This week, get ready for a whole loot box of gaming-related stories!
First up, we find out about a video game that could give people the power to battle misinformation.
We also hear how scientists are putting harbour seals in front of a computer monitor to decipher how they navigate under the water.
And Dr Brett Kagan from Cortical Labs joins us down the line to tell us why he taught a clump of brain cells to play the 1970s arcade game Pong.
Along the way, we discover what happens when artificial intelligence tries to explain idioms, we learn about a tiny frog named after Bilbo Baggins and try to establish whether or not video games benefit your brain.
All that, plus many more Unexpected Elements.
Presenter: Marnie Chesterton, with Kai Kupferschmidt and Leonie Joubert
Producer: Alice Lipscombe-Southwell, with Margaret Sessa Hawkins, Imaan Moin and Minnie Harrop
"Olo" does not exist in nature, nor can it be found among paint cans. But for a very select few, olo can be seen — through the intervention of careful computing and lasers. A team led by vision scientist Austin Roorda and computer scientist Ren Ng at UC Berkeley figured out a method for stimulating only one specific subset of cones of the retina. It's the only way to view this spectacular teal. Creating the color is helping push the boundaries of vision science.
What is Fusarium graminearum and why were scientists allegedly smuggling it into the US? Also, Alpine Glacier collapse and an HIV capitulation.
The FBI has accused two Chinese scientists of trying to smuggle a dangerous crop fungus into the US, calling it a potential agro-terrorist threat. But the fungus has long been widespread across US farms, and elsewhere, and is treatable. So what’s going on? Frédéric Suffert, Senior researcher in plant disease epidemiology at France’s National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment, gives us some insight.
Last week, a glacier above the swiss village of Blatten collapsed and up to 12 million tonnes of ice and rock buried the idyllic, yet thankfully all-but evacuated, hamlet below. Daniel Farinotti of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology explains how it was monitored more than any such event before, and maybe, despite the tragedy, could help inform the science of such events in a warming world.
Amongst the latest cuts to scientific funding by the US government, two consortia working at advanced stages of a potential HIV vaccine have been told their funding will not continue. Dennis Burton of Scripps Research describes finding out.
The recipient of the Royal Society Faraday Prize 2024 gave his prize lecture last week. Titled Science Under Threat: The Politics of Institutionalised Disinformation, Salim Abdul Karim’s lecture is available on YouTube. Afterwards, he was kindly able to have a chat with Science in Action about his theme.
Presenter: Roland Pease
Producer: Alex Mansfield
Production co-ordinator: Jasmine Cerys George
(Photo: A hand holding an ear of wheat. Credit: Heather Schlitz/Reuters)
There are over 200 species of deep-sea anglerfish; some are long and thin, some are squat and round, some have fins that they use to "walk" along the sea floor, and others have huge eyes set far back into their heads. But how did all this morphological diversity first come to be? Thanks to a new anglerfish family tree, now we know.
Scientists built this evolutionary tree using genetic information from hundreds of samples and anglerfish specimens across the globe. It indicates that anglerfish originated from an ancestor that crawled along the seafloor ... and sheds new light on how experts could think about biodiversity as a whole.
As artificial intelligence seeps into some realms of society, it rushes into others. One area it's making a big difference is protein science — as in the "building blocks of life,"proteins! Producer Berly McCoy talks to host Emily Kwong about the newest advance in protein science: AlphaFold3, an AI program from Google DeepMind. Plus, they talk about the wider field of AI protein science and why researchers hope it will solve a range of problems, from disease to the climate.
Have other aspects of AI you want us to cover? Email us at shortwave@npr.org.
When economic news, especially that revolving around working, gets reported, it tends to get reported in aggregate – the total number of jobs affected or created, the average wage paid, the impact on a defined geographic area. This is an approach labor economist David Autor knows well. But he also knows that the aggregate often masks the effect on the individual.
What he finds is not as straightforward as the headlines alluded to above. Take China and its remarkable ascent and how that impacted the United States.
“[The rise] benefited a lot of people. It lowered prices. It allowed American companies to kind of produce a lot of products more cheaply. You know, it's hard to imagine Apple's growth without China, for example, to do all that assembly, which would have been extremely expensive to do in the United States. At the same time, it displaced a lot of people, more than a million, and in a very geographically and temporarily concentrated way, extremely scarring the labor market. Now those people also got lower prices, but that's not even remote compensation for what they lost. And now there are new jobs -- even in those places where those trade shock occurs -- but it's not really the same people doing them. It's not the people who lost manufacturing work.”
Concerns about these shocks have been widespread in the 2020s, but the tough if erratic talk about tariffs coming from the U.S. president centers on the idea of restoring something (while ignoring question of that thing ever existed or if it makes sense to go back). Autor argues that the administration actually is asking the right question – but they are arriving at the wrong answers, He notes that the U.S. currently has a half a million unfilled manufacturing jobs open already, a sizeable figure relative to the nation’s 13 million manufacturing workers. But that number itself is roughly a tenth of China’s 120 million.
“We cannot compete with them across every front. .. What we should be very deeply worried about is losing the frontier sectors that we currently maintain. Those are threatened. So aircraft, telecommunications, robotics, power generation, fusion, quantum computing, batteries and storage, electric vehicles, shipping. These are sectors that we still have (except for shipping, actually) but China is making incredibly fast progress, and instead of trying to get commodity furniture back, we need to think about the current war we're in, not the last war.”
At MIT, Autor is co-director of the School Effectiveness and Inequality Initiative, while off campus he is a research associate and co-director of the Labor Studies Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
For hundreds of years sailors have told stories about miles of glowing ocean during moonless nights. This phenomenon is known as "milky seas," but the only scientific sample was collected in 1985. So atmospheric scientist Justin Hudson, a PhD candidate at Colorado State University, used accounts spanning 400 years to create a database of milky seas. By also using satellite images to visually confirm the tales, Justin hopes his research brings us one step closer to unraveling this maritime mystery.
Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.
Got a question about a scientific mystery? Let us know at shortwave@npr.org.
A group of gray seals in Rhode Island are making a splash. They were rescued in March and April after becoming entangled in fishing gear and other debris near Block Island. Several were recently released after being rehabilitated. John Yang has the story. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders
Listener Christine wants to understand one of the strangest phenomena in the universe. But to get to grips with it, she’ll need a crash course in the bizarre behaviour of the very small. Here, things don’t act the way you might expect — and it’s famously hard to wrap your head around.
Anand Jagatia has assembled some of the sharpest minds in the field and locked them in a studio. No one’s getting out until Christine and Anand know exactly what’s going on. Or at least, that’s the plan.
On hand to help are Kanta Dihal, lecturer in science communication at Imperial College London; James Millen, King’s Quantum Director at King’s College London; and particle physicist Harry Cliff from the University of Cambridge.
Prepare to enter the world of the very small—and the very weird—where particles can be in two places at once, influence each other across vast distances, and seem to decide what they are only when observed. Hear how these once-theoretical oddities are now driving a technological revolution, transforming everything from computing to communication.
Presenter: Anand Jagatia
Producer: Harrison Lewis
Series Producer: Ben Motley
With the new Mission Impossible film playing in cinemas, the Unexpected Elements team is channelling Tom Cruise’s energy to see if scientists can push the boundaries of what is considered ‘impossible.’
First up, we fuse medieval alchemy with particle physics and explore a method to turn lead into gold. We then look at the latest research that uses artificial intelligence to help us humans communicate with animals.
We put the spotlight on a favourite trope of science-fiction films – time travel! String theorist Brian Greene of Columbia University explains how going to the past, or back to the future, may or may not be hypothetically possible.
We also ponder ancient auroras, whether ants can plan a Hollywood-style heist, and what it takes to understand our consciousness.
Presenter: Marnie Chesterton, with Affelia Wibisono and Andrada Fiscutean
Producer: Imaan Moin, with Alice Lipscombe-Southwell
Studio engineer: Mike Mallen
