Short Wave

Encore episode. NASA engineer Dajae Williams is using hip hop to make math and science more accessible to young people of color. We talk with Dajae about her path to NASA, and how music helped her fall in love with math and science when she was a teenager. Email the show at shortwave@npr.org . See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to...

Encore episode. A deadly triangle of factors is killing off U.S. honeybees. Last year, forty percent of honeybee colonies died in the U.S., continuing an alarming trend. Entomologist Sammy Ramsey tells host Maddie Sofia about the "three P's" and what listeners can do to help our fuzzy-flighted friends. Email the show at shortwave@npr.org . See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection a...

Though Black Americans make up 13% of the U.S. population, they represent only 5% of physicians. How does that lack of diversity in the physician workforce impact Black patients' health and well-being? Dr. Owen Garrick, the CEO and President of Bridge Clinical Research, wanted to know. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage y...

A special episode from our colleagues at NPR's history podcast Throughline . When a cook who carried typhoid fever showed no symptoms and refused to stop working, authorities forcibly quarantined her for nearly three decades. Was she a perfect villain? Or a woman scapegoated because of her background? Throughline hosts Rund Abdelfatah and Ramtin Arablouei tell the story of Typhoid Mary — a story a...

If you pay attention to what's going on in your own backyard, ornithologist Viviana Ruiz Gutierrez says the birds among us have been putting on a great show. Gutierrez explains migration, mating dances, nesting, and shares tips on how to be hospitable to the birds in your neighborhood. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage y...

Meatpacking plants have been some of the biggest COVID-19 hot spots in the country. Thousands of workers have been infected, dozens have died. As plants reopen, one strategy has helped slow the virus's spread: large-scale employee testing. NPR food and agriculture correspondent Dan Charles explains how this approach could be a lesson for other industries as well. See pcm.adswizz.com for informatio...

NASA is on a mission to explore Titan — the largest moon of Saturn. To do that, scientists are building a nuclear-powered, self-driving drone (technically an octocopter) called Dragonfly. Scheduled to launch in 2026 and arrive on Titan in 2034, Dragonfly could provide clues about how the building blocks of life started here on Earth. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use...

A few years ago, climate scientist Kim Cobb had a brutal realization about how much she was flying for conferences and meetings. Those flights were adding lots of climate-warming carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Host Maddie Sofia talks with her about her push to get scientists to fly less for work, and what happened when the pandemic suddenly made that idea a reality. See pcm.adswizz.com for in...

Approximately 200 COVID-19 vaccines are being actively developed, a process that health officials are expediting to help end the pandemic. Today on the show, NPR science correspondent Joe Palca walks us through the latest in vaccine development — from how a coronavirus vaccine would work to the challenges of distributing it to the world. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and...

Racial discrimination shaped the map of Minneapolis. Then city zoning locked many of those patterns into place. Maddie talks with NPR climate reporter Lauren Sommer about Minneapolis' bold plan to tackle housing disparities — and climate change. The new rules went into effect earlier this year. Community groups are calling on the city to follow through. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about ou...

Scientists have known for decades that one of the main causes of the smell of fresh rain is geosmin: a chemical compound produced by soil-dwelling bacteria. But why do the bacteria make it in the first place? It was a bacteria-based mystery... until now! Maddie gets some answers from reporter Emily Vaughn, former Short Wave intern. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use o...

Earlier this month, IBM said it was getting out of the facial recognition business. Then Amazon and Microsoft announced prohibitions on law enforcement using their facial recognition tech. There's growing evidence these algorithmic systems are riddled with gender and racial bias. Today on the show, Short Wave speaks with AI policy researcher Mutale Nkonde about algorithmic bias — how facial recogn...

America is still stuck in the first one. Maddie and Emily examine how the idea of a 'second wave' of coronavirus might have taken hold. NPR science correspondent Nurith Aizenman's report on why the first wave isn't over. Email the show at shortwave@npr.org . See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship pref...

Encore episode. Researchers discovered that this simple instrument could offer insights into the evolution of human speech. Short Wave reporter Emily Kwong talks with primatologist Adriano Lameira about a growing body of evidence that humans may not be the only great apes with voice control. Read the paper he published last year. P.S. Sign up for our trivia night this Tuesday, June 23, at 8 pm EDT...

Marine biologist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson wrote a Washington Post op-ed about the ways the fight around climate change and racial justice go hand in hand. Host Maddie Sofia talks with her about that and how Ayana says the fight against climate change could be stronger if people of color weren't being constantly exhausted by racism. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of...

It's called asymptomatic spread. Recently a scientist with the World Health Organization created confusion when she seemed to suggest it was "very rare." It's not, as the WHO attempted to clarify. NPR science reporter Pien Huang explains what scientists know about asymptomatic spread, and what might have caused the WHO's mixed messages. Email the show at shortwave@npr.org . See pcm.adswizz.com for...

Does getting the coronavirus once make you immune to it or could you get it again? Many are looking to antibody tests for answers. The logic is: if I have antibodies for the coronavirus, I must be immune. Well, turns out ... it's complicated, as Katherine Wu writes for the Smithsonian Magazine. We invited her onto the show to explain. Between episodes, you can catch up with Maddie on Twitter @madd...

A federal court recently ordered farmers to stop spraying one of the country's most widely used herbicides, dicamba. NPR's food and agriculture correspondent Dan Charles tells us the ruling has turned the world of Midwestern agriculture upside down. Then the Environmental Protection Agency came out with its own order. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal dat...

That's what they call themselves: long-haulers. They've been sick for months. Many have never had a positive test. Doctors cannot explain their illness any other way, and can only guess at why the virus appears to be with them for so long. Ed Yong of The Atlantic explains what might be going on, and why their experience mirrors that of other sufferers with chronic illnesses who battle to be believ...

We chat with National Geographic Explorer and paleontologist Nizar Ibrahim about his team's discovery of the Spinosaurus , the first known swimming dinosaur. The years-long journey to uncover the fossilized remains is like something out of a movie, beginning with a mustached Moroccan man wearing white. Read more on National Geographic's website . Tweet Maddie your dinosaur facts @maddie_sofia . Pl...

In protests around the country, law enforcement agencies have used tear gas to disperse crowds. But is it safe? ProPublica environment reporter Lisa Song speaks with Short Wave reporter Emily Kwong about the potential dangers of that practice, especially in the middle of a respiratory pandemic. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to...

In this episode, Maddie Sofia talks with Invisibilia's Alix Spiegel about the bioethics of conducting human challenge trials with the aim of producing a viable coronavirus vaccine. We hear from James Kublin, a clinical health professor in the Department of Global Health at the University of Washington, and from Lehua Gray, a 32-year-old woman interested in participating in a trial. See pcm.adswizz...

Encore episode. Brandon Taylor's story has a happy ending. Today he's a successful writer whose debut novel 'Real Life' received glowing reviews earlier this year. But his success only underscores what science lost when Brandon walked away from a graduate biochemistry program in 2016. He tells host Maddie Sofia why he left, and what he misses. Read his essay in BuzzFeed, 'Working In Science Was A...

The last few weeks have been filled with devastating news — stories about the police killing black people. So today, we're turning the mic over to our colleagues at NPR's Code Switch . Now, as always, they're doing really important work covering race and identity in the United States. In this episode, they spoke with Jamil Smith , who wrote the essay "What Does Seeing Black Men Die Do For You?" fo...

Across the country, demonstrators are protesting the death of George Floyd and the ongoing systemic racism that is woven into the fabric of the United States. The protests come in the middle of an unprecedented pandemic that is disproportionately killing people of color — particularly black Americans. We talk to public health expert David Williams about how these two historic moments are intertwin...