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There's a lot going on with the coronavirus. To keep you up to speed, we'll be doing more regular updates on the latest about the pandemic. Today, NPR science correspondents Jon Hamilton and Nell Greenfieldboyce discuss challenges in testing for the virus and how COVID-19 affects the elderly.
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Pi Day (3/14) approaches. To help honor the coming holiday and the importance of math, stand-up mathematician Matt Parker unspools a common math mistake known as the off-by-one-error. His new book is called 'Humble Pi: When Math Goes Wrong In The Real World.'
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Coronavirus is all over the headlines. Accompanying the growing anxiety around its spread, has been suspicion and harassment of Asians and Asian Americans. For more on this, we turned to Gene Demby, co-host of NPR's Code Switch podcast, and his conversation with historian Erika Lee. We talk about how this wave of stigma is part of a longer history in the United States of camouflaging xenophobia as public health and hygiene concerns.
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In 2016, biologists and fishermen across the country started to notice something disturbing. Freshwater mussels were dying in large numbers. NPR National Correspondent Nathan Rott tells us about the unsolved mystery surrounding the die-off, the team racing to figure it out, and why mussels are so important for the health of our streams and rivers.
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Physicists have done the math and there should be as much antimatter as matter — but that hasn't been the case so far. NPR Correspondent Geoff Brumfiel explains what's up with matter's "evil twin," antimatter.
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From currency and commerce, food labels to laboratories, the metric system is the foundation of many science and math fields. To mark our 100th episode (a multiple of 10, which is the basis for the metric system!), we spoke with Elizabeth Benham, Metric Program Coordinator at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, about the presence of the metric system in our everyday lives.
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This one doesn't end the way you'd expect. Inspired by the Netflix documentary series "Night On Earth," we learn everything we can about a mouse and scorpion who do battle on the regular — from two scientists who study them: Ashlee Rowe at the University of Oklahoma and Lauren Esposito at the California Academy of Sciences.
If you have Netflix, you can watch the critters clash about 18 minutes into the episode 'Moonlit Plains' here.
Read more about Lauren's work with scorpions here, and Ashlee's work with grasshopper mice here. And you can learn more about grasshopper mouse vocalizations from Northern Arizona University's Bret Pasch here.
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Despite quarantines and other measures, the coronavirus keeps popping up. What makes it so hard to control?
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As sea levels rise from climate change, coastal communities face a greater risk of chronic flooding. Climate scientist Astrid Caldas and her colleagues have looked at where it's happening now and where it could happen in the future as the tides keep getting higher. Follow host Maddie Sofia on Twitter @maddie_sofia. Email the show at shortwave@npr.org.
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NPR Pharmaceuticals Correspondent Sydney Lupkin joins us to talk about a dad who learned his daughter needed an expensive drug — but there was a nearly identical one that was thousands of dollars cheaper. It's part of NPR's Bill of the Month series, which is done in partnership with Kaiser Health News. Follow Emily and Sydney on Twitter. They're @EmilyKwong1234 and @slupkin. Email the show at shortwave@npr.org.
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