Short Wave

It’s likely you have at least one “guilty pleasure.” Maybe it’s romance novels. Or reality TV… Playing video games… or getting swept into obscure corners of TikTok. Neuroscientists say the pleasure re...

When producer Berly McCoy was out on her local frozen lake, she saw something she'd never seen before. There were dark spidery, star-shaped patterns in the ice and they freaked her out. So, we called ...

In 1999 hundreds of gray whales washed up along the west coast of North America. More in 2000. They lost an estimated 25% of their population. But then the whale population recovered and people moved ...

Today, guest host Selena Simmons-Duffin is exploring a detail very personal to her: How the number of older brothers a person has can influence their sexuality. Scientific research on sexuality has a...

Paleontologists have often determined how old a dinosaur was by counting the growth rings in its bones. Just like with trees, it was thought that each ring corresponded to a single year of age. But re...

Teens aren’t getting enough sleep! And a two-decade study suggests it’s getting worse. Scientists found that the number of high schoolers getting insufficient sleep — less than seven hours a night — h...

In his role as secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is changing how the United States approaches vaccines. But those changes aren’t limited to the United States. NPR global he...

If you’ve been on the internet in the past few weeks, chances are you’ve seen him: a tiny gray-brown monkey dragging a big, stuffed orangutan around Japan’s Ichikawa Zoo. His name? Punch-kun, or Punch...

Lakes are freezing later, thawing earlier and experiencing dramatic temperature swings in between. And all that throws off the delicate balance of life below the surface. And that has a major impact o...

Over half a billion people live by lakes that freeze over in the winter. But as the climate warms, those lakes are losing whole days of ice cover. Winters are also getting weirder, with more intense t...