Short Wave

It's 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...

Riddle us this: Which animal is pink, curved beaked and a master of the physics required to create water tornadoes? If you guessed flamingos, you're right. New research out this month in the journal P...

What's it like to get bit by a venomous snake? "It's like a bee sting times a thousand," Tim Friede says. Tim would know. Over the past few decades, he's let himself be bitten over 200 times by all ki...

The Trump administration is rewriting policies and reducing funding for multiple agencies that handle climate change, including NOAA, EPA and FEMA. We asked NPR reporters Lauren Sommer and Alejandra B...

In science fiction, wormholes are hyperspace subway tubes linking one part of a galaxy directly to another, distant point. But could they actually exist? To find out, we talk to theoretical physicist ...

Approximately 80% of orange cats are males, including the four orange cats owned by the Short Wave team. Scientists have long suspected that orange color was a sex-linked trait — hiding somewhere on t...

Most bats use echolocation to navigate and hunt, but some use their ears for another trick: eavesdropping. "And then these frog-eating bats, for example, they are actually listening in on the mating...

Becoming fluent in a second language is difficult. But for adults, is it impossible? Science says no. In this encore episode, Short Wave host Emily Kwong dissects the "critical period hypothesis," a t...

Today, we're airing an episode of NPR's daily economics podcast, The Indicator from Planet Money. It's about a group of people we know well: scientists. President Trump's federal cuts and scrutiny o...

Google, Microsoft and Meta have all pledged to reach at least net-zero carbon emissions by 2030. Amazon set their net-zero deadline for 2040. To understand how these four tech companies could possibly...