Science, Spoken

As health care workers prepare for surges of Covid-19 patients, they must grapple with the ethics of rationing critical medical gear. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

While it might seem wasteful to test the seemingly-healthy, tracking antibodies could show how widely the virus has spread—and who may now be immune. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The national railroad system converted a TGV high-speed train to move 20 Covid-19 patients from Strasbourg to calmer hospitals in the Loire Valley. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

When American whiskey evaporates, it leaves behind webs, or fingerprints of sorts, that could help sleuths identify counterfeit swill. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

We've been led to believe that robots and AI are replacing humans en masse. But this economic catastrophe is blowing up that myth. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

A 100-year-old way to beat disease could help researchers figure out how to harness the antibodies from earlier patients to help the newly infected. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

“Virtual visits” can be an effective way to decide who needs to be tested for Covid-19. But remote doctors can't diagnose or treat illness. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Epidemiologist Larry Brilliant, who warned of pandemic in 2006, says we can beat the novel coronavirus—but first, we need with lots more testing. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Prestige Ameritech typically makes 250,000 masks a day. Now it's manufacturing 1 million daily, and turning away orders for 100 million more. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Hollywood tells us humans are prone to lose all rationality in a disaster, looting and trampling one another. But that’s not giving our brains any credit. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Researchers looked at how long the virus can survive on cardboard, plastic, and stainless steel, as well as after being aerosolized and suspended in midair. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Everything you need to know about the coronavirus. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Inside a cavernous hangar at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility along the Virginia coast, a gleaming white P-3 Orion aircraft sits parked under harsh floodlights. It’s just after midnight and a group of scientists, technicians and graduate students cluster underneath a wing, peering at a 5-inch crack in one of the ailerons that the pilot uses to maneuver the plane. Their disappointment is palpable. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The ocean is normally a fairly noisy place, with the sounds of happy dolphins, lonely whales and diesel-chugging ships saturating the undersea world. But climate change may turn up the volume on this liquid symphony as warmer sea temperatures boost the volume of noise produced by the small but incredibly loud percussionist in this orchestra: the snapping shrimp. This crustacean uses its oversize claw as a bubble-forming pistol of sorts, snapping it at more than 210 decibels. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In 1947, Kenneth Arnold was flying his CallAir A-2 between Chehalis and Yakima, Washington, when he took a detour to search for a downed Marine Corps aircraft. There was a reward for anyone who could find the plane, and who couldn’t use $5,000? Arnold flew around searching for a while, and accidentally found something else—something much stranger than what he’d actually been looking for. As he watched, rapt, nine objects flew through the air in formation. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Of the varied conspiracy theories regarding contrails—you know, chemtrails—one stands out for being especially wrong: the belief that the plane-made clouds are chemicals the government is secretly spraying to battle climate change, to the peril of those on the ground. First, contrails are nothing but the incidental result of mixing hot, water-vapor-filled jet engine exhaust with cold air. Second, the government has nothing to do with them. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

As California has descended into wildfire hell, with ever bigger blazes burning ever more intensely over the last few years, an unlikely firefighting hero has emerged: the goat. Officials in mountain cities in particular have been hiring herds to hoover up overgrown vegetation, creating fire breaks around the edges of towns. It’s what these ungulates—and their brethren the world over—are born to do. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In late spring of 2012, climactic chaos descended upon the Midwest and Great Plains in the midst of the growing season. A drought is supposed to unfold on a timeline of seasons to years, but in the two weeks between June 12 and 26, the High Plains went from what a monitoring group called “abnormally dry” to “severe drought. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Alice Collins Plebuch, or Grandma Nerd, as her grandkids call her, is good at solving puzzles. She was among the first wave of computer programmers—when that term meant punching information on cards to be fed into mainframes. She has an analytical mind and is at ease with technology. Years ago, she began digging into her father’s history, hoping to find more about the man who’d grown up in an Irish-Catholic orphanage in New York. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

What could be worse than getting the pneumonia-like illness now known as Covid-19? Getting it twice. That’s what Japanese government officials say may have happened to a female tour bus guide in Osaka. The woman was first diagnosed with Covid-19 in late January, according to a statement released by Osaka’s prefectural government Wednesday. She was discharged shortly after, once her symptoms had improved. A subsequent test came back negative for the virus. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Robots already have us beat in some ways: They’re stronger, more consistent, and they never demand a lunch break. But when it comes to the senses, machines still struggle mightily. They can’t smell particularly well, or taste (though researchers are making progress on robotic tongues), or feel with their robotic grips—and that’s a serious consideration if we don’t want them crushing our dishes or skulls. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Katherine Johnson blazed trails, not just as a black female mathematician during the Cold War, but by mapping literal paths through outer space. Her math continues to carve out new paths for spacecraft navigating our solar system, as NASA engineers use evolved versions of her equations that will execute missions to the moon and beyond. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

You’ve never seen amphibians in this light before. Like, literally, this specific azure light. Today in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers for the first time show that amphibians glow if you throw blue light on them. The tiger salamander suddenly pops with brilliant green spots. Cranwell's horned frog is striped in a nuclear glow. Even the marbled salamander’s tiny toe bones fluoresce brightly—oh, and as does its cloaca, perhaps as a kind of sexual display. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Frogs are reflecting and satellites are detecting, but first: a cartoon about self-driving without a license. Here's the news you need to know, in two minutes or less. Want to receive this two-minute roundup as an email every weekday? Sign up here! Today’s News Amphibians glow. Humans just couldn't see it—until now New research in Scientific Reports reveals that amphibians actually glow, and always have—scientists just couldn't see it. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Today in the journal Nature Climate Change, researchers are publishing a series of articles as a kind of postmortem of the Australian bushfires. The series is both a diagnosis of what happened as flames swept across the continent, and a call to action for researchers the world over: Climate change is a crisis for people, the natural world at large—and for science itself. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On Monday, Amazon CEO and world’s richest human Jeff Bezos announced he was pledging nearly 8 percent of his net worth to fight climate change. This money, known as the Bezos Earth Fund, will be used to support “any effort that offers a real possibility to help preserve and protect the natural world,” Bezos wrote in an Instagram post. There are plenty of problems with a billionaire single-handedly dictating how the world community will fight climate change. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

When the Diamond Princess left the port of Yokohama in Japan on January 20, the 2,666 passengers on board were ready to unwind with a trip to China, Vietnam and Taiwan. But two weeks later they’d find themselves confined to their cabins, allowed out for only a few hours each day, while 542 of their fellow passengers and crew tested positive for Covid-19—the novel virus that has infected 75,000 people worldwide. Wired UK This story originally appeared on WIRED UK. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Your organs are a lot of things—a powerful computer (in the case of your brain), detoxers (your liver and kidneys), breathing devices (your lungs). But there’s one thing they’re decidedly not: transparent. That’s unless you’re Kevin Bacon in The Invisible Man, or if your organs end up in the lab of Ali Ertürk, director of Helmholtz Munich’s Institute for Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Smack dab between eastern Canada’s Misery Point and Greenland's Cape Desolation is a place where the thrashing of the Atlantic Ocean’s churn sounds about as friendly as the nearby place names. This stretch of water, the Labrador Sea, has long been considered a critical junction in the global circulatory system of the world's oceans. By pumping warm water north and cool water south, the system regulates the planet’s climate. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Confronted with a baby—or puppy—most adults can’t stop themselves from dissolving into baby talk: “WHO’S the cutest? It’s YOU! YES it IS!” We slow down, increase our pitch by nearly an octave, and milk each vowel for all it’s worth. And even if the baby can’t speak yet, we mimic the turn-taking of a conversation. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

One sunny day last summer, Mathias Kolle, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, took a couple of eminent colleagues out sailing. They talked about their research. They had some drinks. Then Kolle noticed something was off: A rowboat tied to his boat had come loose and was drifting toward the horizon. As he tacked across the water to retrieve the wayward vessel, he realized his mistake. In securing the rowboat, he must have tied the knot wrong. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This story originally appeared on The Guardian and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Two scientific studies of the number of insects splattered by cars have revealed a huge decline in abundance at European sites in two decades. The research adds to growing evidence of what some scientists have called an “insect apocalypse,” which is threatening a collapse in the natural world that sustains humans and all life on Earth. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

What if I told you that in Australia, a mouse-like marsupial called antechinus breeds so manically during its three-week mating season that the males bleed internally and go blind, until every male lies dead? And what if I told you that this isn’t the reason the species is facing an existential threat? Reporting today in the journal Frontiers in Physiology, biologists from University of New England in Australia and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology present troubling evidence that antechinus might be ill-prepared for a warmer world. The researchers set out to... Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Nearly 10 months after Vice President Mike Pence directed NASA to return astronauts to the Moon by 2024, the space agency has estimated how much its Artemis Program will cost. NASA says it will need an additional $35 billion over the next four years—on top of its existing budget—to develop a Human Landing System to get down to the Moon's surface from lunar orbit while also accelerating other programs to make the 2024 date. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Just before midnight on Sunday, a spacecraft will depart from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a mission to the sun. Known as Solar Orbiter, this spacecraft will spend the next seven years dipping in and out of the extremely inhospitable environment around the sun. In the process, it will provide us with our first glimpse of the sun’s poles, which will be critical to understanding its topsy-turvy magnetic field. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Tearing across East Africa right now is a plague of biblical proportions: Hundreds of billions of locusts in swarms the size of major cities are laying waste to the crops in their path. It’s the worst outbreak in 25 years in Ethiopia. In Kenya, make that the worst in seven decades. Fueling the locusts’ destruction is a bounty of vegetation following unusually heavy rains. All that food means the landscape can support a huge number of rapidly breeding insects. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Everybody loves bubbles, regardless of age—the bigger the better. But to blow really big, world-record-scale bubbles requires a very precise bubble mixture. Physicists have determined that a key ingredient is mixing in polymers of varying strand lengths, according to a new paper in Physical Review Fluids. That produces a soap film able to stretch sufficiently thin to make a giant bubble without breaking. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Gene-editing trials are optimistic and Tesla stocks are going ballistic, but first: a cartoon about meme cinema. Here's the news you need to know, in two minutes or less. Want to receive this two-minute roundup as an email every weekday? Sign up here! Today’s News Crispr-edited cells show promise in first US human safety trial Initial reports on the safety of the nation’s first in-human test of the disease-fighting potential of Crispr gene editing are here: So far, so good. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It’s been over three years since US regulators greenlit the nation’s first in-human test of Crispr’s disease-fighting potential, more than three years of waiting to find out if the much-hyped gene-editing technique could be safely used to beat back tough-to-treat cancers. Today, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford finally revealed the first published report describing the trial. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It’s perhaps the best known and more worrisome of climate feedback loops: As the planet warms, permafrost—landscapes of frozen soil and rock—begins to thaw. And when it does, microbes consume organic matter, releasing CO2 and methane into the atmosphere, leading to more warming, more thawing, and even more carbon emissions. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

No disrespect, but roboticists have got nothing on the animal kingdom. Birds cut through the air with ease, while our drones plummet out of the sky. Humans balance elegantly on two legs, while humanoid robots fall on their faces. It takes roboticists a whole lot of work to even begin to approach the wonders of evolution. But maybe if you can’t beat ‘em, hack ‘em. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Inside a small metal box on a laboratory table in Vienna, physicist Markus Aspelmeyer and his team have engineered, perhaps, the quietest place on Earth. The area in question is a microscopic spot in the middle of the box. Here, levitating in midair—except there is no air because the box is in vacuum—is a tiny glass bead a thousand times smaller than a grain of sand. Aspelmeyer’s apparatus uses lasers to render this bead literally motionless. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Jonathan Read admits to being something of a dinosaur when it comes to publishing his work. An epidemiologist at Lancaster University in the UK, Read had always followed the old ways—submit to a journal, get accepted, get comments and edits from peer reviewers, revise the article, publish. But a few years ago, something started nagging at him. That process typically moves a lot slower than a disease outbreak. And even when it moves fast, it can involve considerations besides rigor. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Rocket ships are spinning and jellyfish are winning, but first: a cartoon about Instagram art. Here's the news you need to know, in two minutes or less. Want to receive this two-minute roundup as an email every weekday? Sign up here! Today’s News Inside Spinlaunch, the space industry's best-kept secret A company called Spinlaunch is giving life to a decades-old idea for how to get rockets into space: spin them here on earth and hurl them into the cosmos. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Chinese government announced Wednesday that it would quarantine the city of Wuhan, the center of an outbreak of a new viral disease that has (officially) killed 17 people and infected more than 500. As of 10 AM Thursday morning in Wuhan—9 PM EST—no flights were leaving the airport. High-speed rail won’t depart for Shanghai, 500 miles to the east, or anywhere else. The bus terminals and roads are closed. Supposedly, it’s no one in or out. To be clear, that’s nuts. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

This autumn, after years of dropping view-amassing videos of Spot the robot dog fending off stick-wielding humans and opening doors for its pals, Boston Dynamics finally announced that the machine was hitting the market—for a select few early adopters, at least. BD’s people would be the first to tell you that they don’t fully know what the hypnotically agile robot will be best at. Things like patrolling job sites, sure. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

When asked what’s so special about Drosophila melanogaster, or the common fruit fly, Gerry Rubin quickly gets on a roll. Rubin has poked and prodded flies for decades, including as a leader of the effort to sequence their genome. So permit him to count their merits. They’re expert navigators, for one, zipping around without crashing into walls. They have great memories, too, he adds. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Hyundai is solving and robots are evolving, but first: a cartoon about parental phone tracking. Here's the news you need to know, in two minutes or less. Want to receive this two-minute roundup as an email every weekday? Sign up here! Today’s News Spot the robot dog trots into the big, bad world You've probably seen the videos of Boston Dynamics' incredible (and creepy) robot dog Spot opening doors, trotting in parking lots, and fending off stick-wielding humans. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On October 12, 2019, Eliud Kipchoge crossed under a pink finishing arch emblazoned with the time 1:59:40. He had just become the first person to run a marathon in under two hours. For a few hours, this achievement, long unthinkable, was celebrated across the world. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Forgive baristas. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices