Emily Kwong

You know, buy local.

Get excited for all of that on this episode of Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.

It happened under some prehistoric mistletoe.

And by kissing, scientists define that as non-aggressive mouth-to-mouth contact that does not involve passing food.

And Matilda Brindle at the University of Oxford wanted to know, how far back in evolutionary history does this go?

Which they did by determining which primates kiss and which do not.

So Matilda had to watch a lot of video footage of primates locking lips.

And she compiled evidence of which of our primate cousins canoodle.

She built her family tree.

And she discovered something else, which is that Neanderthals probably kissed too.

And that is a big deal.

So as humans contemplate long term space travel, scientists want to know which plants may survive the extremes of space because space is cold.

There is a lot of radiation.

It's a vacuum.

Scientists can simulate some of that on Earth.

But to know how a plant will do in space, you got to put it there.

This is plant biologist Tomomichi Fujita at Hokkaido University, who led the work.

And he says land is a lot harsher than the ocean, with larger temperature fluctuations, higher risk of drying out, and more UV.

They did shockingly well, says Magdalena Bezania, a cell biologist at Dartmouth who is not involved in this work.

Her lab just happens to study the same moss.