Regina Barber
Appearances
NPR News Now
NPR News: 01-21-2025 8PM EST
That sound isn't from Star Trek. It's an audio clip created from radiation coming 100,000 miles above Earth's surface. These waves are thought to be created from bunched up, charged electrons trapped in Earth's magnetic field. These rising and lowering waves of radiation have been studied for the past 70 years.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 01-21-2025 8PM EST
And a new study from Beijing, China, published in the journal Nature, was the first to find these waves at this location, where Earth's magnetic field is weak and less uniform. This information could help protect satellites and other spacecraft from damage, since chorus waves can accelerate particles to close to the speed of light. Regina Barber, NPR News.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 02-23-2025 8PM EST
Alto Espicio lies in the Atacama Desert, and it's perfectly situated to collect fog. At about 2,000 feet in Chile, Alto Espicio is the only city which is inside of the cloud. That's geographer Virginia Carter. She led a study that gathered data at various fog collection sites around the city for a year. In the past, fog collection has only been studied and used in small villages.
NPR News Now
NPR News: 02-23-2025 8PM EST
But for the first time, Carter and her team used computer modeling to map how much water could be collected from fog all over the region. They found that fog could supply hundreds of thousands of liters of drinking water per week, enough to supplement the water demands of under-resourced parts of the city. Regina Barber, NPR News.
Short Wave
This Radio Wave Mystery Changed Astronomy
These radio waves shoot out of the magnetic poles of some of these neutron stars as they spin. And on Earth, you'll only detect the radio waves if they happen to sweep across our planet, like the beam of a lighthouse.
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This Radio Wave Mystery Changed Astronomy
It looks like a pulse. That's why these particular stars are called pulsars.
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This Radio Wave Mystery Changed Astronomy
Today on the show, Dr. Jocelyn Bell Burnell's story, how her astronomical discovery revolutionized an entire field of science. I'm Regina Barber, and you're listening to Shortwave, the daily science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
This Radio Wave Mystery Changed Astronomy
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Jocelyn Bell Burnell knows that in space, just as in life, nothing lasts forever.
Short Wave
This Radio Wave Mystery Changed Astronomy
Jocelyn was just a teenager when astronomy took root.
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This Radio Wave Mystery Changed Astronomy
I can't work at night. That is, until she found a kind of astronomy she could do in the daytime. Radio astronomy.
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This Radio Wave Mystery Changed Astronomy
So with a bachelor's degree in physics and a desire to be a daytime astronomer, Jocelyn starts graduate school at Cambridge, where she helps build the radio telescope that she used to detect the first pulsar. Although, at the time, that's not what she was looking for.
Short Wave
This Radio Wave Mystery Changed Astronomy
At the time, astronomers had only ever detected about 20 of these elusive quasars.
Short Wave
This Radio Wave Mystery Changed Astronomy
So Jocelyn searches for these quasars by detecting radio waves with this telescope. Basically, some of the light from distant stars reaches us as radio waves, and these antennae on the radio telescope focus those waves. The receiver detects those signals and turns them into data points on a page that look kind of like the marks on a polygraph.
Short Wave
This Radio Wave Mystery Changed Astronomy
And as one of the only women, she was very concerned about proving she was capable of that real work.
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This Radio Wave Mystery Changed Astronomy
But as she's collecting data, Jocelyn saw that odd signal again. And she recognized it. So she goes back to her miles of paper data and finds another signal that doesn't make sense.
Short Wave
This Radio Wave Mystery Changed Astronomy
Massive stars more than 20 times bigger than our sun eventually collapse into black holes. Infinitely small points of immense mass that we can't directly see. Then there are smaller stars, still bigger than our sun, that don't fully collapse into black holes.
Short Wave
This Radio Wave Mystery Changed Astronomy
But the pulses occupied only about a quarter of an inch on the paper. When she showed it to her thesis advisor, Anthony Hewish, he said she needed to enlarge it.
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This Radio Wave Mystery Changed Astronomy
But she kept at it. And finally, she detected pulses again, this time in a string. One and a third seconds apart.
Short Wave
This Radio Wave Mystery Changed Astronomy
Antony Hewish presented the data to an audience of scientists. The data lit up the scientific community and other researchers switched gears, looking for more evidence of these pulsating radio waves. Soon, scientists concluded that the radio waves the telescope was picking up were from a neutron star's poles. And so when spinning, they might sweep the radio waves across Earth.
Short Wave
This Radio Wave Mystery Changed Astronomy
The discovery of pulsars amounted to a 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics for Antony Hewish, which he split with astronomer Martin Ryle, who hugely advanced the sensitivity of telescopes. After Jocelyn made her landmark discovery, she married Martin Burnell, and her career took a turn.
Short Wave
This Radio Wave Mystery Changed Astronomy
Peculiar because with each move, she looked for a new astronomy job.
Short Wave
This Radio Wave Mystery Changed Astronomy
And quite often got the kind of jobs you get when you go begging. And so the work wasn't always in radio astronomy. the field where she made her name unmarried.
Short Wave
This Radio Wave Mystery Changed Astronomy
Today, pulsars allow astronomers to measure cosmic distances, look for gravitational waves, and search for planets beyond our solar system.
Short Wave
This Radio Wave Mystery Changed Astronomy
Those neutrons? They were created when the pressure from the explosion compressed the protons and electrons so tightly together, they combined.
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This Radio Wave Mystery Changed Astronomy
Thanks, as always, to you listeners for tuning in. And we asked you for some of your favorite space facts.
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This Radio Wave Mystery Changed Astronomy
This episode was produced by Burleigh McCoy, edited by Rebecca Ramirez, and fact-checked by Rachel Carlson. The audio engineer was Natasha Branch. Giselle Grayson is our senior supervising editor. I'm Regina Barber. Join us again tomorrow for more Shortwave from NPR.
Short Wave
This Radio Wave Mystery Changed Astronomy
A chunk of a neutron star the size of just a sugar cube would weigh a billion tons on Earth. Or no big deal about the weight of a mountain. And because of that compression, these stars have much stronger magnetic fields.
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Where Are We In The Quest To Find Alien Life?
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. When I was a teenager in the late 90s, I downloaded a special screensaver. It had lots of pretty colors and graphs, but that's not why I wanted it. My goal was to humbly contribute to humankind's search for intelligent life in the universe, a.k.a. aliens. This effort is officially called the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI.
Short Wave
Where Are We In The Quest To Find Alien Life?
David Todd even convinced the U.S. Army and Navy to listen for anything unusual in radio signals.
Short Wave
Where Are We In The Quest To Find Alien Life?
But humans have continued to look for signs of intelligent life in the universe. And James says we've barely scratched the surface.
Short Wave
Where Are We In The Quest To Find Alien Life?
And that's where our scientific efforts have mostly been, looking at radio transmissions from outer space. SETI has looked for spikes, chirps, and unusual things from radio telescopes for about 60 years. But James and others think there's so much more data to sift through outside of these radio signals.
Short Wave
Where Are We In The Quest To Find Alien Life?
So today on the show, a legitimate look at the search for intelligent life in space, the ways we look, and how scientists are taking the search to the next level. I'm Regina Barber, and you're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. OK, James, let's just like get into it. There's this equation that people throw around.
Short Wave
Where Are We In The Quest To Find Alien Life?
It's an equation that tells us the likelihood that there's alien life that could send us a signal. It's called the Drake equation. Can you break that down for us?
Short Wave
Where Are We In The Quest To Find Alien Life?
The screensaver I downloaded, called SETI at Home, was part of a large-scale community project to use people's everyday PCs to comb through radio signals that hit Earth from space, mostly from stars. These signals have particular patterns. So if astronomers find a signal that doesn't quite fit those patterns, it could mean some intelligent life is sending them.
Short Wave
Where Are We In The Quest To Find Alien Life?
And the Drake equation doesn't take into account time. I personally was like, OK, the universe is like 13.8 billion years old. Our sun is like around 4.6 billion years old. I feel like there could have been civilizations that were coming on. I mean, that point. But that equation doesn't take that into account.
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Where Are We In The Quest To Find Alien Life?
Okay, so this illustration, this equation comes from a man who kind of began what led to like modern SETI.
Short Wave
Where Are We In The Quest To Find Alien Life?
Okay, and since SETI has been efficiently operational, that's like 1985, we haven't found anything, right? But you mentioned that analogy that we've only searched the equivalent of a pint glass of water versus the ocean that is the entire sky.
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Where Are We In The Quest To Find Alien Life?
Yeah. Yeah. But you're an astronomer, right, that looks at stars, not radio signals. But you're working with SETI. So, like, how are we going to search more of the sky, like get more than a hot tub in an ocean of water?
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Where Are We In The Quest To Find Alien Life?
OK, so there's even better technology on the horizon to make the search like even more comprehensive. I'm thinking of like the massive Vera Rubin telescope being built in Chile right now. How do you see this telescope impacting like how we look for life outside of Earth?
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Where Are We In The Quest To Find Alien Life?
Within a few years, the SETI at Home project recruited 3.8 million people.
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Where Are We In The Quest To Find Alien Life?
But James, all these decades of searching, we really haven't found anything. How are you this patient? How do you keep yourself inspired that this is going to be like this new era of SETI?
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Where Are We In The Quest To Find Alien Life?
James, thank you so much for coming here and really making me excited about searching for life in space.
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Where Are We In The Quest To Find Alien Life?
This episode was produced by Burleigh McCoy and edited by showrunner 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 Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Shortwave from regular old NPR, not Martian NPR.
Short Wave
Where Are We In The Quest To Find Alien Life?
That's my friend James Davenport. He's an astronomer at the University of Washington, and his focus is on stars. And I talked to him recently because, importantly for this episode, he's a collaborator with the SETI Institute, a nonprofit research organization that combs through astronomical data in search of signs of life outside of Earth.
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Where Are We In The Quest To Find Alien Life?
It's a search that goes way back, way before James and I took control of our family's computers, to 1924. when many researchers were excited about Mars, and Mars' orbit was close to Earth, making it a prime time to listen to signals from the planet. And so an unconventional astronomer named David Todd convinced multiple radio stations in the U.S. and one in South America to go silent.
Short Wave
New Antivenom, Thanks To 200 Intentional Snake Bites
There are lots of other different components in venoms. And we don't know going forward if we just neutralize the key components in the venom, what will the other toxins do? And this is why it's very important to do clinical trials.
Short Wave
New Antivenom, Thanks To 200 Intentional Snake Bites
I would say yes. I would want to, yeah.
Short Wave
What's In Your Personal Care Products?
Mariel, thank you so much for bringing us your reporting. Anytime. Thank you. This episode was originally produced by Claire Marie Schneider and edited by Megan Cain, with special thanks to Carmel Roth. It was produced for Shortwave by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. The audio engineer was Robert Rodriguez.
Short Wave
What's In Your Personal Care Products?
Beth Zonovan is our senior director, and Con Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy.
Short Wave
What's In Your Personal Care Products?
Yeah, I didn't realize that companies don't have to present their cosmetic products to the FDA for approval before they go on market.
Short Wave
What's In Your Personal Care Products?
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, Shore Wavers. Regina Barber here with Life Kit host, Mariel Sagada. Hey, Mariel. Hey, Gina. Okay, so, Mariel, recently on Life Kit, you've been reporting on the safety of personal care products.
Short Wave
What's In Your Personal Care Products?
Today on the show, the safety of cosmetic ingredients. Marielle gets into what it means for a product to be safe and what the latest research shows on some current ingredients of concern. I'm Regina Barber. And I'm Marielle Segarra. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
What's In Your Personal Care Products?
All right. In this shortwave life kit collab, Mariel, you're going to walk us through three takeaways from your reporting on the safety of like personal care products. Where do you want to start?
Short Wave
What's In Your Personal Care Products?
All right, and that brings us to the second takeaway. Learn about ingredients of concern, starting with fragrance.
Short Wave
What's In Your Personal Care Products?
Wow. So with all that in mind, like, does Emily have any advice? Definitely.
Short Wave
What's In Your Personal Care Products?
Okay, that's helpful. Mariel, next up is takeaway three, right?
Short Wave
Party In Peru: New Critters Just Dropped
And almost immediately, it became clear. There were a lot more critters out there than they thought.
Short Wave
Party In Peru: New Critters Just Dropped
This little bronze salamander climbing in the vegetation turned out to be more than just rare. It was completely new to science.
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Party In Peru: New Critters Just Dropped
And they continued to make many more discoveries over the course of the expedition.
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Party In Peru: New Critters Just Dropped
In all, the team recorded 2,046 species, 27 of which were previously unknown in the scientific world. Today on the show, preserving Peru. We take a look at the species the researchers found in the Altamayo and their importance to the Oahu who live there. Plus, my personal favorite, the blob-headed catfish. I'm Regina Barber, and you're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
Party In Peru: New Critters Just Dropped
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, short wavers, it's Regina Barber. And the story I have for you starts in northern Peru, where the Amazon basin meets the Andes Mountains.
Short Wave
Party In Peru: New Critters Just Dropped
So this expedition all started with Conservation International trying to understand the local habitat in this area of Peru to either protect what was there or, if needed, work to restore parts of the habitat so that all of the wildlife could continue to move around easily and healthily. To do that, they really had to understand the ecosystem, what's there, how it moves, how it lives.
Short Wave
Party In Peru: New Critters Just Dropped
And that's how Tron, plus the Peruvian researchers and their Awa Hu guides, ended up starting this assessment.
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Party In Peru: New Critters Just Dropped
Diego Durullani is an anthropologist with Conservation International. His job was to help the researchers work alongside the people living with the land, who already know the landscape. He said he was only there for a few days of the expedition and followed Tron during that time.
Short Wave
Party In Peru: New Critters Just Dropped
So he stayed put as the team continued up, photographing some of the species the team found, and he even had a favorite finding. But he didn't get a seat in person.
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Party In Peru: New Critters Just Dropped
The rat Diego's referring to is actually a mouse, a swimming mouse that Tron said belonged to a group of semi-aquatic rodents.
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Party In Peru: New Critters Just Dropped
And that wasn't the only new male. The team documented three more species that were new to science. A squirrel, a bat, a spiny mouse. On top of that, there were eight new fish species. One of them was my personal favorite from the study, the blob-headed catfish. It had like a body of a catfish. It was gray, spiny fins, the tail like you would expect to see.
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Party In Peru: New Critters Just Dropped
But then the head, it just transitions into this cartoonish, swollen squidward nose. But the interesting thing is that blob-headed fish wasn't a new discovery for everyone. Like, it definitely wasn't new to Yulisa Tiwihuahay, an indigenous woman on the team.
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Party In Peru: New Critters Just Dropped
It's not just the blob-headed catfish that's integral to daily life for locals. Yulisa says the forest has always been a really critical part of the Oahu culture.
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Party In Peru: New Critters Just Dropped
For example, the Awahun have a long tradition as warriors. And there were stories that Yulisa's grandparents would tell her about a specific kind of frog, the telepus frog, that warriors would use to poison the tips of their weapons.
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Party In Peru: New Critters Just Dropped
During the expedition, the team found that same frog that Yulisa remembers from the stories. These frogs are very rare, and Tran said they'd never been documented at this elevation before. Even Yulisa thought they had vanished from the forests.
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Party In Peru: New Critters Just Dropped
Overall, Yulisa was happy that Conservation International collaborated with the Awahun people during the expedition. She says she hopes this is something that other scientists can add to their research, too. Not just working with indigenous folks, but with indigenous women in particular. Because women are the ones who have more rights.
Short Wave
Party In Peru: New Critters Just Dropped
That's Tron Larson. He's an ecologist at Conservation International, a nonprofit organization based in Arlington, Virginia. He says that this area in Peru straddles two preserves, the Altamira Protection Forest and the Cordillera Escalera Regional Conservation Area. And it's being deforested. It's also under threat of more deforestation.
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Party In Peru: New Critters Just Dropped
Reporting this episode, it was clear that Tron and Diego shared this sentiment and really saw the value in Yulisa and her people being guides to show scientists where to find the animals and give a more complete picture of the landscape. That more holistic approach echoed a larger point Diego had about the expedition.
Short Wave
Party In Peru: New Critters Just Dropped
This area, full of human life, was also full of biodiversity. It was a place, up until now, scientists really hadn't thought to look at. It just makes you wonder, what else is out there that the scientific community hasn't seen? And who already knows about it? If you want to see some of the species from the Altamira, check out our digital story. We'll link it in our show notes.
Short Wave
Party In Peru: New Critters Just Dropped
Special thanks to Valentina Rodriguez-Sanchez for her beautiful voiceover work and to Daniela Amico for interpreting. This episode was produced by Hannah Chin and edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts, and Jimmy Keeley was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy.
Short Wave
Party In Peru: New Critters Just Dropped
I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
Party In Peru: New Critters Just Dropped
Because all that lushness makes it a great place for growing major agricultural products like pineapples, coffee, and chocolate.
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Party In Peru: New Critters Just Dropped
Trond and a team of 12 Peruvian scientists led a 38-day expedition into the area in the summer of 2022, guided by experts from the local indigenous tribe, the Awahun. And along the way, they set up data sensors to complete the survey. The goal was to create a management plan that benefits both the local people and the land, based on a survey of all the local plant and animal life.
Short Wave
How Nature Makes A Complex Brain
In mammals, the structure is near the top of the brain. It's sometimes called the cerebral cortex, and it includes an area called the neocortex, plus some other key structures.
Short Wave
How Nature Makes A Complex Brain
Birds and reptiles don't have a neocortex. So some scientists say mammal brains are totally unique. They must have evolved completely separately from birds and reptiles. But other researchers say while birds and reptiles may not have a neocortex, they do have some of the same neurons. They're just in different places.
Short Wave
How Nature Makes A Complex Brain
This side of the debate says maybe bird brains and mammal brains are more similar than they seem. So Fernando and his lab try to figure out how these structures develop, and if that process could tell us anything about what makes our brains different from bird brains. So today on the show, how does nature make a brain?
Short Wave
How Nature Makes A Complex Brain
Why the phrase bird brains could be a misnomer, and why humans may not be as special as we think. I'm Regina Barber, and you're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
How Nature Makes A Complex Brain
Okay, so Fernando, we're talking about how your study found that bird and mammal brains develop like through different processes. And so you're looking at these palliums of birds, reptiles, and mammals. And what did you find?
Short Wave
How Nature Makes A Complex Brain
Let's go back into like how this evolutionary structure happened. Like what does the study show you?
Short Wave
How Nature Makes A Complex Brain
What do birds, mammals, and reptiles all have in common? We're amniotes, meaning we develop in a fluid-filled egg covered in a membrane. That allows us to develop outside of water, unlike, say, a fish. And that means we all have a common ancestor that branched out into other species that researchers think probably lived over 300 million years ago.
Short Wave
How Nature Makes A Complex Brain
Wow. And then we were talking about this idea of, you know, these brains are different, but they're kind of doing similar things, this idea of convergent evolution. So, like, what is the process called convergent evolution?
Short Wave
How Nature Makes A Complex Brain
If your studies are kind of pointing towards the development of brains being convergent evolution, why is that significant to the understanding of how our brains work?
Short Wave
How Nature Makes A Complex Brain
And was probably similar to an amphibian, with some key differences.
Short Wave
How Nature Makes A Complex Brain
Yeah, and some birds can talk. Some birds can use tools.
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How Nature Makes A Complex Brain
Yeah, I mean, I find it fascinating. You're basically saying that, like, even though bird brains are different, the neurons are in different places, they're doing different things, they developed in different ways, they can still do similar tasks.
Short Wave
How Nature Makes A Complex Brain
But you're saying they're doing that and their intelligence is not the same intelligence we have.
Short Wave
How Nature Makes A Complex Brain
And I know that you didn't study humans, but I'm curious if you think like this research can tell us anything about whether there's something special about like the way the human brain developed.
Short Wave
How Nature Makes A Complex Brain
Fernando Garcia Moreno is an evolutionary and developmental neurobiologist. He says for a long time there's been a debate about how amniote brains, like birds and mammals, evolved, and what makes them similar. One brain structure called the pallium has been seen as a comparable structure in birds, mammals, and reptiles.
Short Wave
How Nature Makes A Complex Brain
Fernando, thank you so much for talking to us about bird brains. Of course.
Short Wave
How Nature Makes A Complex Brain
This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson, edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez, and Tyler Jones checked the facts. Our audio engineer was Kweisi Lee. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Sure Wave from NPR.
Short Wave
Some Dinos Had Feathers. Did They Fly?
For the longest time, I admit, I thought the people at the museums or in the movies were like, taking some creative license. Like, how would they know that all of these dinosaurs had those specific colors, that stripe pattern, these feathers? Because the thing that always threw me off was that some dinosaur displays in the museums had feathers and others didn't have any. Like, what gives?
Short Wave
Some Dinos Had Feathers. Did They Fly?
But of course, they were as accurate as possible. The colors, the patterns, and even which dinosaurs had feathers. Because spoiler alert, not all of them did. So today on the show, the gorgeous, vivid world of dinosaur feathers. Which dinosaurs had feathers? Were they using them to fly? And once and for all, what are ancient dinosaurs' relationship to birds today?
Short Wave
Some Dinos Had Feathers. Did They Fly?
You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
Some Dinos Had Feathers. Did They Fly?
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey short wavers, Regina Barber here. I'm going to start today's episode with a question. When I say dinosaur, what do you picture in your head? Maybe a stegosaurus, like a chunky guy with diamond-shaped plates and a ridge along its back. Or a triceratops with like huge horns, kind of like a rhinoceros, but like a little kid had drawn it.
Short Wave
Some Dinos Had Feathers. Did They Fly?
Okay, Jingmei, I'm really excited to talk to you about dinosaurs and flight and all of that. And I think we need to start with the basics. Feathers, did all dinosaurs have them? How do we know?
Short Wave
Some Dinos Had Feathers. Did They Fly?
Okay, so then if dinosaurs got like bigger, they probably wouldn't need as much insulation. I'm guessing like cold-blooded ones wouldn't either.
Short Wave
Some Dinos Had Feathers. Did They Fly?
You were discussing about like why these protofeathers don't look anything like modern feathers. Can you get into that? Like what did they look like then?
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Some Dinos Had Feathers. Did They Fly?
Okay, so this brings me to a question I've been dying to ask. Are birds descendants of dinosaurs or are they actually dinosaurs?
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Some Dinos Had Feathers. Did They Fly?
Okay, but let's talk about birds then. What made them so well-equipped for the modern world in a way that, like, these other dinosaurs, they were not equipped? How did these dinosaurs that were basically birds survive?
Short Wave
Some Dinos Had Feathers. Did They Fly?
Or a T-Rex, classic, big body, big teeth, tiny little arms. But what you might not think of are feathers. It turns out many dinosaurs did have feathers. We found that out in the mid-90s when dinosaur fossils were discovered at the bottom of a lake in China.
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Some Dinos Had Feathers. Did They Fly?
Okay. So birds are dinosaurs and we know that these dinosaurs had feathers, but how do we know that they actually like flew? Like, did they fly?
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Some Dinos Had Feathers. Did They Fly?
OK, OK, let's get let's get back to flight. Earlier, you said like in the era when most of those dinosaurs died out, one group of these like small, these avian dinosaurs survived the Cretaceous mass extinction and they became the birds we see today. Yeah. But was there like one dino ancestor that evolved to fly? And then like that's why we're seeing all these flying dinosaurs.
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Some Dinos Had Feathers. Did They Fly?
Or could the evolution of flight have happened in like different animals at different times, like independently?
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Some Dinos Had Feathers. Did They Fly?
This is Jingmei O'Connor. She's a dinosaur paleobiologist and the associate curator of fossil reptiles at the Field Museum of Chicago. And she says that the structure of a feather is mostly keratin, which is a protein that usually breaks down over time.
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Some Dinos Had Feathers. Did They Fly?
Jingmei, thank you so much for coming on our show. I think I love dinosaurs more than I did before, and it's all because of you. Thank you so much. Awesome. Well, my job here is done then. This episode was produced by Hannah Chin. It was edited by showrunner Rebecca Ramirez. The engineer was Jimmy Keeley.
Short Wave
Some Dinos Had Feathers. Did They Fly?
Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Shortwave from NPR.
Short Wave
Let's Talk About (Biological) Sex, Baby
If you're curious, Gina, white-throated sparrows and clam shrimp are examples of animals with more than two sexes. And some kinds of snails and worms have just one sex. They can produce both eggs and sperm.
Short Wave
Let's Talk About (Biological) Sex, Baby
Yeah, Anne told me that's really common with fish.
Short Wave
Let's Talk About (Biological) Sex, Baby
Researchers have found more than 450 fish species that can and do change sex. So yes, clownfish, but also gobies and wrasse. It's a pretty long list.
Short Wave
Let's Talk About (Biological) Sex, Baby
Totally. But this doesn't necessarily translate to humans, right? Like lizards can do a lot of things that we can't and vice versa. We're not fungi. We're not fish. We're different.
Short Wave
Let's Talk About (Biological) Sex, Baby
What is it? What's it determined by? And when policymakers refer to sex as this unchanging biological constant, is that reality?
Short Wave
Let's Talk About (Biological) Sex, Baby
So in humans, sex is determined based on a variety of factors. But for the purposes of this episode, we're going to focus on three of the main ones, chromosomal, chemical and physical.
Short Wave
Let's Talk About (Biological) Sex, Baby
That's true for most humans. Not all. I'll get to that later. But most. And Hannah Clare says that nowadays, when doctors predict fetal sex, usually they're looking at the chromosomes.
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Let's Talk About (Biological) Sex, Baby
Hannah's a genetic counseling researcher with experience in OBGYN clinics. We're not using her full name here or noting her employer because she's concerned that speaking publicly could hurt her ability to fund her research. But she says this test is super common. Clinicians don't have to wait for the ultrasound to look at the fetus. They just do a little blood test.
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Let's Talk About (Biological) Sex, Baby
Yeah, not like sex, drugs and rock and roll. I'm here with a deep dive on biological sex, which has been mentioned in the news a lot recently. In the House, lawmakers are set to move forward with a bill defining biological sex.
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Let's Talk About (Biological) Sex, Baby
Well, that's really cool. I know, right? So this test tells us the chromosomes that a baby has, but the Y chromosome isn't like an on-off switch for sex. There are sex-influencing genes present in the other 22 pairs of chromosomes too, and there's a lot of variation that's still possible within those genes.
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Let's Talk About (Biological) Sex, Baby
So for a number of reasons, after birth, the baby can develop in a way that's different from what the tests predicted. And that's where this second metric for determining sex comes in.
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Let's Talk About (Biological) Sex, Baby
Yeah. So a big part of sex and how it develops has to do with hormones. Right. And those chemical hormones, they fluctuate through your whole life. Like, as a little kid, you had a different hormone profile than when you went through puberty or than when you start going through menopause.
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Let's Talk About (Biological) Sex, Baby
Way earlier. Okay. All humans have hormones like testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, etc. They just have them in different quantities and different cycles. Wow. And those hormones really fluctuate through life. So a fetus gets the first hit of these hormones in the womb. That triggers things like genital growth and certain types of brain development.
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Let's Talk About (Biological) Sex, Baby
Then there's another hormone surge in babies after birth within the first six months. It's one that endocrinologists call mini-puberty.
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Let's Talk About (Biological) Sex, Baby
This is Faisal Ahmed. He's a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of Glasgow. And he says that once adolescent puberty hits, there's usually an increase in hormones. Those chemicals can also be delayed or boosted, for example, during gender-affirmative hormone therapy. And they're usually what trigger the development of a bunch of other characteristics that we use to determine sex.
Short Wave
Let's Talk About (Biological) Sex, Baby
Well, yes. This can refer to internal genitalia, like ovaries, or external genitalia, like penis and testes. Or we could also look at secondary sexual characteristics, things that usually don't develop until puberty, like breasts or facial hair.
Short Wave
Let's Talk About (Biological) Sex, Baby
Or even things that are determined in part by hormones and are often used to differentiate sex, like your voice or your height or the distribution of fat and muscle on your body. Wow. Wow. I didn't even think about those last things. Like, you're totally right. Yeah. And those physical traits are really the main observable characteristics, the ones that don't require lab work.
Short Wave
Let's Talk About (Biological) Sex, Baby
So usually when people who are not doctors or scientists are talking about biological sex, this is what they really mean. But these physical characteristics don't really fall on a strict binary. I mean, we have tall women and short men. We have women with flatter chests and men without facial hair. People's appearances can really vary. But I digress.
Short Wave
Let's Talk About (Biological) Sex, Baby
Exactly. Exactly. All of these things have the potential to differ from one another or to be ambiguous or unclear. Like someone's chromosomes might be XY, but they don't have a penis or they do have a penis, but they also have internal ovaries. And these differences generally fall under the umbrella of something called intersex conditions.
Short Wave
Let's Talk About (Biological) Sex, Baby
This is Eileen Wong. She's a physician, specifically an adult urologist. And she says that although intersex conditions are rare, they're not as rare as you think. Wait, like how common are they? Well, estimates can vary. But the most common number that I've seen thrown around is that intersex conditions overall affect one to two people in every 100.
Short Wave
Let's Talk About (Biological) Sex, Baby
So that would make it about as common as having red hair and even more common than being born an identical twin.
Short Wave
Let's Talk About (Biological) Sex, Baby
Exactly. And Eileen is really passionate about intersex awareness because she says her training—she went to med school at Yale, she did her residency at Stanford— it still left her really unprepared to treat intersex patients.
Short Wave
Let's Talk About (Biological) Sex, Baby
And just to be clear here, Gina, we're talking about sex here, not gender. That's a whole nother can of worms. But I think a lot of times these conversations are missing something important because there's this sense that gender is socially defined and changing as opposed to sex, which is scientifically defined and has always been binary and clear. But it's not. No, it's not.
Short Wave
Let's Talk About (Biological) Sex, Baby
Eileen told me that in the past, there was this big push to normalize intersex patients' bodies. Doctors would look at an intersex child and operate on them, usually without those children's full understanding or consent. So their bodies would conform to more typical sex assignments.
Short Wave
Let's Talk About (Biological) Sex, Baby
And in 2018, the American Academy of Family Physicians issued a statement opposing medically unnecessary surgeries on intersex children, basically saying this is harmful and we shouldn't do it anymore. But Eileen says there's still a huge information gap when it comes to intersex bodies and medical treatment. Faisal specializes in this kind of treatment. And here he is again.
Short Wave
Let's Talk About (Biological) Sex, Baby
Yeah. Faisal says that if you're short, there could be a bunch of reasons why. Like it could be that your parents are short or it could be a nutrition problem or a genetic condition. And depending on how short you are and the society that you live in, it might or might not pose a problem. Right. When I was talking to Faisal, he drew this comparison of urinal heights in Japan versus in Europe.
Short Wave
Let's Talk About (Biological) Sex, Baby
And that's the thing that's key, Gina. Even though a lot of these metrics for determining sex are based in science, the way we interpret them is rooted in society. All of the scientists that I talked to agreed. Biological sex is definitely not as simple as two separate categories. And we lose a lot of nuance and knowledge when we pretend that it is. Here's Anne Fausto-Sterling again.
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Let's Talk About (Biological) Sex, Baby
She's the biologist that we heard from at the very beginning of the episode.
Short Wave
Let's Talk About (Biological) Sex, Baby
Human biology and all its possible variations are overwhelmingly complex. One might even say too complex to fit into a 15-minute episode.
Short Wave
Let's Talk About (Biological) Sex, Baby
When you get down to the biological reality, sex is way more complicated than that.
Short Wave
Let's Talk About (Biological) Sex, Baby
So while biological sex is scientific, the way that medical experts and scientists determine it is more complicated than I thought. Although saying so has become increasingly politicized. We heard that at the start of the episode, right? And how much media coverage this topic has gotten recently. And I saw the effects of it in my reporting.
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Let's Talk About (Biological) Sex, Baby
I reached out to 11 experts for this story, Gina, and less than half of them agreed to talk to me. Some people who declined, they cited fear for their jobs or their institutions. It feels like a reminder that science doesn't happen in a vacuum.
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Let's Talk About (Biological) Sex, Baby
Newstape at the top of the episode was from the following outlets, KSNT, KPAX, KCCI, WDAL, and CBS News.
Short Wave
Let's Talk About (Biological) Sex, Baby
Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barber. And I'm Hannah Shin.
Short Wave
Let's Talk About (Biological) Sex, Baby
This is Anne Fausto-Sterling. She's a sexologist trained in developmental biology and emeritus professor of gender studies and biology at Brown University. And she says the animal kingdom, for example, has all kinds of sexes.
Short Wave
Could Psychedelics Become Tripless?
So is taking the trip out of these drugs new? Like, I feel like I haven't really heard about this before.
Short Wave
Could Psychedelics Become Tripless?
And I'm Regina Barber. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
Could Psychedelics Become Tripless?
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, short wavers, Regina Barber here, and we're back with the final episode in our series on the science behind psychedelics and related drugs. I'm here with producer Rachel Carlson, who reported out this whole series. Hey, Rachel.
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Could Psychedelics Become Tripless?
Okay, Rachel, today we're talking about companies developing new psychedelics, but psychedelics have been used for millennia. So, like, where did this idea come from?
Short Wave
Could Psychedelics Become Tripless?
Oh, OK. So if you increase the number of leaves, the neurons can like communicate with each other better.
Short Wave
Could Psychedelics Become Tripless?
Oh, OK. So this could be like a different kind of treatment, maybe for people who don't respond to those medications.
Short Wave
Could Psychedelics Become Tripless?
Right, and we've already talked about how a lot of people can't take psychedelics, so that's part of the motivation here too, right?
Short Wave
Could Psychedelics Become Tripless?
Wow. OK, I'm getting why they want this option. But how do companies like Davis try to actually do this?
Short Wave
Could Psychedelics Become Tripless?
I can see how that works for companies like Delix since they're making new drugs, but how does this work with companies making drugs that look more like your classic psychedelics?
Short Wave
Could Psychedelics Become Tripless?
Well, like even the way the room is set up, that's fascinating. But like you said, there are also like some benefits with a patent. Like you can help companies get funding to research new drugs and like bring them to the public. Yeah.
Short Wave
Could Psychedelics Become Tripless?
OK, but Rachel, this week we also have been talking about whether the trip could actually be like helping patients, like the whole journey that comes with taking a drug like psilocybin.
Short Wave
Could Psychedelics Become Tripless?
And by that, he means the effect they have on our brains.
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Could Psychedelics Become Tripless?
Rachel, thank you so much for joining me this week to talk about all of this. Like, you've really made me think. I've learned a lot. Anytime, Gina. Thank you so much for having me. And for listeners who didn't hear the first two episodes, we definitely recommend checking them out. There's a lot of nuance. They're just the previous two episodes in the shortwave feed.
Short Wave
Could Psychedelics Become Tripless?
This episode was produced by Hannah Chin, and it was edited by Rebecca Ramirez and Jeff Brumfield. Tyler Jones checked the facts. 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 Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Shortwave from NPR.
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
Right, these data centers that are those huge buildings filled with hundreds of thousands of computers that store cloud data and do a lot of computing for AI. Those computers can get really hot.
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
Like the water turns into vapor, goes up in the air and does not come down to that location. Not necessarily. That's water consumption. Yeah.
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
Wow. OK, so I know data centers also use a lot of energy, primarily like fossil fuels, but I guess they're also using like a ton of water.
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
A quick note before we start today's 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. Whatever changes this action brings, NPR's commitment to reporting the news without fear or favor will never change.
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
Today on the show, the first in a two-part series on why the true environmental footprint of AI is so elusive.
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
Then we'll talk about how big tech is trying to turn that ship around.
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
All right, Em, so all of these headlines about how AI is using water, it's because it takes a lot of energy to compute and solve really big problems, right? Right.
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
Yeah, I've seen them before. It makes me think of like a library.
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
Yeah, which is smart because water is so much better at transferring heat than air. Yeah, your physics degree really pays off at a time like this. Just in these moments. But where does this warm water go?
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What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
Even as paywalls arise elsewhere, we offer this vital resource to everyone, regardless of their ability to pay. This is a pivotal moment. It's more important than ever that every supporter who can contribute comes together to pitch in as much as they are able. Support the news and programming you and millions rely on by visiting donate.npr.org.
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What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
Which, quick sidebar, we should note that they're all financial supporters of NPR. Amazon also pays to distribute some of NPR's content. Yes.
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
So that golf course number that you mentioned earlier, we only know that because Google freely reported it in like a progress report on their own climate pledges. Can you tell me more about those pledges? Like what has each company promised to do for the climate?
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
And if you already support us via NPR Plus or another means, thank you. Your support means so much to us, now more than ever. You help us make NPR shows freely available to everyone. We are proud to do this work for you and with you.
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
Right. And speaking of like, you know, green energy and being more carbon neutral. I read that Amazon Meta and Alphabet, which like runs Google, just signed an agreement along with other companies saying, that supports tripling the global nuclear supply by 2050.
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
Hey Shore Wavers, it's Regina Barber with my co-host, Emily Kwong.
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
But like until laws are in place, are tech companies like doing anything on their end to fix the problem, like to train or to create more sustainable AI models?
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
I can't wait. This episode was produced by Hannah Chin, edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez, and fact-checked by Tyler Jones. Jimmy Keeley was the audio engineer. Special thanks to Brent Bachman, Johannes Dergi, and our incredible Standards team.
Short Wave
What's The Environmental Cost Of AI?
And I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
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The Trouble With Zero
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Short Wave
The Biggest Health Stories of 2024
Okay, well, Alejandra, Sydney, Will, Ping, thank you all for coming on the show to recap this big year of science. It's been awesome. Thanks so much.
Short Wave
The Biggest Health Stories of 2024
Today on the show, with the help of my colleagues on the science and climate desks here at NPR, we're zooming in on some of the biggest science stories of the year and keeping an eye on the future, where all of these stories will go in 2025. I'm Regina Barber, and you're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
The Biggest Health Stories of 2024
Thanks, guys. This episode was produced by Jessica Young and edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez, as well as Sadie Babbitts and Scott Hensley. Rebecca and Tyler Jones check 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 Regina Barber.
Short Wave
The Biggest Health Stories of 2024
Thank you for listening to SureWave, the science podcast from NPR. See you next year.
Short Wave
The Biggest Health Stories of 2024
Okay, short wavers, we have so much to get through, and I think it makes most sense to go kind of round robin with this. And I'm going to start with Ping Wong. Hey, Ping. Hey, Gina. Ping, and I wanted to start with you because part of your beat as a science correspondent is that your task is covering public health.
Short Wave
The Biggest Health Stories of 2024
And there's a public health angle to basically everything we're going to talk about today, but trust in public health is low, right?
Short Wave
The Biggest Health Stories of 2024
And then there was the continued memification of life, like Mudang, the pygmy hippo, the internet is obsessed with, and honestly, I'm obsessed with too. It was part of my Halloween costume this year. And still, we realize some of the biggest evolving stories of the year, they're all related to human health.
Short Wave
The Biggest Health Stories of 2024
Okay. And now that we have that little preface of trust, I want to get into what I at least see as one of the biggest, most complex stories you've been monitoring. And that's what's in our water supply and what's to be done about it.
Short Wave
The Biggest Health Stories of 2024
So that's PFAS, and you said that there are two. What's the other one?
Short Wave
The Biggest Health Stories of 2024
Right. One of the chemicals they're kind of maybe focusing on is like fluoride. Like, I feel like I've been hearing a lot about that recently.
Short Wave
The Biggest Health Stories of 2024
So we're bringing some of our coolest science reporters around to talk about this year's biggest stories. One of those stories is what's in our drinking water supply, which we have Ping Huang on deck to talk through.
Short Wave
The Biggest Health Stories of 2024
All right. So on to Will. Hey, Will, what's up? Hey there. So we're here to talk about the bird flu. And it's reemerged in the U.S. in farm workers late last year. And you've been monitoring it ever since. And just this month, California declared a state of emergency due to rising cases in dairy cattle. But first, can you give us like a little refresher on how this infection starts?
Short Wave
The Biggest Health Stories of 2024
OK, so as like the months have gone by since that initial outbreak, more infections have emerged, though, generally in agricultural workers, right? Yeah.
Short Wave
The Biggest Health Stories of 2024
OK, what are you monitoring for bird flu like going into the new year?
Short Wave
The Biggest Health Stories of 2024
And we'll get to all of them briefly before turning to Will Stone, who we have here to talk about bird flu, which we might need to know a lot more about next year. Right, Will?
Short Wave
The Biggest Health Stories of 2024
Yeah. Oh, OK. Well, we're going to move on to Sydney and we're going to talk about obesity drugs like Wegovi or Ozempic being used off label. Can you help us unpack why it seems like it's everywhere?
Short Wave
The Biggest Health Stories of 2024
Hey, short wavers, it has been a year. So many big events have happened. I mean, recently we went through a whole election, and back in April, there was a total solar eclipse over the United States for the first time in years. Then there was the Paris Olympics, where athletes from around the world sought to get as close to define the laws of physics as possible.
Short Wave
The Biggest Health Stories of 2024
Do you mind just like talking about like how do they work? Like Ozempic started as a diabetes drug. How did it and these other like permutations end up being like effective for weight loss?
Short Wave
The Biggest Health Stories of 2024
Third, we have Sidney Lepkin to talk all things obesity drugs, which seem to have gotten more and more popular ever since we first heard the word ozempic.
Short Wave
The Biggest Health Stories of 2024
I mean, that's some good news, some bad news. Okay, let's round out this round robin with Alejandra. Hey. Hey, Dina. So I feel like we've just been inundated with like heat news from like spring until maybe a week ago. So what's, tell me more about that.
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The Biggest Health Stories of 2024
And I'm happy to have Alejandra Barunda in the house to round out our squad and break down all things heat. Hey, Ale.
Short Wave
The Biggest Health Stories of 2024
Yeah. So there's just going to be like more heat in our futures then, I guess.
Short Wave
The Biggest Health Stories of 2024
And recently we had you on as a kind of like retro what happened at the latest international climate talks negotiation COP 29. In that episode, you mentioned that in the coming year, countries have to submit like a target for how to reach their climate goals or targets. Is that the next big thing on the horizon for you to be reporting on?
Short Wave
The Latest On Bird Flu
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey Shore Wavers, Regina Barber here to talk about the bird flu, also known as avian influenza. It's spreading among livestock and other mammals in the U.S. and raising fears that another pandemic is in our future. So bird flu got into the news when a farm worker was infected in the spring of last year.
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The Latest On Bird Flu
So today on the show, paying attention to bird flu. We get into the infection landscape, how the government is preparing, and the future of immunity. I'm Regina Barber, and you're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. OK, well, let's back up. So in March 2024, almost a year ago, researchers found bird flu in cattle.
Short Wave
The Latest On Bird Flu
But the global outbreak of bird flu has been going on for a while, right?
Short Wave
The Latest On Bird Flu
And last month, California declared a state of emergency due to rising cases in dairy cattle. So here to parse through the data is health correspondent Will Stone. Hey, Will.
Short Wave
The Latest On Bird Flu
Wow. OK, but since cases are generally with people working with animals, should like the rest of us, should we be concerned?
Short Wave
The Latest On Bird Flu
Will, you've been monitoring bird flu ever since the first case almost a year ago, and there's so much to cover. But can we start with like a refresher? What's happened like so far?
Short Wave
The Latest On Bird Flu
OK, so it sounds like scientists know how people are getting infected with bird flu.
Short Wave
The Latest On Bird Flu
So what is the government doing to prepare for like that possibility, this human to human spread?
Short Wave
The Latest On Bird Flu
I mean, if the bird flu does escalate into this like big crisis, we're going to need to vaccinate like the whole population. So we're going to need like so much more than 10 million vaccines. Yeah.
Short Wave
The Latest On Bird Flu
You talk about this like old technology. Is the government investing in like mRNA vaccine tech, which we used for like the COVID vaccines?
Short Wave
The Latest On Bird Flu
So that's all happening like right now, this kind of planning. We have a new administration that just took over. Do we expect this work to continue? Yeah.
Short Wave
The Latest On Bird Flu
So, Will, since bird flu hasn't been spread widely in humans yet, are there chances we have immunity? That would be nice.
Short Wave
The Latest On Bird Flu
This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson. It was edited by showrunner Rebecca Ramirez, and 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 Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Shortwave from NPR.
Short Wave
The Latest On Bird Flu
But scientists warn it could evolve, right, and be more dangerous. I mean, do you have a sense of how worried scientists are?
Short Wave
Climate Change + Baseball = More Home Runs
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey Shortwavers, my favorite season starts this week, baseball season. As a kid, I loved the sound of the ball hitting the bat at the San Diego Padre games. I thought I could actually hear it when it was going to be a good hit and someone would be getting on base. I was also fascinated by curveballs.
Short Wave
Climate Change + Baseball = More Home Runs
Now, the dynamics between all that science and the game are changing because of climate change. Today on the show, the science of baseball, from home runs to pitches, and how climate change is affecting it all. I'm Regina Barber, and you're listening to ShoreWave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
Climate Change + Baseball = More Home Runs
Okay, so Dr. B, climate change is affecting temperatures around the world, as we know. So more and more research is showing that climate change is actually causing both faster pitches and more home runs. What's the connection there?
Short Wave
Climate Change + Baseball = More Home Runs
Okay, speaking of home runs, what kind of pitch is needed for a home run to happen?
Short Wave
Climate Change + Baseball = More Home Runs
So, but when we're talking about, you know, Absolutely. The cool thing about sports, again, especially sports that involve balls, they really follow classic Newtonian mechanics. The kind of everyday physics we experience, speed, acceleration, collisions.
Short Wave
Climate Change + Baseball = More Home Runs
Like, how did the pitchers get those things to curve like that? And I had heard that there were stadiums that were easier to get home runs in. Frederick Burtley was also fascinated by baseball as a kid, and he also loved science and math. And he would go on to get his Ph.D. in immunology.
Short Wave
Climate Change + Baseball = More Home Runs
Right, because that 45-degree angle, that's going to get you the longest range, as we would say in a physics class.
Short Wave
Climate Change + Baseball = More Home Runs
OK, so let's dwell on home runs, OK? Let's talk about those stadiums. I've heard that there are some stadiums that are easier to get home runs in, right? Is that true?
Short Wave
Climate Change + Baseball = More Home Runs
But when he was a kid, he loved rooting for his local pro baseball team, the Montreal Expos, which have since relocated to Washington, D.C. as the Nationals. And he was inspired to try his hand at it, too.
Short Wave
Climate Change + Baseball = More Home Runs
This brings me actually to my question about precision, because I'm going to admit that I don't actually think home runs are that amazing. Games are won by hits, right? Not home runs. That's correct. Which brings me to the batting average, like one of the most famous baseball stats. What does that batting average mean?
Short Wave
Climate Change + Baseball = More Home Runs
Right, right. So that batting average is just like out of all the times you're pitched the ball, how many times you're hitting it and getting on base. So it's the tortoise wins the race, right?
Short Wave
Climate Change + Baseball = More Home Runs
It's true. I mean, it makes me think of like my favorite hitter of all time, like Tony Gwynn. Well, and Ichiro too, Ichiro Suzuki. They're just, they're so precise, right? They know how to get hits. Absolutely. Absolutely. And they have beautiful batting average numbers.
Short Wave
Climate Change + Baseball = More Home Runs
Yeah. Can you explain why it's so hard? to get a hit even every other time? Why is it so hard to even get it every three times?
Short Wave
Climate Change + Baseball = More Home Runs
Yeah. Well, Dr. B, thank you so much for talking with me about baseball. I had a wonderful time.
Short Wave
Climate Change + Baseball = More Home Runs
Needless to say, he's not a pro baseball player now. But he is the CEO and president of the Center of Science and Industry, or COSI, a science museum in Columbus, Ohio. And he loves spreading the wonder of science, especially when it intersects with sports.
Short Wave
Climate Change + Baseball = More Home Runs
Oh, thank you so much. That is so thoughtful. And I just want the Padres to do well this season.
Short Wave
Climate Change + Baseball = More Home Runs
This episode was produced by Burleigh McCoy and Rachel Carlson. It was edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez, who also checked the facts. Patrick Murray was the audio engineer. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Shortwave from NPR.
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Climate Change + Baseball = More Home Runs
He thinks making videos like these is one of the easiest ways to get sports fans into science. It's a pursuit he feels very passionate about. When Dr. B, as he's known in his videos, watches baseball, he now sees it through a different lens.
Short Wave
Extracting Brains ... For Science
So today on the show, why this early career neuroscientist is going to all the trouble of getting her hands on so many whale and dolphin brains.
Short Wave
Extracting Brains ... For Science
And you're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
Extracting Brains ... For Science
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, Shortwavers. Regina Barber here to tell you about a treasure hunt.
Short Wave
Extracting Brains ... For Science
Okay, all right. Now that we're back, clear something up for me. Like, does Camila have to swim to shore every time she wants a brain?
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Extracting Brains ... For Science
Ah, okay. I mean, when these dolphins and marine mammals get stranded, do the scientists know why that happens, Ari?
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Extracting Brains ... For Science
Yeah, almost certainly not. Ari Daniel, you're a science reporter and you're bringing us the story which took place like a year and a half ago, right?
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Extracting Brains ... For Science
See, I knew it. I knew I could trust you. We're there now.
Short Wave
Extracting Brains ... For Science
Cetaceans. Cetaceans? Is that a word for whales and dolphins that I don't know?
Short Wave
Extracting Brains ... For Science
Wow. Okay, so how do they, like, study these brains? Like, what can they learn from a brain that's, like, no longer on, for lack of a better word?
Short Wave
Extracting Brains ... For Science
We need to have a fresh carcass. Okay, so like fresh as in the brain hasn't turned to goo, like so they can still study it.
Short Wave
Extracting Brains ... For Science
This all makes sense now, like why she had to like swim to that baby humpback.
Short Wave
Extracting Brains ... For Science
I mean, I love the way they talk about these brains, but did you actually get to see one?
Short Wave
Extracting Brains ... For Science
All right. I really like this. This story, like it's fascinating, but it's also like kind of gross. And like Camila, she's so cool. I mean, she's early in her career. Like, what is she planning to do next? Like, where is she going to go?
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Extracting Brains ... For Science
Give me the hat. I went from like sad to like now I'm just surprised. She wants the brain? What?
Short Wave
Extracting Brains ... For Science
I just love the way she talks about her work. It's so joy-filled. It sounds like it's healing her inner child. Ari, thank you so much for this lovely story about cetacean brains, right?
Short Wave
Extracting Brains ... For Science
Thank you. New word. For all you listening, if you liked this episode, make sure you never miss a new one by following us on whichever podcasting platform you're listening from. 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 showrunner Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts.
Short Wave
Extracting Brains ... For Science
Beth Donovan is our senior director and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
What to Know About The Measles Outbreak
So reports from a bunch of places around the U.S., but an outbreak is different, right?
Short Wave
What to Know About The Measles Outbreak
So today on the show, what you need to know about measles. We're covering the signs and symptoms of this illness, the ways officials are working to stop it from spreading, and what you need to know to stay safe. I'm Regina Barber. And I'm Maria Godoy. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
What to Know About The Measles Outbreak
Okay, Maria, to start off, can you tell me about the symptoms of measles? Like if I were to get an infection, what would that look like?
Short Wave
What to Know About The Measles Outbreak
Yeah. And so we've mentioned that it is very contagious. So how does measles spread?
Short Wave
What to Know About The Measles Outbreak
Hey, Shore Wavers, Regina Barber here. And in the past few weeks, one of the things that's been all over the news is the measles outbreak.
Short Wave
What to Know About The Measles Outbreak
Wow. So how do we usually keep it from spreading then?
Short Wave
What to Know About The Measles Outbreak
I mean, I think many of us have heard that some parents are concerned that the vaccine is more dangerous than the virus. Like, what do doctors say to that?
Short Wave
What to Know About The Measles Outbreak
This sounds horrifying. And I know from the news that there's been two recent deaths, an unvaccinated child and an unvaccinated adult. But Maria, since we're talking about these like long-term effects, I've heard that measles can basically wipe out your immune system's memory. Is that right?
Short Wave
What to Know About The Measles Outbreak
Right. So like how worried should people be about this ongoing outbreak?
Short Wave
What to Know About The Measles Outbreak
How is the federal government responding to this outbreak specifically? Like what are officials recommending people do?
Short Wave
What to Know About The Measles Outbreak
What's their plan? This outbreak started in West Texas in January and spread across state borders into New Mexico. As of last Friday, there were nearly 300 confirmed cases reported. That surpasses the total measles infections reported in the U.S. in all of 2024. That number is expected to increase when new numbers are released Tuesday. And there have been cases reported in other states as well.
Short Wave
What to Know About The Measles Outbreak
Like you can forego the vaccine, which is not true.
Short Wave
What to Know About The Measles Outbreak
Maria Godoy, thank you so much for bringing us this reporting. Oh, it's my pleasure. And thanks for having me on, Gina. This episode was produced by Hannah Chin, edited by Jane Greenhalgh and our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts and Jimmy Keeley was the audio engineer.
Short Wave
What to Know About The Measles Outbreak
Beth Donovan is our senior director and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. News clips used at the beginning of this episode were from Today, Scripps News, PBS NewsHour and CBS. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
What to Know About The Measles Outbreak
Like I've heard of cases as far away as Alaska, Pennsylvania and Kentucky.
Short Wave
What to Know About The Measles Outbreak
Right. And you're here to help us like make sense of all this. Hey, Maria. Hi, Regina. You're a health and science correspondent for NPR. So I know you've been keeping track of all of this, including the nuances between these like individual cases versus the outbreak in Texas. So what is the difference there?
Short Wave
When AI Cannibalizes Its Data
In the spring of 2023, Elio was a research fellow at the University of Oxford. And he and his brother were talking over lunch. They were like, OK, if the Internet is full of machine-generated content and that machine-generated content goes into future machines, what's going to happen?
Short Wave
When AI Cannibalizes Its Data
Ilya and his team did this research study indicating that eventually, any large language model that learns from its own synthetic data would start to degrade over time, producing results that got worse and worse and worse.
Short Wave
When AI Cannibalizes Its Data
So today on the show, AI model collapse. What happens when a large language model reads too much of its own content? And could it limit the future of generative AI? I'm Regina Barber, and you're listening to ShoreWave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
When AI Cannibalizes Its Data
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. It seems like these days generative AI is everywhere. It's in my Google searches. It's suggested as a tool on TikTok. It's running customer service chats. And there's a lot of forms that generative AI can take, like it can create images or video.
Short Wave
When AI Cannibalizes Its Data
OK, Ilya, before we get into the big problem of like model collapse, I think we need to understand why these errors are actually happening. So can you explain to me what kinds of errors do you get from a large language model and like how do they happen? Why do they happen?
Short Wave
When AI Cannibalizes Its Data
Right. You're like telling me now that there's like a lot of fake baby peacock images, but machines don't know that. Right. They're just going to think, great, this is a baby peacock. And also there's not that many like real baby peacock images to compare it to.
Short Wave
When AI Cannibalizes Its Data
Not just babies, but baby birds. Not just baby birds, but baby peacocks.
Short Wave
When AI Cannibalizes Its Data
Okay, so that's one kind of problem, a data problem. What are the other two?
Short Wave
When AI Cannibalizes Its Data
It's like a black box. We don't know how it's making these decisions. We don't know where, like you said, in that order, it's fixing those decisions. Yeah.
Short Wave
When AI Cannibalizes Its Data
Right, right. Okay, so the three places errors could come from is like, one, the model itself, two, the way it's trained, right? And three, the data or the lack of data that it's trained on.
Short Wave
When AI Cannibalizes Its Data
But the ones that have been in the news recently, DeepSeek R1, OpenAI's ChatGBT, Google Gemini, Apple Intelligence, all of those are large language models. A large language model is kind of like the predictive text feature in your phone, but on steroids.
Short Wave
When AI Cannibalizes Its Data
Let's talk about how those errors build. What happens when they start to build upon each other? Can you describe that outcome to me?
Short Wave
When AI Cannibalizes Its Data
Okay, so over time you start to lose the more unique occurrences and all the data starts to look more similar to the average.
Short Wave
When AI Cannibalizes Its Data
So instead of this bell curve, you just have like a point in the middle. You just have a whole bunch of stuff in the middle.
Short Wave
When AI Cannibalizes Its Data
I know this isn't exactly the same, but it makes me think of the telephone game. You know, when you tell somebody a phrase or a couple sentences, and then the next person tells you.
Short Wave
When AI Cannibalizes Its Data
I mean, I'm looking at some of the like image output of these models that are trained on their own data right now. And we'll link these images in the show notes. But I'm looking at like somebody's handwriting of like zero to nine. And, you know, it's not perfect. It's handwriting. But like as it gets regenerated by the models over and over like 15 times, they're just dots, right?
Short Wave
When AI Cannibalizes Its Data
Like they're not distinguishable. You can't even tell their numbers, like which one is which.
Short Wave
When AI Cannibalizes Its Data
I love these images. This is so good, Ilya. This is so good.
Short Wave
When AI Cannibalizes Its Data
Okay. So like you said, you know, chat GPT isn't going to disappear tomorrow. What are researchers doing to avoid the problem of model collapse? Like as a computer scientist, what do you think the solution is?
Short Wave
When AI Cannibalizes Its Data
That's Ilya Shumailov. He's a computer scientist and he says in order to teach these models, scientists have to train them on a lot of human written examples. Like, they basically make the models read the entire internet. which works for a while. But nowadays, thanks in part to these same large language models, a lot of the content on our internet is written by generative AI.
Short Wave
When AI Cannibalizes Its Data
I like that perspective. Ilya, thank you so much for talking with us today.
Short Wave
When AI Cannibalizes Its Data
If you want to see some of the images I was looking at, you know, see the consequences of AI model collapse for yourself, we'll link to those in our show notes. Also make sure you never miss a new episode by following us on whichever podcasting platform you're listening from. This episode was produced by Hannah Chin and edited by showrunner Rebecca Ramirez.
Short Wave
When AI Cannibalizes Its Data
Hannah and Tyler Jones checked the facts. Jimmy Keeley was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to ShoreWave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
Why Big Tech Wants Nuclear Power
OK, so Jeff, we joke about this because you cover all things nuclear. You also sometimes cover artificial intelligence or AI.
Short Wave
Why Big Tech Wants Nuclear Power
Okay, so Jeff, let's start with the problem. Like, why do these companies need all of this electricity?
Short Wave
Why Big Tech Wants Nuclear Power
Apple will be 100% carbon neutral for our entire end-to-end footprint.
Short Wave
Why Big Tech Wants Nuclear Power
OK, so they're buying lots of renewable power. The wind and solar companies were using those profits to build more. Seems like a reasonable solution. Why can't they keep doing that?
Short Wave
Why Big Tech Wants Nuclear Power
OK. Yeah. Storage problem is huge, right? It's been going on forever. But anyway, I do understand why they need a lot of power and they don't want to produce greenhouse gases. But why are they specifically focusing on nuclear power?
Short Wave
Why Big Tech Wants Nuclear Power
OK, so you recently went to a reactor at Three Mile Island, the one that didn't melt down, right? Yeah.
Short Wave
Why Big Tech Wants Nuclear Power
Wow. But I take it you're not taking this tour just to look at an empty nuclear plant. Like what's happening now?
Short Wave
Why Big Tech Wants Nuclear Power
Yeah. I mean, when I think of AI and nuclear power together, it just sounds like this, like, dystopian sci-fi movie. Yeah.
Short Wave
Why Big Tech Wants Nuclear Power
Wow. OK, so Three Mile Island is coming back online. But is one nuclear power plant going to be enough power to power all these like AI data centers?
Short Wave
Why Big Tech Wants Nuclear Power
Hey there, short wavers. Regina Barber here. And today I'm joined by NPR's most radioactive correspondent, Jeff Brumfield. Hey, Jeff.
Short Wave
Why Big Tech Wants Nuclear Power
Well, Mr. Burns, he owns the power plant in Springfield and it has those like big, like, I don't know, like hourglass looking things. Right.
Short Wave
Why Big Tech Wants Nuclear Power
Cooling towers. Yeah. All the cooling towers and like the inanimate carbon rods. And I don't know.
Short Wave
Why Big Tech Wants Nuclear Power
Okay, so a meltdown-proof reactor. I mean, it sounds great.
Short Wave
Why Big Tech Wants Nuclear Power
OK, so let's get back to the original point of all this. Like these companies are trying to fight climate change. This is what they say. Is time really on their side here?
Short Wave
Why Big Tech Wants Nuclear Power
So today on the show, the AI and nuclear power collab. Why does big tech want to go nuclear?
Short Wave
Why Big Tech Wants Nuclear Power
This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson and edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts and James Willits was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Shortwave from NPR.
Short Wave
Why Big Tech Wants Nuclear Power
You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
Are they thinking about testing again?
Short Wave
What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
So today on the show, Jeff takes us on a rare trip to tunnels deep under the Nevada desert, where America does science instead of nuclear testing. I'm Regina Barber, and you're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
OK, so let's start with like a little history on nuclear testing. Like, how did we get to where we are today where we're not doing it anymore?
Short Wave
What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
Which was what, like the late 1980s, early 1990s? That's when the Soviet Union collapsed. Right, right. So why did nuclear testing stop then?
Short Wave
What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
Hey, short wavers, before we get started, quick little favor to ask. Can you help us shape the future of shortwave by completing a short anonymous survey? It's a chance for you to tell us about what you like and don't and how we can serve you better. It's an awesome responsibility, but I trust you. And we want to hear from everyone, whether you're a day one or brand new listener.
Short Wave
What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
So you could still run tests. They were just on computers, not like an actual detonation of a nuke.
Short Wave
What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
And this is what nuclear testing looks like today. Making sure the weapons we do have work, but using supercomputers, right? Like problem solve, like no more real world tests. Not quite. Okay, okay.
Short Wave
What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
Just go to npr.org slash shortwave survey. We'll also put a link in our show notes. Thank you. Okay, on to our show. You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, Gina. Hey, NPR science correspondent Jeff Brumfield. Why are you darkening my doorstep?
Short Wave
What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
OK, so, Jeff, this gives like a real sense of what it was like to visit those tunnels. And like Tim Beller said, is that the U.S. is following these rules. Right. But you mentioned there might be like a return to testing. Is that because scientists need to do like another test they couldn't do with these supercomputers?
Short Wave
What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
Okay. So if it's not scientific, it's not technical, why would America test again?
Short Wave
What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
OK, so if the U.S. did resume underground testing, what would be the consequences of that?
Short Wave
What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
I'm going to say possibly in the late 70s.
Short Wave
What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
OK, so, Jeff, I can see now that we could be at this precipice of a return to nuclear testing because we're at this like very unstable moment right now in the world. Nobody like no country wants to go first. But if one country tests, the other countries are likely to follow. Right.
Short Wave
What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
Jeff Brumfield, thank you so much for bringing us this story.
Short Wave
What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson and edited by Burleigh McCoy. Jeff Brumfield and Tyler Jones checked the facts. Jimmy Keeley was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
What If You Took The "Trip" Out Of Ketamine?
So today on the show, the creative ways some researchers are trying to navigate research on drugs like psychedelics and ketamine.
Short Wave
What If You Took The "Trip" Out Of Ketamine?
I'm Rachel Carlson. And I'm Regina Barber. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. OK, Rachel, so when people say drugs like psychedelics and ketamine can help treat different conditions, there could be a few things happening.
Short Wave
What If You Took The "Trip" Out Of Ketamine?
Any beneficial effects of the drug could be related to, one, simply mentally and therapeutically preparing to take a drug like a psychedelic, two, the experience of actually taking it like the trip, or three, the effect of the drug itself on a person's brain, right?
Short Wave
What If You Took The "Trip" Out Of Ketamine?
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, Short Wavers, Regina Barber here. I'm talking with one of our producers, Rachel Carlson, who's been reporting a series on psychedelics and related drugs. Hey, Rachel. Hi, Gina.
Short Wave
What If You Took The "Trip" Out Of Ketamine?
And for anyone listening who also doesn't know what it is, ketamine isn't a psychedelic like LSD or psilocybin, mushrooms. Those seem to work on different receptors in the brain. But like you said, Rachel, ketamine can kind of have like similar effects to psychedelics depending on like the dose a person takes.
Short Wave
What If You Took The "Trip" Out Of Ketamine?
Right, because patients usually know if they've gotten the drug or the placebo.
Short Wave
What If You Took The "Trip" Out Of Ketamine?
OK, so these patients like Cindy are going like under anesthesia for their surgeries and then they either get ketamine or they don't. Exactly.
Short Wave
What If You Took The "Trip" Out Of Ketamine?
Definitely check out that episode if you missed it, but also this one will make sense without it. Rachel, you touched on one thing in that episode that we're going to go a little deeper on today, and that's the challenge of studying these drugs.
Short Wave
What If You Took The "Trip" Out Of Ketamine?
So you're saying that even though she got ketamine, her feeling better could also have been like related to these other parts of the experience, like working closely with Boris and like feeling like people are actually like listening to her.
Short Wave
What If You Took The "Trip" Out Of Ketamine?
But that could have just been the placebo effect.
Short Wave
What If You Took The "Trip" Out Of Ketamine?
Wow. It's like that expectation. And this brings us back to the question you asked earlier, like, do we even need a trip at all? It's kind of related to all this.
Short Wave
What If You Took The "Trip" Out Of Ketamine?
Okay, wait, wait. So he's like re-engineering these drugs and taking out the trip.
Short Wave
What If You Took The "Trip" Out Of Ketamine?
I can't wait. Thank you so much, Rachel, for bringing us this reporting.
Short Wave
What If You Took The "Trip" Out Of Ketamine?
Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Rachel Carlson. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
How Two Veterans Developed The Same Rare Brain Condition
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, shortwavers. NPR's brain guy and sometimes shortwave substitute host is with me today. Hello, John Hamilton.
Short Wave
How Two Veterans Developed The Same Rare Brain Condition
Well, here are John's really powerful reporting written up for our companion show, All Things Considered. It will be told with the voices of these two veterans, William Wilcox and Michael Lozano, and one of their doctors and some researchers about whether firing heavy weapons may have caused their AVMs. I'm Regina Barber.
Short Wave
How Two Veterans Developed The Same Rare Brain Condition
So you've been on the pod many times with me, also substituting for me while I was away. Thank you very much. Thank you for making fun of me on the show.
Short Wave
How Two Veterans Developed The Same Rare Brain Condition
Of course. I mean, people can't live without me. We're going to turn things a little bit more serious, though, today, John. You're actually joining us today to follow up on an episode we did actually a few months ago, right?
Short Wave
How Two Veterans Developed The Same Rare Brain Condition
Yeah. Can you remind me what an AVM is?
Short Wave
How Two Veterans Developed The Same Rare Brain Condition
The engineer was Kweisi Lee. Beth Donovan is our senior director. And Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barber.
Short Wave
How Two Veterans Developed The Same Rare Brain Condition
That's devastating. And you talked to a Marine named William Wilcox, right?
Short Wave
Reviving The Woolly Mammoth ... With Mice
Wow. Okay. So today on the show, woolly mice and what they mean for the elusive goal known as de-extinction. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
Reviving The Woolly Mammoth ... With Mice
Okay, Rob, we're going to go from mice to mammoths. Yeah. Let's start with these woolly mice. Like, how are they different from normal mice? And how were they created exactly?
Short Wave
Reviving The Woolly Mammoth ... With Mice
So in practice, I imagine they're like hunting for genes responsible for like iconic, you know, mammoth traits like their distinctive coat.
Short Wave
Reviving The Woolly Mammoth ... With Mice
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey there, short wavers. Regina Barber here. And today I'm joined by NPR's Rob Stein. Hey, Rob.
Short Wave
Reviving The Woolly Mammoth ... With Mice
So it takes a lot of time to isolate those genes, insert them into Asian elephant embryos, wait to see if that pans out, then go back to the drawing board with the next one.
Short Wave
Reviving The Woolly Mammoth ... With Mice
Wow. Okay. So that's where the mice come in. Like they reproduce so quickly. There's so many generations and like they get more data faster.
Short Wave
Reviving The Woolly Mammoth ... With Mice
And so they can see, like, did this gene that shows up in the woolly mammoth DNA have, like, the same effect in mice?
Short Wave
Reviving The Woolly Mammoth ... With Mice
Rob, you're usually here to talk about stuff related to health like COVID or CRISPR or organ transplants. But word on the street is today is a little different.
Short Wave
Reviving The Woolly Mammoth ... With Mice
Wait, wait. So not dark brown like children's books when I see the mammoths? Are those mammoths just like dirty?
Short Wave
Reviving The Woolly Mammoth ... With Mice
I'm going to look. Oh, my gosh. They look like little craft, like things that you could actually make, like little dolls. I know.
Short Wave
Reviving The Woolly Mammoth ... With Mice
Totally. I mean, they must be so excited about this.
Short Wave
Reviving The Woolly Mammoth ... With Mice
Which on one hand, like, is a huge deal, right? But like, on the other hand, is pretty controversial. So do you have a sense of, like, what other scientists think about all this?
Short Wave
Reviving The Woolly Mammoth ... With Mice
Wow. I hadn't thought of that. So what do some folks at La Colossal say about all these concerns?
Short Wave
Reviving The Woolly Mammoth ... With Mice
Wow. Okay, well, Rob, you've given me a lot to think about. Thank you so much for bringing this story to Shortwave.
Short Wave
Reviving The Woolly Mammoth ... With Mice
For all you listening, if you liked this episode, make sure you never miss a new one by following us on whatever podcasting platform you're listening from. 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 and edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts.
Short Wave
Reviving The Woolly Mammoth ... With Mice
Okay, woolly mice. Rob, what makes them woolly?
Short Wave
Reviving The Woolly Mammoth ... With Mice
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 Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Shorewave from NPR.
Short Wave
Reviving The Woolly Mammoth ... With Mice
Of course. I love those hairy elephants. They used to roam the tundra. They were actually still around when the pyramids were built.
Short Wave
Reviving The Woolly Mammoth ... With Mice
Okay. So these mice, they're like miniature versions of woolly mammoths?
Short Wave
Reviving The Woolly Mammoth ... With Mice
Cool. Okay. But why are you bringing them up now?
Short Wave
Reviving The Woolly Mammoth ... With Mice
Wow. So they have like Jurassic Park-like intentions? Yeah.
Short Wave
Why Black Holes Are More Than They Seem
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. In pop culture, black holes have developed this reputation for gobbling things up. Being these points in the universe where all matter, even light, is inescapably sucked up into this extraordinarily dense black void.
Short Wave
Why Black Holes Are More Than They Seem
Rogers is an astrophysicist and a professor at Stanford University. In the 1970s, when he and his friend Roman Znayek were at the University of Cambridge over in the UK, they started to look at how these black hole jets were created. And they came up with a hypothesis for how these jets were powered.
Short Wave
Why Black Holes Are More Than They Seem
But it would take some time for all these pieces to come together to see if this explanation held true. So today on the show, a look at the most energetic objects in the universe, supermassive black hole jets. What are they, how they might be created, and what new images can tell us about these mysterious objects? I'm Regina Barber, and you're listening to Shortwave, a science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
Why Black Holes Are More Than They Seem
Okay, so funny thing about black hole jets, they were first imaged before astronomers could even agree on what a galaxy was. Heber Curtis is one of the astronomers at the center of that debate, and he's the one who first identified a jet in 1918. At first, it seemed like a strange bright streak in the cosmos.
Short Wave
Why Black Holes Are More Than They Seem
The ray was coming out of a fuzzy thing named M87, we now know to be an enormous galaxy 50 million light years from Earth.
Short Wave
Why Black Holes Are More Than They Seem
Fast forward to the early 70s when Roger was starting graduate school and astronomy was buzzing with new discoveries. Humans had landed on the moon in 1969. The first black hole was confirmed to exist in 1971 after decades of mathematical theory. And astronomers were looking at the really bright centers of galaxies in our universe. The centers of these galaxies have extremely massive black holes.
Short Wave
Why Black Holes Are More Than They Seem
And some also seem to have these bright streaks or jets of energy coming from the middle. Just like the one Curtis saw coming out of M87 decades earlier.
Short Wave
Why Black Holes Are More Than They Seem
And these jets they found that were coming from these black holes were huge, four times as long as they were wide. These blazing streaks were stretching far past the width of the galaxies they lived in.
Short Wave
Why Black Holes Are More Than They Seem
That's Priyambada Natarajan, an astrophysicist at Yale University who focuses on black holes, specifically how extremely large ones came to be. And Priya says these supermassive black holes, like the one in the center of our own Milky Way galaxy, are more than just cosmic vacuum cleaners.
Short Wave
Why Black Holes Are More Than They Seem
But how do these jets exist in the first place? Well, to solve any good mystery, we need clues. And we're better to look for clues than the black holes themselves. Black holes have two important clues. First, black holes spin, or as we say in physics, they have angular momentum. But why are black holes spinning?
Short Wave
Why Black Holes Are More Than They Seem
The dust and gas getting sucked up into the black holes, they're also spinning and have angular momentum. But along the way to entering a supermassive black hole, that dust and gas swirling in, it loses angular momentum.
Short Wave
Why Black Holes Are More Than They Seem
So stuff accumulates around these black holes and causes them to spin. But how is that material getting shot out into space in these huge energetic jets? Clue two, magnetic fields. Black holes have magnetic fields like stars and some planets do. And as black holes spin, these magnetic fields get tangled up.
Short Wave
Why Black Holes Are More Than They Seem
And charged particles in the gas get carried away along field lines and eventually into the jets.
Short Wave
Why Black Holes Are More Than They Seem
And then it goes out. And with all these charged particles, you get radiation.
Short Wave
Why Black Holes Are More Than They Seem
The Blanford-Znalyuk process is a culmination of all of Roger and Roman's work. And it upends the idea that black holes are just vacuum cleaners.
Short Wave
Why Black Holes Are More Than They Seem
Because when black holes eat material immediately around them, they create this bright disk, like a glowing donut.
Short Wave
Why Black Holes Are More Than They Seem
This hypothesis and its equations bring together big concepts in physics, like Albert Einstein's equations of general relativity, how gravity is just a warping of space-time, and James Clerk Maxwell's older electromagnetism equations that describe how electricity and magnetism interact.
Short Wave
Why Black Holes Are More Than They Seem
And it wasn't until the last decade or so that scientists were able to really see the jets up close, with a bunch of radio telescopes around the world showing high-resolution images of the jet coming from that supermassive black hole at the center of M87, the one Heber Curtis stumbled upon in 1918.
Short Wave
Why Black Holes Are More Than They Seem
Images also showed a magnetic field around the black hole, one step in supporting the Blanford-Sniak process.
Short Wave
Why Black Holes Are More Than They Seem
These images are the closest we can get to studying black holes directly.
Short Wave
Why Black Holes Are More Than They Seem
They're so close that scientists aren't just learning about jets. They're learning about the fascinating characteristics of black holes in general, which as long as scientists have known about them, have been super mysterious.
Short Wave
Why Black Holes Are More Than They Seem
Everything we're learning about black holes points to them being huge players in the universe. The supermassive black holes in the center of galaxies affect the whole galaxy, the billions of stars in them, and the planets that orbit those stars.
Short Wave
Why Black Holes Are More Than They Seem
Basically, black holes are really messy eaters, so not all the dust and gas they eat make it down the hatch. And for a supermassive black hole, this can look like beams of white-hot plasma and radiation shooting out of that glowing donut just outside the event horizon that makes up the edge of the black hole. Sometimes these beams are millions of light-years long.
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Why Black Holes Are More Than They Seem
So, black holes. Destroyers, yeah. But at times, creators too. They're powerful entities molding galaxies from the inside out. And we are just starting to get to know them. Short Wavers, we've covered black holes a lot over the years. We'll leave links to those episodes in our show notes in case you want to hear more about them. Also thank you so much for listening.
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Why Black Holes Are More Than They Seem
Make sure you never miss a new episode by following us on whatever podcasting platform you're listening to. This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson and edited by showrunner Rebecca Ramirez. Rachel and Tyler Jones checked the facts. Jimmy Keeley was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barber.
Short Wave
Why Black Holes Are More Than They Seem
Thank you for listening to Shorewave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
Why Black Holes Are More Than They Seem
Roger Blanford says you can think of these black hole jets carrying this massive amount of energy, kind of like nuclear power.
Short Wave
These Rats Can Drive. What's Happening In Their Brains?
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, Shortwavers, Regina Barber here. And today, our story starts with a rat scientist.
Short Wave
These Rats Can Drive. What's Happening In Their Brains?
And in 2020, right at the peak of the COVID lockdown, watching these rats, Kelly had a breakthrough.
Short Wave
These Rats Can Drive. What's Happening In Their Brains?
So that's what Kelly and her team are studying now. Anticipation. They teach their rats how to drive these little cars in different situations and environments, and they study how these rats respond, how it changes their brains and their behavior. So today on the show, we're learning from rats about anticipation, decision-making, and how to enjoy life.
Short Wave
These Rats Can Drive. What's Happening In Their Brains?
I'm Regina Barber, and you're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. Hey shortwavers, Regina Barber here. Before we get back to the show, can you give me a quick minute to talk to you about what makes shortwave possible? Aside from caffeine, a well-calibrated circadian rhythm, and a love of science, specifically astronomy.
Short Wave
These Rats Can Drive. What's Happening In Their Brains?
Aside from all that, what really makes shortwave possible is you. That's because we work for NPR and NPR is public media, which means we exist not to make money, but to create a more informed public. Public media is kind of like a sidewalk or a public park. It's infrastructure that we all use. It's free. It's for everyone.
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These Rats Can Drive. What's Happening In Their Brains?
That's why we work really hard to bring you stories about science that matter to you, no matter where you live or what community you belong to. We love doing that work. So this time of year, we are saying thank you. Thank you for listening. Thank you for your support. And wouldn't you know, it's Giving Tuesday. That means it's a perfect time to keep Shortwave going.
Short Wave
These Rats Can Drive. What's Happening In Their Brains?
Sign up for sponsor-free episodes and similar perks across more than 25 podcasts with NPR Plus today. Join us at plus.npr.org. Plus.npr.org. That link is in our episode notes. And if you don't want podcast benefits, no one can stop you from simply just going to donate.npr.org. Your gifts are tax deductible either way you choose to give. Okay, thank you for listening and back to the show.
Short Wave
These Rats Can Drive. What's Happening In Their Brains?
Okay, Kelly, describe this setup. So, like, what do the carts look like that the rats are driving, and how do they do it?
Short Wave
These Rats Can Drive. What's Happening In Their Brains?
That's Kelly Lambert. She's a professor of behavioral neuroscience at the University of Richmond. And a while ago, this colleague of hers, a cognitive scientist who's into robotics and design, reached out with kind of a weird question.
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These Rats Can Drive. What's Happening In Their Brains?
Okay, that seems like a lot of work, but you're saying these rats, they like this. They like driving. Like, how do you know that? Is it from their brains? Is it from their behavior? Or is it like both?
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These Rats Can Drive. What's Happening In Their Brains?
Yeah, I watched the videos. I saw them like revving it up. It really seemed like they were like so ready to go.
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These Rats Can Drive. What's Happening In Their Brains?
Okay, I'm just going to like pause you right there because I want to talk about this like anticipation because I know that there are these other studies out there indicating that there's like natural dopamine being released in these rats as they're like anticipating reward. And it seems like you're like building on these studies. Can you explain how like driving fits into all that?
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These Rats Can Drive. What's Happening In Their Brains?
Okay, so you mentioned that there are like physical like behavior cues that these rats are, they are experiencing this dopamine. Can you tell me a little bit?
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These Rats Can Drive. What's Happening In Their Brains?
That's amazing. And I really like this like term that you've coined this like behaviorceuticals, this idea that behaviors can alter your brain chemistry, which you're seeing like similar to pharmaceuticals. How does this work with driving rats? Like add to that line of research.
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These Rats Can Drive. What's Happening In Their Brains?
Here we go. If you guessed that's the sound of a rat driving a tiny car, you're right. Kelly's rats are in a lab at the University of Richmond zooming in these four-wheeled little plastic boxes around this big arena.
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These Rats Can Drive. What's Happening In Their Brains?
Yeah. And neuroplasticity, as you're saying, is like the brain's ability to like change and learn. Right. And so to sum up, like training new skills helps these rats like regulate emotions, which lowers stress, which makes their neuroplasticity stronger. Right. Like like it's a cycle.
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These Rats Can Drive. What's Happening In Their Brains?
Aside from like what is scientifically proven and like how similar rat's brains are to human brains, what has this work done for you like personally? Has it changed how you look at life, how you look at anticipation and about delayed gratification and working for things? Yeah.
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These Rats Can Drive. What's Happening In Their Brains?
I love it. I'm going to take this and be like, you know, you can actually think that random good things are going to happen to not just bad things.
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These Rats Can Drive. What's Happening In Their Brains?
Yes. Well, thank you so much for sharing your work with us.
Short Wave
These Rats Can Drive. What's Happening In Their Brains?
This episode was produced by Hannah Chin. It was edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. James Keeley was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Colleen Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Shortwave from NPR.
Short Wave
The Iguanas That Rafted To Fiji
Wow. Okay, so today on the show, how scientists figured out the Fijian iguana origin story.
Short Wave
The Iguanas That Rafted To Fiji
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey Shore Wavers, Regina Barber here. And today I'm joined by NPR's Jonathan Lambert. Hey, Jon.
Short Wave
The Iguanas That Rafted To Fiji
You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
The Iguanas That Rafted To Fiji
OK, John, so let's like back up a second. Tell me more about like this mystery and why scientists didn't really know how iguanas ended up on Fiji.
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The Iguanas That Rafted To Fiji
But there aren't iguanas in the eastern hemisphere now, right? Like Asia, Australia, or anywhere besides Fiji.
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The Iguanas That Rafted To Fiji
And that's the one that they point to in the paper, right? That's the hypothesis.
Short Wave
The Iguanas That Rafted To Fiji
So what was stopping them? Like, why couldn't they tell which one it was up until now?
Short Wave
The Iguanas That Rafted To Fiji
So today you're bringing us a story that you say is sort of like half mystery, half swashbuckling adventure.
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The Iguanas That Rafted To Fiji
Okay, so like they're trying to figure out when these populations broke off and like from what other species to help figure out like how these iguanas got to Fiji, right?
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The Iguanas That Rafted To Fiji
Okay, but I'm assuming we wouldn't be talking about like this study unless they like figured both of these things out. Like, so how did they get closer to an answer?
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The Iguanas That Rafted To Fiji
Oh my gosh, this is giving me very like One Piece vibes. Okay.
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The Iguanas That Rafted To Fiji
Wow. OK, so this sounds so wild to me. Like, has anything like this ever been observed before? Like, is this idea of like land animals floating on a raft just some like idea biologists had or has it been observed?
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The Iguanas That Rafted To Fiji
Wow. OK, but Fiji is like way further away. This still seems really surprising.
Short Wave
The Iguanas That Rafted To Fiji
It is so remarkable. But as the skeptic here, like, how sure are these scientists? Like, have they absolutely ruled out those other hypotheses or these other solutions to this mystery?
Short Wave
The Iguanas That Rafted To Fiji
Interesting. OK, so for now, iguanas are still like the reigning non-human trans-oceanic dispersal champions, right?
Short Wave
The Iguanas That Rafted To Fiji
That's beautiful, John. Thank you so much for bringing us this reporting.
Short Wave
The Iguanas That Rafted To Fiji
This episode was produced by Hannah Chin and edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. John Lambert and Tyler Jones check the facts. Beth Donovan is our senior director and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barber.
Short Wave
The Iguanas That Rafted To Fiji
Thank you for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
The Iguanas That Rafted To Fiji
Okay, so how did these land-bound lizards wind up all the way across the Pacific?
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What's A Weather Forecast Worth?
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, short wavers, Regina Barber here with an extra bonus episode for you this weekend. We wanted to give you a chance to hear something from our friends over at The Indicator, which is NPR's daily economics podcast. And this particular episode is about something science-y we think you'd be into. So thanks for checking it out.
Short Wave
What's A Weather Forecast Worth?
And here are your Indicator hosts, Wei-Lin Wong and Adrienne Ma.
Short Wave
Is AI Ready For Robots?
Today on the show, what happens when artificial intelligence moves out of the chat and into the real world?
Short Wave
Is AI Ready For Robots?
Okay, so Jeff, you were interested in finding out more about how AI works in robots. Where did you start?
Short Wave
Is AI Ready For Robots?
Hey, short wavers. Regina Barber here. It seems like artificial intelligence is everywhere in our virtual lives. It's in our search results, our phones. It's trying to read my emails. But NPR science correspondent Jeff Brunfield has noticed that AI isn't just showing up online anymore. It's starting to creep into reality.
Short Wave
Is AI Ready For Robots?
Yeah, it makes me think of this like smiling robot story we did and that robot just watched like a lot of videos of people smiling. Then it learned how to do it.
Short Wave
Is AI Ready For Robots?
Okay, so Jeff, personally, I've been waiting for something like AI in robotics because you can teach it to do something, you can ask it to do something to make me an ice cream sundae or something without any fancy programming or special knowledge.
Short Wave
Is AI Ready For Robots?
Okay, so ice cream sundaes, is that too advanced? Is folding an easier start?
Short Wave
Is AI Ready For Robots?
Okay, it's going to the dryer. It's pulling stuff out, putting it in a basket. It has the concentration I have when I'm going to do laundry. It almost looks, like, annoyed with folding like I do. Oh, my God. It's doing really well, actually.
Short Wave
Is AI Ready For Robots?
It doesn't even have a head, but I'm, like, giving it personality. It looks like it's like, oh, I just got to fold another one. Yeah. OK, so is it really as simple as like just teaching a robot like what to do? Because if it was, wouldn't these robots be everywhere?
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Is AI Ready For Robots?
OK, so like tell me why. Because like AI chatbots have gotten like way better super fast. So why are these robots getting stuck?
Short Wave
Is AI Ready For Robots?
Okay, that's so long. Like, are there any alternatives? There must be.
Short Wave
Is AI Ready For Robots?
OK, so it sounds like these like simulations have limits and real world training is going to take like a while. I can begin to see why AI robots aren't going to like be here tomorrow.
Short Wave
Is AI Ready For Robots?
Okay. So, Jeff, you've taken me from, like, optimist to pessimist. It's the, you know, the road I take every day. I'm starting to think that AI is, like, never going to work that well in robots or, like, it's going to be a really long time.
Short Wave
Is AI Ready For Robots?
I'm excited to hear more, Jeff. Thank you so much for bringing this reporting to us.
Short Wave
Is AI Ready For Robots?
We'll link Jeff's full story, which has robot videos, in our episode notes. This episode was produced by Burleigh McCoy, edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez, and fact-checked by Tyler Jones. Jimmy Keeley was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy.
Short Wave
Is AI Ready For Robots?
I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Shortwave from NPR.
Short Wave
Is AI Ready For Robots?
OK, Jeff, but even before AI came along, people and companies have been making like big claims about robots.
Short Wave
Bird Backpacks Could Help This Parrot Bounce Back
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.
Short Wave
Bird Backpacks Could Help This Parrot Bounce Back
A century ago, some residents say those forests were filled with nesting parrots. But over the decades, their habitat has shrunk and their population has plummeted, which is why in 1970 they were listed as endangered.
Short Wave
Bird Backpacks Could Help This Parrot Bounce Back
But in Monterey, a town in the Sierra Madre, there's a conservation group called OVIS, or Organización Vida Silvestre, Wildlife Organization, that partners with the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance. Ernesto Ankerlin-Hufflach is the director of science there.
Short Wave
Bird Backpacks Could Help This Parrot Bounce Back
Love the name. Yeah. Protecting the thick-billed parrots is kind of the latest step in what's been a longtime interest in conservation that Ernesto inherited from his father.
Short Wave
Bird Backpacks Could Help This Parrot Bounce Back
On top of the generational change he's making to be a conservationist, Ernesto is also innovating by involving the local community. For almost 30 years, he and his collaborators have been helping to save thick-billed parrots. And it might be working.
Short Wave
Bird Backpacks Could Help This Parrot Bounce Back
You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
Bird Backpacks Could Help This Parrot Bounce Back
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.
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Bird Backpacks Could Help This Parrot Bounce Back
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.
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Bird Backpacks Could Help This Parrot Bounce Back
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
Bird Backpacks Could Help This Parrot Bounce Back
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Short Wave
Bird Backpacks Could Help This Parrot Bounce Back
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Short Wave
Bird Backpacks Could Help This Parrot Bounce Back
Okay, Rachel, so earlier we talked about how the thick-billed parrots were really struggling. Like, in the 1990s, scientists think the population could have been at its lowest. And that's the same time period when these researchers at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance and OVIS started doing a census of these birds every couple years to keep track of how they were doing.
Short Wave
Bird Backpacks Could Help This Parrot Bounce Back
And at the same time they're keeping an eye on the parrot population, these researchers are also working to help the people who make a living from the forest. Remember, logging is historically the largest threat to these parrots.
Short Wave
Bird Backpacks Could Help This Parrot Bounce Back
Yeah, and this is the first facet of their approach, identifying and protecting forests in partnership with both the government and the local community. And this work has come a long way. Ernesto says that at the beginning, decades ago, he approached the issue pretty differently from locals.
Short Wave
Bird Backpacks Could Help This Parrot Bounce Back
Even with these efforts, finding a tree to build a nest is still difficult for the thick-billed parrot. So researchers and community members came up with a second facet to their conservation efforts, wooden nesting boxes in the forest.
Short Wave
Bird Backpacks Could Help This Parrot Bounce Back
But these birds are also figuring out how to thrive on their own. Ernesto says the parrots are also learning how to use different trees to nest and different food to eat.
Short Wave
Bird Backpacks Could Help This Parrot Bounce Back
Hey, Shortwavers. Regina Barber here with producer Rachel Carlson. Hey, Rachel. Hey, Gina. Okay, welcome again to the show. I love reporting with you.
Short Wave
Bird Backpacks Could Help This Parrot Bounce Back
And these backpacks are powered by the sun.
Short Wave
Bird Backpacks Could Help This Parrot Bounce Back
And with this data, the researchers have been able to document the migration patterns and the nesting habits of these parrots, which in turn help them keep track of the parrot's recovery. And that gradual recovery makes Ernesto pretty confident they'll keep getting funding to continue this work through the end of the decade.
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Bird Backpacks Could Help This Parrot Bounce Back
Yeah, and historically you could see them from the southwest United States all the way south into Venezuela, and in particular in Mexico's Sierra Madre Mountains, where you might still hear them up high in the old-growth forests. So it's very green.
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Bird Backpacks Could Help This Parrot Bounce Back
This summer, the thick-billed parrot was accepted as an Association of Zoos and Aquariums Safe Species. And that's a program that creates recovery plans, facilitates collaborations, and even helps with funding.
Short Wave
Bird Backpacks Could Help This Parrot Bounce Back
Oh, I loved having you here. Thank you so much. This episode was produced by Hannah Chin. It was edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez and Tyler Jones checked the facts.
Short Wave
Harnessing Spineless Sea Creatures' Superpowers
And it's not the only one. Across these marine invertebrates, there's a whole bunch of superpowers. Everything from regeneration to super strength and even stealing other animals' abilities. Drew says understanding these animals' superpowers not only helps researchers understand the rules of life, the lessons scientists learn from them can transform our medicines.
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Harnessing Spineless Sea Creatures' Superpowers
So today on the show, the strange world of the ocean's spineless creatures, what their ancient superpowers are, and how they continue to inspire human innovation today. I'm Regina Barber. You're listening to Shorewave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
Harnessing Spineless Sea Creatures' Superpowers
How the hunt for gangster Al Capone launched the IRS to power.
Short Wave
Harnessing Spineless Sea Creatures' Superpowers
Okay, Drew, we're talking about the superpowers of marine invertebrates from your book, The Ocean's Menagerie. We're going to talk about a few, starting with sponges, which I have trouble imagining. What should I imagine?
Short Wave
Harnessing Spineless Sea Creatures' Superpowers
When it comes to the ocean, some species get more attention than others.
Short Wave
Harnessing Spineless Sea Creatures' Superpowers
Let's talk about sea slugs next. Introduce us to these critters. What should we know about sea slugs?
Short Wave
Harnessing Spineless Sea Creatures' Superpowers
Sharks and dolphins also tend to get a lot of love. But marine biologist Drew Harvell fell in love with a different group in the ocean.
Short Wave
Harnessing Spineless Sea Creatures' Superpowers
A nudibranch being like another name for sea slugs.
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Harnessing Spineless Sea Creatures' Superpowers
Yeah. And I've learned sea slugs are a relative of snails, but instead of having a shell, they have these like chemical defenses in which they can eat other animals and steal their powers. Can you tell me more about like one of those?
Short Wave
Harnessing Spineless Sea Creatures' Superpowers
It's almost as if I were to eat a venomous snake, then somehow I could have venom or something like that. So what lessons can humans learn from that?
Short Wave
Harnessing Spineless Sea Creatures' Superpowers
All right. Last but not least, my favorite, maybe yours, are sea stars? Yes.
Short Wave
Harnessing Spineless Sea Creatures' Superpowers
These unsung icons of the sea have no backbones. And there's a lot of them.
Short Wave
Harnessing Spineless Sea Creatures' Superpowers
Yeah, all their arms are heads. I remember doing a story about that.
Short Wave
Harnessing Spineless Sea Creatures' Superpowers
I really like this. You're talking about how these sea stars, they're eating these urchins. They also eat a lot of clams. So how are sea stars doing this?
Short Wave
Harnessing Spineless Sea Creatures' Superpowers
So what could humans do with this superpower of like neural control?
Short Wave
Harnessing Spineless Sea Creatures' Superpowers
In the epilogue of your book, you write, the most precious resource on our planet is not oil or metal. It's the deep secrets that string our web of life together. What would you like to see in the future in how humans care for the ocean, like in honor of the statement?
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Harnessing Spineless Sea Creatures' Superpowers
Thank you so much for talking with me today, Drew. I had a wonderful time.
Short Wave
Harnessing Spineless Sea Creatures' Superpowers
Drew Harvell's book, The Ocean's Menagerie, is out now, where you can read about other invertebrates like jellyfish, octopi, giant clams, sea fans, and corals. And if you like nudibranchs, check out our past episode all about these fascinating creatures. We'll link it in our show notes. This episode was produced by Berlin McCoy.
Short Wave
Harnessing Spineless Sea Creatures' Superpowers
Drew was so fascinated with spineless creatures that she wrote a whole book about these ancient critters and how their long evolutionary histories have led to some interesting biology.
Short Wave
Harnessing Spineless Sea Creatures' Superpowers
It was edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez, and fact-checked by Tyler Jones. The audio engineer was Jimmy Keeley. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Shortwave from NPR.
Short Wave
The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
Right. So fewer shipwrecks because now like ships knew the time and knowing the time let them know where they were.
Short Wave
The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
Right. I mean, so we're planning to go to Mars, maybe even further into space.
Short Wave
The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
That's why today on the show, space clocks. How scientists are pushing the envelope to build an atomic clock with even better precision. And what that could mean for addressing some of the biggest mysteries of the universe. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
All right. You ventured actually a few miles north in D.C. to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, which we've been to together and it's like super cool. Yeah. Goddard is a campus.
Short Wave
The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
Yep. I mean, that's a good acronym. Like physicists and astronomers, like we're obsessed with acronyms.
Short Wave
The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
Hey, everyone. Regina Barber here with Emily Kwong and a story about time. Yes.
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The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
Okay, I loved optical benches when I was like a physics undergrad and I was always the student that screwed in the beam splitters in the mirrors. Of course you were. And not only is the precise alignment important, but the system has to be really durable.
Short Wave
The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
Right. So tell me about the atomic clocks that are like in space orbiting like right now.
Short Wave
The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
Yeah. So longitude is like the east-west position on Earth. It's relative to the Prime Meridian in Greenwich, England, right?
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The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
Yeah, so most atomic clocks use an atom of cesium or rubidium, but in general, I think it's like easiest to explain this process with like... the element hydrogen because it just has one proton at its center and one electron orbiting it. And like orbit is a bit of a simplification for now, but let's just say orbit. Electrons, they have these different orbits.
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The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
Each of them are associated with like a different energy. And if an atom absorbs energy, let's say through like a little chunk of light or a photon, the electron will change its orbit. It'll go to like this higher energy state. It'll go to a higher orbit. And then when the electron eventually goes down, energy is released from that atom as another photon.
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The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
And by knowing the difference between these two times, you can calculate, like, the in-between longitudinal degrees and know your location. Yeah, you can math. Right.
Short Wave
The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
And it's more precise because it's using optical light instead of microwaves.
Short Wave
The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
Okay, so like in this case, the atom will only get excited if the laser is on beat. It has that specific frequency.
Short Wave
The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
So what will OASIC, the clock, look like once it's built?
Short Wave
The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
Wow. OK, so gravity and quantum mechanics interacting is like the holy grail of physics. OK, so how far along are these new clocks?
Short Wave
The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
This was a great story. I loved it. I love learning about atomic clocks. Thank you for bringing it to us. It's always time for physics, Gina. It's always time for physics.
Short Wave
The Great Space Race ... With Clocks
Check it out. This episode was produced by Hannah Chin. It was edited by showrunner Rebecca Ramirez and Tyler Jones checked the facts. Jimmy Keeley was the audio engineer.
Short Wave
Should Humans Live On Mars?
One path is we stay on Earth forever, and then there will be some eventual extinction event. The alternative is to become a space-faring civilization and a multi-planet species.
Short Wave
Could Wormholes Exist?
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Space. I love it. And the things inside of it. Us, of course. Stars and galaxies I studied. And I even love the other cool hypothetical stuff that mostly lives in science fiction. Like wormholes. Wormholes are a funky but possible solution to Albert Einstein's famous equations for the theory of general relativity.
Short Wave
Could Wormholes Exist?
And that would be the opposite to a black hole. They'd push out matter instead of consuming it. And the thing that could connect them is a wormhole. But scientists have never seen one. And as a lifelong Trekkie, I have long wanted to know, could we ever? Or are wormholes purely science fiction?
Short Wave
Could Wormholes Exist?
So today on the show, wormholes, the geometry of space-time, and how, to a theoretical physicist, if the math checks out, you can't rule it out. I'm Regina Barber, and you're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. Okay, Ron, let's start with hard stuff today.
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Could Wormholes Exist?
Honestly, because like before we can talk about like fun wormholes, we kind of need to talk about Einstein's theory of general relativity. And this seems like kind of jargony, but it has been talked about in movies. Can you help us out? Can you summarize the theory of general relativity?
Short Wave
Could Wormholes Exist?
These theoretical cosmic portals can shorten a trip from hundreds of light years to minutes. Wormholes have been a mainstay of transportation in movies like Interstellar.
Short Wave
Could Wormholes Exist?
Like the things at the mall where you put the coin in. That's what I would always say to my students.
Short Wave
Could Wormholes Exist?
Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Space is curving, and one consequence of that curving is wormholes. Can you describe a wormhole?
Short Wave
Could Wormholes Exist?
OK. And like we said earlier, right, like the tunneling of a wormhole is this like connection from a black hole that consumes matter to this like theoretical white hole that pukes out matter somewhere else in space.
Short Wave
Could Wormholes Exist?
This image is like hard to reconcile with like the classic way teachers describe space time, like this 4D stretchy sheet. Like think of this trampoline material with like a bowling ball in the center. And that's like a star in space time. Like how do you feel about this like stretchy sheet metaphor?
Short Wave
Could Wormholes Exist?
And TV shows like my favorite, Star Trek. The aliens who live in the wormhole, as you call them. Which Ron Campbell says is not far off from how scientists think about these wormholes.
Short Wave
Could Wormholes Exist?
Yeah. And maybe like another complication, like for people who have heard it, is this idea that black holes are like potholes in the fabric of space-time. And we've said it before on the show, because it's a great way for scientists to convey this like huge amount of gravity, right? But in a conversation about wormholes, maybe it's too simplistic.
Short Wave
Could Wormholes Exist?
Okay, I love that image. It's like a dumbbell. But why are people so resistant to wormholes' existence? Why would we not see one in nature?
Short Wave
Could Wormholes Exist?
So I remember reading that, like you were saying, you need this like weird matter or energy to keep wormholes open because they're going to collapse otherwise. So if we were to detect a wormhole, someone from like a different alien civilization would have had to make it.
Short Wave
Could Wormholes Exist?
I love talking to theoretical physicists. Like anything's possible.
Short Wave
Could Wormholes Exist?
Ron's a theoretical physicist, and he wrote his PhD on funky solutions to Einstein's equations for general relativity, like wormholes. Basically, he did this by studying space-time, the four-dimensional existence we all live in. It includes three dimensions of space and one dimension of time moving forward as that fourth dimension.
Short Wave
Could Wormholes Exist?
So we're talking about all these like possibilities, right? You would have to find this exotic energy, this exotic matter. But like, so what is the main skepticism when you're talking to astronomers, when you're talking to other scientists? What is the main reason why wormholes is something that's kind of still in like the outlier research topics?
Short Wave
Could Wormholes Exist?
For you, why is it so important to not rule out these mathematical solutions to general relativity?
Short Wave
Could Wormholes Exist?
Ron, thank you so much for talking with us today. I've become slightly more hopeful for the existence of wormholes.
Short Wave
Could Wormholes Exist?
This episode was produced by Burleigh McCoy, edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez, and fact-checked by Tyler Jones. The audio engineer was Jimmy Keeley. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Shorewave from NPR.
Short Wave
Could Wormholes Exist?
And general relativity talks about how space-time itself has a shape to it. a shape that is distorted by all the wonders inside of it. All the beautiful stars, planets, galaxies, black holes. Their distortion of space-time is gravity. And if you push that gravity to its extreme, you get black holes. And some physicists theorize that white holes could also exist.
Short Wave
Could This Particle 'Clean Up' A Cosmic Mystery?
Hey Short Wavers, before we get started, quick little favor to ask. Can you help us shape the future of Shortwave by completing a short anonymous survey? It's a chance for you to tell us about what you like and don't and how we can serve you better. It's an awesome responsibility, but I trust you. And we want to hear from everyone, whether you're a day one or brand new listener.
Short Wave
Could This Particle 'Clean Up' A Cosmic Mystery?
That's why it's often called dark matter. It makes up over a quarter of the entire universe. Scientists don't know what it is, but they do know whatever it is has to have a few key components.
Short Wave
Could This Particle 'Clean Up' A Cosmic Mystery?
So what could this mysterious substance be? A lot of astronomers are searching for the answer, and some, like Chanda, think a particle called the axion may help make the dark matter problem a little tidier.
Short Wave
Could This Particle 'Clean Up' A Cosmic Mystery?
An axion is smaller than an atom and hypothetical, meaning scientists have never seen one and don't know if they exist. Today on the show, what does it mean if axions exist? Could they be the solution to the mysterious dark matter problem? And how can scientists find one? I'm Regina Barber, and you're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
Could This Particle 'Clean Up' A Cosmic Mystery?
Just go to npr.org slash shortwave survey. We'll also put a link in our show notes. Thank you. Okay, on to our show. You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Physics has a bit of a messy problem. There's matter missing in our universe. Something's there that we can't see, but we can detect it. This mysterious substance behaves a lot like the matter we know.
Short Wave
Could This Particle 'Clean Up' A Cosmic Mystery?
Okay, Chanda, tell me more about axions and your research. Like, what are they? What are you looking into? And what would you like to find out?
Short Wave
Could This Particle 'Clean Up' A Cosmic Mystery?
Our listeners are going to love that. They love the wave-particle duality. Yeah.
Short Wave
Could This Particle 'Clean Up' A Cosmic Mystery?
I loved those when I was an undergrad. Why don't you tell everyone what a Bose-Einstein condensate is?
Short Wave
Could This Particle 'Clean Up' A Cosmic Mystery?
Okay, and so are they a kind of particle we can find by just like smashing things together? Like, can we use particle accelerators like CERN to find them?
Short Wave
Could This Particle 'Clean Up' A Cosmic Mystery?
OK, so like how do we go into space and look at our telescopes? And and like how do we find confirmation that axions are really doing this work?
Short Wave
Could This Particle 'Clean Up' A Cosmic Mystery?
You know, the matter that makes up you, me, the sun, the planets, and the stars. At least in the way that matter attracts other matter. Stars can orbit other stars, galaxies, collections of billions of stars can orbit other galaxies, And looking at those orbits or the way things move around other things in space can tell us how massive the object in the center is.
Short Wave
Could This Particle 'Clean Up' A Cosmic Mystery?
Tell me a little bit more about that study that just came out talking about like these axion clouds, not just around, you know, big galaxies, but around these like dense dead stars, these neutron stars. Is that going to tell us a little bit more about dark matter?
Short Wave
Could This Particle 'Clean Up' A Cosmic Mystery?
So to find axions, scientists could look for excess photons, these particles of light, and that might tell us some interaction happened.
Short Wave
Could This Particle 'Clean Up' A Cosmic Mystery?
So this is kind of understood that there might be these axions around neutron stars? Have they been found or is it just like we're still just looking around these neutron stars?
Short Wave
Could This Particle 'Clean Up' A Cosmic Mystery?
So what would strengthen the idea that axions are the best possible solution for like solving the dark matter problem? In your mind, what would happen? What would have to happen?
Short Wave
Could This Particle 'Clean Up' A Cosmic Mystery?
But sometimes we can't see what is really causing that movement.
Short Wave
Could This Particle 'Clean Up' A Cosmic Mystery?
Chanda, thank you so much for like enlightening me about axions. Pun intended, they could turn into photons.
Short Wave
Could This Particle 'Clean Up' A Cosmic Mystery?
If you liked this episode, check out our episodes on black hole jets and neutrinos. Also make sure you never miss a new episode by following us on whichever podcasting platform you're listening from. This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson and edited by showrunner Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Robert Rodriguez was the audio engineer.
Short Wave
Could This Particle 'Clean Up' A Cosmic Mystery?
Beth Donovan is our senior director and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to ShoreWave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
Could This Particle 'Clean Up' A Cosmic Mystery?
That's Chanda Prescott-Weinstein. She's a theoretical particle physicist at the University of New Hampshire.
Short Wave
The Indicator: American Science Brain Drain
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, Shortwavers, Regina Barber here with one of the co-hosts of NPR's daily economics podcast, The Indicator from Planet Money, Darian Woods. Hey, Darian. Hey, Gina. OK, so we brought you on because of some labor reporting you've been doing.
Short Wave
The Indicator: American Science Brain Drain
Right, like all of the federal spending cuts that have been like changing the landscape for people who like do the science that we discuss on Shortwave day in and day out.
Short Wave
The Indicator: American Science Brain Drain
That was Darian Woods with The Indicator podcast, along with co-host Adrian Ma. Darian, thank you so much for bringing your reporting to Shortwave listeners. You're welcome. This episode was originally produced for The Indicator by Julia Ritchie, with engineering by Maggie Luthar and Sina Lafredo. It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Kate Concanon edits The Indicator.
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The Indicator: American Science Brain Drain
It was produced for Shortwave by Burley McCoy and edited by showrunner Rebecca Ramirez. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to this special collab episode of Shortwave from NPR.
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The Indicator: American Science Brain Drain
Yeah, I remember reading like 75% of respondents to this Nature poll back in March have considered leaving the United States.
Short Wave
The Indicator: American Science Brain Drain
I actually know some researchers who are applying abroad.
Short Wave
The Indicator: American Science Brain Drain
So today on the show, the scientific brain drain. Darian and Adrian get personal with a Hollywood entomologist reconsidering the United States and a Canadian CEO who's seen an opportunity to attract world-leading health scientists over the border. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
The Great Antarctic Food Web Puzzle
So many that in the summer, there are enough of them to feed the millions of tons of krill that then feed all the whales that migrate to Antarctica. So it's a very, very productive community, and it's also very diverse. There are a lot of kinds of phytoplankton that have adapted to live in these polar fjords in a certain balance with each other.
Short Wave
The Great Antarctic Food Web Puzzle
But new research Martina is doing as part of a community science program called Fjord Phyto suggests that balance may be shifting. Samples collected by Antarctic tour operators and tourists are beginning to pick apart the influence of climate change on the foundation of the ocean's food web.
Short Wave
The Great Antarctic Food Web Puzzle
So today on the show, how regular people are fueling research on some of the tiniest, most influential critters on Earth, and how the shifting balance of power could ripple across the entire ocean. I'm Regina Barber, and you're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. Okay, so Martina, what do we know about phytoplankton? Or maybe a better question is, what don't we know about them?
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The Great Antarctic Food Web Puzzle
Okay, so we're talking about these fjords, we're talking about these like phytoplankton. Where do they live in the water column?
Short Wave
The Great Antarctic Food Web Puzzle
Okay, so they're in these fjords. They're surrounded by these glaciers that are melting into the ocean. What do we know about that process?
Short Wave
The Great Antarctic Food Web Puzzle
So a huge way that you've learned about phytoplankton in these waters is the Fjord Phyto Project. It's a massive community science project where like regular people on like tour ships are collecting samples that you and other scientists can then like analyze in the lab. So how do passengers physically collect these samples?
Short Wave
The Great Antarctic Food Web Puzzle
If you had to pick a favorite ocean critter, what would it be? Whale? Dolphin? Penguin? Coral? One of my new favorites after talking with biologist Martina Messioni is phytoplankton.
Short Wave
The Great Antarctic Food Web Puzzle
So you rely on these passenger vessels to collect water samples from dozens of locations. And sometimes you get to go. What is that like?
Short Wave
The Great Antarctic Food Web Puzzle
Okay. So why passenger ships? Like, how does that help with the phytoplankton research?
Short Wave
The Great Antarctic Food Web Puzzle
And from the, like, Fjord Fido project, you have, like, more continuous data, like, from these passenger ships. What have you learned, like, in putting together this puzzle so far?
Short Wave
The Great Antarctic Food Web Puzzle
So you're just trying to, like, figure out, like, what the ecosystem even looks like. Yeah. Okay, cool. At least for the Fjord Fido level, yeah. Yeah. Okay, so you've got samples from all these passenger ships. What can you learn from those samples?
Short Wave
The Great Antarctic Food Web Puzzle
So there's all different kinds of phytoplankton. And I know that they can bloom like this explosion in population, like maybe a couple times a year. And even some of them are so big, you can see them from space. So can you see like a huge jump in the population in the samples that people like return to you during these blooms?
Short Wave
The Great Antarctic Food Web Puzzle
Plankton comes from the Greek word for drifter and refers to anything that can't swim against the current, which makes jellyfish plankton. And the plankton we're talking about today, phytoplankton, can make their own food from sunlight through photosynthesis. Because of this, the whole ocean needs them. And so do humans.
Short Wave
The Great Antarctic Food Web Puzzle
Can you talk about what would happen if something happens to these phytoplankton and their numbers start to decline? Like how would that affect other things?
Short Wave
The Great Antarctic Food Web Puzzle
Why do you think like really understanding this ecosystem, really understanding the populations of phytoplankton in Antarctica, why is that so important?
Short Wave
The Great Antarctic Food Web Puzzle
I like that thought. It's very optimistic. Martina, thank you so much for talking with me today. No, it was super fun. To learn more about the Fjord Fido project, check out the link in our episode notes. And if you liked this episode, follow us on whatever podcasting platform you're listening from. That way you'll never miss a new episode.
Short Wave
The Great Antarctic Food Web Puzzle
This episode was produced by Burleigh McCoy and edited by showrunner Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Jimmy Keeley was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Shortwave from NPR.
Short Wave
The Great Antarctic Food Web Puzzle
Martina studies phytoplankton that live in Antarctic polar fjords, these narrow ocean inlets that have been carved out by glaciers. Because of the crystal clear water and the abundance of nutrients like nitrates, phosphates, and sulfur, there are a lot of phytoplankton in and near the surface of these waters.
Short Wave
The Dangers Of Mirror Cell Research
A lot of short daily news podcasts focus on just one story. But right now, you probably need more. On Up First from NPR, we bring you three of the world's top headlines every day in under 15 minutes. Because no one story can capture all that's happening in this big, crazy world of ours on any given morning. Listen now to the Up First podcast from NPR. You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.
Short Wave
Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
So she tried psilocybin in this study. Does she feel better?
Short Wave
Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
Okay, so Lori has this really powerful emotional experience and maybe that's what helped?
Short Wave
Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
So today on the show, psychedelics. How do we entangle the ways they change our experience of the world with how they might change our brains?
Short Wave
Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
We're breaking down the history of psychedelics and some of the roadblocks researchers are facing when it comes to how to study them now. I'm Rachel Carlson. And I'm Regina Barber. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. Okay, Rachel, I have a question. Haven't people been talking about and, like, studying psychedelics for a long time?
Short Wave
Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
Like, why is all this research happening now?
Short Wave
Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
Hey, short wavers. Chances are you've heard about psychedelics once or twice. And shortwave producer Rachel Carlson has been diving into the science behind them. She's joining me this week to talk all about them. Hey, Rachel.
Short Wave
Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
Yeah, I mean, this is the sort of thing that I think of when somebody mentions psychedelics, like this trippy magic mushroom experience.
Short Wave
Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
Oh, OK. So with that in mind, let's kind of like drill down into like these two questions. One, how do we effectively study such a trippy drug? And then two, once you know how to study it, how do you tell what part of the drug is actually helpful?
Short Wave
Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
And that therapy component is pretty common, right? Since, like, people can have, like, intense experiences with these drugs, like a bad trip.
Short Wave
Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
And this isn't necessarily unique to psychedelics, right? Because I feel like just the experience of feeling like you're about to make this like change in your life could also play a role.
Short Wave
Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
OK, so there's this like big debate, right? Like, is it the trip or is it the drug? And does it even matter if we try to separate these things?
Short Wave
Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
I'm Regina Barber. And I'm Rachel Carlson. And if you liked this episode, make sure you never miss a new one, especially episodes two and three of this psychedelic series, by following us on whatever podcasting platform you're listening from. This episode was produced by Hannah Chin and edited by Rebecca Ramirez and Jeff Brumfield. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Kweisi Lee was the audio engineer.
Short Wave
Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
Beth Donovan is our senior director. And Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. Thank you for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
The Great Space (Clock) Race
Right. So fewer shipwrecks because now like ships knew the time and knowing the time let them know where they were.
Short Wave
The Great Space (Clock) Race
Right. I mean, so we're planning to go to Mars, maybe even further into space.
Short Wave
The Great Space (Clock) Race
That's why today on the show, space clocks. How scientists are pushing the envelope to build an atomic clock with even better precision. And what that could mean for addressing some of the biggest mysteries of the universe. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. All right. You ventured actually a few miles north in D.C.
Short Wave
The Great Space (Clock) Race
to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, which we've been to together and it's like super cool. Yeah. Goddard is a campus.
Short Wave
The Great Space (Clock) Race
I mean, that's a good acronym. Like physicists and astronomers, like we're obsessed with acronyms.
Short Wave
The Great Space (Clock) Race
Okay, I loved optical benches when I was like a physics undergrad and I was always the student that screwed in the beam splitters in the mirrors. Of course you were.
Short Wave
The Great Space (Clock) Race
Hey, everyone. Regina Barber here with Emily Kwong and a story about time. Yes.
Short Wave
The Great Space (Clock) Race
Right. So tell me about the atomic clocks that are like in space orbiting like right now.
Short Wave
The Great Space (Clock) Race
Yeah. So longitude is like the east-west position on Earth. It's relative to the Prime Meridian in Greenwich, England, right?
Short Wave
The Great Space (Clock) Race
Yeah, so most atomic clocks use an atom of cesium or rubidium, but in general, I think it's, like, easiest to explain this process with, like, the element hydrogen because it just has one proton at its center and one electron orbiting it. And like orbit is a bit of a simplification for now, but let's just say orbit. Electrons, they have these different orbits.
Short Wave
The Great Space (Clock) Race
Each of them are associated with like a different energy. And if an atom absorbs energy, let's say through like a little chunk of light or a photon, the electron will change its orbit. It'll go to this higher energy state. It'll go to a higher orbit. And then when the electron eventually goes down, energy is released from that atom as another photon.
Short Wave
The Great Space (Clock) Race
And it's more precise because it's using optical light instead of microwaves.
Short Wave
The Great Space (Clock) Race
Okay, so like in this case, the atom will only get excited if the laser is on beat. It has that specific frequency.
Short Wave
The Great Space (Clock) Race
And by knowing the difference between these two times, you can calculate, like, the in-between longitudinal degrees and know your location. Yeah, you can math. Right.
Short Wave
The Great Space (Clock) Race
Wow. OK, so gravity and quantum mechanics interacting is like the holy grail of physics. OK, so how far along are these new clocks?
Short Wave
The Great Space (Clock) Race
This was a great story. I loved it. I love learning about atomic clocks. Thank you for bringing it to us. It's always time for physics, Gina. It's always time for physics.
Short Wave
The Great Space (Clock) Race
Check it out. This episode was produced by Hannah Chin. It was edited by showrunner Rebecca Ramirez and Tyler Jones checked the facts. Jimmy Keeley was the audio engineer.
Short Wave
Did Scientists Find Alien Life Or Just Controversy?
Today on the show, what happens when a team of scientists claim to have found hints of alien life? We look at what the researchers said, how everyone reacted, and what all this means for the future of searching for life beyond our solar system. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
Did Scientists Find Alien Life Or Just Controversy?
OK, so now let's start out with just like some basics about Planet K2-18b. Like, what is this place?
Short Wave
Did Scientists Find Alien Life Or Just Controversy?
Yeah, so the idea is that you can, like, analyze the starlight to get clues about the atmosphere and, like, what gases are inside of it.
Short Wave
Did Scientists Find Alien Life Or Just Controversy?
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hello, fellow Earthlings. Regina Barber here. And today we're going to talk about some recent science news that made a big splash. The claims that possible signs of life have been found on a planet called K2-18b. This made headlines everywhere, including NPR, where it was reported on by none other than our old pal, Nell Greenfield-Boyce. Hey, Nell.
Short Wave
Did Scientists Find Alien Life Or Just Controversy?
I mean, that's a strong statement. Like, what did they find? Like, what were these hints?
Short Wave
Did Scientists Find Alien Life Or Just Controversy?
Right. And these like sulfur-based gases aren't made by anything else?
Short Wave
Did Scientists Find Alien Life Or Just Controversy?
Like geologic processes or, like, something that didn't require life.
Short Wave
Did Scientists Find Alien Life Or Just Controversy?
Yeah, I mean, this would be a huge deal, not just like in the history of like science, but the history of like humanity. But you said other astronomers were a little skeptical.
Short Wave
Did Scientists Find Alien Life Or Just Controversy?
So that's a few critics, but like how did this land overall?
Short Wave
Did Scientists Find Alien Life Or Just Controversy?
So what did the original researchers say in response? Like, obviously, they felt like something was there.
Short Wave
Did Scientists Find Alien Life Or Just Controversy?
Hey there. So, Nell, this was new research done with the James Webb Space Telescope. And basically, researchers said that they detected a couple of sulfur-based gases that on Earth are strongly associated with life, such as marine microbes.
Short Wave
Did Scientists Find Alien Life Or Just Controversy?
And this is the way, like, science goes. Like, this is going to go on and on for months.
Short Wave
Did Scientists Find Alien Life Or Just Controversy?
I mean, short of a UFO hovering above Times Square and aliens coming out of it, the discussion about this stuff is going to be contentious, right? I mean, this is how science is done. Somebody makes a claim. Somebody else has to check it to see if it's true or if it can be disproven.
Short Wave
Did Scientists Find Alien Life Or Just Controversy?
Yeah, it was very similar, right? Like, it's another gas associated with life that was detected in a planet's atmosphere. It made headlines. And then, like, people debated whether the detection was even real. And if so, like, whether it could have been made by, like, some other process. Yeah.
Short Wave
Did Scientists Find Alien Life Or Just Controversy?
Nell, if that does happen, we expect you to come right here and talk to us about it.
Short Wave
Did Scientists Find Alien Life Or Just Controversy?
This episode was produced by Burleigh McCoy, edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez, and fact-checked by Tyler Jones and Nell. Maggie Luther was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to ShoreWave from NPR.
Short Wave
Did Scientists Find Alien Life Or Just Controversy?
Yeah, and all of this created like quite the uproar in astronomy circles.
Short Wave
What It's Like Taking Alzheimer's Drugs
Wow. Okay. So what's the difference between these two drugs?
Short Wave
What It's Like Taking Alzheimer's Drugs
OK, so these sound pretty good, like even if they just reduce the decline a little. But are there downsides like the ones that you hear in like drug ads?
Short Wave
What It's Like Taking Alzheimer's Drugs
Wow. OK, so why do you think people are taking this risk?
Short Wave
What It's Like Taking Alzheimer's Drugs
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, short wavers. Regina Barber here. And today on the show, we're bringing you some Alzheimer's reporting from NPR's brain guy, John Hamilton. Hey, John.
Short Wave
What It's Like Taking Alzheimer's Drugs
So today on the show, John Hamilton introduces us to two women who share their experiences taking Alzheimer's drugs. I'm Regina Barber, and you're listening to Shorewave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
What It's Like Taking Alzheimer's Drugs
Okay. So, John, I hear you got a couple stories for us.
Short Wave
What It's Like Taking Alzheimer's Drugs
John, thank you so much for bringing us these two stories.
Short Wave
What It's Like Taking Alzheimer's Drugs
This episode was produced by Burleigh McCoy. It was edited by Giselle Grayson and fact-checked by Giselle and John Hamilton. 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 Regina Barber.
Short Wave
Why Your Brain Loves Sales
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hi, Gina. Hey, how's it going? This is my daughter, Dory. You want to say hi? Hi. Alina, I'm so excited to go shopping with you. It's going to be amazing. So I guess we should tell people why we're weirdly recording. Yes. At a mall next to a Christmas tree. We are next to a giant Christmas tree.
Short Wave
Why Your Brain Loves Sales
And they confirm this idea that something does happen in your brain when you encounter a discount.
Short Wave
Why Your Brain Loves Sales
I'm Regina Barber. I'm Alina Siluk. You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.
Short Wave
Why Your Brain Loves Sales
I feel pretty overwhelmed. There are like way too many things. I don't know what to choose. It's a lot of pressure. It's a lot of pressure and we haven't even started. Yeah. Yeah. So you don't have a list. Don't have a list. Do you have a budget? I should, but I don't. You don't have a budget. But I want to save money. good start. This is a great start. I should have been better prepared. Yes.
Short Wave
Why Your Brain Loves Sales
Okay. So the mall was huge and it was busy. And standing in that food court, I definitely felt unprepared.
Short Wave
Why Your Brain Loves Sales
So that's where you get that dopamine hit, right? The neurotransmitter that motivates us and... pumps you up to buy some cool new thing like when we went to Claire's with my daughter Dory, that accessory store that's like a magnet for teens and tweens.
Short Wave
Why Your Brain Loves Sales
Where didn't we go shopping? Yeah, we walked around a lot. So Alina Selyuk, you're a business correspondent at NPR and you apparently know a lot about malls.
Short Wave
Why Your Brain Loves Sales
Okay, and your rational part of your brain is just like chilling while you're having this moment? We are talking milliseconds here, okay?
Short Wave
Why Your Brain Loves Sales
Talking to Jorge, I immediately was like, it's our lizard brain. Like that ancient part of our brain that just like can't help itself.
Short Wave
Why Your Brain Loves Sales
Okay. So let's get back to the sales. We left them as we were weighing down our internal scales with some false sense of reward and freaking out our poor little accountant. Yes.
Short Wave
Why Your Brain Loves Sales
Right. For science. And you are kind enough to talk to us a little bit about the science involved in shopping, right? Specifically, the psychology of a sale, which is why we went hunting for sales at Pentagon City Mall just outside Washington.
Short Wave
Why Your Brain Loves Sales
Right. Like the sale is happening today while supplies last. You know,
Short Wave
Why Your Brain Loves Sales
Oh, this is like the whole thing they used to do with, like, supersizing and stuff. And popcorn and movie theaters. Yeah, it makes so much sense. Okay, so it makes the big bag look like the best deal.
Short Wave
Why Your Brain Loves Sales
So, like, this rewards mechanism has outweighed your cognitive concerns about your budget, your excitement to find this coat, to find it at a discount, like, makes you happy.
Short Wave
Why Your Brain Loves Sales
Right. So the human brain really has to work to like resist a sale.
Short Wave
Why Your Brain Loves Sales
Okay, well, so we didn't follow any of this advice on our trip to the mall. Granted, we didn't know. But it turns out like Dory and I have pretty strong rational brains. Like we don't love shopping and we didn't really want to buy that many things, but we couldn't really resist a visit to Claire's. And you could kind of tell it was a lot in the moment.
Short Wave
Why Your Brain Loves Sales
I mean, I do have to say, like, I do get happy when I find discounts, right? Like, since the three of us went to the mall, I have bought things online for Christmas. And I know now why that, like, I get this dopamine hit. But now you know the deal with deals. Thank you so much, Alina, for bringing us the story and for taking me shopping. You're welcome.
Short Wave
Why Your Brain Loves Sales
This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson, edited by showrunner Rebecca Ramirez and Alina Check the Facts. Maggie Luthar was our audio engineer. Special thanks to John Hamilton and Emily Kopp. I'm Regina Barber. Thanks for listening to Shorewave from NPR.
Short Wave
Why Your Brain Loves Sales
Malls are way nicer than they used to be. Even the one I used to work at is way nicer than it was when I worked there. Like, the floors are clean, you know?
Short Wave
10 Technologies To Watch
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Sometimes I marvel at the speed our technology is advancing, from AI and medicine to the most recent scientific breakthroughs and the newest tech. But it's also hard to know which ones are just hype and which ones may be game changers. Little did I know there's a whole magazine dedicated to this topic called MIT Technology Review.
Short Wave
10 Technologies To Watch
But in a sea of innovation, it can be hard to tell what tech is the real deal and what could shift our society. So today on the show, we break out the crystal ball. We're exploring some of the top technologies MIT Tech Review predicts will be breakout stars this year. From increasing our view of the cosmos to decreasing methane-filled cow burps.
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10 Technologies To Watch
I'm Regina Barber, and you're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. Okay, Amy, let's just dive into the top 10 technologies of 2025 per your publication, MIT Tech Review. We don't have time to go through all of them. So for the rest of this episode, we're going to like spotlight a few, starting with my favorite as an astrophysicist, the Vera Rubin Telescope in Chile.
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10 Technologies To Watch
So let's just start off. How is this telescope different from the others?
Short Wave
10 Technologies To Watch
Yeah, and I'm very excited about it. But from the scientists that you've talked to and you've done this research, what are they excited about that this telescope is now going to allow them to do that they couldn't do before?
Short Wave
10 Technologies To Watch
Okay, let's do the next one. And this is also very close to my heart. And it is because it's about a technology to reduce cow burps. Can you tell me more about this? Right.
Short Wave
10 Technologies To Watch
That's Amy Nordrum, an executive editor of the publication. And she said a couple of decades ago, the editors were trying to make predictions about which emerging technologies would be the most impactful that year, for better or for worse. They decided to make a list of their top 10.
Short Wave
10 Technologies To Watch
So when you say like 30% reduction in the ones that are already here and like above 50%, like how much of a dent can we put in, you know, our emissions?
Short Wave
10 Technologies To Watch
Okay, so Amy, because we are on a super long podcast and we can't go over everything on this list, to end, we're going to go into rapid fire with three honorable mentions. So first up, long-acting HIV prevention meds.
Short Wave
10 Technologies To Watch
Oh. So amazing. Amy, thank you so much for bringing us the new technologies that are going to happen in 2025. I really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you so much. Thanks so much for having me. The full MIT Technology Review of 10 Breakthrough Technologies is out now. We'll link to it in our episode notes. Shortwavers, thank you for listening.
Short Wave
10 Technologies To Watch
Make sure you never miss a new episode by following us on whichever podcasting platform you're listening to. And hey, if you have a science question, send us an email at shortwave at npr.org. This episode was produced by Burleigh McCoy and edited by showrunner Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Kweisi Lee was the audio engineer.
Short Wave
10 Technologies To Watch
Beth Donovan is our senior director and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to ShoreWave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
10 Technologies To Watch
In 2009, we put Intelligent Software Assistance on the list. Specifically, Siri, which was released in February 2010. On their first list, they included natural language processing.
Short Wave
10 Technologies To Watch
Satellite megaconstellations were on their 2020 list. One year, they predicted virtual reality headsets. Another year, they included data mining, when you extract different bits of info from large datasets.
Short Wave
Why Daylight Boosts Immunity
Yes. I'm going to let Burley start though, but yes, that's sweet.
Short Wave
Why Daylight Boosts Immunity
Yeah, many immune cells have a built-in circadian clock, like a lot of cells in our body. But there's some immune cells that don't even live a full day. Scientists wanted to know if they could tell time.
Short Wave
Why Daylight Boosts Immunity
Well, a different group of researchers used baby zebrafish, which are transparent, to watch how fluorescent bacteria interacted with fluorescent neutrophils. And they found that neutrophils can indeed tell whether it's day or night. We talked to immunologist Chris Hall, who was part of that research team.
Short Wave
Why Daylight Boosts Immunity
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey Shore Wavers, Regina Barber here. And Burleigh McCoy. With our bi-weekly science news roundup featuring the hosts of All Things Considered. And today we have one of our favorites, Ari Shapiro.
Short Wave
Why Daylight Boosts Immunity
Or scientists could look at how to do the opposite. So like how to modify these clock immune genes to lower inflammation.
Short Wave
Why Daylight Boosts Immunity
Yeah, they embedded tiny microscopic particles in contact lenses that convert certain wavelengths of infrared light to specific wavelengths of visible light. So using a few versions of these particles, they could convert a range of infrared light into different colors.
Short Wave
Why Daylight Boosts Immunity
And Ari, one really cool thing, it kind of blew my mind about these contact lenses, is that participants could see infrared light when their eyes were closed. And this is because the longer wavelength can actually go through eyelids.
Short Wave
Why Daylight Boosts Immunity
Well, as we mentioned before, these won't pick up infrared in like the environment just yet. So scientists need to work on their efficiency, like turning infrared to visible light. But if they could do that, one advantage of wearing them would be able to see when it's foggy or if there's low light.
Short Wave
Why Daylight Boosts Immunity
For example, if you're like driving across a bridge when it's foggy, infrared light can travel farther like without scattering on fog particles.
Short Wave
Why Daylight Boosts Immunity
But if the hawk just swoops in, the prey will fly away. The hawk needs cover for this ambush. And that's when the story, like, really starts. Zoologist Vladimir Dinitz observed a hawk waiting for a long string of cars to line up at this traffic light.
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Why Daylight Boosts Immunity
Yeah. So Vladimir noticed that whenever the crosswalk button was pushed, it would make this like beeping sound. And the hawk would position itself in a tree down the street from the crumb house, like staging this attack. And he says that when the crosswalk button was like activated, the red light lasts a bit longer.
Short Wave
Why Daylight Boosts Immunity
And this would make the line of cars get like just long enough to give the hawk proper coverage for this like surprise attack.
Short Wave
Why Daylight Boosts Immunity
Yeah, still, it's important to keep in mind that this is like one hawk. This was only observed by Vladimir. It's not been filmed. So when we talked to Petra Zumutzkutner, a professor of behavioral ecology at the University of Vienna, who didn't work on this study, she was excited about this behavior, but she was skeptical that this hawk was being cued by this crosswalk sound.
Short Wave
Why Daylight Boosts Immunity
We're all hoping for that. But, you know, we might not see the hawk again, but we're probably going to see you again, Ari. Thank you for coming and hanging out with us.
Short Wave
Why Daylight Boosts Immunity
Come back anytime. You can hear more of Ari Shapiro on Consider This, NPR's afternoon podcast about what the news means for you.
Short Wave
Why Daylight Boosts Immunity
This episode was produced by Jordan Marie Smith and Burleigh McCoy. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez and Christopher Intagliata.
Short Wave
Why Daylight Boosts Immunity
I'm Burleigh McCoy. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
Rare Narwhal Footage Shows New Tusk Activities
So he was actually talking about this with my colleague, science correspondent Nell Greenfield-Boyce. And Nell, I hear you're no stranger to narwhal tusks yourself, right?
Short Wave
Rare Narwhal Footage Shows New Tusk Activities
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, Shortwavers, Regina Barber here. So if I say unicorns, what comes to mind? For me, I think about the way this legendary creature has been talked about for hundreds and hundreds of years. It's linked to magic and fantasy. And of course, I also think of that key feature of unicorns. You know what I'm talking about. The famous unicorn horn.
Short Wave
Rare Narwhal Footage Shows New Tusk Activities
I mean, I would have. Okay, so moving on to what narwhals eat and how this might relate to their tusks and why we wanted to talk to you today, we understand that there's some new drone footage of narwhals. Indeed. I am so excited. Okay, so today on the show, we're going to dive into what scientists recently saw when they spied on narwhals with overhead drones.
Short Wave
Rare Narwhal Footage Shows New Tusk Activities
and what it says about what this mysterious whale might do with its unusual and fantastical tusk. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
Rare Narwhal Footage Shows New Tusk Activities
OK, now let's just start with the basics when it comes to narwhals.
Short Wave
Rare Narwhal Footage Shows New Tusk Activities
Yeah. So what's the deal with the tusk? Like my understanding is it's kind of like a tooth coming out of their head.
Short Wave
Rare Narwhal Footage Shows New Tusk Activities
Okay, so this is where we get into the drone footage.
Short Wave
Rare Narwhal Footage Shows New Tusk Activities
You see, in medieval Europe, wealthy people could buy unicorn horns. They looked like these long spiral horns that tapered to a point.
Short Wave
Rare Narwhal Footage Shows New Tusk Activities
So are scientists saying this is like a part of how narwhals hunt, like using their tusks?
Short Wave
Rare Narwhal Footage Shows New Tusk Activities
Right. So it's not necessary like for foraging.
Short Wave
Rare Narwhal Footage Shows New Tusk Activities
That's zoologist Greg Okori-Crow. He's with Florida Atlantic University. And he doesn't study unicorns. He studies narwhals, the Arctic whale that has a long tusk jutting out of its head. And it's sometimes called the unicorn of the sea. Greg says way back when, seafarers brought narwhal tusks back to Europe and passed them off as unicorn horns.
Short Wave
Rare Narwhal Footage Shows New Tusk Activities
But I thought, like, everyone had agreed that the main use of their tusks was to, like, amaze the females. Like, that was not a mystery, right? Exactly.
Short Wave
Rare Narwhal Footage Shows New Tusk Activities
Wow. So the length of the tusk tells you how big those hidden male organs are.
Short Wave
Rare Narwhal Footage Shows New Tusk Activities
Well, based on these videos, maybe they would just poke it with their tusks or like play with it.
Short Wave
Rare Narwhal Footage Shows New Tusk Activities
And even though they're not really unicorn horns, they're kind of magical.
Short Wave
Rare Narwhal Footage Shows New Tusk Activities
A tusk can be 10 feet long, and he says it's beautiful.
Short Wave
Why These Squirrels Are Eating Meat
Hello. Thanks for having me. I hear today we're talking about carnivorous squirrels hunting in California. Yeah.
Short Wave
Why These Squirrels Are Eating Meat
Wow, I am suddenly not hungry anymore. Okay, this really sounds like serious predator behavior. Is this a new phenomenon?
Short Wave
Why These Squirrels Are Eating Meat
And where exactly do these fiercely predatory squirrels live?
Short Wave
Why These Squirrels Are Eating Meat
All right. Speaking of animals undergoing change, let's talk about this new study of species on early Earth. What's going on there?
Short Wave
Why These Squirrels Are Eating Meat
All right. Let's go from one ancient era to another. Now we're going to talk about our ancient relationship with dogs. I have a very present-day relationship with my dog, Bromo, who's kind of like my best friend.
Short Wave
Why These Squirrels Are Eating Meat
Interesting. What made that leg bone such a fascinating find?
Short Wave
Why These Squirrels Are Eating Meat
Sounds just like my dog when he sits under my kitchen table and begs for scraps.
Short Wave
Why These Squirrels Are Eating Meat
Wow, what an honor. Please let me come back. I love this.
Short Wave
This Telescope Could Find "Planet 9"
That's so many images. So like you could basically make like a movie out of this, like the entire night sky, like how it changes over time, which is new.
Short Wave
This Telescope Could Find "Planet 9"
Wow. I mean, that really boggles my mind. It's like really an astonishing amount of data.
Short Wave
This Telescope Could Find "Planet 9"
Including possibly another large planet in our solar system, right? Because my understanding is that this observatory is the best chance of finding the elusive so-called Planet 9. Right.
Short Wave
This Telescope Could Find "Planet 9"
So today on the show, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. What happens when big data comes to astronomy and why its telescope has the best chance of finding another planet in our solar system. Plus, what else this radical observatory might see. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
This Telescope Could Find "Planet 9"
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey Shore Wavers, Regina Barber here, and today we're going to talk about a powerful, highly unusual telescope that's just now starting up. Most telescopes are designed to point at a particular object in the sky, maybe a certain galaxy or planet or star, so that astronomers can study it in detail.
Short Wave
This Telescope Could Find "Planet 9"
All right, now, the Rubin Observatory has been in the works for decades. Like, tell me how this idea came about.
Short Wave
This Telescope Could Find "Planet 9"
Yep, everyone was dancing it. And the president was Bill Clinton. Yeah, I was in high school. I was watching a lot of Simpsons. I was playing the saxophone like Lisa and former President Clinton. Indeed.
Short Wave
This Telescope Could Find "Planet 9"
Wow. OK, so, I mean, that's right. Like Moore's law, the computer chips were getting like more and more powerful.
Short Wave
This Telescope Could Find "Planet 9"
Yeah, I did not know it. But how did this observatory come to be named after like Vera Rubin, the astronomer that's like famous for work on dark matter?
Short Wave
This Telescope Could Find "Planet 9"
Then it moves on to the next galaxy or another star, and it does it all over again.
Short Wave
This Telescope Could Find "Planet 9"
Wow, and that's because of this big camera, that car-sized one. Yeah. And I'm assuming these images are really big.
Short Wave
This Telescope Could Find "Planet 9"
I mean, Nell, this is just like a mind bending amount of observations. And you said it's all like being immediately analyzed. And I'm assuming this is like all automatic, too.
Short Wave
This Telescope Could Find "Planet 9"
That's NPR science correspondent Nell Greenfield-Boyce, everyone. She's here to tell us about the awesome power of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.
Short Wave
This Telescope Could Find "Planet 9"
Ooh, planets. Okay, now we're getting into this nitty gritty. Planets move across the sky. That's the kind of change this observatory was built to see. Lay it on me. Is the Vera Rubin Observatory going to find Planet 9?
Short Wave
This Telescope Could Find "Planet 9"
So there's like not enough data so they can like pinpoint exactly where to look.
Short Wave
This Telescope Could Find "Planet 9"
That's so cool. OK, so when will we know? Like when could data start coming in that might like reveal this planet if it actually does exist?
Short Wave
This Telescope Could Find "Planet 9"
Nell, if that happens, though, clear spot for us on your calendar because we are definitely going to want to talk about it. Absolutely. I will be back here with the details. Nell, thank you so much for bringing us the story. Oh, always a pleasure to talk to you. And thank you, shortwavers, for listening. Follow us on this podcasting platform to make sure you never miss a new episode.
Short Wave
This Telescope Could Find "Planet 9"
And hey, if you have a science question, send us an email at shortwave at npr.org. We may answer it on an upcoming episode. This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson. 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
This Telescope Could Find "Planet 9"
I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
Peeing Is Contagious!
Yeah, I'm holding back the yawn right now. So Ina Onishi, a grad student at Kyoto University in Japan, was studying a group of captive chimpanzees when something similar struck her as odd.
Short Wave
Peeing Is Contagious!
So basically chimps were peeing together a bit more often than you'd expect if they were just peeing at random. And she published that conclusion in the journal Current Biology this week. Could she tell why this was happening? So being closer helped, but proximity wasn't like the main factor here.
Short Wave
Peeing Is Contagious!
Chimps have a hierarchical society, and it turns out that the lower ranking chimps were more likely to catch the urge to pee from more dominant chimps.
Short Wave
Peeing Is Contagious!
But we can't rule out that there might be like a non-adaptive reason. It could be just that the chimps pee when they hear other chimps pee, sort of like humans get the urge when you hear like running water.
Short Wave
Peeing Is Contagious!
Hey, short wavers. Regina Barber here with science correspondent Jonathan Lambert. Welcome to the News Roundup.
Short Wave
Peeing Is Contagious!
Yeah, so there are these things called chorus waves. Do you want to hear?
Short Wave
Peeing Is Contagious!
Yeah, it's an audio clip and it's been reconstructed from radiation coming 100,000 miles above Earth's surface.
Short Wave
Peeing Is Contagious!
So that's Richard Horn, a professor and distinguished research scientist at the British Antarctic Survey on Space Weather. He wasn't part of the study, but he said the study might change how scientists think course waves are created.
Short Wave
Peeing Is Contagious!
Well, the leading hypothesis on how chorus waves are created suggests that gradients in the Earth's magnetic field are very important, and that as chorus waves grow, they should cause bunching of electrons.
Short Wave
Peeing Is Contagious!
We are totally excited to have you. And we're also excited to have a News Roundup favorite, Ari Shapiro, one of the hosts of All Things Considered. Welcome back.
Short Wave
Peeing Is Contagious!
Right. I mean, legit question. Electrons create these waves and then the waves themselves affect the electrons. It's like a feedback loop. Coarse waves can actually like push these electrons to move nearly the speed of light.
Short Wave
Peeing Is Contagious!
Yeah. So I'm lactose intolerant. I'm not a fan of vegan cheese, but I'm like excited for possible better vegan cheese in the future. So my question to you, have you tried it?
Short Wave
Peeing Is Contagious!
Science, Ari. So Stacey Dobson is a PhD candidate at the University of Guelph in Ontario, and she and a research team developed this new cheese formulation and told us that the team's first step was to get a better understanding on how the protein starches and fats were like all working together.
Short Wave
Peeing Is Contagious!
They looked at a bunch of proteins, including lentils and fava beans and pea protein, and they tested those with different fats.
Short Wave
Peeing Is Contagious!
Okay, so we're going to do what we usually do. We're going to go over three science stories in the news. The first one being what, John?
Short Wave
Peeing Is Contagious!
Yes. And Stacey says that the team also put these combinations into a machine that's kind of like a CT scan, but for food. So it lets the researchers look at the inside of the structures, things like how big the fat globs were inside each version of the cheese.
Short Wave
Peeing Is Contagious!
Yeah, so she and her team said that they tried like lots of this cheese during the research process. They had this little pizza oven and toaster to test it all out.
Short Wave
Peeing Is Contagious!
Ari, we missed your energy. We're so happy to have you back. Thank you for coming and hanging out with us.
Short Wave
Peeing Is Contagious!
And before we go, we want to say a big thank you if you're one of the listeners who answered the call in the last few months and supported our show by signing up for NPR+. That support is so important to keeping our week going. So thank you. And if you've heard about NPR+, but you haven't supported us yet, it's really easy to sign up. Just go to plus.npr.org.
Short Wave
Peeing Is Contagious!
Tyler Jones checked the facts. Ko Takasuki Chernovan and Becky Brown were the audio engineers. I'm Regina Barber.
Short Wave
Peeing Is Contagious!
And not only do we have peeing chimps, but we're also going to get chirping chorus waves from space.
Short Wave
Peeing Is Contagious!
We totally do. All that on this episode of Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
Flamingos: The Water-Bending Physics Masters
Are you one of the half of Americans who say money management is part of their self-care routine? Or one of the 41% of young adults who think financial well-being means having multiple streams of income? On It's Been a Minute, I'm investigating how young people are turning to OnlyFans, sports betting, and Klarna to stretch every last dollar.
Short Wave
Flamingos: The Water-Bending Physics Masters
That's all month long on the It's Been a Minute podcast from NPR. You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.
Short Wave
What Experts Say About ADHD-Tok
And the answer resoundingly was it looked more like the kinds of circuits that we use in order to produce flexible speech.
Short Wave
This Is Your Brain On Dessert
Scott, it's our brains. So one of the ways our body signals that we're full involves these satiety neurons, and they're located in this part of our brain called the hypothalamus. But sugar seems to hijack that system in an interesting way.
Short Wave
This Is Your Brain On Dessert
Yes. So when the researchers blocked this pathway, the mice seemed less interested in sugar.
Short Wave
This Is Your Brain On Dessert
Yeah. And then Henning and his colleagues found the same pathways in humans by looking at donated brain tissue and scanning brains of volunteers who sat in an fMRI machine and were fed a sugar solution through a tube.
Short Wave
This Is Your Brain On Dessert
Hey, ShareWavers. Regina Barber here. And Emily Kwong. With our bi-weekly science news roundup featuring the hosts of All Things Considered. And today we have fellow nerd, Scott Detrow.
Short Wave
This Is Your Brain On Dessert
Yeah. Researchers figured out a way to measure the health of parts of the ocean by tracking and weighing elephant seals.
Short Wave
This Is Your Brain On Dessert
According to lead researcher Roxanne Beltran, a huge pulley system, basically. They wait for pregnant females to return from their months long foraging trip to beaches on the California coast where they give birth and bond with their pups. Then using binoculars and cameras, the scientists identify previously tagged seals they want to weigh and then they weigh them.
Short Wave
This Is Your Brain On Dessert
Yeah, they can't. So this is part of the ocean that scientists have a really hard time getting information from. It's called the Twilight Zone, one of my favorite shows. It's hundreds to thousands of feet below the surface. And Roxanne says not knowing the true number of fish in these dark depths is a problem.
Short Wave
This Is Your Brain On Dessert
Okay, we should have brought some in. There might be some in the building we can look after, but we're here to talk to you about why our dessert craving actually begins in our brain. How elephant seals are helping scientists monitor ocean health. And then finding water in the desert. Fog.
Short Wave
This Is Your Brain On Dessert
No, it's not new. So fog collection is like an old technique. And scientists have been studying it for at least 40 years. But all of that data came from small villages. And now a new study in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Science shows that fog could be a viable source of drinking water in a big city too.
Short Wave
This Is Your Brain On Dessert
Well, after collecting data at various like fog collection sites for a year, the researchers used a computer model to map how much water could be collected from fog over this whole region. And they found that fog could supply hundreds of thousands of liters of drinking water per week. enough to supplement the water demands of under-resourced parts of the city.
Short Wave
This Is Your Brain On Dessert
He spells. He hosts. He's Scott Dutro. You can hear more of Scott on Consider This and PR's afternoon podcast about what the news means for you. This episode was produced by Hannah Chen, Burley McCoy, and Alejandro Marquez-Hanse. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez and Christopher Intagliata.
Short Wave
This Is Your Brain On Dessert
I'm Emily Kwong. And I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Shorewave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
This Is Your Brain On Dessert
Oh, fine. I guess we lie. All of that on this episode of Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.
Short Wave
The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
This sounds very like sci-fi film.
Short Wave
The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
I hear that you've been working on this really interesting story for the past year.
Short Wave
The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
So today on the show, the first living person to receive a new kind of genetically modified pig kidney and what that could mean for the future of transplant medicine. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
Hey, short wavers. 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 First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
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 First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
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 First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
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Short Wave
The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
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
The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
OK, Rob, so you're the only journalist allowed in the operating room, right? So, like, set the scene. How was it?
Short Wave
The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
Wow. OK, so who is this patient being operated on receiving this transplant?
Short Wave
The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
Okay, so you're saying farm animals. So there's like a farm just full of cloned animals.
Short Wave
The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
So she's been dealing with this for almost a decade. And this treatment, like transplanting an organ from another animal, it's a new experimental approach, right?
Short Wave
The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
Yeah, I don't think I've heard of clinical trials for this. Aren't those required before human patients can get these like experimental treatments?
Short Wave
The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
Wait, wait. So the organs arrive like during surgery? Yeah.
Short Wave
The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
And then they check to make sure, like, everything's working, right? Yeah.
Short Wave
The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
I like my heart's racing and I'm just like hearing all this. Like, so the surgery was a success. Like, how's Tawana doing now?
Short Wave
The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
Hey Shortwavers, Regina Barber here and I'm here with my colleague, NPR health correspondent and awesome guy, Rob Stein. Hey Rob.
Short Wave
The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
I am so happy for her. It seems like she's optimistic and like her doctors are optimistic too. But this procedure is still like very controversial, right? Yeah.
Short Wave
The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
Right. And given that, like, what do her doctors say about her chances for, like, long-term health? Will this kidney last her a long time?
Short Wave
The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
Rob, thank you so much for bringing us this like incredible story. I hope you come back and like keep us updated.
Short Wave
The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
This episode was produced by Jessica Young and Rachel Carlson. It was edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez and Rob Check the Facts. Patrick Murray was our audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Shortwave from NPR.
Short Wave
The First Woman To Get A New Kind Of Kidney Transplant
Wow, you're like breaking my brain here. Okay, so there are these identical organs in all of these pigs so they can be used in humans, right?
Short Wave
Orange Cat Lovers, Rise Up!
All right, Juana, where do you want to begin? I have a guess. I mean, there's no other place but Orange Cats. Right.
Short Wave
Orange Cat Lovers, Rise Up!
My blonde orange boy, Benny, also agrees. Maybe not the other three cats, but our boss also has two orange cats, Tang and Dorito. Both of them are males too. Guys, I have to tell you something. I also have an orange cat and guess what?
Short Wave
Orange Cat Lovers, Rise Up!
Male cats, just like male humans, have an X and Y chromosome. So any male cat with this mutation ends up orange. Female cats need the mutation on both of their X chromosomes to be fully orange, which is statistically less likely. So nearly all calico and tortoiseshell cats are female because this mutation is found on only one of their X chromosomes.
Short Wave
Orange Cat Lovers, Rise Up!
So no orange cats were harmed in the pursuit of this genetic mystery. Well, that's good. In fact, study author Greg Barsh says that the Stanford team partnered with cat lovers and community scientists to gather DNA samples from dozens of different orange cats.
Short Wave
Orange Cat Lovers, Rise Up!
Are their orange colors linked to their sex chromosomes too? So actually, no, their orange color arises from regular chromosomes known as autosomes.
Short Wave
Orange Cat Lovers, Rise Up!
Yes, Juana. I just bought a bike. I just started biking. I don't want to get hit by a car. So I was very interested in the study where like computer scientists created a system called proxy cycle. It's a sensor to monitor how close cars get to cyclists. The scientists deployed the sensor on 15 bikes over the span of two months in Seattle, Washington.
Short Wave
Orange Cat Lovers, Rise Up!
Hey, Short Wavers, Regina Barber here. And Emily Kwong. With our biweekly science news roundup featuring the host of All Things Considered, Juana Summers.
Short Wave
Orange Cat Lovers, Rise Up!
And that might seem like an obvious connection to make, but the lead researcher Joe Breda at the University of Washington has surveyed cyclists and found that people who were like new to city biking weren't all that good at like gauging how safe routes were. And that's where this answer could help. Like he just wants to encourage more people to bike.
Short Wave
Orange Cat Lovers, Rise Up!
And you know, Juana, we've gotten so used to like maps when we're driving, like people's devices telling companies like Google where traffic is, allowing them to reroute themselves. Imagine something like that for cyclists where all of this like crowdsourced data from the sensors can feed into a map that helps like find safer bike routes.
Short Wave
Orange Cat Lovers, Rise Up!
Like in a regular rapid heart rhythm? Yes. Right. AFib is common, affecting about 10 million U.S. adults. And now AFib isn't necessarily life-threatening, but it can be dangerous, especially for older people. And gum disease is also really common. It affects nearly half of U.S. adults.
Short Wave
Orange Cat Lovers, Rise Up!
To study the connection, his team infected mice with a bacteria associated with gum disease and found that these mice developed AFib more easily than those without the bacteria. They also saw that mouth bacteria migrated to the heart, like in mice and in humans.
Short Wave
Orange Cat Lovers, Rise Up!
Still, like once the bacteria reaches the heart, the study authors think it may lead to tissue scarring or inflammation, which may contribute to all sorts of other problems like AFib.
Short Wave
Orange Cat Lovers, Rise Up!
Yes. Elizabeth Jackson is a cardiologist at University of Alabama at Birmingham, and she was not involved in the study, but she said it highlights the importance of good dental care and healthy living overall, like exercise, healthy food.
Short Wave
Orange Cat Lovers, Rise Up!
I mean, I am actually going to do that. Juana, thank you so much for coming on the show and talking about orange cats with us. That was my favorite. Yeah, we should get all our orange cats together. Cat party.
Short Wave
Orange Cat Lovers, Rise Up!
You can hear more of Juana on Consider This, NPR's afternoon podcast about what the news means for you. This episode was produced by Elena Burnett and Rachel Carlson. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez and Christopher Intagliata.
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Orange Cat Lovers, Rise Up!
And I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
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How Do Astronomers Find Exoplanets? Wiggles!
But those planets are only part of the story. Without a way to find planets far from their stars, scientists haven't been able to paint a full picture of these solar systems until now.
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How Do Astronomers Find Exoplanets? Wiggles!
This new method lets us fill in the gaps of the picture, finding planets that astronomers couldn't detect before.
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How Do Astronomers Find Exoplanets? Wiggles!
So today on the show, the next phase of exoplanet discovery, how scientists are filling in missing pieces of a solar system puzzle, and how this search has just begun. I'm Regina Barber, and you're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
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How Do Astronomers Find Exoplanets? Wiggles!
Okay, Josh, so to start, can you tell me, how have we found exoplanets in the past? Like, what methods do we know work?
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How Do Astronomers Find Exoplanets? Wiggles!
Growing up, you might have learned the names of the planets. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter. But what about Beta Pictoris C? You probably didn't learn that one. I didn't either. That's because we only found out about it in 2019. And because it's an extrasolar planet, or an exoplanet.
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How Do Astronomers Find Exoplanets? Wiggles!
It makes me think of like a lighthouse, right? Like if you're not at the right angle, if you were a helicopter above the lighthouse, you would not see like the beam of light hitting you. You could miss it.
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How Do Astronomers Find Exoplanets? Wiggles!
Right. I mean, one analogy I like to use is sound instead of light. They're both waves, so we can do that. The siren of a fire engine, it's going to sound different when it's coming at you versus when it passes you. Right. And that's the Doppler effect.
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How Do Astronomers Find Exoplanets? Wiggles!
So you use this new method to measure how, like, stars wiggle, and it's called astrometry. Like, what is astrometry?
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How Do Astronomers Find Exoplanets? Wiggles!
Oh, wow. Okay. Okay. So it's just straight up measuring where the star is.
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How Do Astronomers Find Exoplanets? Wiggles!
Yeah, and that's what I thought we were actually measuring when I first learned about star wiggling, like back in the 1990s. But you're saying that that was actually the Doppler method, and we were measuring the speed of stars rather than observing those stars move.
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How Do Astronomers Find Exoplanets? Wiggles!
Okay, okay. So using this new method, what kind of planets do we expect to see?
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How Do Astronomers Find Exoplanets? Wiggles!
So why is this method possible now, like when it wasn't before?
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How Do Astronomers Find Exoplanets? Wiggles!
That's Josh Wynn. He's an astronomer at Princeton University and an exoplanet hunter.
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How Do Astronomers Find Exoplanets? Wiggles!
Okay, so to summarize, this new method is only possible because Gaia is capable of doing these precise measurements, which in turn makes it possible to really see these wiggling stars and help us identify potential exoplanets. And I mean, there's lots of stars out there. You found this one exoplanet with this new method. How did you pick which stars to look at?
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How Do Astronomers Find Exoplanets? Wiggles!
And this one exoplanet, which has since been named Gaia 4b, can you talk a little bit more about that planet? What do we know about it?
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How Do Astronomers Find Exoplanets? Wiggles!
Yeah, I mean, for me, as someone who studied, like, galaxies that were, like, hundreds of millions of light years away. But I also, I love Jupiter. So, like, super Jupiters sound incredible. All of this Gaia data, like, just sounds so awesome.
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How Do Astronomers Find Exoplanets? Wiggles!
Scientists have found thousands of exoplanets since then by relying on a little trick of gravity.
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How Do Astronomers Find Exoplanets? Wiggles!
But there's all this data that we haven't even looked at yet, right?
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How Do Astronomers Find Exoplanets? Wiggles!
So tell me more about how using astrometry is going to basically give us a more complete picture. Why do you think it's important for people to know more about these other solar systems, these other planets around other stars?
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How Do Astronomers Find Exoplanets? Wiggles!
Yeah. Josh, thank you so much. I can't wait to see how many you find when you start analyzing that Gaia data.
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How Do Astronomers Find Exoplanets? Wiggles!
If you like this episode, make sure you never miss a new one by following us on whatever podcasting platform you're listening from. 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 Burleigh McCoy. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Kweisi Lee was the audio engineer.
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How Do Astronomers Find Exoplanets? Wiggles!
Beth Donovan is our senior director and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Shortwave from NPR.
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How Do Astronomers Find Exoplanets? Wiggles!
Compared to the planet, the star is massive, so the pull of gravity from the planet doesn't make it move much.
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How Do Astronomers Find Exoplanets? Wiggles!
Basically, planets make their stars wiggle. But we haven't always been able to directly observe this wiggle. Our telescopes just haven't been sensitive enough to detect it. So in the past, we've mainly used other methods instead. And these methods...
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Could AI Go Green?
A quick note before we start today's 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. The executive order is an affront to the First Amendment rights of public media organizations.
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Could AI Go Green?
Yeah, you were saying that AI innovation was causing this surge in energy and water use to cool data centers. And the construction of those data centers was only going to increase.
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Could AI Go Green?
It's like the amount of energy that Canada consumed two years ago. Okay, so U.S. data centers alone could someday use a Canada-sized amount of energy. They could. Wow.
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Could AI Go Green?
And a model is just like an AI program that's trained to take in data and like output data.
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Could AI Go Green?
Wait, so I actually do want her to get started. Like, why are these like big players all using these huge models? I'm glad you asked.
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Could AI Go Green?
And I'm Regina Barber. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. Don't worry, you won't be lost if you haven't heard part one.
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Could AI Go Green?
OK, Em, you've been talking with like four of the biggest tech companies, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon, which I should say are like all financial supporters of NPR. It's true.
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Could AI Go Green?
It's also an affront to the First Amendment rights of the American people. NPR remains committed to serving the public. That's you. We lay out the facts and bring you stories that spark your curiosity that you won't find anywhere else. This is a pivotal moment. It's more important than ever that every supporter who can contribute comes together to pitch in as much as they are able.
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Could AI Go Green?
Right. And these four companies all have ambitious goals for hitting net zero carbon emissions, most by 2030, Amazon by 2040. How are they going to get there?
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Could AI Go Green?
Yeah, our colleague Jeff Brumfield, he came on the show in December to talk about how Microsoft purchased Three Mile Island, like the site of a partial nuclear meltdown in 1979.
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Could AI Go Green?
Yeah, I mean, like I hear Sasha here because like I'm a big fan of like AI's benefits. It's totally changed science and medicine and business and banking, all these things that affect our lives. But it does feel like opting out of AI is like becoming more and more difficult.
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Could AI Go Green?
Visit donate.npr.org now to give. And if you already support us via NPR Plus or another means, thank you. Your support means so much to us, now more than ever. You help make NPR shows freely available to everyone. We are proud to do this work for you and with you.
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Could AI Go Green?
Okay. So the idea of like running coolant through like a car engine. The very same.
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Could AI Go Green?
OK. But because I'm a numbers person, like how much energy is being saved by liquid cooling versus like air or water cooling?
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Could AI Go Green?
Literally. Okay. OK, so Hamana is just like one of these data centers like out of thousands, right?
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Could AI Go Green?
Kind of disruptor in this space is DeepSeek. Right. That's the chatbot out of a company in China, and it is claiming to use less energy.
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Could AI Go Green?
Hey, short wavers. Regina Barber here with my co-host, Emily Kwong, with the second half of a miniseries she reported on the environmental footprint of AI.
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Could AI Go Green?
So like Energy Star was created to rank the energy efficiencies of appliances. You see that little star on a lot of those appliances.
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Could AI Go Green?
I mean, yeah, I mean, I certainly had no idea about all of this while I was growing up. All this was happening in the background. But you can't, like, disinvent the Internet, right? Nor should we. Where would we get our cat videos?
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Could AI Go Green?
Em, thank you so much for bringing us this reporting. Thanks, Gina. If you liked this episode, you can check out part one of our series on AI and the environment. It's already out. This episode was produced by Hannah Chin, edited by showrunner Rebecca Ramirez, and fact-checked by Tyler Jones. Robert Rodriguez was the audio engineer.
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Could AI Go Green?
Special thanks to Brent Bachman, Johannes Durge, and our incredible Standards team. And special thanks to TED Conferences, LLC.
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Could AI Go Green?
I'm Emily Kwong. And I'm Regina Barber. Thanks for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
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How Physics Could Make Big Crowds Safer
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.
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Could Running Change Your Brain?
Like neurodegenerative diseases. Okay, so for marathon runners or marathon runner hopefuls like me, it sounds like we're all okay to keep on running.
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Could Running Change Your Brain?
All right. So next up, we've got fermenting food in space. I'm always good for food story. So what kind of food are we talking about here?
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Could Running Change Your Brain?
Hey, Juana. Hi, excited to be here. I hear we're talking about one of my favorite things, running, and how running a marathon can change your brain.
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Could Running Change Your Brain?
But fortunately, once NASA like got the explanation, they launched it anyway. So what did the researchers learn from this fermenting adventure?
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Could Running Change Your Brain?
I mean, as a cook or an attempted cook, I'm sort of curious. Did fermenting this miso in space make it taste any different than making it on Earth?
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Could Running Change Your Brain?
All right, y'all, let's bring it home. We've got to end on bats. You say that scientists figured out how they avoid collisions?
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Could Running Change Your Brain?
Wow, that's incredible. So how did scientists sort of sort out all of these different calls?
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Could Running Change Your Brain?
Maybe we need to let them borrow an NPR producer to mic up their bats next time.
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Could Running Change Your Brain?
Well, y'all, any lessons from this bat mystery that could help us humans?
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Could Running Change Your Brain?
Super interesting. That is something I would have never thought about.
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Could Running Change Your Brain?
All right. Just to start off, tell me about marathon running. I'm training for one myself, so I'm really interested in this story.
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The Dubious World's Largest Snowflake Record
There's a little problem with the language in that a snowflake means more than one thing.
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The Dubious World's Largest Snowflake Record
they always imagine a snow crystal, which is a different beast entirely.
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The Dubious World's Largest Snowflake Record
Just all of a sudden, these really large flowers appear. just came falling out of the sky. And I mean, they were very noticeable because they were just gigantic.
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The Dubious World's Largest Snowflake Record
And I told them that, you know, even if mine was not the biggest, it'd be fun. People might now be inclined to look around and find a bigger one.
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What Can Minecraft Teach Us About Learning?
We're stronger together, Juana. Yes. And in the past, these two modes of learning, on your own or mimicking another person, were mostly studied in isolation. It was either one or the other. But I take it that is not the case in this study? No. No, no.
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What Can Minecraft Teach Us About Learning?
So in this study, researchers created a few scenarios where it would be more or less advantageous for Minecraft players to mimic other players to, for example, mine around the spot where they saw other players on their screen gathering gems.
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What Can Minecraft Teach Us About Learning?
So Charlie and his team, they analyzed all of these scenarios and they created a computer model that was able to take in what each player saw on their screen and predicted to a pretty good degree of accuracy how individual learning works in conjunction with social learning.
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What Can Minecraft Teach Us About Learning?
This is Natalia Velez, another cognitive scientist who didn't work on the study. And she pointed out something else that's cool about it. Video games are incredibly popular among kids. It's where they often meet up and build social connections they may not otherwise have.
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What Can Minecraft Teach Us About Learning?
Cacio e pepe. Yum. So that dish, it's so good. It's that symphonic combination of pasta, black pepper, and pecorino romano cheese. It's a personal favorite of Giacomo Bartolucci and Ivan Di Terlizzi, both physicists living abroad who miss the comfort food of Rome and were throwing these big dinner parties for other scientists. Go physics.
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What Can Minecraft Teach Us About Learning?
With starch. For generations, Italian grandmothers have known this. They have added cornstarch or potato starch to the water to prevent the cheese from clumping. And it created this creamy, stable sauce that uniformly coated the pasta. Giacomo called it grandma knowledge.
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What Can Minecraft Teach Us About Learning?
So Giacomo and Ivan, along with a whole team of scientists, decided to investigate the best way to add cheese to hot water. And they published their results in the journal Physics of Fluids. Truly news you can use. What did they find?
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What Can Minecraft Teach Us About Learning?
That's why we invited you. Yes. Yes. And then we're going to feed you a classic Roman pasta dish with some science on the side. Love it. Then we're going to get a little serious with a possible reason why more and more young people are getting colorectal cancer.
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What Can Minecraft Teach Us About Learning?
What does that mean? When you're in your home kitchen, Juana, if you're adding, let's say, 160 grams of pecorino cheese, first dissolve four grams of starch into your pasta water and you will have a delicious sauce by the end.
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What Can Minecraft Teach Us About Learning?
Yeah, so colorectal cancer is cancer that originates in the colon or the rectum. Many people think of it as something older adults get. But our colleague Will Stone has reported that in the last two decades, cases have doubled in people under 55. And researchers don't know why. So this recent study from the journal Nature suggests that this rise in young people with colorectal cancer
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What Can Minecraft Teach Us About Learning?
could be related to a harmful bacteria called colibactin. That is produced by some strains of E. coli in people's colons and rectums. Wait, so do a lot of people just have E. coli just hanging out in their guts? Some people do, yeah. And not all E. coli produces colibactin, but when it does, that colibactin can damage DNA and cause cancer mutations.
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What Can Minecraft Teach Us About Learning?
Potentially, yeah. The study doesn't prove that colibactin is the sole cause, but it's a strong association.
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What Can Minecraft Teach Us About Learning?
Yeah, thank you. Also have a great vacation that you're heading on shortly. Thank you so much. I guess I'll be listening to Shortwave. That's right.
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What Can Minecraft Teach Us About Learning?
Yes. All of that on this episode of Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
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What Can Minecraft Teach Us About Learning?
You can hear more of Juana on Consider This, NPR's afternoon podcast, about what the news means for you.
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What Can Minecraft Teach Us About Learning?
Tyler Jones checked the facts. Jimmy Keeley and Becky Brown were the audio engineers. I'm Emily Kwong.
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What Can Minecraft Teach Us About Learning?
All right, Juana, our queen, where would you like to begin? We've got to start with the video game news, right? Yes, definitely.
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What Can Minecraft Teach Us About Learning?
It can tell us a lot about social learning. So learning in groups. A study in the journal Nature Communications tried to bridge this gap between studying how we learn individually and how we learn socially by watching over 100 participants with specific goals in crafted Minecraft environments.