Science, Spoken

Flu season is good for no one. The infection kills thousands of people every year, while many more spend days suffering in bed. Kids get infected. Then the virus flattens the parents who stay home with them. Even dogs are laid low. Except there is one entity that kinda loves the flu. Telemedicine companies are hoping to use the annual scourge as a lure for new customers. When the days get shorter and the germs run rampant, they start to see more users checking out their services. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

For hundreds of millions of years, sharks have been roaming Earth’s oceans making meals out of a huge range of critters, from the whale shark gobbling up tiny krill to the 60-foot megalodon that could take down whales. Their ancestral line has survived mass extinctions with ease, most notably the catastrophe that took down the dinosaurs. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

From the beginning of time, humankind has searched for the secret to a long life. Now science may have found an answer, in the form of molecular augury. The pattern of chemical chains that attach to the DNA in your cells—on-off switches known as epigenetic markers—can reveal how swiftly you are aging, and perhaps even how much longer you will live. While genetic testing might tell you where you came from, epigenetics promises a glimpse into the future. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Nearly 6,000 years ago, in a seaside marshland in what is now southern Denmark, a woman with blue eyes and dark hair and skin popped a piece of chewing gum in her mouth. Not spearmint gum, mind you, but a decidedly less palatable chunk of black-brown pitch, boiled down from the bark of the birch tree. An indispensable tool in her time, birch pitch would solidify as it cooled, so the woman and her comrades would have had to chew it before using it as a sort of superglue for, say, making tools. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

There’s a cruel irony in the fact that holiday travel tends to coincide with the rise of flu season. Yet more than 47 million Americans are preparing to sit for hours inside a tube in the sky, perhaps near someone with a hacking cough. It sounds like the perfect (infectious) storm. But reaching your destination without collecting microbial stowaways isn’t as daunting as it seems. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Experienced mathematicians warn up-and-comers to stay away from the Collatz conjecture. It’s a siren song, they say: Fall under its trance and you may never do meaningful work again. The Collatz conjecture is quite possibly the simplest unsolved problem in mathematics—which is exactly what makes it so treacherously alluring. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In the summer of 2014, Markie Miller discovered she'd been drinking toxic coffee. Miller lives in Toledo, Ohio, where fertilizer runoff from farms had caused blooms of toxic cyanobacteria in Lake Erie, her water supply. The city issued an alert at 2 am, but by the time Miller saw it she'd already been sipping her morning java. “I'm like, shit, what did I just expose myself to?” she says. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

You may have heard the phrase “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch,” perhaps in conversation with your parents when they wanted you to get a job. Its acronym—TANSTAAFL—pops up in subreddits like r/Anarcho_Capitalism, on sweatshirts from the politically inclined website LibertyManiacs.com, and as a nerdy economics rap on YouTube. Also: For the first eight years of the Libertarian party’s existence, TANSTAAFL was its official slogan. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

For the last 20 years, the future of nuclear power has stood in a high bay laboratory tucked away on the Oregon State University campus in the western part of the state. Operated by NuScale Power, an Oregon-based energy startup, this prototype reactor represents a new chapter in the conflict-ridden, politically bedeviled saga of nuclear power plants. NuScale’s reactor won’t need massive cooling towers or sprawling emergency zones. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In 2004, a 64-year-old woman in Indiana had a catheter put in to help with dialysis. Soon after the procedure, she came to a local hospital with low blood pressure and what turned out to be a dangerous antibiotic-resistant infection from a bacteria called Enterococcus faecalis. Today, that woman’s blood samples helped solve a long-standing mystery: how this deadly bacteria neutralizes the most powerful antibiotic used to fight it. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices