Short Wave

By NPR

What's Short Wave about?

New discoveries, everyday mysteries, and the science behind the headlines — all in about 10 minutes. It's science for everyone, using a lot of creativity and a little humor. Join hosts Emily Kwong, Aaron Scott and Regina Barber for science on a different wavelength.

If you're hooked, try Short Wave Plus. Your subscription supports the show and unlocks a sponsor-free feed. Learn more at plus.npr.org/shortwave

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LAST EPISODE

Helping A Man Walk Again Wi...

06.02.2023

This week's science news roundup reunites All Things Considered host Ailsa Chang with Short Wave hosts Emily Kwong and Regina G. Barber to dig into the latest headlines in biomedical research, also known as cool things for the human body. ...

Short Wave episodes:

06.02.2023 Helping A Man Walk Again With Science This week's science news roundup reunites All Things Considered host Ailsa Chang with Short Wave hosts Emily Kwong and Regina G. Barber to dig into the latest headlines in biomedical research, also known as cool things for the human body. ...
05.31.2023 Why Melting Ice In Antarctica Is Making Hurricanes Worse In Texas Ice in Antarctica is melting really quickly because of climate change. That's driving sea level rise around the world, and the water is rising especially fast in the seaside city of Galveston, Texas — thousands of miles from Antarctica. Why ...
05.29.2023 What Happens When An Infant Loses Half Their Brain? Mora Leeb was 9 months old when surgeons removed half her brain. Now 15, she plays soccer and tells jokes. Scientists say Mora is an extreme example of a process known as brain plasticity, which allows a brain to modify ...
05.26.2023 Galaxies Are Older Than We Thought — That's A Big Deal If you ask a physicist or cosmologist about the beginnings of the universe, they'll probably point you to some math and tell you about the Big Bang theory. It's a scientific theory about how the entire universe began, and it's ...
05.24.2023 When Your Body Rejects The Kidney It Needs In February 2021, pandemic restrictions were just starting to ease in Hawaii, and Leila Mirhaydari was finally able to see her kidney doctor. Transplanted organs need diligent care, and Leila had been looking after her donated kidney all on her ...
05.22.2023 Two Squirrely Responses To Climate Change Kwasi Wrensford studies two related species: the Alpine chipmunk and the Lodgepole chipmunk. The two have very different ways of coping with climate change. In this episode, Kwasi explains to host Emily Kwong how these squirrelly critters typify two important ...
05.19.2023 The Physics Behind The Perfect Gummy Candy This week for our science news roundup, superstar host of All Things Considered Ari Shapiro joins Short Wave hosts Emily Kwong and Regina G. Barber to discuss the joy and wonder found in all types of structures. The big. The ...
05.17.2023 Why You Can't Tell Your Race From A DNA Test Race is a social construct — so why are DNA test kits like the ones from 23andMe coded like they reveal biological fact about the user's racial makeup? This episode, Short Wave Scientist in Residence Regina G. Barber talks to ...
05.15.2023 Long COVID Scientists Try To Unravel Blood Clot Mystery The COVID-19 public health emergency has ended, but millions across the globe continue to deal with Long COVID. Researchers are still pursuing basic questions about Long COVID — its causes, how to test for it and how it progresses. Today, ...
05.12.2023 Move over, humans—lemurs have rhythm, too There's a lot for scientists to learn about the origins of humans' musical abilities. In the last few years, though, they've discovered homo sapiens have some company in our ability to make musical rhythm. That's why today, producer Berly McCoy ...
05.10.2023 We Need To Talk About Teens, Social Media And Mental Health This week, the American Psychological Association issued its first-of-kind guidelines for parents to increase protection for children online. It comes at a time of rising rates of depression and anxiety among teens. This episode, NPR science correspondent Michaeleen Doucleff looks ...
05.08.2023 What Could We Do With A Third Thumb? Today on the show, we meet a prosthetic designer and a neuroscientist fascinated with understanding how the brain and body might adapt to something we haven't had before — a third thumb. Dani Clode and Tamar Makin spoke to Short ...
05.05.2023 Some people get sick from VR. Why? Another week comes by, and luckily so does our roundup of science news. This time, we've got some questions about better understanding our health: Why do some people get motion sickness from virtual reality (VR) content? Do we really need ...
05.02.2023 Will Artificial Intelligence Help — Or Hurt — Medicine? A doctor's job is to help patients. With that help, often comes lots and lots of paperwork. That's where some startups are betting artificial intelligence may come in. The hope is that chatbots could generate data like treatment plans that ...
05.01.2023 Shoring Up The Future With Greener Batteries Today on the show, next-generation energy innovators Bill David and Serena Cussen challenged us to think about the future of clean energy storage. They spoke to Emily Kwong at the 2023 annual meeting for the American Association for the Advancement ...
04.28.2023 SUPERBLOOM: An Upside To The California Downpours California's wet winter has devastated many local communities. It has also benefited some of the state's endangered ecosystems. Those benefits are on full display in California's largest remaining grassland. Wetlands, long severed from the rivers and streams that nourished them, ...
04.26.2023 Worm Blobs In The Bowels Of The Earth In the toxic waters of Sulphur Cave in Steamboat Springs, Colo. live blood-red worm blobs that have attracted international scientific interest. We don special breathing gear and go into the cave with a team of researchers. There, we collect worms ...
04.24.2023 The News Roundup Goes Intergalactic It's our latest roundup of science news! This time, with Ailsa Chang of NPR's All Things Considered, who joins us to discuss three stories that take us on a journey through space — from the sounds of Earth's magnetosphere, to ...
04.21.2023 Fire And Ice: Linking Intense Wildfire And The Melting Arctic In the Arctic Ocean, sea ice is shrinking as the climate heats up. In the Western U.S., wildfires are getting increasingly destructive. Those two phenomena are thousands of miles apart, but scientists are uncovering a surprising connection. The ice is ...
04.19.2023 The Race To Protect Millions Of People From Melting Glaciers Melting glaciers are leaving behind large, unstable lakes that can cause dangerous flash floods. Millions of people downstream are threatened. In today's episode, NPR Climate Desk reporter Rebecca Hersher and producer Ryan Kellman take Short Wave co-host Emily Kwong to ...
04.17.2023 Where are the whales? Scientists find clues thousands of miles away Endangered North Atlantic right whales are disappearing from their native waters, a serious danger for a species with only 340 animals left. The mystery behind this change took NPR's climate reporter Lauren Sommer 2,000 miles away to the world's second-largest ...
04.14.2023 Are Rats Running This Podcast? This week, New York City crowned Kathleen Corradi its first rat czar. The new position is part of a multipronged approach from city officials. Reporter and New Yorker Anil Oza called up rodentologists to understand — does their approach withstand ...
04.12.2023 Peep The Delightful Science Of Chickens When Tove Danovich decided to dabble in backyard chicken keeping, she embraced a tried and true journalistic practice — reading everything there is to find on the subject. In her search, she found plenty of how-to guides, but what she ...
04.10.2023 Launching Into Space — Sustainably! In 1957, the Space Age began with the launch of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite. Since then, the number of objects humans have hurled toward the stars has soared to the thousands. As those objects have collided with one another, ...
04.07.2023 News Round Up: Mammoth Meatballs, Stressed Plants And Apologetic Robots In this Friday round up of science news we can't let go, not everything is as it seems. Meatballs are not made of fresh meat from the cattle range. Robots are keeping something from you. And plants have secrets they ...
04.05.2023 Allergies Are Weird. So Are Cats Katie Wu is a bona fide cat person. She has two of them: twin boys named Calvin and Hobbes. Every night, they curl up in bed with her, bonking their little noses together, rubbing their fur and whiskers everywhere, and ...
04.03.2023 Why We Should Care About Viruses Jumping From Animals To People The phenomenon of zoonotic spillover — of viruses jumping from animals to people — is incredibly common. The question is: which one will start the next pandemic? NPR science desk correspondent Michaeleen Doucleff brings us her reporting on Influenza D, ...
03.31.2023 Eunice Foote: The Hidden Grandmother Of Climate Science Today, most climate science is done with satellites, sensors and complicated computer models. But it all started with a pioneering female physicist and two glass tubes. Eunice Foote, the woman behind that glass tube experiment, has largely been left out ...
03.29.2023 Why Scientists Just Mapped Every Synapse In A Fly Brain To really understand the human brain, scientists say you'd have to map its wiring. The only problem: there are more than 100 trillion different connections to find, trace and characterize. But a team of scientists has made a big stride ...
03.27.2023 Perennial Rice: Plant Once, Harvest Again And Again Rice is arguably the world's most important staple crop. About half of the global population depends on it for sustenance. But, like other staples such as wheat and corn, rice is cultivated annually. That means replanting the fields year after ...
03.24.2023 News Round Up: Algal Threats, An Asteroid With Life's Building Blocks And Bee Maps After reading the science headlines this week, we have A LOT of questions. Why did the Virgin Islands declare a state of emergency over a large blob of floating algae? What can a far-off asteroid tell us about the origins ...
03.23.2023 Why Pandemic Researchers Are Talking About Raccoon Dogs A few weeks ago, raw data gathered in Janaury 2020 from Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China — the early epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic — was uploaded to an online virology database. It caught the attention of researchers. ...
03.22.2023 If ChatGPT Designed A Rocket — Would It Get To Space? From text churned out by ChatGPT to the artistic renderings of Midjourney, people have been taking notice of new, bot-produced creative works. But how does this artificial intelligence software fare when there are facts at stake — like designing a ...
03.21.2023 What we lose if the Great Salt Lake dries up Dotted across the Great Basin of the American West are salty, smelly lakes. The largest of these, by far, is the Great Salt Lake in Utah. But a recent report found that water diversions for farming, climate change and population ...
03.20.2023 Venus And Earth: A Tale Of Two 'Twins' 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 ...
03.18.2023 Tweeting Directly From Your Brain (And What's Next) Our friends at NPR's TED Radio Hour podcast have been pondering some BIG things — specifically, the connection between our physical, mental, and spiritual health. In this special excerpt, what if you could control a device, not with your hand, ...
03.17.2023 Flying Into Snowstorms ... For Science! For the past few winters, researchers have been intentionally flying into snowstorms. And high in those icy clouds, the team collected all the information they could to understand—how exactly do winter storms work? With more accurate data could come more ...
03.16.2023 Could de-extincting the dodo help struggling species? 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 ...
03.15.2023 It's Boom Times In Ancient DNA 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 ...
03.14.2023 How To Bake Pi, Mathematically (And Deliciously) This March 14, Short Wave is celebrating pi ... and pie! We do that with the help of mathematician Eugenia Cheng, Scientist In Residence at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and author of the book How to ...
03.13.2023 How Well Does A New Alzheimer's Drug Work For Those Most At Risk? 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 ...
03.10.2023 Ocean World Tour: Whale Vocal Fry, Fossilizing Plankton and A Treaty Reading the science headlines this week, we have A LOT of questions. Why are more animals than just humans saddled — er, blessed — with vocal fry? Why should we care if 8 million year old plankton fossils are in ...
03.09.2023 'Are You A Model?': Crickets Are So Hot Right Now 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. ...
03.08.2023 The Race To Save A Tree Species 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 ...
03.07.2023 The $20 Billion Deal To Get Indonesia Off Coal Indonesia is the world's largest exporter of coal for electricity. And it's also an emerging economy trying to address climate change. The country recently signed a highly publicized, $20 billion international deal to transition away from coal and toward renewable ...
03.06.2023 Rome wasn't built in a day, but they sure had strong concrete The Roman Colosseum is a giant, oval amphitheater built almost two thousand years ago. Despite its age and a 14th century earthquake that knocked down the south side of the colosseum, most of the 150-some foot building is still standing. ...
03.03.2023 Chanda Prescod-Weinstein's Disordered Cosmos Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is a theoretical physicist at the University of New Hampshire. It's her job to ask deep questions about how we — and the rest of the universe — got to this moment. Her new book, The Disordered Cosmos: ...
03.02.2023 Honoring The 'Hidden Figures' Of Black Gardening When Abra Lee became the landscape manager at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, she sought some advice about how to best do the job. The answer: study the history of gardening. That led to her uncovering how Black involvement in horticulture ...
03.01.2023 This Navy vet helped discover a new, super-heavy element As a kid, Clarice Phelps dreamed of being an astronaut, or maybe an explorer like the characters on Star Trek. Her path to a career in science turned out to be a bit different than what she expected, including lengthy ...
02.28.2023 What DNA kits leave out: race, ancestry and 'scientific sankofa' Population geneticist Dr. Janina Jeff is the host and executive producer of In Those Genes, a hip-hop inspired podcast that uses genetics to uncover the those lost identifies of African descended Americans through the lens of Black culture. Short Wave ...

Older episodes

Short Wave

What's Short Wave about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Short Wave episodes:

Helping A Man Walk Again With Science

Why Melting Ice In Antarctica Is Making Hurricanes Worse In Texas

What Happens When An Infant Loses Half Their Brain?

Galaxies Are Older Than We Thought — That's A Big Deal

When Your Body Rejects The Kidney It Needs

Two Squirrely Responses To Climate Change

The Physics Behind The Perfect Gummy Candy

Why You Can't Tell Your Race From A DNA Test

Long COVID Scientists Try To Unravel Blood Clot Mystery

Move over, humans—lemurs have rhythm, too

We Need To Talk About Teens, Social Media And Mental Health

What Could We Do With A Third Thumb?

Some people get sick from VR. Why?

Will Artificial Intelligence Help — Or Hurt — Medicine?

Shoring Up The Future With Greener Batteries

SUPERBLOOM: An Upside To The California Downpours

Worm Blobs In The Bowels Of The Earth

The News Roundup Goes Intergalactic

Fire And Ice: Linking Intense Wildfire And The Melting Arctic

The Race To Protect Millions Of People From Melting Glaciers

Where are the whales? Scientists find clues thousands of miles away

Are Rats Running This Podcast?

Peep The Delightful Science Of Chickens

Launching Into Space — Sustainably!

News Round Up: Mammoth Meatballs, Stressed Plants And Apologetic Robots

Allergies Are Weird. So Are Cats

Why We Should Care About Viruses Jumping From Animals To People

Eunice Foote: The Hidden Grandmother Of Climate Science

Why Scientists Just Mapped Every Synapse In A Fly Brain

Perennial Rice: Plant Once, Harvest Again And Again

News Round Up: Algal Threats, An Asteroid With Life's Building Blocks And Bee Maps

Why Pandemic Researchers Are Talking About Raccoon Dogs

If ChatGPT Designed A Rocket — Would It Get To Space?

What we lose if the Great Salt Lake dries up

Venus And Earth: A Tale Of Two 'Twins'

Tweeting Directly From Your Brain (And What's Next)

Flying Into Snowstorms ... For Science!

Could de-extincting the dodo help struggling species?

It's Boom Times In Ancient DNA

How To Bake Pi, Mathematically (And Deliciously)

How Well Does A New Alzheimer's Drug Work For Those Most At Risk?

Ocean World Tour: Whale Vocal Fry, Fossilizing Plankton and A Treaty

'Are You A Model?': Crickets Are So Hot Right Now

The Race To Save A Tree Species

The $20 Billion Deal To Get Indonesia Off Coal

Rome wasn't built in a day, but they sure had strong concrete

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein's Disordered Cosmos

Honoring The 'Hidden Figures' Of Black Gardening

This Navy vet helped discover a new, super-heavy element

What DNA kits leave out: race, ancestry and 'scientific sankofa'

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