Short Wave - Pop Quiz! Short Wave Birthday Edition

Episode Date: October 14, 2022

Short Wave hosts Aaron Scott and Emily Kwong quiz All Things Considered hosts Mary Louise Kelly and Sacha Pfeiffer on some science questions Short Wave has reported on over the past year. They say they consider all the things, but do they consider the science enough? Quantum physics, prehistoric creatures and spelunking are all fair game in this friendly battle of the brains.-P.S. Short Wave is continuing our birthday celebration by hanging out with all of you on Twitter Spaces! We'll be on NPR's Twitter account @NPR on October 19 at 3pm Eastern, talking about the goofiness of our show and answering your questions. Join us! 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

This is Douglas DeStefano from Rumson, New Jersey. Happy birthday shortwave. This is Ryan. This is Leroy. Homer 8. I'm Britt. O'Reley. Claire.

Alex. I live in Berlin, Germany. Dallas, Texas. Minneapolis, Minnesota. Grand Forks, North Dakota. Huntington, Ohio. Happy birthday, shortwave. You're listening to Shortwave.

From NPR. Hey, Duturino's, Emily Kwong here. So, October 15th is the day we launched Shortwave, which means. Today is our third birthday, Eve. And like a proud mom, I got to say, the show has grown a lot. New colleagues have joined us, including our scientists and residents, Regina Barber, and my co-host, Erin Scott. Hello, Erin.

Hello, Emily, co-hosty with the Most Eve. Oh, thank you. Yeah, our sound has changed so much from just three short years ago. Shortwave launched a few months before the pandemic started. And so the show had to pivot like a tiny podcast dancer from covering shrooms research, and NASA, recovering COVID with some NASA on the side. And as we turn the ripe old age of three, it's time to take stock, look back, smile, and chart a new course. Really consider what we want next for the show and for our sound.

Considering the stuff, Emily, that's kind of our thing. Excuse me. Yes, NPR actually has a show called All Things Considered. We're daily. We aim to cover all the news. Wow, wow, wow. Okay, Mary Louise Kelly and Solution. A fifer from NPR have entered the chat. I'm going to sit down.

From NPR news, it's all things considered. We're here. We need to recover from this. Ooh, this is a little too much for me to process sharing this studio with you all. So we're big listeners. And while we might not consider all the things on our show, we do like to think that everything is science and science is in everything. So, like, that's kind of close, right? Yeah.

Yeah. We'll give you that. We wanted to convene this meeting of the daily audio minds because on the occasion of our birth, we wanted to invite you to play a little quiz game. We like to call Gagallie Wisball. You might want to workshop that a tiny bit, but go on. Not the point, Mary Louise Kelly, and you know that. Okay, so should you both choose to accept the rules are no Googling? Neither you, Mary Louise, nor you, Sasha, are able to review the questions and answers ahead of time.

All you have is your noggin. lots of humility and good sportsmanship. So we encourage the friendly competition. It's good for the soul. Do you accept? I do. I have plenty of humility. Not a lot of knowledge, but I'm game. I accept as well, just hoping there's not too much embarrassment for either one of us here.

Which one of you is more competitive? We're going to get competitive about who's competitive, Sasha. Oh, that's off to a great start. All right. Today on the show, Shortwave puts two of NPRs. most esteemed journalists to the test. They consider all the things, but do they consider science enough? I'm Emily Kwong. I'm Erin Scott. You're listening to Shortwave, the Daily Science Podcast from NPR. All right, Sasha, Mary Louise. Let's start with a newsy question. Last week, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for what kind of research?

You can count on your journalists really wanting to get the facts right. the fact that they're deliberating this much. I'm having a vague memory of reading an intro about this. Was it something to do with outer space? It has to do with physics. Yeah, well, that was, I was tempting you to tell me more, Emily Kwan. Do you want to get into a discipline, a little more specific? I thought you might want to elaborate.

I have no idea, Sasha. No, I also read the headline, and now I realize I cannot tell you what exactly that physicist did. Okay. All right. I'm going to help you out. The answer to the question is quantum physics. Okay. So three scientists shared this award for experiments showing that two particles, let's say Mary Louise Kelly and Sasha Pfeiffer, could behave like a single unit even when far apart, a phenomenon which is known as quantum entanglement. Here's a perfect metaphor. If you take two quarters and you flip them, they land heads or tails independently, right? In quantum entanglement, if you flip both quarters and one lands heads, the other is always going to land tails.

I know it makes no sense because of the rules of classical physics, but in quantum physics, that's how it works. And that innovation is what is allowing for quantum computers, which tech companies are investing millions in developing. Cool. I talked about this with Jeff Brumfield. He explained to me why these computers are able to go so much faster with the help of Google engineer, Marissa Justina. So first, imagine a regular computer is like a board game with square spaces, and you're trying to get to a diagonal space. Can I move diagonally like in checkers? No, no, you can't.

You have to take two steps, one up and one to the left or something. So then imagine a quantum computer has hexagonal spaces. Oh, like settlers of Catan. Yep, exactly. If you are on a hexagonal board or a board with diagonals, then you can do that in one step. So with a quantum computer, it's a faster way to make the same exact moves. Exactly. Get it?

It's starting to make sense. Okay, all right. Yeah, this is the kind of science we like on Shortwave. For us, it's all about maintaining curiosity for how things actually work. Next question. This is a completely different field. What is this animal? I can take a wild guess.

All right. I think it's a baby something, and I would guess bird. But I want to disclaim I'm wildly guessing here. That is not quite it. It is something that's a little bit closer related to we humans. Is it a baby monkey? Monkey? Something close to a monkey?

Primate. Yes, yes, yes. Here's our answer from John Hamilton. Okay. Poor baby bonobo. It sounds like a human. With chimps, you know, aggression is pretty common. And physical strength is key.

so the animal in charge is invariably a dominant male. Bonobos aren't like that. Here's something Dr. Jonas Mukamba told us. He's the lead veterinarian at the sanctuary. Bonobos, they're the female who dominion. It's the female who is chief of group. What he's saying is that with bonobos, the females dominate, and that a female is always the head of the group.

So this is a story that John Hamilton reported about research in a bonobo sanctuary, and what is teaching us about how people, how we evolved. I love that. I never would have guessed that was a bonobo, but I do speak French and he said the females are the boss. That's right. But let us keep going. Emily Kwong is the kind of host who loves heading out for shortwave, sometimes into very challenging situations.

Which of the following has she not done for our show? Run a marathon, hung out with giant bears. crawled into a toxic cave looking for wriggling worm blobs or recalled her past life in the circus. Sasha, go for it. I'm going to give a practical answer, which is that Emily did not climb into a toxic cave because NPR would have a serious employee liability problem.

Sasha, I most certainly did not, but you know who did? Who did? Right here. It wasn't Emily. It was actually me. It was for a series we did about science taking place in our public lands. And to your point, I had to put on a breathing apparatus and crawl into this cave to find these little worms that only live in sulfuric water in the spring in this cave.

And as you look, you can see clumps of worms everywhere. Wow, they really are everywhere. I mean, it's stunning. I'm just going to collect a couple of worms real quickly. The worm blobs look like little blood-red sea anemones, wriggling in the streambed, and they live off the bacteria that in turn lives off the sulfur. So it's easy to see why scientists look to places like this sulfur cave to dream up what life might look like on other planets. Where was this cave, by the way?

It was in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, just over the hill from where I grew up, actually. Cool. It was kind of fulfilling a childhood fantasy. Fantastic. Spillinking. By my estimation, the score is one-to-one. You are tied. Erin, next question. Perfect. Our next topic is moving on to genetics. Shortwave did an entire series on the different kinds of tastes that we called taste buddies. Mary Louise and Sasha, I would love if you would tell me what taste evolved to keep us from poisoning ourselves. My husband happens to be a seventh grade science teacher and he teaches genetics. Unfair advantage that should have been disclosed at the get-go, but go on.

It may be a conflict of interest. I feel like I have to take a shot at this just because I live with a science teacher. Yes, please. Go for it. I am going to say that it is bitterness that is the tip-off. You are correct. Good. This is a scientist we talked to Masha Neve explaining it. So bitter, as the common paradigm says, it has to protect from poisons,

or, as I try to say, it has to alert us so that we decide whether something is poisonous for us or not. Because in the world around us, there are plants and there are insects, and there are lots of natural chemical compounds around us. And we kind of need these receptors to say, okay, it's something new. Let's first be a little bit careful about it, a little bit averse to it. Sasha has taken the leave. Yes, she has. I'm not bitter. She has phoned a friend.

Her husband, the seventh grade science teacher. Shout out to teachers everywhere. You have one more question, though. Your final question has to do with creatures of the distant past. And honestly, my earliest science fandom, dinosaurs. Shortwave recently asked why dinosaurs ended up the dominant species on planet Earth because there were other critters around. We want you to name one of the three kinds of animals that were competing with dynos

during the Triassic period 250 million years ago. One of the three kinds of animals. That's correct. All right, Mary Louise. Fish? Oh, Mary Louise, I'm going to give it to you because there were fish during the triassic period. However, I would not consider them really competing with dynos. They weren't really up to snuff in the way that some of these other animals were.

We're going to help you out playing a little bit of a story featuring paleo-climatologists, Elena Suarez and shortwave scientist in residence Regina Barber. First up, the phytosaurs. We had kind of these crocodile-looking organisms called phytosaurs. They lived probably in the freshwater ecosystem in rivers and lakes. And they got pretty big. Some of their skulls were like, you know, three feet long. Next up, the Adosaurs.

These were one of the dominant vertebrate land animals. And those organisms were kind of like, kind of, like cows. They kind of had like an armored back and they had little heads and little teeth and they were plant eaters. And it starts to get a little spicy with their big carnivore characters, the Rusukians.

That kind of looked like dinosaurs but walked on all fours that had big sharp teeth but like their limbs were underneath the body so they could probably like gallop and run. So you had this like... Okay so I think our final tally is a tie. Are we two to two?

By my calculations, we're Two to two. How very NPR. It's very NPR. We're all winners here. If you try, you will win. Yeah, participation trophies. Truly, thank you so much for playing along with us today.

We love the work you do on this show. Back at you. So much. Thank you. And you're two of our favorite reporters and, you know, kind of inspire us every day with what you do. Well, this was a ton of fun. Yes, thank you. And happy third birthday.

Happy birthday. Thank you. you so much. Shortwave is continuing our birthday celebration next week by hanging out with all of you on Twitter spaces next Wednesday, October 19th at 3 p.m. Eastern. Join us. We'll be going live from the NPR Twitter account. And we're going to talk about all the goofiness on our show, tell some behind-the-scenes stories, and take your questions. Today's episode was produced and edited by our senior supervising editor, Jaselle Grayson and Rebecca Ramirez, with help from Christopher and Taliatta, Megan Lim, and Courtney Dorney. Beth Donovan is the programming senior director, and Anya Grunman is the senior vice president of programming.

I'm Erin Scott. I'm Emily Kwong. You're listening to Shortwave, the Daily Science podcast from NPR.