It’s Black Friday! Everyone is camping in the street, staying up all night for the very best deals around. And Unexpected Elements are joining in.
We take a look at the huge underground trade of vital resources...not run by criminals but fungi.
Then it is onto illegal animal trade and the 300 pets who got a terrible deal, strapped to a man’s chest as he tried to make it through airport security.
Have you ever asked a pigeon for advice when gambling? We hear from a professor of psychology about why you should not.
And finally, the story of Lee Sedol, the world’s best player of the board game Go, who was challenged by Google to a game worth one million dollars.
Presenter: Caroline Steel, with Phillys Mwatee and Christine Yohannes
Producers: Emily Knight, Harrison Lewis, Imaan Moin and William Hornbrook
Sound engineer: Searle Whittney
Beaked hazelnuts are a wild food native to North America. Indigenous peoples in British Columbia have passed down stories of these hazelnuts as a vital food source their ancestors planted and cultivated. These stories motivated Chelsea Geralda Armstrong of Simon Fraser University to look more deeply at the genetics of the beaked hazelnut and determine just how widely it was cultivated. Indigenous rights attorney Jack Woodward hopes research like this can make a difference in the Land Back movement, providing evidence that land once considered wilderness by European settler colonists was actually being carefully managed by tribes.
Another science story in the news catch your eye? Let us know by emailing shortwave@npr.org — we'd love to hear from you!
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.
November 1974 became known as the “November Revolution” in particle physics. Two teams on either side of the US discovered the same particle - the “J/psi” meson. On the "J" team, at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, Sau Lan Wu and colleagues were smashing protons and neutrons together and looking for electrons and positron pairs in the debris. Over at Stanford on the other side of the US, Dr Michael Riordan was in a lab with the "psi" team who, in some ways the other direction, were smashing electrons and positrons together to see what was created. They both, unbeknownst to each other, found a peak around 3.1Gev.
It was shortly after that the full significance was clear. The existence of this particle confirmed a new type of quark, theorised in what we now call the Standard Model, but never before observed - the Charm quark. And with Prof Sau Lan Wu’s team’s subsequent discovery of gluons – the things that hold it all together – a pattern appeared in what had been the chaos of high energy physics and the nature of matter. Sau Lan and Michael (author of "The Hunting of the Quark: A True Story of Modern Physics") tell Roland the story.
Prof Matthew Genge and colleagues at the Natural History Museum in London have found evidence of a bacillus growing on samples of the asteroid Ryugu brought back from space by the Hayabusa 2 mission. Rather than evidence for alien life, as they suggest in a paper this month, the contamination shows how easily terrestrial microorganisms can colonise space rocks, even when subjected to the strictest control precautions.
And Per Ahlberg of Uppsala University and colleagues report in Science how they have taken a load of fossilised faecal matter and mapped out the evolution of dinosaur diets. First came the carnivores… then the vegetarian revolution…
(Photo: Samuel Ting (front) shown with members of his J/psi experimental team. Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory)
This year's United Nations climate talks, COP29, wrapped Saturday. Throughout the talks, it was all about the numbers. With the help of NPR climate reporters Julia Simon and Alejandra Borunda, we home in on two. First, $300 billion. That's the amount of money wealthy countries agreed to give developing countries to help them adapt to climate change and reduce pollution. Second, 1.5C. That's a warming limit countries agreed to try not to breach, but that is creeping closer every year.
Want to hear the latest in climate news and solutions? Let us know your thoughts by emailing 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.
By the end of the century, more than 40% of the world's estimated 7,000 languages are in danger of disappearing. Those include indigenous languages in the Amazon. The United Nations also estimates that an Indigenous language dies every two weeks. Today, we focus on two endangered languages spoken in the Vaupés region of northwest Amazonia: Desano and Siriano. Linguist Wilson de Lima Silva at the University of Arizona has been working with the community for a decade in an effort to document the language for future generations.
Monarch butterfly populations have plummeted due to habitat loss, pesticide use and climate change. In early December, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is going to decide whether the monarch should be listed under the Endangered Species Act. If that comes to pass, the migratory butterfly would be one of the most widespread species to receive this listing.
Want to hear more on the animals that surround us? Email us your ideas to shortwave@npr.org — we'd love to hear from you!
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.
As we enter our teenage years, many of us feel like life is just getting started. But for dogs, celebrating a ‘teen’ birthday is a sign of old age, entering a phase when things start slowing down. Listener Susan was besotted with her beloved corgi Copper John and wants to know why our furry companions rarely live as long as us.
We investigate what accounts for the huge differences in lifespans across animal species. From fish that live a few weeks, to sharks who can survive for 500 years, what are the factors that affect the ticking on our biological clocks? Central to this field is the idea of ‘live fast, die young’, with some animals burning more quickly through their ‘life fuel’. But is this rate set in stone?
Presenter Anand Jagatia find out how animals’ growth, reproduction and anti-ageing methods contribute to the length of their survival. Dr Kevin Healy, a macroecologist at the University of Galway, discusses some of these theories, explaining how the dangers and luxuries faced by animals during their evolution shape their speed of life.
One example of extreme slow living is the Greenland Shark. John Fleng Steffensen, Professor of Marine Biology at the University of Copenhagen, describes how he helped figure out how old they really are, and how their cold living quarters increase their lifespan. Alessandro Cellerino, physiologist at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, finds the key to the sharks’ longevity in their DNA.
Anand also goes on a hunt on the west coast of Ireland for a creature that lives fast but surprisingly, dies old. Noel Fahy, research student at the University of Galway, is his guide, while Dr Nicole Foley, Associate Research Scientist at Texas A&M University, reveals the life-extending secrets of this creature.
And geneticist Trey Ideker, Professor at the University of California San Diego, busts the myth that one dog year is seven human years. But how much is this misconception off by?
Presenter: Anand Jagatia
Producer: Julia Ravey
Content Editor: Cathy Edwards
Studio Manager: Sarah Hockley
Production Coordinator: Ishmael Soriano
(Photo: Copper John the Welsh Pembrokeshire Corgi, by listener Susan)
Headlines that Canadian uranium deposits could make it a nuclear superpower has the Unexpected Elements team musing on all manner of superpowers.
Tardigrades are an obvious candidate – boil them, freeze them, irradiate them in space, these adorable creatures are almost indestructible. We also meet Dr Deep Sea, Joseph Dituri, from the University of South Florida, who lived under water for 100 days and swears by it as a boost for our health.
As the leader of the free world goes on an Amazon jungle tour, we talk tiny frogs, giant frogs and radiation tolerant frogs.
We also hear how cancer survivors may have a secret superpower and how we’ve co-opted plants superpowers for medicines.
Presenter: Marnie Chesterton, with Camilla Mota and Affelia Wibisono
Producers: Imaan Moin, Harrison Lewis and Dan Welsh
Sound engineer: Gavin Wong
SpaceX's Starship rocket took off again Tuesday for its sixth test flight. Crowds, including President-elect Donald Trump, gathered at the launch site in Texas to watch it fly part way around the world to the Indian Ocean.
Starship – the largest rocket ever built – is the dream of Elon Musk, who hopes to make humans a multiplanetary species. But building the rocket is having a real impact on Earth. The launch site is located in the middle of one of Texas' largest wildlife sanctuaries and environmentalists say every launch is causing damage.
Plus, how government regulation of launches may change in a second Trump administration.
Want to hear more on the future of space exploration? Email us your ideas to shortwave@npr.org — we'd love to hear from you!
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.
It is hard not to have noticed the intensity of storms around the world this year, not least the Atlantic storms that battered the eastern US. A new study, using a new technique, confirms their attribution to climate change, and goes further, finding that many of them were actually raised in intensity category compared to how strong they might have been in a world without anthropogenic climate change. The costs are already extraordinary, according to Daniel Gilford of Climate Central in Princeton.
When it comes to wildlife conservation, one of the underestimated parameters is the “old and wise” individuals in a population. According to a review paper in the journal Science, not only are earth’s old animals in decline, in many species they are vital to recovery and resilience when outside factors endanger numbers. As co-author Lauren Brent of Exeter University points out, these sorts of nuance are not always looked out for in conservation estimates.
Chimps have culture, but is their culture cumulative and transmissible or innate and intuitive? Comparing a large database of observed chimpanzee behaviours, together with genetic lineages, Cassandra Gunasekaram and Andrea Migliano, of the University of Zurich, found that types of more complex tool usage can be correlated with reproductive overlaps between different chimp communities. The wandering females maybe carry tech knowledge with them when they travel to find new mates. Is this something both chimps and humans inherited from a common ancestor?
And finally, as the harvesting of deep ocean polymetallic nodules gets nearer to commercial reality, the French research ship L’Atalante sets sail this week to study the animals that live on and around these strange chemical balls scattered across the abyssal plains of the mid pacific ocean. As lead scientist aboard, Pierre-Antoine Dessandier tells us, it is essential to understand how these animals live in the dark, 5km down, before the habitats are disturbed. The Eden mission will be searching the Clarion-Clipperton zone until January 2025.
Presenter: Roland Pease
Producer: Alex Mansfield with Eliane Glaser
Production co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth
(Photo: Hurricane Milton seen from the International Space Station. Credit: Nasa/Getty Images)
