential Retaliation, Detained Student Speaks
Was melatonin ever supposed to be taken long term? Because it seems like it was originally designed to be a sleep aid for a short term situation. Yeah.
Up First from NPR
Grading Trump's First 100 Days, Presidential Retaliation, Detained Student Speaks
It might be beneficial to them.
Up First from NPR
Grading Trump's First 100 Days, Presidential Retaliation, Detained Student Speaks
Okay. For all the desperate parents hanging on your every word, what do experts suggest for kids who have trouble sleeping but they want to try other solutions first?
Up First from NPR
Grading Trump's First 100 Days, Presidential Retaliation, Detained Student Speaks
Well, we want kids to have a good night's sleep for sure. And we want parents to sleep too. So Michael, thank you for dipping your toe in the melatonin research waters so that we all can get a good night's sleep.
Up First from NPR
Grading Trump's First 100 Days, Presidential Retaliation, Detained Student Speaks
This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson. It was edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez, and fact-checked by Tyler Jones. Maggie Luthar was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Emily Kwong. Thank you for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Up First from NPR
Grading Trump's First 100 Days, Presidential Retaliation, Detained Student Speaks
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, Shore Wavers, Emily Kwong here. Okay, so possibly my favorite thing in the entire world is a good night's sleep. I mean, nothing makes a bigger difference to my mental and physical health. Without quality sleep, we're less productive, grumpy. It can even affect our hearts. And for kids, sleep is crucial for physical, mental, and emotional development.
Up First from NPR
Grading Trump's First 100 Days, Presidential Retaliation, Detained Student Speaks
But there are a lot of things keeping us awake these days. Screens, electronics, stress. Researchers say that, like adults, kids are having problems falling asleep and staying asleep. So more and more parents are turning to a supplement called melatonin as a possible solution.
Up First from NPR
Grading Trump's First 100 Days, Presidential Retaliation, Detained Student Speaks
Michael Scholzen is a contributing editor at Undark Magazine, where he writes and edits stories about science. And he recently looked into why more and more people are using sleep supplements, especially with their kids. Melatonin is a hormone, and it's one that our bodies produce naturally.
Up First from NPR
Grading Trump's First 100 Days, Presidential Retaliation, Detained Student Speaks
Every night, the pineal gland in our brain releases a bit of melatonin.
Up First from NPR
Grading Trump's First 100 Days, Presidential Retaliation, Detained Student Speaks
Melatonin is widely considered safe for adults in low doses and for kids with certain neurological and neurodevelopmental conditions that get in the way of a good night's sleep.