Category: ScienceNews

Maddie talks with physicist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein about her new book, The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred. In the episode, we talk quarks (one of the building blocks of the universe), intersectionality and access to the night sky as a fundamental right.

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It is one of the Earth's great migrations: each year, millions of monarch butterflies fly some 3,000 miles, from their summer breeding grounds as far north as Canada to their overwintering sites in the central Mexico. It's one of the best-studied migrations and in recent years, ecologists like Sonia Altizer have been able to better answer how and why these intrepid butterflies make the journey. Short Wave brings this episode from the TED Radio Hour's episode with Sonia Altizer, with the University of Georgia.

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They say life is sweet. Well that’s certainly the case for CrowdScience listener Trevor in Poland who wonders why he can’t stop reaching for the cookie jar. He grew up drinking fruit juice with added sugar but wonders whether his genes could be as important as his environment when it comes to his sweet tooth, especially since his wife seem to be satisfied with mainly savoury snacks. The World Health Organisation says added sugar should constitute a maximum of 5% of our daily energy intake because it can contribute to diabetes, heart disease and obesity. But that’s tricky when you consider it’s now in everything from salad dressings, to savoury sauces.

Manufacturers have been promoting sugar alternatives for decades but recreating the unique taste and feel of it in the mouth are a challenge. Marnie Chesterton gets to try a brand new innovation – a so-called ‘rare’ sugar that has 70 percent of the sweetness but almost none of the calories. In nature, allulose is found in figs, but one producer has discovered a way to make it in the lab. Does it taste as good as it claims? Whilst switching to alternative sugars and sweeteners may reduce the calories, some researchers claim that tasting sweetness, wherever it comes from, can disrupt the body’s mechanism for regulating blood-sugar levels, increasing the risk for conditions like diabetes.

Presented by Marnie Chesterton and produced by Marijke Peters for the BBC World Service

After hearing a vicious rumor on the internet that vegetables aren't real, Maddie goes looking for answers. Turns out, vegetables are a mere culinary construct. Still healthful and delicious, but a kinda mythic category of food. With the help of Harvard botanist Molly Edwards, Maddie and Emily break down our favorite foods from broccoli to zucchini.

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Dr. Clare Jolly and colleagues have been looking at how the first of the major covid variants – alpha - evolved to be more transmissible. Whilst a lot of attention has been on the spike binding areas of the virus and the effectiveness of antibodies from either vaccine or prior infection, their preprint paper this week reports how the virus evolved an ability to inhibit our bodies innate virus response once it has infected a cell.

Prof Dan Shugar and colleagues have been studying the conditions that led to the tragic rock and ice avalanche in February in Chamoli, Uttarakhand. 27 million cubic meters of rock and ice broke off the steep mountainside and plummeted almost 2km down into the valleys below. Using satellite, seismic and video data the scientists have investigated the sequence of events that led to the tragic deaths of 204 people in the floods that followed.

It was a thankfully rare combination of geography and geology and events, but highlights the care that should be taken when building the growing number of hydroelectric plants in high mountainous areas.

But avalanches don’t just happen in mountains. A year before, in a canyon under the sea near the outflow of the Congo river, a sediment avalanche rumbled on for almost two days along some 1,100km of the ocean floor. And as Prof Pete Talling describes, whilst it didn’t trigger a tsunami, it did sever cables supplying internet connectivity between South Africa and Nigeria.

And the BBC’s Samara Linton reports on research into a type of DNA you perhaps haven’t heard of – Z-DNA. It winds the other way to what we consider normal DNA, and scientists are finally beginning to understand its role in many human diseases, including cancer, with some future promise of novel therapeutics.

Presented by Roland Pease Produced by Alex Mansfield

(Image: Getty Images)

(Encore episode.) Scientists have known for decades that one of the main causes of the smell of fresh rain is geosmin: a chemical compound produced by soil-dwelling bacteria. But why do the bacteria make it in the first place? Reporter Emily Vaughn answers this mystery.

Read the paper on which this episode was based.

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Other scent mysteries driving your nose wild? Email the show at shortwave@npr.org and we might track down the answer.

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The Biden Administration is working to fight climate change in a way that also address the country's economic and racial disparities. Emily talks with NPR correspondent Dan Charles about why the ground work for a climate justice plan could be laid in the city of Cleveland.

For more of Dan's reporting, follow him on Twitter @NPRDanCharles.

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Nationwide, almost 65% of adults have had at least one vaccine shot, but vaccination rates vary significantly depending on the state. NPR health correspondent Allison Aubrey gives us the latest on the country's vaccination progress: which states are on track (and which are not), new research about why it's important teenagers get vaccinated, and what we know about the possibility of booster shots.

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Despite being someone who doesn’t “particularly enjoy the game,” cognitive anthropologist Martha Newson is drawn to football. “Football is one of the most exciting games to watch as an anthropologist,” she explains in this Social Science Bites podcast. “I’m not watching the ball go around the pitch – I’m watching the fans. I’m transfixed by them! You go through all the emotions in a single match.” Newson, based at the universities of Kent and Oxford, describes for interviewer David Edmonds how fans of football often fuse their own identities into a tightly bonded group (even as they retain their individuality). This “identity fusion,” in which fans feel completely immersed in their group, is widely seen outside of sports. Some obvious venues are national identity, religion, or family group, places where individuals will go to extreme ends to defend or protect our group. “The research has expanded to look at how we can fuse to a value or an idea,” Newson notes.

But studying football (or soccer) offers some pragmatic advantages to the researcher.  For one, the bonding is very public and very passionate. Fused fans will tattoo themselves, for example, an indelible statement that demonstrates they’re much easier to access and observe than say a terrorist cell or secretive political group.

And football fandom is diverse culturally and geographically. One study Newson is working on currently taps into fanbases in Indonesia, Australian, Britain, Brazil and Spain. While there are differences in each country, “the love of the fans is quite consistent.” (And it is also love for the fans, Newson says, since it seems to be fusion to their fellow fans, and not necessarily the team or town, that’s the real driving force of cohesion.)

Newson has taken an innovative and interdisciplinary approach in her research, conducting surveys of fans, measuring their physiological responses and even drawing on existing and disparate databases like police records of fan violence.

And while violence or hostility may be linked in the popular imagination with extreme fandom, Newson’s research offers a more nuanced view. When someone feels their group is being threatened, like a mother bear they may wade in to defend their group. But when things are pleasant, like that same bear, so are they. “Fused fans preferred to be cooperative and altruistic to their rivals over being hostile toward them,” Newson has found. “The more fused you are, you are more likely to be violent than the less-fused fans,” she adds, “but that’s only because you’re looking out for your group in some way.”

Identity fusion research also finds that having bonded is a lifetime commitment, regardless of losses (and perhaps abetted by them!). “Once you are fused, you don’t unfuse – fusion really sticks,” Newson explains, adding that the primacy of the bond may wax and wane over time.

Paleontologist Yara Haridy looks at fossilized bones for a living. When she randomly walked by a scientific poster one day, she discovered an entirely new way to take pictures of her fossils. The results are shedding new light on how bones evolved.

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