Champagne has been discovered in a 100+ year old shipwreck. It's an amazing find. But can you drink it? Speaking of bubbly, we learn more about the physics of bubbles, and why understanding it is crucial for the climate. Also on the show, a 2,000 year-old mystery about a navigation device that persists up to the present day.
Waging and winning a nuclear war have been called “thinking about the unthinkable” but that’s exactly what Edward Kaplan and I discussed in our interview about his recent book,The End of Victory: Prevailing in the Thermonuclear Age(Cornell UP, 2022).
The current Dean of the School of Strategic Landpower at the US Army War College, Kaplan recounts the costs of failure in nuclear war through the work of the most secret deliberative body of the National Security Council, the Net Evaluation Subcommittee (NESC).
From 1953 onward, US leaders wanted to know as precisely as possible what would happen if they failed in a nuclear war―how many Americans would die and how much of the country would remain. The NESC told Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy what would be the result of the worst failure of American strategy―a maximum-effort surprise Soviet nuclear assault on the United States.
Kaplan details how NESC studies provided key information for presidential decisions on the objectives of a war with the USSR and on the size and shape of the US military. The subcommittee delivered its annual reports in a decade marked by crises in Berlin, Quemoy and Matsu, Laos, and Cuba, among others. During these critical moments and day-to-day containment of the USSR, the NESC’s reports offered the best estimates of the butcher’s bill of conflict and of how to reduce the cost in American lives.
Taken with the intelligence community’s assessment of the probability of a surprise attack, the NESC’s work framed the risks of US strategy in the chilliest years of the Cold War. The End of Victory reveals how all policy decisions run risks―and ones involving military force run grave ones―though they can rarely be known with precision.
Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on a book about the reversal in US grand strategy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at andrew.pace@usm.edu or via andrewopace.com. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components.
In almost all sports, people will refer to what is known as having a home-field advantage.
Home-field advantage is a simple concept. It implies that teams playing in their home stadium, arena, or field have a slight advantage over the visiting team.
But is home-field advantage a real thing? And if it is, what are the reasons for it, and which teams and which leagues have the largest home-field advantages?
Learn more about home-field advantage and if it is, in fact, a real thing on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
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Silicon Valley leaders have been weighing in loudly on the upcoming presidential race. Over four hundred venture capitalists and other tech executives recently signed a pledge to support Vice President Kamala Harris, while some prominent holdouts like Tesla CEO Elon Musk are backing former President Donald Trump. To learn more about the tech figures getting involved in this election and precisely what's at stake for them in the 2024 election, we spoke with New York Times business journalist Erin Griffith.
And in headlines: the United States and Russia complete a major prisoner swap, Israel says it killed the head of the Hamas military in July, the Senate blocks a bill that would've expanded the child tax credit, and an incredible comeback from Team USA's Simone Biles.
We'll tell you about a historic deal to bring Americans home from Russian prisons and what the U.S. and its allies had to give up in return.
Also, what could be bringing border crossings down, and where could a tropical storm hit this weekend?
Plus, controversial new school rules went into effect; a new proposal hopes to solve a travel problem for parents, and remember the ice bucket challenge? It's still making an impact a decade later.
Those stories and more news to know in about 10 minutes!
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About Us: From the creators of Robinhood Snacks Daily, The Best One Yet (TBOY) is the daily pop-biz news show making today’s top stories your business. 20 minutes on the 3 business, economics, and finance stories you need, with fresh takes you can pretend you came up with — Pairs perfectly with your morning oatmeal ritual. Hosted by Jack Crivici-Kramer & Nick Martell.
Another Olympics, another set of stellar performances by the U.S. women's artistic gymnastics team. Thursday, the team won two medals in the women's all-around final: a gold for Simone Biles and a bronze for Sunisa Lee. The medals add to the team's overall count, which also includes a gold for the women's team final. Simone and Suni are expected to lead the team to more medals in the coming days. Each day the gymnasts compete, we are left to pick our jaws off the floor and wonder: How do they do that? So we called up one of our favorite science communicators, Frederic Bertley, to explain just that. He's the CEO of the Center of Science and Industry and our gymnastics physics guide for the day.
Want us to cover the science powering other Olympians? Email us at shortwave@npr.org. We'd love to hear from you!
A previous version of this episode suggested that at the top of a gymnast's jump, they are moving with zero acceleration. In fact, there they have zero velocity, but still have the same acceleration. Also, gravity is constant as a person performs gymnastics tricks on Earth. A previous version of this episode also did not make clear that conservation of angular momentum happens as gymnasts move through the air in uneven bars — as opposed to when the gymnasts are on the bars themselves and the gymnasts are subject to additional forces.
The age when you need to start being screened for cancers may need to be updated, as rates among younger people are on the rise. New testing methods could make the process a lot easier than, say, a colonoscopy - but they’re not perfect.
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Sen. Roger Marshall says he will launch an investigation into Google after the search engine suppressed content related to the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump.
Google is “no longer functioning as a search engine that just assimilates” information, says Marshall, R-Kan., “but now they're using algorithms to campaign against President Trump.”
Initiating a Google search of “assassination attempt on president,” quickly reveals that Trump’s name is not within the autofill of suggested searches, although former Presidents Harry Truman, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan are.
Google enjoys legal protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Those protections shield Google and other platforms, such as Facebook and X, from civil liability for the content users of the platform generate. But if Google wants to act as a publisher, like a news outlet, they should not enjoy Section 230 protections, Marshall says.
The Kansas Republican is calling on Google to explain what he regards as content suppression, but says he thinks that “if we had a strong commander in chief, that they would be intervening already.”
Marshall joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss the investigation into what he asserts is Google’s content suppression.
Marshall also weighs in on the plea deal reached with three terrorists behind the 9/11 attacks, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, described as the mastermind of the attacks. The deal takes the death penalty off the table for the terrorists imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in exchange for them pleading guilty to a number of charges, including the murders of nearly 3,000 people on Sept. 11, 2001.
The Kansas lawmaker explains why he thinks the deal is a “slap in the face” to the men and women who lost their lives on 9/11, their families, and all who still suffer from physical injuries because of the terrorist attacks.
