Category: ScienceNews

The numbers are staggering. India has been reporting more than 300,000 COVID-19 cases each day for the past two weeks, and recently topped more than 400,000 cases in a single day, a global record. Many more cases are likely unreported. NPR International Correspondent Lauren Frayer shares the latest from India.

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Analysis of the 78,0000-year-old fossil of a Kenyan boy reveals he was likely buried with care and attention, the body wrapped and laid to rest supported on a pillow. Maria Martinon-Torres, of the National Research Centre on Human Evolution in Burgos, Spain, and a team from Kenya and Germany used techniques from paleontology and forensic science to reveal his story from the fragile remains.

A promising malaria vaccine is to enter trials which could lead to it being used globally to vaccinate children. Merheen Datoo, Oxford University’s Jenner Institute, explains malaria vaccines have been in development for 100 years. Research from these helped covid vaccine development and the success of covid vaccines may now help to speed up the rollout of malaria vaccines.

Covid vaccines may also help to treat those who have symptoms of long covid – a range of immune system issues that develop sometimes months after the initial infection. Yale University immunologist Akiko Kawasaki is embarking on a research project to assess the impact. If you’d like to take part, have yet to be vaccinated, and live in Connecticut in the US, email covidrecovery@yale.edu.

And in India scientists are calling on the government to make all data on Covid more widely available. At present Indian bureaucracy means statistics on infection rates, variants and recovery are not distributed widely. Science journalist TV Padma says greater access to the data could help more scientists come together to work on solutions to India’s Covid crisis.

(Image: An artist’s interpretation of Mtoto’s burial Credit: Fernando Fueyo)

Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Julian Siddle

Katie Clapp and Michael Tranfaglia's son was born with a genetic disorder that affects brain development. It makes it hard to learn language and basic daily tasks and often is accompanied by a host of other disorders. To help find a cure, they started a foundation and raised research money. After several setbacks, one treatment is showing promise. NPR neuroscience reporter Jon Hamilton tells Emily Kwong the story.

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We've been talking a lot about COVID in the US. Now, we want to look at how things are going in some other countries. NPR's correspondents — Jason Beaubien, Phil Reeves, and Anthony Kuhn — talk with Morning Edition's Noel King about why most of the world is struggling to get even a small percentage of their population vaccinated.

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The rate of vaccination in the U.S. continues to slow. Maddie Sofia talks with NPR health correspondent Allison Aubrey about that and what can be done to get more people vaccinated. Also, making sense of the CDC's latest mask guidance.

Have questions about the latest coronavirus headlines? Email us at shortwave@npr.org and we might cover it on a future episode.

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Today, NPR's mental health correspondent Rhitu Chatterjee guests hosts Short Wave. She talks to Dr. Arghavan Salles about burnout among health care workers — what it looks like, what it's doing to the mental health of doctors and nurses and how institutions can address it.

Have a scientific question you can't stop thinking about? Drop us a line at shortwave@npr.org — we'd love to hear it.

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When eating a blackberry one day, CrowdScience listener Charles got a tiny seed stuck in his teeth. That got him wondering: why are seeds the size they are? Why does a blackberry have dozens of tiny pips, while a peach has one huge stone right in the middle?

Plant seeds have been around for hundreds of millions of years, so they’ve had plenty of time to shapeshift into wildly different forms: from dust-like orchid seeds to giant coconuts. This evolution has been a long and intricate dance with wind, water and animals; we ask how different kinds of seeds might respond to today’s environmental threats and rapidly changing ecosystems.

And we go in search of the world’s biggest seed, the coco de mer: native to just two remote islands in the Indian Ocean and weighing up to 18kg, how did this seed evolve to be so much bigger than any other?

With Professor Angela Moles, Dr Si-Chong Chen, Marc Jean-Baptiste, Dr Frauke Fleischer-Dogley and Dr Wolfgang Stuppy.

Presented by Marnie Chesterton Produced by Cathy Edwards for the BBC World Service

[Photo: Different sized fruit seeds. Credit: Getty Images]

We at Short Wave are sometimes a little too aware of how difficult it can be to explain science to a general audience. So when we came across Vick Krishna's viral TikTok breaking down how the mRNA vaccine works, we were impressed and immediately like, "We've got to get him on the show!" Today's that show. Vick breaks down the inspiration, the science and his newfound responsibility as an accidental science communicator.

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When Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins – who passed away this week – looked down on the earth from lunar orbit during those days in 1969, he saw more ice and a smaller liquid ocean than you would see today. Of the 200,000 glaciers outside of the polar and Greenland ice sheets, their melting in the last two decades accounts for about a fifth of the sea level rise we are also seeing. Thus according to a paper published this week in the journal nature by, amongst others Bob McNabb of Ulster University who describes to Roland how and why these numbers are more certain than others before. As fellow earth observation expert Anna Hogg adds, the work synthesises years of data from almost half a million images of glaciers taken from space, and provides our best handle yet on our accelerating loss of this finite and dwindling natural feature.

Researchers at Kew in the UK and in Sierra Leone have rediscovered a species of coffee plant once thought lost. As Marnie Chesterton reports, climate change threatens many coffee crops around the world as the most popular variety – arabica – needs cool high altitude conditions which are going to become more scarce. But after a long and arduous search, the researchers have discovered a more resilient variety that might not only save the morning brew for many, it may even prove agriculturally and even economically transformative for some African economies.

And whilst many of us watch the antics of NASA’s Martian helicopter, Ingenuity, as it whizzes across the distant plains of “Wright’s Field” aerodrome on Mars, some are watching with more trepidation than others. In 6 years’ time, Zibi Turtle, Principle Investigator of NASA’s Dragonfly mission, hopes to launch a much larger octocopter drone to Titan, moon of Saturn. As she describes to Roland, the challenges are huge, not least because dragonfly will carry all its instruments on board as it hops around, finding new landing sites autonomously. And communicating with Earth will take a whopping hour each way.

(Image: The lunar module, carrying Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, ascends back up to the command module with Michael Collins. It is often said that Michael Collins is the only human, living or dead, who is not in this photograph. Credit: Michael Collins / NASA)

Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield

In 2011, villages and towns around the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear plant in Japan were evacuated because of a series of meltdowns caused by a tsunami. Ten years later, some of the villages and towns are slowly reopening. Geoff Brumfiel talks with producer Kat Lonsdorf about the Fukushima nuclear accident, its lasting effects on Japan, and the future of nuclear power.

You can read and listen to more of Kat's reporting about Fukushima and Japan here.

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