Short Wave

Planetary scientists announced some big news this week about our next-door neighbor, Venus. For the first time, they had found direct evidence that Venus has active, ongoing volcanic activity. "It's a big deal," says Dr. Martha Gilmore, a planetary geologist at Wesleyan College. "It's a big deal in ...

Our friends at NPR's TED Radio Hour grace us with a look at their new series "Mind, Body, Spirit," an exploration of the three and how they intersect.

A plane of scientists has been flying through frozen skies this winter, sampling cloud particles to better predict which storms will wreak havoc.

As a leading expert on paleogenomics, Beth Shapiro has been hearing the same question ever since she started working on ancient DNA: "The only question that we consistently were asked was, how close are we to bringing a mammoth back to life?"In the second part of our conversation (listen to yesterda...

Research into very, very old DNA has made huge leaps forward over the last two decades. That has allowed scientists like Beth Shapiro to push the frontier further and further. "For a long time, we thought, you know, maybe the limit is going to be around 100,000 years [old]. Or, maybe the limit is go...

Happy Pi Day, Short Wavers! For a celebration of π and baking, we're turning to mathematician Eugenia Cheng.

A new drug for Alzheimer's disease, called lecanemab, got a lot of attention earlier this year for getting fast-tracked approval based on a clinical trial that included nearly 1,800 people. It was the most diverse trial for an Alzheimer's treatment to date, but still not enough to definitively say i...

https://www.npr.org/2023/02/08/1155584777/news-round-up-fda-chocolate-assessment-a-powerful-solar-storm-and-fly-pheromones

Have you ever wondered how biologists choose what animal to use in their research? Since scientists can't do a lot of basic research on people, they study animals to shed light on everything from human health to ecosystems to genetics. And yet, just a handful of critters appear over and over again. ...

The whitebark pine is a hardy tree that grows in an area stretching from British Columbia, Canada south to parts of California and east to Montana. It's a keystone species in its subalpine and timberline ecosystems and plays an outsized role in its interactions with other species and the land — feed...