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.
Know someone else bringing science to the masses? Send us an email at shortwave@npr.org.
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)
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.
Feeling green? If you'd like to do something to slow down climate change, even if it's just a small thing, you can get started in your own apartment or house. With the help of our friends over at Life Kit, NPR correspondent Dan Charles shares five ways to cut carbon emissions in your own home.
This episode was adapted from an earlier Life Kit. To hear the full version, check out npr.org/lifekit.
Short Wave's Emily Kwong talks with NPR health correspondent Allison Aubrey about some of the latest coronavirus news, including the return of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine in the U.S. and vaccine outreach in harder to reach communities.
Have questions about the latest coronavirus headlines? Email us at shortwave@npr.org and we might cover it on a future episode.
On April 15, at four o'clock in the morning, a small group of scientists found their way to a secret location. A light wintry mix of rain and snow was falling. The lousy weather was a relief because it meant even less of a chance that someone might randomly pass by.
Today on the show, NPR science correspondent Nell Greenfieldboyce unearths why a new generation of scientists is digging up seeds under the cover of night buried 142 years ago.
Most of us don’t like to dwell on our toilet habits, but this week Crowdscience has gone down the drain to discover what wastewater can tell us about our health.
It’s been more than a year since scientists across the globe started to track the spread of Covid-19, with help from home test results and hospital data. Marnie Chesterton investigates the latest tool in their arsenal: sewage. Listener Kevin has heard how human waste can be monitored to check for virus levels, and wants to know if it can also be used to stop the disease in its tracks?
Although the coronavirus has been discovered in people’s poo, so far there’s little indication it’s actually being spread through the water system. But by taking regular samples from different parts of cities, authorities are now able to accurately predict a local peak weeks before the population shows signs of sickness, then take immediate measures to alert them. In Detroit we hear how environmental engineer Professor Irene Xagoraraki used this method to detect a rare strain of Herpes which doctors didn’t even know was a potential problem.
Marnie also talks to Professor Nick Thomson from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, who sequenced the genome of the bacteria that causes cholera, to understand how it has crisscrossed the globe. He discovered that the pandemic currently devastating Yemen actually originated in Asia. It’s a discovery that has changed how the WHO is thinking about this killer disease and could have important implications for vaccination programmes. But our effluent can also pose environmental problems, and Professor Andrew Johnson from the UK’s Centre for Ecology and Hydrology explains there are now as many as 300,000 chemicals that could threaten natural habitats.
While authorities try to test each one individually, he’s concerned they may have different effects when they mix in wastewater, and current monitoring systems don’t take this into account. Not only that, but some of these substances contain silver nanoparticles, which Professor Juliane Filser tells us stick around in soil for ever, threatening organisms and bacteria at the base of the food chain.
Presented by Marnie Chesterton and Produced by Marijke Peters for the BBC World Service.
President Biden is hosting dozens of world leaders for a virtual climate summit on Thursday and Friday. The administration is trying to regain ground lost by pulling out of the Paris climate agreement during the Trump administration. The Biden team is promising dramatic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions in the next several decades. Rhitu Chatterjee talks with NPR climate reporters Rebecca Hersher and Lauren Sommer.
As Covid cases surge almost beyond belief in India, how much is to do with social distancing, and how much to do with the mutations to the original virus?
Ramanan Laxminarayan talks to Roland from Delhi about ways in which the huge second wave could and could not have been predicted and avoided. Suggestions of the latest variant to make the headlines, B1.617, have got virologists such as Ravindra Gupta working hard to identify the clinical significance of the latest combinations of mutations.
In the journal Science, Stephen Chanock of the US Cancer program reports work with colleagues in Ukraine looking at the long footprint of radiation dosing from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, 35 years ago this week. In the first of two papers, they find a definite footprint of radiation damage accounting for the many sad cases of thyroid cancer in people alive in the region at the time. But in another study, they looked at whether any higher level of mutations could be detected in the germlines of children conceived subsequently to parents who had experienced radiation in the disaster. While the parents' own health is often affected, 35 years on, thus far their offspring show no widespread elevated levels of disease, as was commonly expected.
And in the week that the world witnessed a guilty verdict delivered in the trial for the murder of George Floyd in the US, David Curtis of the University of Utah and colleagues report in the journal PNAS a study that suggests the widespread media coverage of acts of racial violence, including deaths at the hands of police, leads to poorer mental health in Black Americans. As the BBC’s Samara Linton reports, the study involved google search data over five years up to 2017, and nearly 2.3 million survey respondents.
Image: NurPhoto/Getty Images
Presenter: Roland Pease
Reporter: Samara Linton
Producer: Alex Mansfield
