Category: ScienceNews

This week, New York City crowned Kathleen Corradi its first rat czar. The new position is part of a multipronged approach from city officials. Reporter and New Yorker Anil Oza called up rodentologists to understand — does their approach withstand the test of scientific research?

We love hearing your musings and questions about the science in your everyday life. Reach us by emailing shortwave@npr.org.

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H5N1, a highly pathogenic avian flu is racing across the world, and has infected multiple species, including wild and farmed birds, and mammals from cats to sea lions. What can be done to control it? Roland Pease talks to global experts about the dangers to animal and human health, and about the measures to bring the outbreak under control.

Producer: Roland Pease Assistant producer: Sophie Ormiston

(Photo: A government worker examines chicks for signs of bird flu infection at a poultry farm in Darul Imarah in Indonesia's Aceh province. Credit: Chaideer Mahyuddin)

When Tove Danovich decided to dabble in backyard chicken keeping, she embraced a tried and true journalistic practice — reading everything there is to find on the subject. In her search, she found plenty of how-to guides, but what she really wanted was to know more about the science. She wanted to understand their evolution and unique relationship with humans.

"As I was reading more and as I was wanting this book that increasingly it seemed like it it just didn't exist. I wound up writing it instead," says Tove.

Today, Aaron visits Tove in her chicken coop to talk about her recent book Under the Henfluence: Inside the World of Backyard Chickens and the People Who Love Them and to meet the chicken stars of Tove's Instagram account.

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In 1957, the Space Age began with the launch of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite. Since then, the number of objects humans have hurled toward the stars has soared to the thousands. As those objects have collided with one another, they've created more space debris in Earth's orbit. According to some estimates, all of that debris and human-made space trash, the number of objects — from satellites to screws — could be in the millions. In this iteration of our AAAS live show series, Short Wave co-host Aaron Scott talks to Danielle Wood, an assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT, about the dangers of accumulating space debris, and how she and others are working to make space more sustainable.

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Compared to the entirety of human existence, our history of flying in aeroplanes is very short indeed. So what does this fast form of travel do to bodies that have evolved for land-based living? That's what listener Sofia wants to know after working as a flight attendant for over a decade.

What effect does working at 35,000 feet have on one's health? How disruptive to your circadian rhythms is hopping across ten time zones in less than 24 hours? What's happening in our stomachs if a crisp packet blows up to the point of popping as the cabin pressure changes? And why do we feel so darn dehydrated when we get off a plane?

Host Caroline Steel not only talks to the experts about everything from swollen ankles to what we should eat and drink on planes, she also records her own journey from London to Australia. She does just about everything wrong along the way, but the experts sort her out with some top tips for her next long-haul flight on how to avoid blood clots and even, how to avoid jet lag all together!

While in Australia, Caroline also visits a sleep lab where researchers can simulate jet lag to learn how to improve flight safety and the wellbeing of flight attendants and pilots.

Join Caroline on her journey as CrowdScience takes to the skies to find out what frequent flyers need to know when it comes cosmic ionising radiation and what we can all do to make that next flight a little more pleasant.

Produced by Sam Baker for the BBC World Service.

Featuring: Tony Schiemer, Senior Aviation Medical Officer, Royal Australian Air Force Eileen McNeely, Executive Director, SHINE at Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health Tracey Sletten, Senior Lecturer, Turner Inst for Brain & Mental Health, Monash University

(Photo: Getty Creative # 1432221653)

In this Friday round up of science news we can't let go, not everything is as it seems. Meatballs are not made of fresh meat from the cattle range. Robots are keeping something from you. And plants have secrets they keep out of your earshot. It's deceptive science, Short Wave-style.

We love hearing what you're reading and what science is catching your eye! Reach the show by emailing shortwave@npr.org.

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Chasing tornados in the American mid-West – scientists are trying to learn the maximum from the tornado outbreaks currently in America. Professor Karen Kosiba calls us from a radar truck studying the storms, and Professor John Allen explains the energy powering them. From the weather of today to the skies of 800 years ago... Dr Sébastien Guillet reveals how lunar observations by medieval monks are helping untangle the connection between historic eruptions and climate. Finally, we go back even further in time to the Bronze Age with Professor Elisa Guerra-Doce – to find out what drugs our ancestors were into.

Image credit: Getty Images / Michael B. Thomas Producer: Roland Pease  Assistant Producer: Sophie Ormiston

Everyone, it is said, is allowed their own opinion. But what if someone’s own opinion was in fact one foisted on them by someone else, and yet the original opinion holder in turn holds the changeling opinion as their own?

Unlikely? Actually, not so unlikely, as the research of Petter Johansson and Lars Hall into ‘choice blindness’ shows. In this Social Science Bites podcast, Johansson – who with Hall runs the Choice Blindness Laboratory at Sweden’s Lund University – reveals some of the unexpected aspects of self-interpretation and how there’s been a very large natural example in the United States of this blindness in action.

We are “less aware of the reasons for our choices than we think we are,” he has determined, and reasoning, as we call it, is often conducted post hoc.

Johansson starts his discussion with host David Edmonds by giving his and Hall’s first forays into the study of “how we come to know our own minds.” Their work built on others’ research into something called “change blindness,” which describes not noticing a change – even a major one – that occurs before your eyes.

(Inattentional bias – such as the famous gorilla basketball video – is when we miss something obvious but unexpected right before us because we’re focusing on something else in the tableau. “I’ve seen this at conferences on monster-sized screens, when it is practically King Kong walking in the background, but still people miss this.”)

Johansson describes how the research partners ‘magically’ morphed this line of inquiry into studies of what they call “choice blindness” using a card trick. “When you have the appearance of free choice,” he says, “when you have the magician say, ‘Pick a card, any card you want,’ the only thing you know is that the choice is no longer free. This was the aspect we wanted to incorporate into our experiments.”

In the initial experiment, subjects were shown pairs of faces on cards, and asked to choose which they found more attractive. The researcher then handed them that card and asked why they chose it over the other. But sometimes, using sleight of hand, the researcher handed the subject the card with the other face, and asked again why they chose that face.

“Even when the faces were drastically dissimilar, and the [subjects] could look at the cards for as long as they want, only 25 to 30 percent of the participants detect that the switch has been made,” Johansson reveals. “But it’s not only that they pick it up – they then must start constructing reasons why they picked this face,” justifying a choice they didn’t make.

Subsequent experimentation found that opinions on taste, smell, consumer choice, and more could be subject to such blindness. The researchers, for example, set up a tasting station at a local supermarket, and after having the ol’ switcheroo played on their choice of jam, the subjects came up with “similar types of elaborate explanations” for why the jam they didn’t choose was in fact the better one. The researchers also worked with pairs of people, asking them who they might choose to flat with. And here the resulting confabulation was collective.

The researchers also found choice blindness in politics (especially when the other opinion had a reasonable case that could be made). People on the street were asked to participate in survey about a policy position, and the interviewer would respond with “you clearly believe …” in a position they didn’t choose. And as you now will expect, the subjects defended their ‘new’ stance.

“This says something about what a belief is, or an attitude is,” Johansson says. The source of the opinion matters: if you think it comes from you – even when it in fact did not – there must be good reason to hold the opinion. “People don’t like being told what’s right or wrong. But if you can tell yourself what’s right or wrong, it’s much more likely to stick.”

And this can also be outsourced when your “team” makes a call, and partisans “quickly change their own attitudes to match.”

Which brings us to former U.S. President Donald Trump. Under Trump, Johansson says, “It felt like there was four years of showing this point almost every day. Trump would change the policies or long-held beliefs almost every day and Fox and Friends and all these voters would just fall in line and quickly construct arguments why this was the right view all along.”

While this might seem a dour outcome with opinion chameleons calling the shots, Johansson sees a brightside. “It does show we are probably more flexible than we think. We have the ability to change.”

Katie Wu is a bona fide cat person. She has two of them: twin boys named Calvin and Hobbes. Every night, they curl up in bed with her, bonking their little noses together, rubbing their fur and whiskers everywhere, and leaving behind inevitable cat residue. It's certifiably cute ... and a little bit gross.

It's also the worst nightmare for the cat-allergic. Which, just shy of a decade ago, Katie was. In a stroke of luck, Katie's debilitating cat allergy disappeared. The reasons for her immune overhaul remain a mystery.

Allergies can wax and wane over time, but it seems to be less common to have the night-and-day shift that Katie experienced. In this episode, Katie walks host Aaron Scott through the dynamic world of allergies and what it reveals about our immune systems. And of course, Katie's cats make cameo appearances. (encore)

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The phenomenon of zoonotic spillover — of viruses jumping from animals to people — is incredibly common. The question is: which one will start the next pandemic? NPR science desk correspondent Michaeleen Doucleff brings us her reporting on Influenza D, an emerging virus spreading among cows and other livestock in the United States.

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