Category: DailyShorts

Navigation on the open ocean is extremely difficult. It is a skill that takes years to master. Even with years of skill, an experienced mariner was still able to ground their ship on an unseen reef, underwater rocks, or a sandbar, because they didn’t know their precise location. The main problem, which was unsolved for centuries, was determining your longitude. Learn more about the longitude problem, and how it was eventually solved, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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It can be hard enough to answer the question, "what kind of music do you like?" But how about "why do you like it?" That's one of the many questions about the human brain and sound that neuroscientist Nina Kraus set out to answer in her book Of Sound Mind. In this interview with NPR's Ari Shapiro, she breaks down the science behind what our brains do when they process sound, and how it differs for each of us.

As I have mentioned in many episodes of this podcast, there are a great many things that were originally invented in Ancient China. There are literally hundreds of inventions that were developed in China before they were introduced anywhere else. However, there are four inventions in particular which stand out as having revolutionized not just Chinese civilization, but the entire world.

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In the early 1950s, war ravaged the Korean peninsula. However, the fighting ceased on July 27, 1953. Both sides of the conflict pulled back from the front and created a buffer zone 4 kilometers or 2.5 miles wide. That buffer zone still exists today. Learn more about the Korean Demilitarized Zone, its past and present, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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You probably heard the expression that something is “the greatest thing since sliced bread”. Well did you ever wonder what the greatest thing was before sliced bread? Or why we measure greatness in terms of sliced bread? Well, there’s an answer to these questions. Learn more about why sliced bread is so freaking amazing on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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At first glance, journalist Dawn Turner's book Three Girls from Bronzeville: A Uniquely American Memoir of Race, Fate, and Sisterhood and detective novelist Walter Mosley's Down The River Unto The Sea don't have a ton in common. The former takes place in Chicago and focuses on the tough childhoods of Turner, her sister and her best friend; the latter takes readers to the streets of New York, where a cop-turned-private eye investigates police corruption. But in today's episode, each author talks to Michel Martin about how both their stories illustrate systems that treat Black Americans unfairly, and what that says about justice in the U.S.

I am speaking these words in the year 2021. You might be listening to them in a different year, but whatever year you happen to be in right now, it will be a year using the same number convention for years that we do now. But why did we start counting years at year 1? What did they do before that? Who picked year 1 and why? Why isn’t there a year zero? And what is the deal with AD and CE? Learn more about why we count years the way we do on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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For decades, the author and scientist Giulio Boc­caletti has studied the substance that's come to define life as we know it: water. And in his book Water: A Biography, he traces the history of how humanity, regardless of continent or creed, has shaped entire civilizations around a resource that's both fickle and essential for life on earth. In this episode, All Things Considered host Ari Shapiro talks to Boccaletti about our long, complicated history with water, and why understanding the past is crucial to the fight with climate change.