Category: ScienceNews

CrowdScience listener Griffith in Ghana, isn’t JUST a CrowdScience listener. He’s also a listener to our sister show on the World Service, Unexpected Elements. But he’s noticed something funny.

In the weekly Unexpected Elements multiple-choice quiz, the answer is almost NEVER ‘a’. It’s nearly always ‘b’, or ‘c’. Why is this? When we set the quiz, why are we so reluctant to choose option ‘a’?

His question leads presenter Alex Lathbridge on a journey into the murky depths of our brain, where he discovers the cognitive biases which so often trip us up in games of chance, or probability. Your brain might be a marvellous machine when it comes to figuring out how to understand the world, but sometimes, in the name of efficiency, it takes clever little short-cuts to the answer.

This pragmatic approach to problem solving helps us manage an incredibly complicated world. But occasionally, especially when it comes to mathematics, chance, and probability, it leads us in the wrong direction. With the help of mathematician Kit Yates from the University of Bath in the UK, and some rather stale sweets, Alex will be finding out how to win at games of chance.

Alex also explores the world of gaming, and gambling. Games of chance in which our intuition sometimes lets us down, and makes us choose unwisely. Rachel Croson, Professor of Economics at the University of Minnesota, USA, talks us through how the human brain can work against us.

But can knowledge of those human pitfalls help us to win? Alex hears from Maria Konnikova, who turned her research on the psychology of poker into a successful gambling career. Can we really use maths to beat our brains, and learn how to win more often?

  Presenter Alex Lathbridge

Producer Emily Knight

Editor Ben Motley

(Photo: Close up image of multiple choice question. Credit: BBC)

The Winter Olympics has the Unexpected Elements team looking into some of the incredible science behind the sports. First up, the tale of India’s lone luge pilot: how did using old train tracks as sled runners give him a competitive edge? Then, we look at the physics behind a cheating scandal that has rocked the ski jumping world. Scientific studies tell us exactly how much difference changing a single stitch in a costume can make.

Did you know there are different types of ice? Professor Christoph Salzmann has discovered three of them, and tells us what makes them unique. Plus dinosaurs, disease, and whether we laugh with an accent. All on this week’s Unexpected Elements.

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton, with Chhavi Sachdev and Tristan Ahtone Producers: Margaret Sessa-Hawkins, with Lucy Davies, Imy Harper and Tim Dodd

The Winter Olympics has the Unexpected Elements team looking into some of the incredible science behind the sports. First up, the tale of India’s lone luge pilot: how did using old train tracks as sled runners give him a competitive edge? Then, we look at the physics behind a cheating scandal that has rocked the ski jumping world. Scientific studies tell us exactly how much difference changing a single stitch in a costume can make.

Did you know there are different types of ice? Professor Christoph Salzmann has discovered three of them, and tells us what makes them unique. Plus dinosaurs, disease, and whether we laugh with an accent. All on this week’s Unexpected Elements.

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton, with Chhavi Sachdev and Tristan Ahtone Producers: Margaret Sessa-Hawkins, with Lucy Davies, Imy Harper and Tim Dodd

Rhythm is everywhere. Even if you don’t think you have it, it’s fundamental to humans’ biological systems. Our heartbeat is rhythmic. Speech is rhythmic. Even as babies, humans can track basic rhythm. Researchers wanted to find out if there were more layers to this: Could babies also track melody and more complicated rhythms? So they played Bach for a bunch of sleeping newborns and monitored the babies’ brains to see if they could predict the next note. What they found offers clues about whether melody and rhythm are hard-wired in the human brain or learned over time. We also get into what powers the eating habits of some snakes and chameleons, and insights into the role of sleep in problem-solving.


Have a scientific question you want us to answer? Email us at shortwave@npr.org.


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This episode was produced by Jordan-Marie Smith and Rachel Carlson. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez and Christopher Intagliata. Tyler Jones checked the facts. The audio engineers were Jimmy Keeley and Hannah Gluvna. 

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If you've been following Miles O'Brien's reports from Antarctica, you know he's with an international group of researchers trying to measure what's happening to the rapidly melting Thwaites Glacier. Their work has been trying to capture information in ways that have never been done before. O'Brien has an update on how all that turned out, for our Tipping Point series. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy

Olympic sliding sports – bobsled, luge and skeleton – are known for their speed. Athletes chase medals down a track of ice at up to 80 or 90 mph. With this thrill comes the risk of “sled head.” Athletes use the term to explain the dizziness, nausea, exhaustion and even blackouts that can follow a brain-rattling run. Untreated, this can turn into concussions and subconcussions. But there’s still a lot more to learn about this condition. So today, host Emily Kwong speaks with two experts about the medical research into sled head – and how the sport would need to change to protect athletes’ brain health.

Check out more of NPR’s Olympics coverage.

Interested in more Olympic science? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org.

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Autism has a long history of misinformation that continues to today. The Trump administration has perpetuated some of this misinformation in the last year. Among other things, officials have claimed certain groups of people don’t get the condition and that taking Tylenol while pregnant causes autism to later develop in children. Today, NPR Science Correspondent Jon Hamilton sets the record straight with host Emily Kwong on what scientists do and don’t know about autism. 


If you liked this episode, check out our episodes on an Autism researcher’s take on Trump’s claims about Tylenol and a Fragile X treatment that may be on the horizon.


Interested in more science in the news? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org.


Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.

This episode was produced by Berly McCoy. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. The audio engineer was Damian Herring.

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A key insight social anthropologist Mukulika Banerjee had while observing electoral behavior in a Bengali village was that -- at least in the India of that moment -- elections were sacred. This was not a religious epiphany but a cultural one; at the center was not a figure, religious or political, but an ideal - democracy.

Banerjee has explored her insights in the years since in a variety or formats, but academic and popular, ranging from her written work like 2021's Cultivating Democracy: Politics and citizenship in agrarian India or 2014's Why India Votes? to a 2009 radio documentary for the BBC specifically titled "Sacred Elections." In this Social Science Bites podcast, the professor at the London School of Economics reviews much of the underlying scholarship behind those works, then explores with host David Edmonds the de-sanctification of democracy in both India and the Global North in the years since.

"I think what has happened ... in the US and in the UK," she explains, "is a complacency that regardless of whether you do your little bit, whether it is literally just turning up to vote or learning to organize and be informed politically, is going to happen regardless of whether you do it or not. And because of this complacency, is precisely why these degenerations of democracy have happened."

Banerjee is the founding series editor of Routledge's Exploring the Political in South Asia and is also working on a grant from the Indo-European Networking Programme in the Social Sciences on Explanations of Electoral Change in Urban and Rural India. This year, courtesy of a British Academy-Leverhulme Senior Fellowship, she is on a research sabbatical studying the nexus of democracy and taxation.

PFAS make pans nonstick, clothes waterproof and furniture stain resistant. They're so ubiquitous, they're even inside of us. Now, researchers are looking for more insights in firefighters' blood.

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What do non-stick pans, firefighting foam and many of our couches, carpets and cosmetics have in common? They're all made with PFAS. The so-called forever chemicals helped spur innovation, but they're also insidious to human health. Horizons moderator William Brangham explores these chemicals and how we can protect ourselves with investigative journalist Mariah Blake and scientist Laurel Schaider. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy