Category: ScienceNews

The past year has been the driest or second driest in most Southwestern U.S. states since record-keeping began in 1895. Climate Correspondent Lauren Sommer reports that farms and cities have begun imposing water restrictions, but the water supply will shrink no matter what the weather brings. The supply spans tens of millions of people and the farmland that produces most of the country's fruits and vegetables. As a result, the people who manage the West's complex water systems are realizing that with climate change, they can no longer rely on the past to predict the future.

Read more of Lauren's reporting.

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Tam O'Shaughnessy and Sally Ride, the first American woman to fly in space, shared a passion for getting girls involved in STEM. It led them to co-found Sally Ride Science, a company focused on equity and inclusion in science education. But, there was much more to Tam and Sally's relationship. Tam gives us an intimate look at their decades-long partnership: how they met and fell in love, the pressures they faced as a queer couple, and their long-awaited and public coming out with Sally's death in 2012. We want to know which LGBTQ+ scientists have inspired you! Email the show at shortwave@npr.org.

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Health Correspondent Allison Aubrey updates us on the Biden Administration's goal to have 70 percent of U.S. adults vaccinated by the July 4. Plus, as vaccine makers plan for the possibility that COVID-19 vaccine boosters will be needed, they're pushing ahead with research into new-generation flu shots and mRNA cancer vaccines.

Questions? Existential dread? Optimism? We'd love to hear it — write us at shortwave@npr.org.

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The anus is an evolutionary marvel. But how and when did this organ evolve into what it is today? Today on Short Wave, Maddie gets to the bottom of these questions with The Atlantic's science writer Katherine Wu.

For more of Katherine's reporting, check out 'The Body's Most Embarrassing Organ Is an Evolutionary Marvel' from The Atlantic.

If you have stories ideas or comments — email us at ShortWave@NPR.org.

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Nearly 1 billion people speak Mandarin Chinese. But Short Wave host Emily Kwong is not among them. As a third generation Chinese American, Emily's heritage language was lost through the years when her father, Christopher Kwong, stopped speaking the language at a young age in order to adjust to life in the U.S. Now, at age 30, Emily's trying to reclaim Chinese by attending virtual Mandarin classes for the first time. In conversation with her father, Emily explores how being 'Chinese enough' gets tied up in language fluency, and how language is a bridge that can be broken and rebuilt between generations — as an act of love and reclamation.

Check out more of the Where We Come From series here.

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Scales don’t come planet-sized, so answering a question from David in Ghana may require some ingenuity, after all, calculating the weight of the Earth is a huge task. Using a set of weighing scales and a 400 year-old equation, Marnie Chesterton attempts to find out just how much the Earth weighs and is it getting heavier or lighter over time? But how would a planet gain or lose mass? Which tips the scales: meteorites falling from space or gases constantly escaping from our atmosphere? And does the answer have any implications for the future of Earth? Could the atmosphere eventually run out? Contributors: Anuradha TK, former project director at ISRO Matt Genge, geologist at Imperial College London Jon Larsen, researcher at the University of Oslo Anjali Tripathi, astrophysicist Ethan Seigel, journalist and astrophysicist

Presented by Marnie Chesterton. Produced by Caroline Steel for the BBC World Service.

[Image: Earth on scales. Credit: Getty Images]

Hey, Nerd! NPR takes Juneteenth off. We'll be back Sunday with a special episode from NPR's Where We Come From series. It focuses on Emily Kwong's relationship to her heritage language and journey to learn Mandarin as an adult.

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Nasa scientists have observed that the Earth’s energy imbalance has doubled in just 15 years. As greenhouse gas atmospheric concentrations have risen, so too has the difference between the total amount of energy being absorbed from the sun, and the total amount being reradiated back into space. Meanwhile, as we all heat up, scientists at the LIGO Gravitational Wave Observatory have managed to do something very cool with their mirrors. Such is the precision with which the detectors have been engineered, they have managed to effectively reduce the temperature of one of the big 10kg reflectors to such an extent that it betrays its quantum state, as if it were simply one big subatomic particle. So what? Roland Pease finds out.

Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Alex Mansfield

(Photo: Giant sun in the horizon. Credit: Getty Images)

#BlackBirdersWeek emerged last year from a groundswell of support for Christian Cooper, a Black man and avid birder, who was harassed by a white woman while birding in Central Park. This year is all about celebrating Black joy. Co-organizer Deja Perkins talks about how the week went and why it's important to observe nature wherever you live.

Send us your birding highlights! We're at shortwave@npr.org.

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Becoming fluent in a second language is difficult. But for adults, is it impossible? Short Wave hosts Maddie Sofia and Emily Kwong dissect the "critical period hypothesis," a theory which linguists have been debating for decades — with the help of Sarah Frances Phillips, a Ph.D. student in the linguistics department at New York University.

You can watch a related video about Emily learning Mandarin here. It's part of the Where We Come From series.

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