Podcasts – A Moment of Science

The ocean is getting louder. Fish make noise. They whistle, chirp, hum, sing, swish. But boat engines, sonar, and deep-sea mining cause quite the racket, making it difficult for fishes to hear the call of friends or potential mates.

In 2019 a team of Swedish and British scientists published a study claiming that whether we chose to own a dog or not may be influenced by our genes.

A high-powered camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft recently took a picture of a newly formed impact crater on Mars. Researchers know that the impact happened sometime between pictures of the area taken in September 2016 and February 2019.

According to new research, if a person is good at recognizing patterns, that’s a good indicator that they’ll be good at learning languages, too. There’s mixed research on whether language learning ability is based on language specific capacities in the brain, or whether it draws on more general pattern-recognition abilities.

According to natural selection, species evolve in ways that better enable them to survive and pass on their genes.  But sometimes evolution takes what may appear to be odd and unexpected turns.  Take, for example, birds that have wings but can't fly.  What can explain this strange phenomenon?

According to many scientists, we are in the midst of a major mass extinction catastrophe right now. In 2019 a United Nations backed scientific panel concluded that the rate of species extinctions happening right now is already tens to hundreds of times higher than the average over the past ten million years.

Naked mole-rats are resistant to certain kinds of pain, like the burning sensation caused by acid and capsaicin, the compound that gives chili peppers their heat. But they do feel the painful effects of a substance called allyl isothiocyanate, which is what gives wasabi its burn.

Today on A Moment of Science, we’re going to take a moment to think about coffee and specifically about the importance of water temperature when brewing coffee.

According to new research, most diamonds found at the Earth’s surface are made of carbon from recycled ancient seabed. It’s been a theory for a while, since some diamonds have traces of salt trapped in them.

Perhaps you’ve heard that the average person dreams four to six times each night. But did you know that most of us are unable to recall 90% of our dreams? Today on A Moment of Science we ask why it is that we forget most of our dreams.

An overabundance of so-called "bad" cholesterol clogs the arteries with plaque, making blood flow more difficult. If the plaque ruptures, a blood clot can form and cut off blood supply completely.

The Atacama Desert in Northern Chile is the driest desert on Earth. The only life there is microbial, and researchers study it to get an idea of what we might find on Mars.

There’s been a lot of research lately about how we can get rid of malaria-carrying mosquito populations. One way might be to use a transgenic fungus.

Humans aren’t the only species that send their children to nurseries in order to play, learn and be protected. Giraffes, in fact, sometimes leave their calves in a sort of nursery.

Mark and Scott Kelly are identical twin brothers who are both NASA astronauts. In 2015, Scott Kelly was launched on a record 340 day mission to the International Space Station.