Jessica Young
Appearances
Short Wave
This COP29, It's All About The Numbers
1.5 is not just a number for our Pacific small island developing states. It is a line in the sand necessary to ensure our survival.
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Bone Marrow Cells: Key To Vaccine Longevity?
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?
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Bone Marrow Cells: Key To Vaccine Longevity?
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.
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Bone Marrow Cells: Key To Vaccine Longevity?
So ultimately, Bali wants this basic research to lead to better vaccines for everyone.
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Bone Marrow Cells: Key To Vaccine Longevity?
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.
Short Wave
Bone Marrow Cells: Key To Vaccine Longevity?
These shapes, of course, were meant to represent a simplified scaled-down version of a human hula hooping.
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Bone Marrow Cells: Key To Vaccine Longevity?
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.
Short Wave
Bone Marrow Cells: Key To Vaccine Longevity?
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.
Short Wave
Bone Marrow Cells: Key To Vaccine Longevity?
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.
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Bone Marrow Cells: Key To Vaccine Longevity?
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.
Short Wave
Bone Marrow Cells: Key To Vaccine Longevity?
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.
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Bone Marrow Cells: Key To Vaccine Longevity?
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.
Short Wave
Bone Marrow Cells: Key To Vaccine Longevity?
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.
Short Wave
This Hazelnut May Help The Land Back Movement In Canada
All right, I want to start with hazelnuts because I grew up in the state of Oregon, which produces more than 90% of the U.S. hazelnut crop. But we're talking about hazelnuts in Canada. What's going on?
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This Hazelnut May Help The Land Back Movement In Canada
That's cool. How does it change our understanding of agricultural history?
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This Hazelnut May Help The Land Back Movement In Canada
Cool. All right, let's go to Mars next. You're telling me it was habitable long ago?
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This Hazelnut May Help The Land Back Movement In Canada
Wait, hydrothermal vents like hot springs on the seafloor?
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This Hazelnut May Help The Land Back Movement In Canada
Okay, so back to the new discovery. How did scientists find out that there might be hydrothermal vents on Mars?
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This Hazelnut May Help The Land Back Movement In Canada
That's not long after the solar system was formed, right?
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This Hazelnut May Help The Land Back Movement In Canada
Okay, so you've got these tiny bread slices thinner than half a human hair, and what did they learn from it?
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This Hazelnut May Help The Land Back Movement In Canada
We've got hazelnuts. We've got fish. It sounds like a Thanksgiving feast.
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This Hazelnut May Help The Land Back Movement In Canada
Oh, so that's why the researchers connected hydrothermal vents to this sample from Mars.
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This Hazelnut May Help The Land Back Movement In Canada
All right. From planets, let's go to fish. Or fish. That's O-A-R.
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This Hazelnut May Help The Land Back Movement In Canada
22 in more than a century, but three since August?
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This Hazelnut May Help The Land Back Movement In Canada
Ooh, are you going to tell me a folktale? No.
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This Hazelnut May Help The Land Back Movement In Canada
I don't know if they were looking hard enough. But anyway, why might some of these oarfish be washing up now?
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Why These Squirrels Are Eating Meat
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.
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Why These Squirrels Are Eating Meat
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.
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Why These Squirrels Are Eating Meat
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.
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Why These Squirrels Are Eating Meat
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.
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Why These Squirrels Are Eating Meat
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.
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Why These Squirrels Are Eating Meat
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.
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Why These Squirrels Are Eating Meat
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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Why These Squirrels Are Eating Meat
And new evidence of canid bones from Alaska supports that theory. Their paper analyzes more than 100 specimens, but the most interesting bone was excavated in 2018 outside of Fairbanks. There, researchers found a single tibia, or lower leg bone, and DNA evidence suggests the bone belonged to some kind of ancient wolf or proto-dog, and dated the bone to 12,000 years ago.
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Why These Squirrels Are Eating Meat
But, I mean, how do we know that these canids weren't just out there hunting salmon themselves? So salmon is not naturally available in big quantities in Fairbanks, which is why researchers think they were probably getting salmon from humans, like proof of domestication, at least for this one ancient wolf.
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Why These Squirrels Are Eating Meat
Tyler Jones, check the facts. Beth Donovan is our senior director. And Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barber. And I'm Jessica Young.
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Conan The Bacterium's Superpower: Resisting Radiation
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.
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Conan The Bacterium's Superpower: Resisting Radiation
This is Michael Daly, a professor of pathology at the Uniformed Services University, who has studied the Conan bacteria for decades.
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Conan The Bacterium's Superpower: Resisting Radiation
Yeah, look, when combined, these three, phosphate, manganese, and peptides, offer astounding radiation protection. The details about this appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Michael says this breakthrough means big things for the future.
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Conan The Bacterium's Superpower: Resisting Radiation
Yes, we have a very lonely society, and there are a lot of studies out there showing this, including the National Poll on Healthy Aging from the University of Michigan. Now, for six years, the poll gathered household data from older Americans ages 50 to 80 about how lonely they are, loneliness being defined as feeling a lack of companionship.
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Conan The Bacterium's Superpower: Resisting Radiation
We also have cures for our loneliness epidemic.
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Conan The Bacterium's Superpower: Resisting Radiation
Yeah. Yeah. One third of older adults. It's a lot. And an outside researcher thinks this could be an undercount. Geriatrician Thomas Cujo at Johns Hopkins University is especially worried about older adults who are, say, homebound or cognitively impaired and may not take part in a poll like this.
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Conan The Bacterium's Superpower: Resisting Radiation
Yeah, lead author Preeti Malani wants everyone to think of loneliness as a health problem, like cancer or heart disease, as something that can be treated and prevented. We can actively cultivate human connection.
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Conan The Bacterium's Superpower: Resisting Radiation
All that on this episode of Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. OK, Ari, where do you want to start?
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Conan The Bacterium's Superpower: Resisting Radiation
And there's medical interventions, too, like getting fitted for hearing aids so those who are hard of hearing can connect like we are now through good old-fashioned conversation.
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Conan The Bacterium's Superpower: Resisting Radiation
But what's weird is that we humans have supporting cells in our inner ears, too. They just fail to step into the spotlight and take over. And that's true of all adult mammals like mice.
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Conan The Bacterium's Superpower: Resisting Radiation
They can be open or closed. And in adult mammals, which can't regenerate hearing, the enhancers are closed. But according to this new research, these switches are on for adult zebrafish, meaning the curtain can be raised for the supporting cells to step forward and do their thing and restore the hearing.
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Conan The Bacterium's Superpower: Resisting Radiation
The scientists also found that if you took them out, the zebrafish lose this ability to regenerate hair cells.
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Conan The Bacterium's Superpower: Resisting Radiation
It's cool. It's always happening, so we'll be back.
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Conan The Bacterium's Superpower: Resisting Radiation
You can hear more of Ari on Consider This, NPR's afternoon podcast about what the news means for you.
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Conan The Bacterium's Superpower: Resisting Radiation
Which is why scientists have given it this funny nickname, Conan the Bacterium, a resilient superhero of the microbial world.