Science, Spoken

As health care workers prepare for surges of Covid-19 patients, they must grapple with the ethics of rationing critical medical gear. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

While it might seem wasteful to test the seemingly-healthy, tracking antibodies could show how widely the virus has spread—and who may now be immune. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The national railroad system converted a TGV high-speed train to move 20 Covid-19 patients from Strasbourg to calmer hospitals in the Loire Valley. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When American whiskey evaporates, it leaves behind webs, or fingerprints of sorts, that could help sleuths identify counterfeit swill. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We've been led to believe that robots and AI are replacing humans en masse. But this economic catastrophe is blowing up that myth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A 100-year-old way to beat disease could help researchers figure out how to harness the antibodies from earlier patients to help the newly infected. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

“Virtual visits” can be an effective way to decide who needs to be tested for Covid-19. But remote doctors can't diagnose or treat illness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Epidemiologist Larry Brilliant, who warned of pandemic in 2006, says we can beat the novel coronavirus—but first, we need with lots more testing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Prestige Ameritech typically makes 250,000 masks a day. Now it's manufacturing 1 million daily, and turning away orders for 100 million more. Â Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hollywood tells us humans are prone to lose all rationality in a disaster, looting and trampling one another. But that’s not giving our brains any credit. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Researchers looked at how long the virus can survive on cardboard, plastic, and stainless steel, as well as after being aerosolized and suspended in midair. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Everything you need to know about the coronavirus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Inside a cavernous hangar at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility along the Virginia coast, a gleaming white P-3 Orion aircraft sits parked under harsh floodlights. It’s just after midnight and a group of scientists, technicians and graduate students cluster underneath a wing, peering at a 5-inch crack in one of the ailerons that the pilot uses to maneuver the plane. Their disappointment is palpable. Le...

The ocean is normally a fairly noisy place, with the sounds of happy dolphins, lonely whales and diesel-chugging ships saturating the undersea world. But climate change may turn up the volume on this liquid symphony as warmer sea temperatures boost the volume of noise produced by the small but incredibly loud percussionist in this orchestra: the snapping shrimp. This crustacean uses its oversize c...

In 1947, Kenneth Arnold was flying his CallAir A-2 between Chehalis and Yakima, Washington, when he took a detour to search for a downed Marine Corps aircraft. There was a reward for anyone who could find the plane, and who couldn’t use $5,000? Arnold flew around searching for a while, and accidentally found something else—something much stranger than what he’d actually been looking for. As he wat...

Of the varied conspiracy theories regarding contrails—you know, chemtrails—one stands out for being especially wrong: the belief that the plane-made clouds are chemicals the government is secretly spraying to battle climate change, to the peril of those on the ground. First, contrails are nothing but the incidental result of mixing hot, water-vapor-filled jet engine exhaust with cold air. Second,...

As California has descended into wildfire hell, with ever bigger blazes burning ever more intensely over the last few years, an unlikely firefighting hero has emerged: the goat. Officials in mountain cities in particular have been hiring herds to hoover up overgrown vegetation, creating fire breaks around the edges of towns. It’s what these ungulates—and their brethren the world over—are born to d...

In late spring of 2012, climactic chaos descended upon the Midwest and Great Plains in the midst of the growing season. A drought is supposed to unfold on a timeline of seasons to years, but in the two weeks between June 12 and 26, the High Plains went from what a monitoring group called “abnormally dry” to “severe drought. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Alice Collins Plebuch, or Grandma Nerd, as her grandkids call her, is good at solving puzzles. She was among the first wave of computer programmers—when that term meant punching information on cards to be fed into mainframes. She has an analytical mind and is at ease with technology. Years ago, she began digging into her father’s history, hoping to find more about the man who’d grown up in an Iris...

What could be worse than getting the pneumonia-like illness now known as Covid-19? Getting it twice. That’s what Japanese government officials say may have happened to a female tour bus guide in Osaka. The woman was first diagnosed with Covid-19 in late January, according to a statement released by Osaka’s prefectural government Wednesday. She was discharged shortly after, once her symptoms had im...

Robots already have us beat in some ways: They’re stronger, more consistent, and they never demand a lunch break. But when it comes to the senses, machines still struggle mightily. They can’t smell particularly well, or taste (though researchers are making progress on robotic tongues), or feel with their robotic grips—and that’s a serious consideration if we don’t want them crushing our dishes or...

Katherine Johnson blazed trails, not just as a black female mathematician during the Cold War, but by mapping literal paths through outer space. Her math continues to carve out new paths for spacecraft navigating our solar system, as NASA engineers use evolved versions of her equations that will execute missions to the moon and beyond. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adc...

You’ve never seen amphibians in this light before. Like, literally, this specific azure light. Today in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers for the first time show that amphibians glow if you throw blue light on them. The tiger salamander suddenly pops with brilliant green spots. Cranwell's horned frog is striped in a nuclear glow. Even the marbled salamander’s tiny toe bones fluoresce bri...

Frogs are reflecting and satellites are detecting, but first: a cartoon about self-driving without a license. Here's the news you need to know, in two minutes or less. Want to receive this two-minute roundup as an email every weekday? Sign up here! Today’s News Amphibians glow. Humans just couldn't see it—until now New research in Scientific Reports reveals that amphibians actually glow, and alway...

Today in the journal Nature Climate Change, researchers are publishing a series of articles as a kind of postmortem of the Australian bushfires. The series is both a diagnosis of what happened as flames swept across the continent, and a call to action for researchers the world over: Climate change is a crisis for people, the natural world at large—and for science itself. Learn more about your ad c...