Jessica Young
speaker
59 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Jan 2025
Jessica Young’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Well, there's a new study on how the longevity of a vaccine may be decided by our bone marrow. And then another one on the math and science behind hula hooping. And we have a roundup of what to look for over the next year in space news. Love it. All that on this episode of Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Yeah, exactly, or the yellow fever vaccine. And this contrast is actually what led Stanford medicine professor Bali Pulendran to wonder, like, why? Why are some vaccines able to stimulate immunity for a few months, but others last a lifetime?
And it was through this basic research question that Bali and a team at Stanford Medicine uncovered a major insight having to do with megakaryocytes.
So ultimately, Bali wants this basic research to lead to better vaccines for everyone.
It involves lots of mathematical modeling and physics, too. They created these little hula hooping robots using 3D printed models of different shapes. Some robots had cylinder shapes, others cones, others were hourglass-like. They wiggled all of these shapes with a tiny little hoop just under six inches across.
These shapes, of course, were meant to represent a simplified scaled-down version of a human hula hooping.
No, totally. I was worried about that, too. But the researchers said that you can actually just give the hula hoop more energy by moving your hips more quickly, like upping the frequency of that circular motion. And also, obviously, hula hooping isn't just for the waist. You can hula hoop on your neck or wrists or ankles.
Yeah, starting as early as this month. In January, there are two missions expected to launch for the moon. One is called Resilience Mission 2, and the other is called Blue Ghost.
And then sometime early this year, NASA's Lunar Trailblazer will launch to look for water on the moon for future moonwalkers, probably for splitting into hydrogen and oxygen to make rocket fuel on the moon. So this mission is going to be looking for where the water is on the moon and also the nature of it. Because there's just still a lot that we don't know.
And we're going to have to find out a lot more about water on the moon if future astronauts are going to be using it for drinking water and fuel. Mm-hmm.
And then, of course, there's the Europa Clipper mission. Shortwave actually reported on its launch in October. This is the mission that will be looking for evidence of whether Jupiter's moon Europa could support life. It should get there around 2030. But this March, it will get a little energy boost when it flies by Mars by using the planet's gravity to help it accelerate towards Jupiter.
This episode was produced by Rebecca Ramirez and Megan Lim. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez and Christopher Intagliata. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Jimmy Keeley and Neil T. Vault were the audio engineers. I'm Emily Kwong. And I'm Jessica Young. Thanks for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Okay, Juana, where do you want to start? Okay, we got to start off with these squirrels. I thought squirrels ate nuts. Yeah, so a study that was just published in the Journal of Ethology shows a group of California ground squirrels hunting, killing, and eating a vole, like a little mouse. And I talked with the lead researcher and a behavioral ecologist, Jennifer Smith.
She's at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.
There's also accounts of squirrels eating like roadkill or insects. But what's new here is that they've documented the whole process from start to finish with video, the hunt, the kill, and then the consumption. And they've shown that this isn't just like a one-off, but part of these squirrels' behavior.
Yeah. And Jennifer said the next big thing is to find out like how these squirrels learn this behavior. Are they teaching each other? Does this abundance of vole meat like lead to more squirrel babies? There's like so much to explore.
Why is that? So there's a few reasons. One researcher said that the time period is just less studied. And also, it's generally harder for organisms from this time to become fossils because their bodies were so soft and they had no shells, no skeletons.
Interesting. How's he doing that? So Xu Haixiao and his team use the existing fossil record, even though it's small, as a sample of all the species at different times in history.
So from this small number of fossil samples, they can make some big picture inferences about the history of life on Earth. Okay, that makes sense. Tell us what they found.
And they also found that like right after the Boring Billion, there are ice ages that were followed by super rapid species turnover and like a boom of diversity, which has made Xu Hai wonder if ice ages reset evolution.
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