Short Wave Folgen

Dietary supplements — the vitamins, herbs and botanicals that you'll find in most grocery stores — are everywhere. More than half of U.S. adults over 20 take them, spending almost $50 billion on vitamins and other supplements in 2021. Yet decades of research have produced little evidence that they really work. Aaron Scott talks to Dr. Jenny Jia about the science of dietary supplements: which ones might help, which ones might hurt, and where we could be spending our money instead.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Brazil's president-elect, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, is renewing calls to protect the Amazon and rein in the deforestation. Climate scientists are encouraged but so far there aren't a lot of specifics of how this might happen. NPR's Kirk Siegler traveled to a remote Amazonian research station that is also threatened by illegal logging and talks to host Aaron Scott about his trip.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

On Dec. 5 at 1 o'clock in the morning local time, researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California used lasers to zap a tiny pellet of hydrogen fuel. The lasers hit their target with 2.05 megajoules of energy, and the pellet released roughly 3.15 megajoules. It's a major milestone, and one that the field of fusion science has struggled to reach for more than half a century: producing a fusion reaction that generates more energy than it consumes. While progress, the technology is still a ways off from its promise to produce energy without creating greenhouse gases. Today on the show, Regina G. Barber brings us two NPR stories that explain what this experiment showed and what else needs to happen to make fusion a practical energy source.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy