Category: ScienceNews

Ten years ago, Flint, Mich. switched water sources to the Flint River. The lack of corrosion control in the pipes caused lead to leach into the water supply of tens of thousands of residents. Pediatrician Mona Hanna-Attisha recognized a public health crisis in the making and gathered data proving the negative health impact on Flint's young children. In doing so, she and community organizers in Flint sparked a national conversation about lead in the U.S. water system that persists today.

Today on the show, host Emily Kwong and science correspondent Pien Huang talk about the state of Flint and other cities with lead pipes. Efforts to replace these pipes hinge on proposed changes to the EPA's Lead and Copper Rule.

Have questions or comments for us to consider for a future episode? Email us at shortwave@npr.org — we'd love to hear from you!

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Friday, April 13th 2029 – mark it in your calendar. That’s the day an asteroid the size of an aircraft carrier will fly past Earth, closer than some satellites. Don’t worry – it will miss, but it’ll will pass so close to Earth that it will be visible to the naked eye of 2 billion people, particularly in North Africa and Western Europe.

Roland Pease this week attended the Apophis T-5 Years conference at the European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) in the Netherlands, meeting astronomers scrambling to get missions up to the object to learn what kind of threats such asteroids might pose to us in the future and to discuss the science of planetary defence.

NASA’s OSIRIS-APEX, a follow-on to OSIRIS-REx, will study the physical changes due to the gravitational forces from the Earth as it closely passes us by. But will there be an armada of spacecraft sent to monitor Apophis? The European Space Agency hope to gather support for their own mission, RAMSES.

Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Jonathan Blackwell

Image Credit: JPL/Caltech

NPR's Tom Dreisbach is back in the host chair for a day. This time, he reports on a story very close to home: The years-long battle his parents have been locked in with the local wild beaver population. Each night, the beavers would dam the culverts along the Dreisbachs' property, threatening to make their home inaccessible. Each morning, Tom's parents deconstructed those dams — until the annual winter freeze hit and left them all in a temporary stalemate.

As beaver populations have increased, so have these kinds of conflicts with people...like Tom's parents. But the solution may not be to chase away the beavers. They're a keystone species that scientists believe could play an important role in cleaning water supplies, creating healthy ecosystems and alleviating some of the effects of climate change. So, today, Tom calls up Jakob Shockey, the executive director of the non-profit Project Beaver. Jakob offers a bit of perspective to Tom and his parents, and the Dreisbachs contemplate what a peaceful coexistence with these furry neighbors might look like.

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Roughly 196 million tons of fish were harvested in 2020, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. The organization also notes that the number of overfished stocks worldwide has tripled in the last century. All of this overfishing has led to the decline of entire species, like Atlantic cod.

Enter the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch. It and other free guides give consumers an overview of the world of fish and seafood, helping people to figure out the most sustainable fish available to them. With the help of Life Kit's Clare Marie Schneider, we figure out how to make informed decisions about what we eating – whether that's at a restaurant or the local supermarket.

Check out more from Life Kit on sustainable seafood.

Have questions or comments for us to consider for a future episode? Email us at shortwave@npr.org — we'd love to hear from you!

A previous version of this episode incorrectly stated that there are native wild salmon in Chile. Salmon are not native to Chile.

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Around the world, coastlines are constantly changing due to the power of waves, currents and tides. Coastal areas are also some of the most heavily populated and developed land areas in the world. So it’s not hard to see how the natural process of coastal erosion can cause serious problems for us.

It’s an issue that’s been bothering CrowdScience listener Anne in Miami Beach, Florida. She can see the beach from her window and wonders why after every storm, several trucks arrive to dump more sand on it.

In this first of two programmes, CrowdScience visits Anne’s home in south Florida and finds out how erosion threatens Florida’s famous beaches. Caroline Steel speaks to geoscientist Dr Tiffany Roberts Briggs and hears why it’s such a problem for this tourist-reliant state. Tiffany explains the delicate balance between natural processes and human infrastructure.

Meanwhile, the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico declared a state of emergency in April 2023 due to coastal erosion. Caroline witnesses the impacts of erosion first-hand, as Ruperto Chaparro shows her abandoned houses crumbling into the sea.

But how can we quantify the rate of erosion? Dr Kevian Perez in the Graduate School of Planning at University of Puerto Rico explains the methods they use to monitor Puerto Rico’s coastlines, and how they are evaluating the effectiveness of different mitigation methods.

However, some of the methods used to protect coastal communities from the encroaching sea have done more harm than good. So what are the best ways to tackle this problem? That’s what we’ll be exploring in next week’s programme.

Presenter: Caroline Steel Producer: Hannah Fisher Editor: Cathy Edwards Production Co-ordinator: Liz Tuohy Studio Manager: Steve Greenwood and Bob Nettles

Featuring: Dr Tiffany Roberts Briggs, Associate Professor at Florida Atlantic University Ruperto Chaparro, Director of Sea Grant Programme, University of Puerto Rico Anabela Fuentes Garcia, Villa Cristiana community leader Dr Kevian Perez, researcher at the Coastal Research and Planning Institute of Puerto Rico at the Graduate School of Planning

(Photo: Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. Credit: Orlando Sentinel/Getty Images)

These days, over a trillion semiconductor microchips are made and shipped each year. The industry is worth eye-watering amounts, and since the 2020-2023 global shortage, nearly all governments are trying to get a slice of the industrial wafer.

But what was it like just 40 years ago trying to get yourself a home computer when your communist leaders didn’t approve, and there were nowhere enough devices to go round anyway? Andrada Fiscutean spoke to some of the bootleggers.

These days, not only are computing devices in just about everyone’s hands, they are mostly interconnected to vast arrays of machines collectively forming “the cloud”, which provides so much of our economic and scientific infrastructure. It is no longer about stand alone computing.

But just maybe the deep future of computing lies in using individual atoms and photons as information-bearing digits. This is the basis of “quantum computing” which could use the properties and mechanics of the quantum scale to perform hugely complicated calculations in fractions of a second.

Prof David Lucas of Oxford University physics department and colleagues are building some key demonstrators of the techniques we need to master. And just recently, they built an impressive manifestation of “Blind Quantum Computing”, which just might enable something like the quantum cloud of the future.

Also, we have a look at an app for modern motorists that adjusts a piece of music to react to the movement of the car. Developed by Mercedes-AMG and the rapper Will.i.am, Christine Yohannes has been thinking about drivers becoming the musical maestros of their own journeys.

Presented by Alex Lathbridge, with Andrada Fiscutean and Christine Yohannes. Produced by Alex Mansfield, with Harrison Lewis and Tom Bonnett.

When the dinosaurs walked the Earth, massive marine reptiles swam. Among them, a species of Ichthyosaur that measured over 80 feet long. Today, we look into how a chance discovery by a father-daughter duo of fossil hunters furthered paleontologist's understanding of the "giant fish lizard of the Severn." Currently, it is the largest marine reptile known to scientists.

Read more about this specimen in the study published in the journal PLOS One.

Have another ancient animal or scientific revelation you want us to cover? Email us at shortwave@npr.org — we might talk about it on a future episode!

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A black hole just discovered in our Milky Way galaxy, weighing 33 times the mass of the Sun, and dating back to near the time of the Big Bang, gives new clues to the origins of this dark astronomical mysteries. And dancing with a Sun-like star in our galactic neighbourhood, it offers a great opportunity for astronomers to take a detailed look in coming years, as astronomer Professor Gerry Gilmore of Cambridge University tells the programme.

Presenter Roland Pease has headed to the lab of Professor Ludovic Orlando in Toulouse, France where they are extracting ancient DNA from horses as part of a project called “Horsepower” - to reveal how our prehistoric ancestors tamed and domesticated these powerful animals (long after cattle and sheep) and in the process helped shape the extraordinary history of the first states of China and Mongolia. And a deep look into the mechanisms of addiction – showing how drugs of abuse, such as cocaine, hijack the neuronal pathways that had evolved to drive our innate needs such as eating and drinking. Roland hears from psychiatrist Eric J. Nestler of the Friedman Brain Institute at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, how this could one day improve addiction treatments.

Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Jonathan Blackwell Production Coordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth

(Image: An artist's impression shows the orbits of the most massive stellar black hole in our galaxy, dubbed Gaia BH3, and a companion star. Credit: European Southern Observatory via Reuters)

500 million years ago, the world was a very different place. During this period of time, known as the Cambrian period, basically all life was in the water. The ocean was brimming with animals that looked pretty different from the ones we recognize today — including a group of predatory worms with a throat covered in teeth and spines.

Researchers thought these tiny terrors died out at the end of the Cambrian period. But a paper published recently in the journal Biology Letters showed examples of a new species of this worm in the fossil record 25 million years after scientists thought they'd vanished from the Earth. One of the authors of the paper, Karma Nanglu, tells us how this finding may change how scientists understand the boundaries of time.

Curious about other weird wonders of the ancient Earth? Email us at shortwave@npr.org.

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We've all been there: You sit down for one episode of a reality TV show, and six hours later you're sitting guiltily on the couch, blinking the screen-induced crust off your eyeballs.

Okay. Maybe you haven't been there like our team has. But it's likely you have at least one guilty pleasure, whether it's playing video games, reading romance novels or getting swept into obscure corners of TikTok. It turns out that experiencing – and studying – pleasure is not as straightforward as it might seem. And yet, pleasure is quite literally key to the survival of humanity. So today on the show, we explore the pleasure cycle: What it is, where it lives in the brain and how to have a healthier relationship with the things that make us feel good.

Want more on the brain? Email us the neuroscience you want us to talk about at shortwave@npr.org! (Also please email us if you would like to gush about any of the books you've been loving — romantasy or otherwise!)

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