Category: ScienceNews

July 2021 saw temperatures in the western US and Canada smash previous records by 5 degrees. And that’s what we should expect, according to a study prepared much earlier but published, coincidentally, just a few days later. A hallmark of rapid climate change, says author Erich Fischer of ETH Zurich, will be an accelerating number of record-shattering, and socially disruptive, events.

A large new study on communications and hierarchy across a large range of our ape and monkey relatives has just been published. Lead author Katie Slocombe of the University of York explains the findings: like us, the primates live socially in groups, and there are leaders, but the more tolerant ones are also the more communicative ones. In species with ‘despotic’ leaders, order seems to be maintained with more menacing silence.

The double helix of all DNA on earth twists in one direction. But researchers at Tsinghua University in China have made some important steps towards making mirror life, in which the DNA twists in the opposite direction. Chemistry journalist Mark Peplow discusses the significance of this discovery with Roland Pease.

One of the benefits of science’s ability to read normal DNA has been to compare human genomes from across the globe – for example in the Human Genome Diversity Project –for what they reveal about both our health – and our past. But sequences from the Middle East have been sadly lacking. The Sanger Institute’s Mohamed Almarri and colleagues have just rectified that, saying that the Middle East played such a key role in the human story.

Today, up to 3 billion people around the world play video games, from candy-based mobile puzzles to virtual battlegrounds filled with weapons. Many people have turned to gaming during the pandemic as a way of staying connected – but what does science really say about the impact of gaming?

Does playing violent video games lead to violence in the real world? Do brain training apps really work? How much gaming is too much – can video games really be addictive? And how can video games help us to explore difficult issues like death, grief and loss?

Alex Lathbridge and Anand Jagatia look at the evidence and play some games along the way, speaking to psychologists, doctors and game designers about the power of video games to change us - for better or worse.

(Photo By Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

Today, up to 3 billion people around the world play video games, from candy based mobile puzzles to virtual battlegrounds filled with weapons. Many people have turned to gaming during the pandemic as a way of staying connected – but what does science really say about the impact of gaming?

Does playing violent video games lead to violence in the real world? Do brain training apps really work? How much gaming is too much – can videogames really be addictive? And how can videogames help us to explore difficult issues like death, grief and loss?

Alex Lathbridge and Anand Jagatia look at the evidence and play some games along the way, speaking to psychologists, doctors and game designers about the power of video games to change us - for better or worse.

With Adrian Hon, Professor Andrew Przybylski, Professor Pete Etchells, Professor Henrietta Bowden-Jones and Dr Sabine Harrer

Science correspondent Nell Greenfieldboyce gives us the latest in gravitational waves and shares what scientists have learned (and heard) from these tiny ripples in spacetime.

Email the show at shortwave@npr.org

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July 2021 saw temperatures in the western US and Canada smash previous records by 5 degrees. And that’s what we should expect, according to a study prepared much earlier but published, coincidentally, just a few days later. A hallmark of rapid climate change, says author Erich Fischer of ETH Zurich, will be an accelerating number of record-shattering, and socially disruptive, events.

A large new study on communications and hierarchy across a large range of our ape and monkey relatives has just been published. Lead author Katie Slocombe of the University of York explains the findings: like us, the primates live socially in groups, and there are leaders, but the more tolerant ones are also the more communicative ones. In species with ‘despotic’ leaders, order seems to be maintained with more menacing silence.

The double helix of all DNA on earth twists in one direction. But researchers at Tsinghua University in China have made some important steps towards making mirror life, in which the DNA twists in the opposite direction. Chemistry journalist Mark Peplow discusses the significance of this discovery with Roland Pease.

One of the benefits of science’s ability to read normal DNA has been to compare human genomes from across the globe – for example in the Human Genome Diversity Project – for what they reveal about both our health – and our past. But sequences from the Middle East have been sadly lacking. The Sanger Institute’s Mohamed Almarri and colleagues have just rectified that, saying that the Middle East played such a key role in the human story.

(Photo By Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

Presenter: Roland Pease Editor: Deborah Cohen

(Encore episode) The World Health Organization has called the spread of misinformation around the coronavirus an "infodemic." So what do you do when it's somebody you love spreading the misinformation? In this episode, Maddie talks with Invisibilia's Yowei Shaw about one man's very unusual approach to correcting his family. And we hear from experts about what actually works when trying to combat misinformation.

For more on how to do science communication right, check out our earlier episode How To Talk About The Coronavirus With Friends And Family.

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The Alzheimer's Association International Conference took place in Denver this year. Today on the show, NPR science correspondent Jon Hamilton talks to Maddie Sofia about what he learned at the conference, the latest on the controversial new drug Aduhelm, and the potential links between COVID and Alzheimer's.

You can follow more of Jon's reporting by clicking this link.

Email the show at ShortWave@NPR.org.

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Whales are more than just beautiful creatures — they play a vital role in the ocean's ecosystem. Today, Asha de Vos, marine biologist and pioneer of long-term blue whale research within the Northern Indian Ocean, explains why protecting whales is crucial for protecting the entire sea in this excerpt of TED Radio Hour.

Listen to the full episode, An SOS From The Ocean, here.

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There is inequality in the United States, a fact most people accept and which data certainly bears out. But how bad do you think that inequality is, say, based on comparing the wealth held by the average Black person in America and the average white person? This is one of the questions that Jennifer Richeson, a social psychologist at Yale University, studies. She has news -- bad news -- about both the actual gap and what people across the board think that gap is.

First off, the facts. The Black-white wealth gap in the United States is, in Richeson’s words, “staggeringly large.” Citing figures from 2016, she notes that “the average Black family had about 10 percent of the wealth of the average white family.” The actual percentage in wealth improved slightly in the five years since, “but the important thing is that it’s a huge, staggering gap that has been persistent for 50 to 60 years.”

With the gap so large and so persistent, you might expect estimates of its size to reflect reality. You would be mistaken, as Richeson tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast. “If you ask the average American on any given day, they will probably say the wealth gap is around 65, 70 percent. … That’s not only wrong, it’s very wrong compared to the actual wealth gap. … Part of the reason we’re so wrong is because we really believe that since the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, things have gotten dramatically better and are continuing to get better.”

The perception is that roughly since the Civil Rights era the gap narrowed from about half to near parity. Respondents to these sorts of questions “feel compelled to conform to this narrative of racial progress” in their estimates, a narrative that Richeson has likened to a mythology.

“No, things are not fine – they are similarly bad as they were in the 60s. That’s true for the wealth gap, that’s true for the wage gap. Income is slightly better, but not much. It’s a persistent and pervasive staggering inequality that’s stubborn, and our psychology refuses to believe that.”

Visions of this delusional economic advancement are shared broadly across the nation’s economic and ethnic strata; “Black Americans,” Richeson says, “are more accurate but still really wrong.” Her research has found that the more you believe in a just world, the more your estimate will underestimate the gap. This suggests in part why Black Americans – with daily experiences of structural inequality – give estimates that are at least a little closer to the mark. “One reason we believe there is this gap between Black Americans and white Americans is because of the differential tendency to believe that outcomes are fair and only determined by your individual effort, talent, hard work.”

This massive misperception matters. While “being this wrong about anything is interesting” academically, Richeson says, the magnitude of this misperception affects individual and societal wellbeing; it also undermines the idea behind the so-called American dream, that American society is a meritocracy. American cannot, she says, “just know the truth and do nothing about it.”

Richeson, the Philip R. Allen Professor of Psychology at Yale, received the SAGE-CASBS Award in 2020 for her work and will deliver a COVID-delayed lecture at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University later this year. That was one of a number of honors she has accumulated, including a 2007 John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (known as the “genius award”), a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2015), the Mamie Phipps Clark and Kenneth B. Clark Distinguished Lecture Award from Columbia University (2019), the Career Trajectory Award from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology (2019), and a Carnegie Foundation Senior Fellowship (2020).

Caregivers in the "Sandwich Generation" have reported a steep decline in mental health, as did others who had to juggle changes in the amount of caregiving they had to provide to loved ones. Caregivers have struggled with anxiety, depression and PTSD at rates much higher than those without caregiving roles. NPR correspondent Rhitu Chatterjee talks about the study and her reporting with Emily Kwong.

If you or anyone you know is struggling, help is available. Call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255. You can also check out this previous episode, 'How To Reach Out When Someone You Know May Be At Risk Of Suicide.'

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Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. It’s a well-known phrase that we all try and follow in our day to day lives. But are our current recycling habits the best they can be? It’s a hot topic at Crowdscience - multiple listeners have contacted Crowdscience with questions about the ins and outs of recycling.

We follow one listener’s food waste to a processing plant to investigate whether or not it could be processed in our own homes. But aside from the food waste, what about the containers it comes in? We investigate if food containers really need to be cleaned before we put them in recycling bins, or if that just wastes water.

Recycling processes differ all over the world, so we hear from reporter Chhavi Sachdev in Mumbai, India, who follows her plastic waste to find out how plastic sorting and recycling is a whole economy of its own.

But new technologies have meant that biodegradable and bioderived plastics are starting to appear in our packaging, and one Crowdscience listener wants to know which is better for the environment – traditional plastic that has been recycled, or bioplastic and compostable alternatives? And looking to the future, could we ever recycle our plastic waste at home and use 3D printers to make useful things out of our own waste?

Marnie Chesterton delves into these questions with Circular Economy Project Manager Dr Rhiannon Hunt of Manchester Metropolitan University, to discover the details of recycling and unearth how we can make our own recycling as efficient as possible.

With Dave Atkins, reporter Chhavi Sachdev and Dr Rhiannon Hunt.

Presented by Marnie Chesterton and Produced by Hannah Fisher for the BBC World Service.

[Image credit; Getty Images]