Category: ScienceNews

Every September, the small town of La Junta, Colorado puts on a whole festival to celebrate a beloved local animal: the tarantula! Around this time of year, thousands of mature male tarantulas start to migrate en masse – but until recently, scientists didn’t know what triggered them to move out of their cozy burrows. On today’s show, biologist Dallas Haselhuhn explains how they solved the mystery, and how climate change could affect future treks.

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This episode was produced by Berly McCoy and edited by Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Robert Rodriguez was the audio engineer.

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It’s no secret that stress isn’t good for you. But just how bad is it? Well, in the last few decades, scientists have linked psychological stress to changes in our DNA that look a lot like what happens on the molecular level as we age. Today on the show, host Regina G. Barber talks to freelance science journalist Diana Kwon about the latest research on stress and aging, including a new hypothesis for how your brain handles aging — and what science could do about all of it.

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Let’s say you were asked to name the greatest health risks facing the planet. Priceton University economist Ramanan Laxminarayan, founder and director of the One Health Trust, would urgently suggest you include anti-microbial resistance near the top of that list.

“We're really in the middle of a crisis right now,” he tells interview David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast. “Every year, about 5 million people die of infections that are associated with antibiotic resistance -- 5 million. That's nearly twice the number of people who die of HIV, TB and malaria, put together -- put together. Antibiotic resistance and associated deaths are the third leading cause of death in the world, after heart disease and stroke. So you're talking about something that's really, really big, and this is not in the future. It is right now.”

The underlying problem, simply put, is that humans are squandering perhaps the greatest health innovations in the last century by using antibiotics stupidly, allowing pathogens to develop resistance and thus rendering existing antibiotics worthless.

For the last 30 years and in particular through One Health Trust and as director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center for Antimicrobial Resistance, Laxminarayan has labored to make both shine a light on anti-microbial resistance and push for policies to address it. This, he tells Edmonds, is a social science problem even more so than a medical science problem – but not the exclusive province of either. “I think one of the failures of economics,” he says, “in some ways, is that we don't take the trouble to understand the nitty gritty of the actual other field, especially when it deals with health economics or environmental economics.”

In addition to his role as a senior research scholar at Princeton, Laxminarayan is an affiliate professor at the University of Washington, a senior associate at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and a visiting professor at the University of Strathclyde.

The bathypelagic zone of the ocean is 1,000 to 4,000 meters below the surface. Sometimes it's called the midnight zone, because it's too deep for sunlight to reach. Most animals here are much smaller than their shallow-water counterparts. But occasionally, researchers find the rare deep sea giant: giant isopods, giant squids, colossal squids, sea spiders.

While these giants sound like the subjects of some people's nightmares, deep sea biologist Craig McClain dreams about them. And today on the show, he helps unravel the mystery and research behind these creatures.

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CrowdScience listener Jon started wondering how our teeth are created while he was in the dentist’s chair. It took his mind off the drilling. He wants to know how our teeth are made, what goes into them and how come we only get two sets of teeth when other animals, like sharks, grow thousands of new ones throughout their lives.

Anand Jagatia goes back to prehistoric times to discover how the story of teeth began millions of years ago. Palaeontologist Yara Haridy explains that teeth weren’t designed originally for eating at all, but as a kind of armour on the exoskeletons of fish that was also sensitive to the environment. It turns out that our teeth in fact are part of our evolutionary success story. Biological anthropologist Peter Ungar reveals that we flourished as a species because our teeth are designed to get the maximum energy from our food.

Anand discovers how teeth can even be grown in a lab when he meets researchers Ana Angelova Volponi and Xuechen Zhang whose team has managed to replicate the environment in which teeth develop. He also talks to Katsu Takahashi who has discovered a method for developing a third set of teeth. It’s a whole new way of creating teeth that will change the way we make them.

Presenter Anand Jagatia Producer Jo Glanville Editor Ben Motley Studio Manager Bob Nettles Production co-ordinator Ishmael Soriano Translation, Katsu Takahashi interview Bethan Jones

This week, a viral video of a robo-traffic-cop in Shanghai has the team contemplating the science of traffic. How do traffic jams with no discernible cause actually form? Does the weather experience traffic jams? And why do our cords also seem to get tangled in their own little cord-traffic-jams no matter how hard we try to keep them separate?

Christine Yohannes from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and Tristan Ahtone in Helsinki, Finland, join Marnie Chesterton to discuss all this, plus many more Unexpected Elements.

Presenter: Marnie Chesterton, with Christine Yohannes and Tristan Ahtone Producers: Margaret Sessa-Hawkins, with Alice Lipscombe-Southwell and Lucy Davies

Last year, we reported how extreme weather events may be dwindling the future of chocolate. Just last week, we saw an inkling of that: The Hershey Company announced it would significantly raise the cost of its candy in the face of historically high cocoa prices. So, we're revisiting host Emily Kwong's conversation with Yasmin Tayag, a food, health and science writer at The Atlantic. They get into the cocoa shortage: What's causing it, how it's linked to weather and poor farming conditions and what potential solutions exist. Plus, they enjoy a chocolate alternative taste test.

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After most of the population of the Pacific rim sought higher ground this week, we speak with the architect of the tsunami warning technology. Also how aging Killifish might help us probe our senior moments.

This week, an M8.8 earthquake near Kamchatka in the western pacific led to tsunami evacuation alerts thousands of miles away. Seismologist Judith Hubbard was writing about the area in the days leading up to it, following a M7.4 event 9 days before, which we now know to categorize as a foreshock. As she says, it’s these subduction zones between tectonic plates that give out the most energy, produce the biggest quakes, leading to the worst tsunamis. The Tsunami alarms were based on modelling developed by Vasily Titov of NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle. Having studied these phenomena for many decades, he describes the fine balance between the potential accuracy of a prediction, and the practical actionable advice authorities need to give out to save as many lives as possible.

Finally, how can a short-lived African freshwater fish help scientists studying senescence? Stanford’s Judith Frydman and colleagues publish this week a study in Science that finds Killifish’s brain cells’ ability to encode proteins degrades with age, in keeping with similar patterns of older human brains. Because Killifish have such brief life cycles, yet seem to follow the brain cycles of most vertebrates, they provide an ideal model species from which to find out more, as she explains.

Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Imaan Moin and Alex Mansfield Production Coordinator: Jana Holesworth

(Image Credit: Vasily Titov PMEL/NOAA)

A grayscale ballerina who appears to be moving. A human who can fit in a doll box. A black-and-white prism that appears to change shape when viewed from three different directions. Those are the top winners of the 2024 Best Illusion of the Year Contest, open to illusion makers around the world and co-created by neuroscientist Susana Martinez-Conde. Today on the show, we get lost in the magic and science of visual illusions.

Have a neuroscience question? Email us at shortwave@npr.org.

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Much of the country is deep in the middle of a heat wave right now. And every summer, Duane Stilwell's town in Arizona seems to get hotter. It has him worried — and he's not the only one. Since 1980, the average number of heat waves in the U.S has doubled and the average length of a heat wave season has increased from 40 days to 70. Future summers, experts say, will be even hotter. But why exactly is that happening, and what can people do to protect themselves from the heat?

This episode is part of Nature Quest, a monthly segment that answers listeners' questions about their local environment. If you have a question, send a voice memo to shortwave@npr.org that includes it, your name and where you live. We might make it into our next Nature Quest episode!

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