Short Wave - Data Centers, Icy Moons And Chameleons

Episode Date: November 14, 2025

It’s another news roundup! This time, we cover how, using data analytics – and ironically, some AI – a team at Cornell University has mapped the environmental impact of AI by state. They determined that, by 2030, the rate of AI growth in the U.S. would put an additional 24 to 44 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The team further calculated that by 2030, AI could use as much water as 6 to 10 millions Americans do every year. All of this, they conclude, would put the tech industry’s climate goals out of reach. This episode, we also get into the potential for life on one of Saturn’s moons and a new discovery about why chameleons’ eyes are so special. Interested in reporting on the environmental impact of AI? Email us your question at [e-mail] to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Hello, my lovely waivers. It is me, your fearless co-host, Emily Kwong, here with a quick, free ask. Right now, on the app or platform where you're listening, can you leave us a rating or review? Like this one from Tristan, who says, howdy from Texas. I love y'all's show. It is always a way for me to learn more about the world, especially as a student, I learn more than I would at school, listening to y'all. But also listen to your teacher. Tristan says, thanks y'all so much for being an excellent source of knowledge. Oh, listen Like Tristan, we appreciate you so much. You help people find our show. So keep it coming. Write a few bars, drop it into the review section, give us some stars, and spread the shortwave word. All right, on to the news roundup. You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.

Hey, Short Waver is Regina Barber here. And Emily Kwong with our biweekly Science News Roundup featuring the host of All Things Considered. And today we have one of our favorites, the amazing space nerd, Scott Detrow. I'm back. I'm here. I'm thrilled. I assume we're going to talk space. Otherwise, I'm leaving. But what other stories?

First, we're going to talk about AI and kind of the energy crisis therein, broken out by state. Then we're going to talk about how scientists are learning more about an ocean moon of Saturn. And finally, after going to space, we're going to come back to Earth to talk about chameleons. Okay. And what makes them so weird and cool. Okay. these are two joyous, interesting things and one existential downery thing. So I can, I'll take that ratio.

Sounds about right. Excellent. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. Okay, Scott, we're going to get to space. But before that one, where do you want to start? Let's, since it seems the least joyous, let's start with AI computing. We talk a lot about AI these days and there's a lot of concern about the power it's sucking up. Yeah, it truly.

A lot of AI computing relies on data centers, data. The data centers are these big buildings which gobble up gigawatts of energy, sometimes millions of gallons of water for cooling. And as tech companies try to make good on AI's potential, there is an energy crisis in the making. How so? Well, because the majority of these data centers are powered by fossil fuels. Tian Chi Shao is a PhD candidate at Cornell University. And he says that if the tech industry and policymakers are not careful, the boom in AI will jeopardize our climate progress. The monitoring will be much important in the next few years.

because before we know the whole picture and they may already do something very bad for our environment. So this week in the journal Nature Sustainability, Tian Shi's team at Cornell published a state-by-state portrait of the environmental impact of AI. And this map took three years to make. Three years. What did it tell us? Was it worth the way? Well, using data analytics and ironically some AI, the team determined that by 2030 at the rate of AI growth in the U.S. would put an additional 24,000, to 44 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And the team said it could use as much water as six to 10 million Americans do every year. All of this, the paper concludes, would put the tech industry's climate goals out of reach. Can you remind me what those initial

goals were or are? Yeah. So Google, Microsoft and Meta have all pledged to reach net zero carbon emissions and to be water positive by 2030. Amazon has set their net zero carbon deadline for 24. But according to this paper, AI is putting all of those climate goals in peril. We reached out to these companies. Google didn't reply. And the others declined to comment. I mean, I'm hearing this. And I'm feeling sad and discouraged.

Yeah, me don't. Never. Is that the right feeling? Never despair, Scott, ever. Because a big part of this study is about solutions. The biggest takeaway is location. Study author, Feng Chi Yu, says where you build a data center matters. If we build AI in the right place,

on the clean power grid and with efficient cooling technology. It could really grow without blowing past climate and water limits. Thanks to you want, data centers built in places with low water stress that are already transitioning to clean energy. So spots in the Midwest and windbelt states like Texas, Montana, Nebraska, and South Dakota are good candidates. And big tech has been scouting future data centers in some of these states. This still makes me anxious and worried. And I think it's time to change the topic to an ocean moon. Yeah.

Which I would much rather. Talk about what a pivot. Well, me too. Me too, Scott. Off Earth. I know you love space. I do. You might remember that Saturn has 274 confirmed moons, right? Confirmed moons. Yeah. And one of those moons is Enceladus, and it's really intriguing to scientists looking for life elsewhere in the solar system because it has an ocean covering its entire surface that's locked under a thick layer of ice. And scientists say it could be a good potential spot for life. It looks like all the right ingredients are there for it. All it needs is time. That's Georgina Miles with the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado.

And the ingredients for life she's talking about are liquid water, chemicals like hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon. And in a new paper in the journal Science advances, she and her colleagues write about another important ingredient, a heating source. Which feels pretty important for life, huh? Yeah, turns out because if the temperatures in the ocean fluctuate too much or too hot or too cold, that's not good for life. You want a stable heat flow process. And overall, this study found that the heat flow seems to be pretty consistent on Enceladus. And that means that the ocean on Enceladus is very stable. It is now and probably has been for most of the moon's existence. Which I assume is another good ingredient for what we're talking about here.

Yeah, it's promising because life takes a really long time to begin and develop. Here's Carly Howitt, another author of the study and fellow planetary scientist. We know that evolution is a slow process, but we're hopeful if it started on Enceladus, there might be something. for us to see today. Something for us to see today. Does that mean we're going there? Are we sending robots there? What's the situation? Not NASA, but the European Space Agency may. Carly and Georgina are based in the UK, and the European Space Agency is proposing a mission to Enceladus in the 2040s. But there is a NASA mission going to another promising moon of Saturn, Titan. It's set to launch in 2008, which is really soon. This moon has mountains of ice and methane lakes. The lander on this mission,

dragonfly will do close-up measurements of a Titan surface. Okay. That's interesting. Yeah. Can we also talk about chameleons? And can I make a request? My three-year-old daughter has recently started calling chameleons colorful lizards. They are. It's true. They're part of a clade called Old World lizards. Yeah. And they are incredibly colorful and funky. Yeah. And Scott, let me also start with this like stone cold, like this universal truth about these colorful lizards, these chameleons. Every aspect of them is weird. This is Ed Stanley, an evolutionary biologist at the Florida Museum of Natural History. They have fused fingers for grasping onto branches.

They have all the color chain stuff. They have a ballistic tongue. Their body shape is absolutely bizarre, right? Most lizards are short and wide. These ones are incredibly thin and tall. And there's another trait to add to the list. They've got really weird optic nerves. Okay.

So optic nerves, that's the bundle of nerve fibers that send information between the eyes and the brain in lizards, they're more straight, but in chameleons, those optic nerves are coiled. In shortwave, in all things considered, we love weirdos. Yeah. It's very true. Three of them are in this room. Yes. But in terms of our chameleon friends, why does all this weirdness matter?

Okay, so researchers suspect it could help chameleons move their eyes in those, like, strange, twisty ways. I'm sure you've seen this before, Scott, like, when one eye of a chameleon is, like, moving independently from the other, like, maybe one is looking at an insect, for lunch and the other one's looking at another chameleon. Camilians can even look backwards. So it's really bizarre for an animal. What?

Right? Okay, this is Juan Daza. He's one of the study authors, and he compared the coils of their optic nerve to those old landline telephone cords. Oh. We discovered at some point that you made this core twisted. You can have more range of movement.

Like, remember the days when the phone would be in the kitchen and you could walk into the living room? So your mom couldn't hear you. Yeah, you didn't want that. Maybe the coil in the car. the optic nerves of chameleons is what allows their eyes to go all catawampus like that. I mean, I'm kind of surprised this is all new information. We've all been loving chameleons for a long time.

Yeah. Yeah. And scientists have dissected them. They've looked at chameleons, but that's probably why we didn't know this. So, like, dissections can damage the optic nerve. Mm-hmm. Researchers in this study, UCT scans, which allowed them to get a 3D view of the chameleon's internal structures without destroying the optic nerve.

They wrote about it this week in the journal's scientific reports. I wish I could look backwards like a chameleon. I think that's my takeaway. Yeah. And I miss phone landlines. I kind of do, too. That's really what we wanted you to take away from this story. Scott, we've had a great time with you.

Please come back as much as you want. Always happy to be here. You can hear more of Scott on Consider This and Pierre's afternoon podcast about what the news means for you. This episode was produced by Daniel Offman and Rachel Carlson. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez and Christopher and Taliatta. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Simon Laslo Jansson and Cui Lee were the audience. engineers. I'm Emily Kwong. And I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Shortwave,

the science podcast from NPR.