Where you learn something new every day.
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Search results for

  • Dozens of protesters gathered at the entrance to one of the nation's largest mass-vaccination sites, leading officials to shut down the entrance for an hour.
  • The pro-democracy newspaper will run its last edition on Saturday — signaling the end to Hong Kong's once freewheeling and muckraking reporting environment as well.
  • Delta will not mandate employees to be vaccinated against the coronavirus, but its CEO says the charge is necessary because the average hospital stay for the virus costs the airline $40,000.
  • Standing atop the podium where no Filipino had stood before, a tearful Hidilyn Diaz, who serves in the Philippine air force, snapped off a salute.
  • It was not the color medal the U.S. had hoped for, but it was a better result than at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics when the USWNT was bounced out of the tournament in the quarterfinals.
  • A Finnish computer scientist had a dream that a blackbird was speaking to her in human language. So she devised a computer program to transform the sounds of the human voice into birdsong.
  • Top level U.S. and European diplomats are visiting Nicaragua urging its president to return to a national dialogue with opposition groups. The pleas come at a time of crackdown on press and protests.
  • California's top election official has announced that organizers of a campaign to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom have submitted enough valid signatures to place the question before voters later this year.
  • In Turkey, the government is touting its donations of medical supplies abroad even though coronavirus is taking a steep toll in Turkey and the economy is on the brink.
  • NPR's David Kestenbaum reports on a possible wrinkle in the space-time continuum. Really. Physicists measuring the fundamental characteristics of a subatomic particle, the muon, have come up with some very puzzling results that could punch a hole in the long-standing "standard model" of how matter is put together. And that could help usher in a completely new theory of matter, time and space. Unless, of course, some scientist has made a mistake. (4:30) (It was later revealed this was a mistake: "Well, I would say I'm responsible for the mistake. My collaborator did most of the work, but I am equally guilty of making mistakes." Toichiro Kinoshita, a physicist at Princeton University. Kinoshita's sin was to have a minus sign where he should have had a plus or maybe the other way around. He can't quite remember, though it ended up having gigantic consequences. Kinoshita and his colleague were calculating how a particular subatomic particle behaves when it's stuck in a magnetic field. The particle, it turns out, wobbles like a toy top at a particular frequency. Kinoshita enlisted hundreds of computers and, after a decade of heroic work, had precisely predicted how fast it should wobble according to the laws of physics. Last winter, other physicists who were out measuring the wobble found it differed significantly from Kinoshita's prediction. In the clockwork world of physics, this was potentially a huge finding, signaling something new and mysterious, except that it wasn't. Kinoshita traced his error to a tiny quirk in a computer program he was using. He hadn't checked that bit, in part because other physicists using a different approach had gotten the same answer."
1,035 of 5,711