New discoveries, everyday mysteries, and the science behind the headlines — in just under 15 minutes. It's science for everyone, using a lot of creativity and a little humor. Join hosts Emily Kwong and Regina Barber for science on a different wavelength.
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3 of the seafood watch list. The aquarium is unveiling its super green list, AKA fish that are super green, exceptionally environmentally friendly, and exceptionally sustainable. Yes. So every month, they're going to name one seafood and they're gonna provide recipes and nutritional facts. And for this month, the pick is albacore tuna. And with that, Stacey, we've covered a lot of ground. So why don't we end with a little recap? Serve it up. Takeaway number 1, use an online guide. There are a bunch of great ones. They're free and the information is amazing, and it goes super in-depth on all kinds of aspects about where your fish came from. And maybe look up some of your favorites in advance. Those guides are kind of complicated and very thorough. Takeaway number 2, ask questions. Ask all the questions. Be that annoying guest because just the act of asking questions can make a real difference, can have a real impact. Takeaway number 3, look up sustainable fish and maybe try some out. You might find something that you really like. That is so true. And you know why, Claire Marie? Why? There are just a lot of fish in the sea. Like corgi. Why why corgi? Claire Marie Schneider, thank you. And thank you to Stacy Vanek Smith for all of your reporting on sustainable seafood and how to be a mindful consumer. Thanks for having us on shortwave, Emily. This episode collab was produced by Claire Marie and edited by our show runner, Rebecca Ramirez. They both checked the facts. Becky Brown and Maggie Luther were the audio engineers for this episode. I am Emily Quang. Thank you for listening to Shortwave from NPR. Support for this NPR pod
A and d. Also, planet oats unsweetened varieties have 0 grams of sugar. It's great in coffee, cereal, smoothies. You name it. So next time you're at the grocery store, save the overthinking for the podcast and reach for the one that has it all. Planet oat oat milk or visit planetoak.com for more. Alright. Mary Luis, as our guest, which topic do you want to start with? First, Well, as usual, I'm kinda into all of these, but let's start dark. Let's go dark energy. Okay, Mary Luis. So to explain dark energy, we do have to go in time just a little bit, like, 13000000000 years to the big bang. This rapid expansion of the universe, everything, And after this explosion, the universe kept expanding. It's still expanding today. And in the late nineties, scientists figured out 2 things, First, that this expansion of our universe is speeding up over time. And second, that there had to be something behind this acceleration. Let me take a wild guess in the dark that this something is is in fact dark energy. That is correct. Ding ding. Yes. Our current model of the universe says dark energy is constant and will continue to push everything in the universe apart. So much so that one day, Mary Louise, other galaxies won't be visible from Earth. Even the stars in our own galaxy will die out leaving behind a cold, dark, nothing. Okay. That is not where I was hoping to go. It's okay. This demise will happen over 1000000000000 plus years, so we'll we'll long be gone. And there might actually be a wrinkle in all of this, so scientists have created a new 3 d map of the universe using this device called DESI, which stands for dark energy spectroscopic instrument. And one of the researchers, Dylan Brout, says the map suggests that dark energy may be getting weaker over the last 11000000000 years. For the last 11000000000 years. Okay. So, not so constant.
Support for this podcast and the following message come from Humana. Employees are the heartbeat of your business. That's why Humana offers group dental, vision, life, and disability plans designed to protect them. Exceptional service, broad networks, and modern benefits, that's the power of human care. You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. 500000000 years ago, the world was a very different place. The land was kind of boring and empty, but the ocean was full of animals, very different from the animals of today. Vaguely beautiful and vaguely horrifying. If you were in, like, a submarine or using, like, a deep sea rover, for example, and you were looking at the animals there, you'd find animals that are able to eat each other, animals that have the capacity to see, interact with their environment, swim, and burrow. But the kinds of animals that are there are very different in terms of the proportion, like which groups are highly successful, which groups have what kind of features. And many of them look vaguely familiar to the kind of animals you'd find in a modern ecosystem, like in the in the ocean, but also quite alien in some ways, with different arrangements of their limbs and their eyes and all sorts of, like, kind of interesting features that, you know, went extinct 100 of 1000000 of years ago as well. This is Karma Nanglu, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology. And he spent a lot of time studying this period, the Cambrian period. 500000000 years ago, there were all these different life forms. It was a total renaissance of biodiversity on Earth. We have the extremely rapid, from a geological perspective, appearance of pretty much every major animal group you can imagine in the fossil record for the first time. Basically, the ancient ocean was full of our animal ancestors, and karma has devoted his career to studying them. As far as he's concerned, the weirder, the better. Why look at animals if they're not a little bit alien? Right? Like, that was the first thing that got me when I was a kid, watching National Geographic, like, with
Can also see this pattern to a lesser extent in our daily lives. We can all have wants triggered by reward, reward cues, things like foods and consumer items and video games and little social messages. These things can trigger dopamine release mesolimbic activation, and we want to engage with them. Even if we don't even like them. Mhmm. This feels consistent with a lot of people's relationship to social media. Yeah. Okay. So just to go back to, like, the origin point of this episode, you're sharing that you love these dragon romance novels Mhmm. But you feel a little guilt. Where does that guilt part come from? So there's not a ton of neuroscience research that specifically focuses on guilty pleasures in the brain, but I did ask Morton to think about his previous research and then hypothesize how having some of these negative emotions about the things we actually like might change those good feelings. They engage these kind of higher social networks, and those social networks then have the power to make us change how it is that we are running through that leisure cycle. The power of other people. It's big. So this idea of a guilty pleasure could be an example of something we really do like but don't want to like, or it could just be a way of signaling to other people like, hey, I'm separate from this thing that I enjoy. It's kind of hard to say. Okay. Although there is some behavioral research that suggests feeling guilty about doing something might actually make us enjoy that thing more. Okay. Tell me more about that, about liking something, even if you should feel guilty about it. I talked to Kelly Goldsmith about this. She's a behavioral scientist and professor of marketing at Vanderbilt University, and she did a whole series of studies in 2012 testing the associations between guilt and pleasure. Oh, wow. She and her team basically got people to be thinking about guilt without being consciously aware of it. How'd they pull that off? So they'd have participants do things like unscramble a bunch of work,
Podcasting strategy. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Shortwave from NPR. This message comes from NPR sponsor, VCU Massey Comprehensive Cancer Center, who as an NCI designated comprehensive cancer center in the country's top 4% is unconditionally committed to keeping loved ones in their lives. Massycancercenter.org/comprehensive. Support for NPR and the following message come from IXL online. Is your child asking questions on their homework you don't feel equipped to answer? IXL Learning uses advanced algorithms to give the right help to each kid no matter the age or personality. One subscription gets you everything. One site for all the kids in your home, pre k to 12th grade. Make an impact on your child's learning. Get IXL now, and NPR listeners can get an exclusive 20% off IXL membership when they sign up today at ixl.com/npr. This election season, you can expect to hear a lot of news. Some of it meaningful, much of it not. Give the Up First podcast 15 minutes, sometimes a little less, and we'll help you sort it out what's going on around the world and at home. Three stories, 15 minutes, Up First every day. Listen every morning wherever you get your podcasts.
