Category: ScienceNews

NPR science correspondent Geoff Brumfiel takes us to IonQ, one of the companies betting on a quantum computing future. Along the way, Geoff explains what little researchers know about how we might actually use this technology. There are hints though quantum computing could change everything from discovering new drugs to developing advanced materials.

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Animals experience all the colds, stomach pains, headaches, parasites, and general illnesses that humans do. But unlike us, animals can’t just grab a painkiller off the shelf at the supermarket to cure it. They don’t have a pharmacy to browse… or at least, not the sort that we’d recognise.

Listener Andrew Chen got in touch to ask whether animals use any kind of medicine themselves. After all, our own drugs largely come from the plants and minerals found in wild habitats. So perhaps animals themselves are using medicines they find in nature.

Presenter Anand Jagatia speaks with the primate researcher who stumbled across a chimp chewing on a bitter leaf 35 years ago, Professor Mike Huffman, whose observations opened up a whole new field of research. We discover why plants contain the medicinal compounds they do, and how butterflies with brains no bigger than a pin-head are still able to select and use medicine to protect their young.

We think of medicine as a human invention - but it turns out that we’ve learnt a lot of what we know from copying the birds, bugs and beasts.

Presented by Anand Jagatia Produced by Rory Galloway

Image: Chimp eating. Credit: Getty Images

NPR climate correspondent Lauren Sommer explains how scientists are getting creative to deal with the hordes of urchins overtaking kelp forests in the Pacific Ocean — and why this kind of drastic ecological change may become more common as the climate gets hotter.

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Sightseers and social media scrollers have flocked to the slopes of Fagradalsfjall, a volcano erupting 40 kilometres west of the Icelandic capital Reykjavik. Having produced less than 1 square kilometre of lava this eruption could be deemed relatively minor, allowing bystanders to get up close and personal. Among the hubbub, you might also spot Dr Evgenia Ilyinskaya from University of Leeds, just one of the researchers measuring and observing the event from an alarmingly small distance. Her interest is more in the invisible toxic gases and trace elements being emitted from one of the deepest magma eruptions in recent times than the more cinematic molten rock.

This week scientists working on results from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN announced intriguing evidence (NB “evidence” – not yet a definite discovery) of physics beyond our current understanding. Everything we can detect directly in the universe is made from a few basic building blocks, fundamental particles. These particles are governed by four universal fundamental forces. Our best understanding of these forces and particles are sewn together in the Standard Model of particle physics. Since the 1970s this model has been able to explain most of our experimental results, but not all. Professor Gudrun Hiller from Technische Universität Dortmund has been theorizing as to what sort of experiments might lead to evidence of where the model might be incomplete. And this week, she has reason to feel a little bit proud. As she and her fellow member of the LHCb consortium, Harry Cliff, explain, a mysterious asymmetry in the way certain quarks – beauty quarks – have been seen to decay could be pointing at a deeper, more sophisticated, picture of the nature of the universe. Theorists are theorizing all around the world: could this be a new class of particle called a “leptoquark” that mediates a whole new type of force? The new results have been submitted for publication in the journal Nature, but have also been made public online in what is known as a “preprint”. Science publication has, for hundreds of years, been governed by peer-review. This process has prevented the wider community of scientists from accessing new scientific reports and papers unless vetted by a smaller number of fellow experts in the field. But this hasn’t been the case for all disciplines. “Preprints”, uncorrected proofs, have for some decades played a role in the publication process of physics and mathematics. In these fields, on the whole, lives are not at risk if mistakes get through to publication, but over the past year the practice of posting proofs to preprint servers is now common in the biomedical and life sciences, to accommodate the deluge of research being conducted on Covid-19. Might this be a problem? Or could it demonstrate the value of preprints? A new paper from Jonny Coates (also a preprint) and colleagues has looked at whether much changes on a biomedical or life-science preprint as it travels through peer-review towards conventional publication.

Image: Lava flows from Fagradalsfjall volcano in Reykjanes Peninsula, Iceland Credit: Kristinn Magnusson/mbl.is Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield

The cicadas are coming! After 17 years, Brood X is emerging this spring to mate. If you're in the eastern part of the United States, get ready to be surrounded by these little critters! Host Maddie Sofia talks with entomologist Sammy Ramsey, aka Dr. Buggs, about what cicadas are, where they've been for the last 17 years, and — of course — why they're so loud.

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(Encore episode.) In 2006, while hiking around the Root Glacier in Alaska, glaciologist Tim Bartholomaus encountered something strange and unexpected on the ice — dozens of fuzzy, green moss balls. It turns out, other glaciologists had come across glacial moss balls before and lovingly called them "glacier mice."

NPR science correspondent Nell Greenfieldboyce and Short Wave reporter Emily Kwong talk about glacial moss balls and delve into the mystery of how they seem to move as a herd.

Read more of Nell's reporting on glacier mice here.

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NPR's international correspondent Lauren Frayer takes us on a tour of the factory of the world's largest vaccine maker: Serum Institute of India. The company aims to manufacture 100 million doses a month of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine and export them globally.

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In North Carolina, a rural electric cooperative is reliving its New Deal history, bringing technologies like fast Internet and clean, low-carbon heating to communities that some have abandoned.

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The space industry, with its fuel-burning rockets, requirements for mined metals and inevitable production of space junk, is not currently renowned for its environmental credentials. Can space exploration ever be truly environmentally friendly? Presenter Marnie Chesterton answers a selection of listeners’ questions on the topic of space environmentalism. She starts by examining the carbon footprint of spaceship manufacturing here on Earth, and asking whether reusable rocket ships such as Space X or Virgin Galactic offer a green route for commuting or tourism in low Earth orbit.

Just beyond our atmosphere, space junk and space debris are multiplying at an exponential rate, jeopardising our communications and mapping satellites, and even putting our access to the wider solar system at risk. As more probes and landers head to the Moon and Mars, what plans are in place to deal with space debris far beyond Earth? Presented by Marnie Chesterton Produced by Jen Whyntie for the BBC World Service

[Image: Space Junk. Credit: Getty Images]

(Encore episode.) The coronavirus is all over the headlines these days. Accompanying those headlines? Suspicion and harassment of Asians and Asian Americans. Our colleague Gene Demby, co-host of NPR's Code Switch podcast, explains that this is part of a longer history in the United States of camouflaging xenophobia and racism as public health and hygiene concerns. We hear from historian Erika Lee, author of "America For Americans: A History Of Xenophobia In The United States."

LEARN MORE:
Check out Code Switch's full digital story and podcast episode.
And here's a collection of NPR's coverage on the rise in violence against Asian Americans.
Erika Lee's book "America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States"

As always, reach out to the show by emailing shortwave@npr.org.

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