Category: ScienceNews

According to the World Health Organization, Ukraine has the fourth highest incidence of tuberculosis in Europe — and one of the highest rates of multidrug resistant TB anywhere in the world. The country had been making progress but then came the pandemic, and now the war. Reporter Ari Daniel says doctors worry about increased spread of this contagious and deadly disease.

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Just over two months ago, the undersea volcano of Hunga Tonga erupted catastrophically, generating huge tsunamis and covering the islands of Tonga in ash. University of Auckland geologist Shane Cronin is now in Tonga, trying to piece together the sequence of violent events.

Edinburgh University palaeontologist Ornella Bertrand tells us about her studies of the ancient mammals that inherited the Earth after the dinosaurs were wiped out. To her surprise, in the first 10 million years after the giant meteorite struck, natural selection favoured larger-bodied mammals, not smarter ones.

At the University of Bristol, a team of engineers are developing skin for robots, designed to give future bots a fine sense of touch. Roland shakes hands with a prototype.

A global satellite survey of the world’s largest coastal cities finds that most of them contain areas that are subsiding faster than the rate that the sea level is rising. Some cities are sinking more than ten times faster, putting many millions of people at an ever-increasing risk of flooding. Oceanographer Steven D’Hondt at the University of Rhode Island explains why this is happening.

(Image: An eruption occurs at the underwater volcano Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha"apai off Tonga, January 14, 2022. Credit: Tonga Geological Services/via Reuters)

Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Andrew Luck-Baker

A Japanese chemist identified umami in the early 1900s, but it took a century for his work to be translated into English. Short Wave host Emily Kwong talks with producer Chloee Weiner about why it took so long for umami to be recognized as the fifth taste.

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Today, we present an episode of NPR's daily economics podcast, The Indicator from Planet Money. It's filled with one of our favorite topics: Data.

Algorithms are the secret sauce for many tech platforms. With user data, they can help a company tailor a subscriber's experience and make the product better. But what happens when the data that feeds an algorithm is obtained through less than legal means?

We learn about the curious case of Kurbo, the weight loss app for kids that the feds say illegally collected data to generate that secret sauce.

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Any work in social and behavioral science presumably – but not necessarily immediately - tells us something about humans in the real world. To come up with those insights, research usually occurs in laboratory settings, where the researchers control the independent variables and which, in essence, rules out research ‘in the wild.’ Enter John List.

“For years,” he tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, “economists thought that the world is so ‘dirty’ that you can’t do field experiments. They had the mentality of a test tube in a chemistry lab, and what they had learned was that if there was a speck of dirt in that tube, you’re in trouble because you can’t control exactly what is happening.”

Since this complex real world isn’t getting any cleaner, you could conclusively rule out field experiments, and that’s what the ‘giants’ of economics did for years. Or you could learn to work around the ‘dirt,’ which is what List started doing around the turn of the millennium. “I actually use the world as my lab,” the Kenneth C. Griffin Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago says.

Since an early start centering on sports trading cards and manure-fertilized crop land (real field work, a self-described “bucolic” List happily acknowledges), his university homepage details a raft of field experiments:

“I have made use of several different markets, including using hospitals, pre-K, grammar, and high schools for educational field experiments, countless charitable fundraising field experiments to learn about the science of philanthropy, the Chicago Board of Trade, Costa Rican CEOs, the new automobile market, coin markets, auto repair markets, open air markets located throughout the globe, various venues on the internet, several auction settings, shopping malls, various labor markets, and partnered with various governmental agencies. More recently, I have been engaged in a series of field experiments with various publicly traded corporations—from car manufacturers to travel companies to ride-share.”

In the podcast, List explains, “I don’t anticipate or assume that I have a ‘clean test tube,’ but what I do is I randomly place people into a treatment condition or a control condition, and then what I look at is their outcomes, and I take the difference between those outcomes. That differences out the ‘dirt.’

“I can go to really dirty settings where other empirical approaches really take dramatic assumptions. All I need is really randomization and a few other things in place and then if I just take the simple difference, I can get an average treatment effect from that setting.”

His work – in journal articles, popular books like The Voltage Effect and The Why Axis, in findings applied immediately outside of academe – has earned him widespread praise (Gary Becker terms his output as “revolutionary”), a huge list of honors, and a recurring spot on Nobel shortlists.

For this podcast, List focuses on two of the many areas in which he’s conducted field experiments: charitable giving and the gig economy.

He describes one finding from working with different charities around the world over the last 25 years on what works best to raise money. For example, appeals to potential donors announcing their money would be matched when they gave, doubling or tripling a contribution’s impact. When he started, it was presumed that the greater the leverage offered by a match, the more someone would give, since their total gift would be that much greater.

“There was no science around it … it was art, or gut feeling.” It was also wrong.

List tested the assumption, offering four different appeals to four different groups: one with just an appeal for funding, one with a 1:1 match, one with a 2:1 match, and the last a 3:1 match. And the results bore out that matching a contribution amped up the results – but the leverage didn’t matter. “Just having the match matters, but the rate of the match does not matter.”

List was later the chief economist with ride-share behemoth Uber – and then with its competitor, Lyft. He coined the term Ubernomics for his ability to manipulate the tsunami of data the company generated. “It’s not only that you have access to a lot of data,” he says, “it’s also that you have access to generating a lot of new data. As a field economist, this is a playground that is very, very difficult to beat.”

This week, U.S. Food and Drug Administration vaccine advisors will meet to discuss long-term COVID vaccine strategy. This follows the recent FDA authorization and CDC recommendation of a second booster available for people 50 and older and some immunocompromised people. Going forward, will the strategy change from counting boosters to making a COVID vaccine a seasonal shot? Allison Aubrey talks to Emily Kwong about the latest on boosters, what's known about the vaccination timeline for younger children, and what some experts are saying about the BA.2 variant.

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For many of us, seeing stars in the night sky is challenging because of light pollution. But there are some communities that are trying to change that. Today on the show, we visit cultural astronomer Danielle Adams in the world's first international dark sky city. Theoretical physicist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein also joins us to explain why access to dark night skies is so important.

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Russian forces in the forested exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear site may be receiving potentially dangerous levels of radiation. After the nuclear accident trees were felled and radioactive material was buried across the site. As the forest regrew its took up much of that radiation - making it the most radioactive forest in the world according to Tom Scott from Bristol University who studies radiation levels in the region. The troop's activities, from digging trenches to lighting fires as missiles are fired, may be releasing radiation. Its unclear how dangerous this is, but those with the greatest and most immediate exposure risk are the troops themselves.

Australia’s iconic Great Barrier Reef has suffered a mass bleaching event – where coral can be killed by rising temperatures. This is the latest in a series of such events which also affect other reefs. Kate Quigley from The Australian Institute of Marine Science is working to breed corals that can be more heat tolerant. However, she says this is not a solution in itself without addressing climate change and continued ocean warming.

Understanding the human genome has reached a new milestone, with a new analysis that digs deep into areas previously dismissed as ‘junk DNA’ but which may actually play a key role in diseases such as cancer and a range of developmental conditions. Karen Miga from the University of California, Santa Cruz is one of the leaders of the collaboration behind the new findings.

And can fish do maths? Yes according to Vera Schlussel from the University of Bonn. Her group managed to train fish in both addition and subtraction. Many animals undertake remarkable migratory journeys; travelling thousands of miles only to return to same burrow or beach they departed from. Yet, unlike humans, they don’t have digital or paper maps to guide their way, so how are they able to orientate themselves with such accuracy?

In the second part of this migration story, CrowdScience’s Anand Jagatia explores how animals are able to navigate using the sun, stars, smells, landmarks and magnetism to help guide them. Anand journeys to the coast of Florida where he helps to place a satellite tracker on a sea turtle in order to follow the long-distance journeys of these animals. He then visits a lab in North Carolina to meet a team that is recreating the earth’s magnetic fields to examine how sea turtles might be using these forces to find their feeding and nesting grounds.

Anand wades into the hotly contested topic of just how birds may be sensing magnetic fields – and hears about one of the latest theories that suggests birds eyes may be exploiting quantum physics. The range of navigational tools we encounter throughout the animal kingdom from whales to ants is beguiling, Anand asks what does our increased understanding of these feats might mean for animal conservation as well as human development of mapping systems.

(Image: Radiation hazard sign in Pripyat, a ghost town in northern Ukraine, evacuated the day after the Chernobyl disaster. Credit: Getty Images)

Many animals undertake remarkable migratory journeys; travelling thousands of miles only to return to same burrow or beach they departed from. Yet, unlike humans, they don’t have digital or paper maps to guide their way, so how are they able to orientate themselves with such accuracy?

In the second part of this migration story, CrowdScience’s Anand Jagatia explores how animals are able to navigate using the sun, stars, smells, landmarks and magnetism to help guide them. Anand journeys to the coast of Florida where he helps to place a satellite tracker on a sea turtle in order to follow the long-distance journeys of these animals. He then visits a lab in North Carolina to meet a team that is recreating the earth’s magnetic fields to examine how sea turtles might be using these forces to find their feeding and nesting grounds.

Anand wades into the hotly contested topic of just how birds may be sensing magnetic fields – and hears about one of the latest theories that suggests birds eyes may be exploiting quantum physics. The range of navigational tools we encounter throughout the animal kingdom from whales to ants is beguiling, Anand asks what does our increased understanding of these feats might mean for animal conservation as well as human development of mapping systems.

Contributors: David Godfrey – Sea Turtle Conservancy Rick Herren – University of Florida Tim Guilford – University of Oxford Ken Lohmann – University of North Carolina Kayla Goforth – University of North Carolina Henrik Mouritsen – University of Oldenburg

(Photo: Sea Turtles. Credit: Getty Images)

Octopuses! They are escape artists, they camouflage in all kinds of surroundings, and they are incredibly intelligent creatures--and that intelligence evolved completely separately from humans'. That separate evolution makes them the perfect animal to study for Dominic Sivitilli, a PhD candidate in astrobiology and behavioral neuroscience at the University of Washington.

Short Wave co-host Aaron Scott and Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) camera person Stephani Gordon visited Dominic's lab to learn about octopus intelligence, and how their arms and suckers can basically think for themselves. Aaron talks to co-host Emily Kwong about how studying octopuses can provide insight into how aliens might think.

To see the octopuses in action, watch the video story Aaron and Stephani produced for OPB's nature show Oregon Field Guide here: https://www.opb.org/article/2022/03/29/want-to-study-how-aliens-might-think-look-to-the-octopus/

Is there another sea creature you want to learn more about? E-mail the show at shortwave@npr.org.

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