The rise of artificial intelligence has touched nearly every industry, disrupting long-established workflows and raising concerns about job losses. Now, the fashion world is reckoning with these changes as AI takes hold, from virtual fitting rooms to AI avatars starring in marketing campaigns. Ali Rogin reports on the refashioning of the industry and why it’s raising alarms. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy
When listener Rob from Devon, UK, heard of a newly detected planet light years away, he was struck by the sheer scale the light must travel to reach us here on Earth. It got him wondering: How long does light last? What’s the oldest light we’ve ever observed? And does light ever die?
To find out, presenter Anand Jagatia calls on some of the brightest minds in astronomy and physics.
Astronomer Matthew Middleton from the University of Southampton describes himself as “a kid in a sweet shop” when it comes to physics, and that enthusiasm comes in handy, because scientists still struggle to define exactly what light is. What we do know is that light comes in many forms, and choosing the right kind can peel back the cosmic curtain, revealing the universe’s deepest and darkest secrets. That knowledge will prove vital in Anand’s search for the oldest light ever observed.
At the European Southern Observatory in Chile, staff astronomer Pascale Hibon gives Anand a behind-the-scenes look at the Very Large Telescope, one of the most advanced optical instruments on Earth, perfectly placed under some of the clearest skies on the planet. Light from the objects Pascale studies has often travelled for billions of years, making her images snapshots of the distant past. In a sense, she’s pretty much a time traveller.
If light has crossed the vastness of the universe to reach us, it must be unimaginably ancient. But what will become of it in the far future? Could we trap it and preserve it forever?
“If we knew what light is, that might be an easier question to answer,” says Miles Padgett at the University of Glasgow, who has spent his career trying to pin it down. As Anand discovers, physics can be more philosophical than you might expect.
From redshifted galaxies at the edge of the observable universe to exotic materials that can slow light to walking pace, CrowdScience explores whether we can catch light, how it changes over time, and why truly understanding it remains one of physics’ most stubborn challenges.
Presenter: Anand Jagatia
Producer: Harrison Lewis
Editor: Ilan Goodman
(Image: An area of deep space with thousands of galaxies in various shapes and sizes on a black background. Most are circles or ovals, with a few spirals. More distant galaxies are smaller, down to being mere dots, while closer galaxies are larger and some appear to be glowing. Red and orange galaxies contain more dust or more stellar activity Credit:ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, G. Östlin, P. G. Perez-Gonzalez, J. Melinder, the JADES Collaboration, M. Zamani (ESA/Webb))
In this Back To School episode we consider the "List of Life": the criteria that define what it is to be a living thing. Some are easy calls: A kitten is alive. A grain of salt is not.
But what about the tricky cases, like a virus? Or, more importantly, what about futuristic android robots?
As part of our Black History Month celebration, developmental biologist Crystal Rogers and Short Wave co-host Regina G. Barber dig into what makes something alive, and wade into a Star-Trek-themed debate.
US Health Secretary RFK Jr’s call to retract a study on childhood vaccines is resisted by the journal. Also antibiotics get designed by AI, and a new way for stars to die.
A study focussing on Danish childhood vaccination data has attracted the US Secretary for Health’s anger, as RFK jr calls for the journal in which it was published, the Annals of Internal Medicine, to retract it. The Editor, Christine Laine, talk to Science in Action about the strengths and challenges of observational studies.
The cuts to prestigious US federal science funded research continue, as last week it was announced that $500 million funding for future mRNA vaccines would be withdrawn. Barney Graham, one of the pioneers in the field and prominent during the Covid vaccines, argues that the research will still happen, though maybe not in the US, as mRNA has become a fundamental area of global research.
Meanwhile, strides are being made in the field of synthetic biology as Jim Collins and colleagues at MIT and Harvard have used AI to design potentially viable antibiotics for two important drug-resistant superbugs. Previously, AI has been used to comb through libraries of known antibiotics. This study has gone a step further, and used generative AI to design new ones, that can then be synthesised using real chemicals. Though a long way from being prescribable drugs, the team think this could herald a new golden age of antibiotic development – something which has been lacking in recent decades.
Finally, it seems astronomers may have discovered a new way for a star to die, sort of. Supernova 2023zkd was seen to explode back in 2023, found by a team looking for odd events. It didn’t seem quite like normal supernovae, in that it took a bit longer to die down. Then the team looked back, and noticed that it had also been getting slowly brighter for almost a year. At 730 million light years away, in a galaxy far, far away, it also seemed to have been stripped of all its hydrogen and even stranger yet, appeared to have exploded twice. As Ashley Villar of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics explains, the almost unique observation fits with a model of the huge star getting closer to a black hole, the gravity of which may have disrupted the star enough to cause it to explode.
Presenter: Roland Pease
Producer: Ella Hubber with Alex Mansfield
Production Coordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth
(Image: Child getting a vaccine. Credit: Luis Alvarez via Getty Images)
Fred Tutman is the riverkeeper of Maryland’s longest and deepest intrastate waterway. He's an advocate for the Patuxent River and one of the longest-serving waterkeepers in the Chesapeake region. Our journalism training program, PBS News Student Reporting Labs, traveled to Maryland to learn about Tutman's unique job. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders
Neurotic, anxious robots like C-3P0 from Star Wars' C-3P0 and Marvin from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy are a staple of science fiction — but they're not as common in the real world. Most of the time, the chatbots and artificial intelligence "robots" we encounter are programmed to be extraverted, confident and cheerful. But what if that changed?
NPR science correspondent Nell Greenfieldboyce dives into the world of robot personality research and talks to a team of researchers that are experimenting with a very different kind of robot temperament.
A Chinese scientist, He Jiankui, made a shocking announcement to the world in 2018: He had secretly engineered the birth of the first gene-edited babies. The birth of the twins was seen as reckless and unethical by the scientific community. That’s because, among other things, the CRISPR gene-editing technique Jiankui used was so new. NPR science correspondent Rob Stein has been following the controversial world of gene-editing and human reproduction, including some companies’ recent quests to push gene-editing technology forward.
Read more of Rob Stein’s reporting on the topic here.
How did life start on Earth? The answer is a big scientific mystery scientists are actively investigating. After talking with many scientists, host Regina G. Barber found that an abundance of water on Earth is most likely key, in some way, to the origin of life — specifically, in either deep sea hydrothermal vents or in tide pools. It's for this reason some scientists are also exploring the potential for life in so-called "water worlds" elsewhere in the solar system, like some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. This episode, Regina digs into two water-related hypotheses for the origin on life on Earth — and what that might mean for possible alien life.
Have another scientific mystery you want us to cover on a future episode? Email us at shortwave@npr.org.
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.
In Geneva, negotiators from 175 nations are trying to hammer out the first-ever legally binding treaty on plastic pollution. The urgency of the talks was underscored this week by a new study published in The Lancet. It calls plastics a “grave, growing and under-recognized danger to human and planetary health.” John Yang speaks with Tracey Woodruff, one of the study’s authors, to learn more. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders
The black market trade in rhino horns is driving the species to near extinction. Now, scientists at a rhino orphanage in the Bushveld of South Africa are trying to protect them from poaching in a rather surprising way. John Yang reports. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders
