Category: ScienceNews

40 million miles of road unite us. They also cause mass destruction for many species. Today, environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb and host Aaron Scott go on a tour of that destruction — the subject of Ben's new book Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet. But don't worry, it's not all grim! Along the way, we learn why fewer insects are hitting our windshields, talk about the breakthrough that is highway overpasses, and how at least one bird has adapted to avoid 18-wheel semi-trucks.

Listen to Short Wave on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts.

Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices

NPR Privacy Policy

More than 5,000 square miles of central California coast could soon become the newest national marine sanctuary in the United States. It could also make history as one of the first federal sanctuaries to be initiated by a Native American tribe—the Chumash—and become part of a growing movement to give tribes a say over the lands and waters that were once theirs. NPR climate reporter Lauren Sommer dives into the details with host Regina G. Barber, touching on ocean science, heritage and what's in a name.

Listen to Short Wave on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts.

Hear about some science news we haven't? Email us at shortwave@npr.org.

Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices

NPR Privacy Policy

CrowdScience listener Leo gets stressed when his young children start screaming at the same time in the middle of the night. He wants to know why we haven’t evolved to deal with the stress more effectively. The challenges of bringing up a family are nothing new and we don’t face the same dangers as our ancestors, so why do we still react as if it’s a life-threatening emergency? Caroline Steel finds out what stress is for, what it does to us and whether we have in fact evolved to manage it.

Contributors:

Tashfia Ahmed, biomedical engineer, post-doctoral researcher, City University, London Anne-Kathrin Gellner, neurologist and psychiatrist, Bonn University James Rilling, anthropologist and neuroscientist, Department of Psychology and Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences, Emory University Gunter Wagner, evolutionary biologist, Vienna University

Presenter: Caroline Steel Producer: Jo Glanville Editor: Richard Collings Production Co-ordinator: Jonathan Harris Studio Manager: Jackie Margerum

(Image: Frustrated father holds baby in his arms. Credit: Jamie Grill / Getty Images)

Today on the show, All Things Considered co-host Ari Shapiro joins Aaron Scott and Regina G. Barber for our science roundup. They talk about how antibiotic resistance may spread through particulate air pollution, magnetically halted black holes and how diversified farms are boosting biodiversity in Costa Rica.

Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices

NPR Privacy Policy

In September 2012 Arctic sea ice melted to its minimum ever recorded and the German research ice breaker, Polarstern, ventured deep into the region North of Russia to record findings. It’s now retracing its steps, over a decade later, to observe how things have progressed. Autun Purser and Antje Boethius describe the journey and the importance of documenting developments in the face of climate change.

Some 75 million individuals are believed to live with Long Covid and, in order to treat the plethora of symptoms presented by patients, researchers continue to search for the root source of the condition in the hope of better prescribing broad therapeutics. Akiko Iwasaki, Professor of Immunobiology at Yale University, updates Roland on the working hypotheses.

And one year on from the Hunga Tonga eruption, where a shockwave circled the globe four times, researchers have been able to calculate the speed of the currents in the southern Pacific Ocean. BBC correspondent Jon Amos caught up with Michael Clare to hear how other South Pacific Islands can learn from the most explosive volcanic eruption in 100 years.

Presenter: Roland Pease Producer: Harrison Lewis

Following recent coups in Niger and Gabon, and with seven African coups in the last three years, some political commentators are suggesting that there might be an epidemic of coups. But are coups really contagious, and what does the political science say?

Caroline Steel and the Unexpected Elements team across three different continents go on a quest to find the science lurking behind the news.

We find out what trees in Chile can tell us about coups and we meet the wasp that performs a coup on a poor unsuspecting cockroach, turning it into a zombie and eating it alive.

There’s light relief in the form of cows listening to classical music, the answer to a listener question about carbon capture and reflections on efforts to rid the world of plastic bags.

All that plus your emails, whatsapps, and more fruit chat than you can shake a banana skin at.

Presented by Caroline Steel

Produced by Ben Motley, with Margaret Sessa Hawkins and Sophie Ormiston

Have frequent, burning pee? Cramping or the urge to pee even though you just went? If you haven't yet, you probably will eventually—along with an estimated 60% of women and 10% of men. That's the large slice of the population that experiences a urinary tract infections (UTI) at least once. Many people avoid talking about these infections, but about one in four women experience recurring UTIs. No matter what they do, the infections come back, again and again. So today on the show, Regina G. Barber takes producer Rachel Carlson on a tour of the urinary tract. We zoom into what recurring UTIs may have to do with changes on the DNA of our bladder cells and the hidden bacterial houses in our bladder walls.

Read more about the latest research into recurring UTIs in this article from our colleagues at NPR's global health blog, Goats and Soda.

Got questions about the big and small of our universe? Email us at shortwave@npr.org.

Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices

NPR Privacy Policy

A common trope in America depicts a traditional family of a married husband and wife and their 2.5 (yes, 2.5) children as the norm, if not perhaps the ideal. Leaving aside the idea of a “traditional” coupling or what the right number of children might be, is there an advantage to growing up with married parents?

Definitely, argues Melissa Kearney, author of The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind and the Neil Moskowitz Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland. In this Social Science Bites podcast, she reviews the long-term benefits of growing up in a two-parent household and details some of the reasons why such units have declined in the last four decades.

As befits her training, Kearney uses economics to analyze marriage. “Marriage,” she tells host David Edmonds, “is fundamentally an economic contract between two individuals—here, I'm gonna sound very unromantic—but it really is about two people making a long-term commitment to pool resources and consume and produce things together.”

In her own research, Kearney looks specifically at being legally married within the United States over the last 40 years and what that means when children are involved. Her findings both fascinate her and, she admits, worries her.

“We talk at length in this country about inequality as we should, but this divergence in family structure and access to two parents and all the resources that brings to kids and the benefits it gives kids in terms of having a leg up in sort of achieving things throughout their life—getting ahead economically, attaining higher levels of education—[well,] we will not close class gaps. without addressing this.”

She provides data showing that the percentage of young Americans living with married parents is indeed falling. In 2020, 63 percent of U.S. children lived with married parents, compared to 77 percent 40 years earlier. Meanwhile, 40 percent of children are born to unmarried parents.

While these percentages are evenly distributed across the geography of the U.S., they are less so among the nation’s demographics. For example, children born to white or Asian, more educated or richer mothers are more likely to be born within wedlock.

“The mechanical drivers of this,” Kearney explains, “are a reduction in marriage and a reduction in the share of births being born inside of marital union, not a rise in divorce, not a rise in birth rates to young or teen moms.” But economics does seem to be a driver, Kearney said – especially among men.

As cultural tumult saw marriage itself growing less popular starting in the 1960s, non-college-educated men saw their economic prospects dimming. “We saw a reduction in male earnings or a reduction in male employment and a corresponding reduction in marriage and rise in the share of kids born outside of marital union. So, there is a causal effect here, economic shocks that have widened inequality hurt the economic security of non-college educated men, and this rising college gap and family structure.”

Over time, new social norms were established, so even when the economic prospects of non-college-educated men rise, there is not a corresponding increase in marriage and decrease in non-marital births. “Once a social norm has been established, where this insistence on sort of having and raising kids in a marital union is broken, then we get this response to economic shocks that we might not have gotten if the social norm towards two-parent households and married-parent households was tighter.”

In addition to her work at the University of Maryland, Kearney maintains a large footprint in the policy world. She is director of the Aspen Economic Strategy Group; a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research; a non-resident senior fellow at Brookings; a scholar affiliate and member of the board of the Notre Dame Wilson-Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities; and a scholar affiliate of the MIT Abdul Jameel Poverty Action Lab, known as J-PAL.

So it’s no surprise that she closes her interview with some policy suggestions.

“[I]mproving the economic position of non-college educated men, I think, is necessary but won't be sufficient. We need more wage subsidies. We need a lot of investment in community colleges throughout the country—they train workers throughout the country—we need to be shoring up those institutions. We need to be stopping bottlenecks in the workforce that make it harder for people without a four-year college degree, or for people who have criminal past, right, criminal history—all of those things. We need to be removing barriers to employment, investing in training, investing in skills, investing in paths to families to sustaining employment.”

This year, the hottest July ever was recorded — and parts of the country were hit with heat waves that lasted for weeks. Heat is becoming increasingly lethal as climate change causes more extreme heat. So in today's encore episode, we're exploring heat. NPR climate correspondent Lauren Sommer talks with Short Wave host Regina G. Barber about how the human body copes with extended extreme heat and how today's heat warning systems could better protect the public. If you can, stay cool out there this Labor Day, dear Short Wavers.

What science story do you want to hear next on Short Wave? Email us at shortwave@npr.org.

Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices

NPR Privacy Policy

Many of us are worried about the environment, but the aim of living in a truly sustainable way is hard to pin down. Do we all need to stop buying things? Is it down to governments to make the changes for us? Is there somewhere in the world painting a picture of the end goal?

It’s a question that has bothered CrowdScience listener Cate for 20 years! She’s worried we’re not doing enough for the environment and just wants a clear scenario of what it might look like to live sustainably, in a way that could work for all eight billion of us on the planet.

It’s a big question, so this week presenter Caroline Steel has teamed up with her friend and colleague Graihagh Jackson from The Climate Question podcast to answer it.

They head to the remote Danish island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea, which is aiming to go carbon neutral by 2025 and zero waste by 2032. How are they going about it and could this be replicated elsewhere? We visit a ground-breaking project turning nappies into compost, meet a glassblower making tableware out of wasted insulin vials, and find out how pig waste can power homes.

This edition of CrowdScience hones in on Bornholm’s zero waste goal. Will the island make it?

Listen to The Climate Question’s look at the island’s quest to go carbon neutral here: BBC World Service - The Climate Question, Going carbon neutral - lessons from Denmark - www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3ct5bkg (Available from 3rd September)

Presenters: Caroline Steel and Graihagh Jackson Producer: Sophie Eastaugh Editor: Richard Collings Production Coordinator: Jonathan Harris

(Image: Dr David Christensen, Project Manager at BOFA, Bornholm’s waste authority with presenter Caroline Steel in front of a giant mound of waste bound for the island’s incinerator. The incinerator will be shut down in 2032 when the island aims to be zero waste. Credit: Sophie Eastaugh)