Short Wave

Chocolate may fill grocery store shelves around the world, but the raw product that powers chocolate is far more selective. The majority of chocolate farms are found in West Africa and South America –...

Thirty years ago, park rangers reintroduced grey wolves into Yellowstone National Park. They wanted to restore the ecosystem and get the elk population, which had decimated the plant community, in che...

Imagine, you’re a toxic toad hanging around South America. No other animals are gonna mess with you, right? After all, you’re ~toxic~! So if anyone tries to eat you, they’ll be exposed to something ca...

Scientists have mapped less than 30% of the world's seafloor. Experts say that getting that number up to 100% would improve everything from tsunami warnings to the Internet and renewable energy. That'...

In this Back To School episode we consider the "List of Life": the criteria that define what it is to be a living thing. Some are easy calls: A kitten is alive. A grain of salt is not.But what about t...

Neurotic, anxious robots like C-3P0 from Star Wars' C-3P0 and Marvin from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy are a staple of science fiction — but they're not as common in the real world. Most of th...

A Chinese scientist, He Jiankui, made a shocking announcement to the world in 2018: He had secretly engineered the birth of the first gene-edited babies. The birth of the twins was seen as reckless an...

How did life start on Earth? The answer is a big scientific mystery scientists are actively investigating. After talking with many scientists, host Regina G. Barber found that an abundance of water on...

The human brain tends to slow down as we age — even healthy brains shrink. That can make learning and memory harder as people age. But some people’s brains shrink more slowly than their peers. This lu...

Every September, the small town of La Junta, Colorado puts on a whole festival to celebrate a beloved local animal: the tarantula! Around this time of year, thousands of mature male tarantulas start t...