Short Wave - The Great Space Race … With Clocks

It's Memorial Day, Short Wavers. This holiday, we bring you a meditation on time ... and clocks. There are hundreds of atomic clocks in orbit right now, perched on satellites all over Earth. We depend on them for GPS location, Internet timing, stock trading and even space navigation. In today's encore episode, hosts Emily Kwong and Regina G. Barber learn how to build a better clock. In order to do that, they ask: How do atomic clocks really work, anyway? What makes a clock precise? And how could that process be improved for even greater accuracy?

- For more about Holly's Optical Atomic Strontium Ion Clock, check out the OASIC project on NASA's website.
- For more about the Longitude Problem, check out Dava Sobel's book,
Longitude.

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.

Have questions or story ideas? Let us know by emailing
shortwave@npr.org!

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NPR's Book of the Day - Karen Hao’s new book is a skeptical look at Sam Altman and Elon Musk’s AI empire

OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit meant to conduct artificial intelligence research that would benefit the general public. In the company's early days, reporter Karen Hao arranged to spend time in OpenAI's offices and noticed the culture there was incredibly secretive. That secrecy raised questions for Hao that ultimately resulted in her new book, Empire of AI. The book is an intimate look at the company behind ChatGPT, but also at the industry-wide race to control AI. In today's episode, she speaks with NPR's Steve Inskeep about early disagreements between founders Sam Altman and Elon Musk, Altman's talents for fundraising and storytelling, and how the AI race is reproducing elements of colonial empire.

To listen to Book of the Day sponsor-free and support NPR's book coverage, sign up for Book of the Day+ at plus.npr.org/bookoftheday

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The Indicator from Planet Money - The dawn of search engines

Today on the show, we bring you a special episode from the Understood feed at CBC podcasts. It's an excerpt from a series called Who Broke the Internet hosted by Cory Doctorow. The four part series details his criticisms on the state of the modern internet and what we can do about it.

From his conversations with Eric Corly the publisher of 2600, an iconic hacker magazine, best known under his hacker name Emmanuel Goldstein, to Clive Thompson a tech and culture writer to Steven Levy the author of "In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes our Lives" this excerpt digs into how search engines started.

You can listen to more of the podcast here.

Related episodes:
The hack that almost broke the internet (Apple / Spotify)

For sponsor-free episodes of The Indicator from Planet Money, subscribe to Planet Money+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.

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What Next - What Next | Daily News and Analysis – The Glaring Problem with Headlights

As What Next celebrates Memorial Day, please enjoy this episode ⁠from our colleagues at Decoder Ring⁠. What Next will be back in your feed tomorrow.

Something seems to have happened to car headlights. In the last few years, many people have become convinced that they are much brighter than they used to be—and it’s driving them to the point of rage. Headlight glare is now Americans’ number one complaint on the road. The story of how and why we got here is illuminating and confounding. It’s what happens when an incredible technological breakthrough meets market forces, regulatory failure, and human foibles.

So if you feel like everyone’s driving around with their high beams on all the time, it’s not your imagination. What once seemed like an obscure technical concern has gone mainstream. But can the movement to reduce glare actually do something about the problem?

In this episode, you’ll hear from ⁠Nate Rogers⁠, who wrote about the “headlight brightness wars” for The Ringer; ⁠Daniel Stern⁠, automotive lighting expert and editor of Driving Vision News; and Paul Gatto, moderator of ⁠r/fuckyourheadlights⁠.

This episode of Decoder Ring was written by Willa Paskin and Olivia Briley, and produced by Olivia Briley and Max Freedman. Our team also includes Katie Shepherd and supervising producer Evan Chung. Merritt Jacob is our Senior Technical Director.

If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at ⁠DecoderRing@slate.com⁠, or leave a message on our hotline at 347-460-7281.



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What Next | Daily News and Analysis - The Glaring Problem with Headlights

As What Next celebrates Memorial Day, please enjoy this episode ⁠from our colleagues at Decoder Ring⁠. What Next will be back in your feed tomorrow.

Something seems to have happened to car headlights. In the last few years, many people have become convinced that they are much brighter than they used to be—and it’s driving them to the point of rage. Headlight glare is now Americans’ number one complaint on the road. The story of how and why we got here is illuminating and confounding. It’s what happens when an incredible technological breakthrough meets market forces, regulatory failure, and human foibles.

So if you feel like everyone’s driving around with their high beams on all the time, it’s not your imagination. What once seemed like an obscure technical concern has gone mainstream. But can the movement to reduce glare actually do something about the problem?

In this episode, you’ll hear from ⁠Nate Rogers⁠, who wrote about the “headlight brightness wars” for The Ringer; ⁠Daniel Stern⁠, automotive lighting expert and editor of Driving Vision News; and Paul Gatto, moderator of ⁠r/fuckyourheadlights⁠.

This episode of Decoder Ring was written by Willa Paskin and Olivia Briley, and produced by Olivia Briley and Max Freedman. Our team also includes Katie Shepherd and supervising producer Evan Chung. Merritt Jacob is our Senior Technical Director.

If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at ⁠DecoderRing@slate.com⁠, or leave a message on our hotline at 347-460-7281.


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It Could Happen Here - Introducing: Away Days Podcast – A Cold Day for Violence

Hi, ICHH fans! We want to share a new show, Away Days: Reporting from the Underbelly. 

Away Days Podcast is an episodic documentary series focused on unreported stories from the fringes of society.  We’re compassionately documenting the underground without watering it down or editorially obscuring it. This is independent journalism with no filter. Real, raw, and ugly. Journalist Jake Hanrahan, the host and creator of Away Days has spent the last 10 years embedded in places he’s not meant to be. With unique access and a straightforward style of on-the-ground reporting, the listener will be taken deep into the places they didn’t know existed.

Episode 1: A Cold Day for Violence

Welcome to the world of ‘No Rules’, a new underground fighting subculture where anything goes. Biting, head stamping, eye gouging, hair pulling, elbows, headbutts—it’s all allowed. These fights are fought on concrete, with no gloves, and no rounds. It’s non-stop organized ultraviolence, and we’ve been allowed to see it first hand…

Watch Away Days documentaries at youtube.com/@awaydaystv

Listen here and subscribe to Away Days on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts!

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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