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1 week ago | 
wrvo.org | Pien Huang |Regina Barber |Rachel Carlson |Rebecca Ramirez
The skunky smell of cannabis may be going out of style. NPR's science correspondent Pien Huang visited the grow facility for District Cannabis, which sells weed in Washington D.C. and Maryland. On her tour, she learned why cannabis smells the way it does. Plus, how many strains have been bred — to smells like lavender, citrus and even cookies.
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3 weeks ago | 
share.google | Emily Kwong |Rachel Carlson |Rebecca Ramirez
Teal is a greenish, blueish hue. But what if it were more? Imagine a vibrant teal that's more saturated than any color you've ever seen in the natural world. That's how a rare few people describe a new color called "olo." The shade has been seen only by a handful of scientists at the University of California, Berkeley in a paper published in the journal Science Advances last month. The view is so exclusive because olo does not exist in nature. It cannot be found among paint cans.
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3 weeks ago | 
wrvo.org | Kimberly McCoy |Emily Kwong |Rachel Carlson |Rebecca Ramirez
As artificial intelligence seeps into various areas of our society, it's rushing into others. One area it's making a big difference is protein science. We're talking the molecules that make our cells work. AI has hurtled the field forward by predicting what these molecular machines look like, which tells scientists how they do what they do — from processing our food to turning light into sugar.
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1 month ago | 
wrvo.org | Emily Kwong |Rachel Carlson |Rebecca Ramirez
Around 40 million people around the world have bipolar disorder, which involves cyclical swings between moods: from depression to mania. Kay Redfield Jamison is one of those people. She's also a professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and has written extensively about the topic, from medical textbooks to personal memoirs. In fact, Jamison penned one of the first memoirs ever written by a medical doctor living with bipolar,An Unquiet Mind.
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1 month ago | 
wrvo.org | Emily Kwong |Hannah Chinn |Rebecca Ramirez
This is the first episode of Nature Quest, a monthly Short Wave segment that answers listener questions about your local environment. Every month, we'll be bringing you a question from a fellow listener who is curious about how nature is changing – how to pay attention to the land around us – and make every day Earth Day. Alessandra Ram is a journalist. She covers the climate crisis, and its impacts on everyday people. And she just had a kid.
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1 month ago | 
tpr.org | Emily Kwong |Hannah Chinn |Rebecca Ramirez
This is the first episode of Nature Quest, a monthly Short Wave segment that answers listener questions about your local environment. Every month, we'll be bringing you a question from a fellow listener who is curious about how nature is changing – how to pay attention to the land around us – and make every day Earth Day. Alessandra Ram is a journalist. She covers the climate crisis, and its impacts on everyday people. And she just had a kid.
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1 month ago | 
wrvo.org | Emily Kwong |Regina Barber |Hannah Chinn |Rebecca Ramirez
Happy Memorial Day, Short Wavers! This holiday, we bring you a meditation on time ... and clocks. There are hundreds of atomic clocks in orbit right now, perched on satellites all over Earth. We depend on them for GPS location, Internet timing, stock trading and even space navigation. In today's encore episode, hosts Emily Kwong and Regina G. Barber learn how to build a better clock. In order to do that, they ask: How do atomic clocks really work, anyway? What makes a clock precise?
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1 month ago | 
wrvo.org | Emily Kwong |Regina Barber |Hannah Chinn |Rebecca Ramirez
In 2018, computer scientist Sasha Luccioni was an AI researcher for Morgan Stanley — and couldn't shake this existential worry. "I essentially was getting more and more climate anxiety. I was really feeling this profound disconnect between my job and my values and the things that I cared about," Luccioni told NPR. So Luccioni quit her job.
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1 month ago | 
wrvo.org | Emily Kwong |Regina Barber |Hannah Chinn |Rebecca Ramirez
As the tech industry has grown, so too have data centers. Data centers are enormous buildings filled with hundreds of thousands of computers that store cloud data and power artificial intelligence. To keep up with computing demands, data centers use electricity and sometimes chilled water to keep those computers cool. The result? A surge in energy and water use that has caught the attention of scientists and lawmakers.
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2 months ago | 
wrvo.org | Regina Barber |Nell Greenfieldboyce |Rachel Carlson |Rebecca Ramirez
Some scientists are convinced that beyond Neptune, there's a planet they've yet to see. This so-called "Planet 9" is so far away, it would be a faint object. The stretch of sky researchers would have to search is huge. But a new astronomical facility on a mountaintop in Chile could help tackle the search. The NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory has been under construction for years.
