Category: ScienceNews

(Encore episode.) Archival records may help researchers figure out how fast the sea level is rising in certain places. Millions of people in coastal cities are vulnerable to rising sea levels and knowing exactly how fast the water is rising is really important. But it's a tough scientific question. NPR climate correspondent Lauren Sommer explains how scientists are looking to historical records to help get at the answer.

If you'd like to help transcribe old tidal data, you can get started here.

For more of Lauren's reporting, follow her on Twitter @lesommer. Email us at ShortWave@npr.org.

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Two weeks ago several G7 leaders called for an international treaty on Pandemic Preparedness for the future. This week 175 prominent leaders called for lifting the IP on vaccine design. And former UK PM Gordon Brown called on the G7 to finance vaccines for the world in the next two months. But are there technical difficulties that limit the pace of manufacture?

Anthony McDonnell is an economist at think tank Centre for Global Development who has been looking at the problem since last year. He suggests, amongst other things, one limit is the human expertise in manufacturing these brand-new technologies, with another being a level of vaccine nationalism that is seeing a lack of exports of components involved in manufacture.

Professor Trudie Lang heads the University of Oxford’s Global Health Network, and looks at health research across the world. She says in most countries there is no lack of public health or infrastructure potential for rolling out the vaccines, if only the supply existed.

The volcano that erupted explosively on St Vincent last week has led to many thousands of people being evacuated. Dr Joan Latchman of the University of West Indies Seismic Research Centre - who has monitored Caribbean volcanos for several decades - describes from Trinidad how the layers of ash mean recovery will take a long time, even if the explosions and pyroclastic dangers subside reasonably soon. Back in The UK, Prof Jenni Barclay and colleagues are examining rocks from the early part of the eruption, before the explosive phase began, to see if there are clues in the microstructure that could provide clues to the future.

And how do our brains so quickly tell a scream of delight from a scream of horror? Or of pain? Prof Sascha Frühholz of the University of Geneva has written in the journal PLOS Biology this week about work looking at how we identify the nature of different human screams. One finding is that we perceive joy quicker than fear..

(Image: Getty Images)

Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield

(Encore episode.) Earlier this year, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a case brought by the city of Baltimore against more than a dozen major oil and gas companies including BP, ExxonMobil and Shell. In the lawsuit, BP P.L.C. v. Mayor and City Council of Baltimore, the city government argued that the fossil fuel giants must help pay for the costs of climate change because they knew that their products cause potentially catastrophic global warming. NPR climate reporter Rebecca Hersher has been following the case.

Read Rebecca's digital piece about the Supreme Court case here.

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(Encore episode.) Global Witness documented that 212 environmental and land activists were murdered in 2019. Over half of those documented murders took place in Colombia and the Philippines, countries where intensive mining and agribusiness has transformed the environment. NPR Short Wave reporter Emily Kwong speaks with three activists about the intersection between natural resource extraction and violence, and what keeps them going in their work.

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(Encore episode.) As sea levels rise from climate change, coastal communities face a greater risk of chronic flooding. Climate scientist Astrid Caldas and her colleagues have looked at where it's happening now and where it could happen in the future as the tides keep getting higher.

Follow host Maddie Sofia on Twitter @maddie_sofia. Email the show at shortwave@npr.org.

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Humans have changed the Earth in such profound ways that scientists say we have entered a new geological period: the Anthropocene Epoch.

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Gossip often has negative connotations, but does it get a bad rap? Might it serve a useful function and should we think of gossiping as an advanced social skill rather than a personality defect? CrowdScience listener Jayogi thinks it might be useful, and has asked CrowdScience to dig into the reasons why we find it so hard to resist salacious stories.

Presenter Datshiane Navanayagam meets a scientist who views gossip as a key evolutionary adaption - as humans started to live in bigger cooperative groups, gossiping was a way of bonding and establishing acceptable group behaviour as well as cementing reputations of trustworthiness.

Datshiane heads to the local park to catch some real gossiping in action and finds out that whilst people like to gossip they don’t consider themselves gossipers.

Datshi asks a team of scientists what information we are most keen to share and glean in these interactions and if there is such a thing as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ gossip. She hears that in some group settings – like in the workplace - gossip can enhance cooperation and limit free-riders, but that it can also have a more self-serving dark side.

Datshiane finds out if our stone-age gossipy minds are fit to operate in the world of mass communication and social media – is our fixation on celebrities related to our being hard wired to gossip?

Presenter: Datshiane Navanayagam Producer: Melanie Brown

[Image: Gossiping people. Credit: Getty Images]

Psychedelics like ketamine and psilocybin are getting a second look as a way to treat psychiatric problems like depression, anxiety, substance use disorders, even PTSD. NPR neuroscience correspondent Jon Hamilton explains how these drugs are helping brain scientists understand what causes mental illness and find new ways to treat it.

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On Wednesday the EU’s EMA and UK’s JCVI announced a suspected correlation between vaccination and an extremely rare type of blood clot. Prof Sabine Eichinger is a co-author of a new paper suggesting a link with vaccination or the immune response to Covid vaccination and suggests the name VIPIT for the condition. One of her patients died at the end of February having presented with a rare combination of symptoms – blood clots and a low blood platelet count. Sabine tells Roland the dots they have managed to join in the story so far.

Scientists at Fermilab in the USA posted four papers and announced an exciting development in particle physics that might lift the curtain on science beyond the Standard Model. Their measurement of something known as g-2 (“gee minus two”, just fyi), by measuring with phenomenal accuracy the magnetic properties of muons flying round in circles confirms a 20-year old attempt at a similar value by colleagues at Brookhaven. At the time, it was breathtaking but suspicious. Muons, rather like heavy electrons, don’t quite behave as the Standard Model might have us believe, hinting at fields and possibly particles or forces hitherto unknown. Dr. Harry Cliffe – a member of the LHCb team who found something similarly weird two weeks ago - describes the finding and the level of excitement amongst theorists worldwide.

Superfans around the world have learned to speak fluent Klingon, a fictional language originating from Star Trek. In a quest to understand the science behind these languages often dismissed as gobbledygook, Gaia Vince has been speaking to some of the linguists responsible for creating these languages. It’s time for her to relax the tongue, loosen those jaw muscles and wrap her head around the scientific building blocks embedded in language and what languages like Klingon tell us about prehistoric forms of communication.

Meanwhile, primatologist Edward Wright of the Max Plank Institute has been hanging out with mountain gorillas in Rwanda and recording the sound of their “chest clapping”. As he describes in the journal Scientific Reports his work confirms what scientists have long suspected - that the famous gesture - often portrayed in films - is a measure of size and strength - allowing communication in the dense, tropical forests in which the animals live.

Image: Platelets, computer illustration. Credit: Sebastian Kaulitzki /Science Photo Library via Getty Images

Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield

A curious symptom of COVID-19 that can stick with patients for a long time is loss of smell. Researchers don't know exactly how prevalent the loss of smell ism and while most people recover from it, some will not. This has given new life to a very specific treatment: smell training. Emily Kwong talks to the Atlantic's science reporter Sarah Zhang about how practicing how to smell might help those who've lost their sense of smell.

For more on smell training, read Sarah's piece in The Atlantic.

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