How Much Should The Public Be Told About Risky Virus Research?

"U.S. officials are currently weighing the benefits and risks of proposed experiments that might make a dangerous pathogen even worse — but the details of that review, and the exact nature of the experiments, aren't being released to the public."

"At the same time, officials are to hold a meeting in Bethesda, Md., later this week to debate how much information to openly share about this kind of controversial work, and how much to reveal about the reasoning behind decisions to pursue or forgo it."

"The meeting comes as the high stakes of this research are coincidentally being highlighted by events in China, where public health workers are grappling with an outbreak of a new coronavirus. The virus likely first arose in animals and seems to have acquired the ability to be transmitted from person to person."

"How animal viruses can acquire the ability to jump into humans and become contagious is exactly the question that some researchers are trying to answer by manipulating pathogens in the lab, to explore what genetic changes alter their virulence and transmissibility."

Border Wall Threatens National Wildlife Refuge That's Been 40 Years In The Making

"Over the past 41 years, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has been buying up land on the lower Texas-Mexico border to protect one of the most biologically diverse regions in North America from developers and farmers."

"But the Rio Grande Valley of Texas is a hotspot for illegal immigration and drug smuggling, as well as biodiversity. That's why the Trump administration is planning to build 110 miles of border wall through the valley (which is actually a river delta)."

"Pieces of that wall will go directly through the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge because it is land already owned by the federal government. Elsewhere on the Texas border, construction of the president's wall is being slowed by difficulties acquiring private land. It can take months or years to take private property through eminent domain."

"It's a tragic situation," said Caroline Brouwer, vice president for government affairs at the National Wildlife Refuge Association, a Washington-based nonprofit that advocates for the nation's often overlooked refuge system. "Fish and Wildlife staff have worked on this issue for decades and decades. And it's being torn down in front of our eyes."

The Kratom Debate: Helpful Herb Or Dangerous Drug?

"Americans know the dangers of drugs such as morphine and heroin. But what about a supplement that acts in the brain a bit like an opiate and is available in many places to kids — even from vending machines."

"Kratom, an herb that's abundant, legal in most states and potentially dangerous, is the subject of an ongoing debate over its risks and benefits."

"Usually, the leaf, which comes from a tropical Southeast Asian tree, is chewed, brewed or crushed into a bitter green powder. The chemicals in the herb interact with different types of receptors in the brain — some that respond to opioids, and others to stimulants. Often sold in the U.S. in a processed form — as pills, capsules or extracts — a small amount of kratom can perk you up, while a large dose has a sedative effect."

"Some people who have struggled with an opioid addiction and switched to kratom swear the substance salvaged their health, livelihood and relationships."

"But the federal Food and Drug Administration and the Drug Enforcement Administration worry that kratom carries the risk of physical and psychological dependency and, in some people, addiction. The FDA warns consumers not to use kratom, and the DEA threatened to prohibit kratom's sale and use in the U.S. (outside of research) in 2016; advocates and lawmakers subsequently pushed back, and the stricter scheduling of kratom that would have prompted that sort of ban never occurred. These days, the DEA lists it as a drug of concern."

Ready For Your First Marathon? Training Can Cut Years Off Your Cardiovascular Age

"If you've ever considered training for a marathon, but you're a bit intimidated by the idea of 26.2 miles, here's some motivation."

"A slow and steady 6-month training program designed to gradually build up endurance and mileage gave a group of novice runners, aged 21 to 69, an impressive boost to their heart health."

"'What we found in this study is that we're able to reverse the processes of aging that occur in the [blood] vessels,' says study author Dr. Anish Bhuva, a British Heart Foundation Cardiology Fellow at Barts Heart Centre in the UK."

"Each of the 138 runners received a scan at the beginning and end of the training. Using these images, researchers documented reductions in aortic artery stiffness which were equivalent to a four-year reduction in vascular age. The findings are published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology."

"'As you get older, the normal aging process causes changes in your heart and your vessels,' Bhuva says. 'When the main blood vessels in your body get stiffer, it means you get higher blood pressure.'"

Tennessine's Wild Ride To The Periodic Table

There are rare chemical elements, and then there is tennessine. Only a couple dozen atoms of the stuff have ever existed. For the 150th anniversary of the periodic table, NPR science correspondent Joe Palca shares the convoluted story of one of the latest elements to be added.

California Reservation's Solar Microgrid Provides Power During Utility Shutoffs

"California's largest electric utility took the unprecedented step of shutting off power to millions of customers beginning last October. The decision was meant to prevent power equipment from sparking catastrophic wildfires."

"Now a renewable energy microgrid on a tiny California Native American reservation is proving to be one solution to this ongoing problem."

"The Blue Lake Rancheria is located just north of Eureka, Calif. On the 100-acre campus, just behind the casino and hotel, Jana Ganion opens a chain-link fence."

"'We're up on a little platform that can oversee most of the array,' she says. 'This is the view I like the best.'"

"Inside, in an area half the size of a football field, are more than 1,500 solar panels, slanted toward the noonday sun."

"Ganion is the sustainability director with the Blue Lake Rancheria, which includes about 50 members. She helped build this solar microgrid as part of the tribe's goal to develop climate-resilient infrastructure and to be ready for earthquakes and tsunamis."

"But then beginning in October, it became useful in a whole new way."

Enormous 'Megafire' In Australia Engulfs 1.5 Million Acres

"A pair of massive bushfires in southeastern Australia has merged into a "megafire" engulfing some 2,300 square miles — a single blaze more than three times as large as any known fire in California."

"The merged fire, which straddles the country's most populous states of New South Wales and Victoria, measures nearly 1.5 million acres, according to The Sydney Morning Herald. It is just one of some 135 bushfires in Australia's southeast that have claimed the lives of at least 26 people, killed more than a billion animals and damaged or destroyed nearly 3,000 homes."

"Since September, the unprecedented bushfires have swept through an area larger than Massachusetts and New Hampshire combined."

"NASA has released an animation showing how smoke from the fires has reached the lower stratosphere and traveled as far away as Chile."

Grim And Hopeful Global Trends To Watch In 2020 (And Fold Into A Zine)

"We don't have a crystal ball, but as journalists covering global health and development, we have a pretty good nose for emerging trends (with some help from our favorite expert sources)."

"Some likely trends give cause for optimism — signs of progress in solving the world's problems. Other trends are pessimistic — threats and challenges that are expected to worsen in the year ahead."

"Here are 11 trend lines we'll be watching in 2020. First we'll give you the bad news — then the hopeful predictions."

"The United Nations is predicting that 168 million people, a record, will need humanitarian assistance in 2020 because of extreme weather, large infectious-disease outbreaks and intensifying, protracted conflicts across more than 50 countries. That's around a million more people than were in need of assistance in 2019, and the number is expected to continue to rise, up to 200 million people by 2022. The U.N. expects that providing this assistance in 2020 could cost up to $29 billion."

"Hot spots include Burkina Faso, where a surge in violence by religious extremists has displaced more than half a million people; the Philippines, where a Christmas Eve typhoon killed more than two dozen; and Venezuela, where an economic collapse has resulted in the exodus of nearly 5 million people in the last five years."

"Shannon Scribner, associate director for humanitarian policy and programs at Oxfam America, says that funding to respond to these crises 'is not keeping pace with the need, and that will continue to be a challenge.'"

A Star In Orion Is Dimming. Is It About To Explode?

"Okay, it wouldn't technically be an explosion. And if it's "about" to happen, it already happened. About 650 years ago. We'll explain, with astronomer Emily Levesque, who studies massive stars at the University of Washington. Follow Short Wave's Emily Kwong on Twitter @emilykwong1234. Email the show at shortwave@npr.org."

Hope, Happiness And Social Connection: Hidden Benefits Of Regular Exercise

"If ever there was a time to up your fitness game, the arrival of the new year and the new decade is it. But after the allure of the new gym membership wears off, our sedentary habits, more often than not, consume our promise of daily workouts. It doesn't have to be this way, says health psychologist and author, Kelly McGonigal."

"In her new book, The Joy of Movement: How Exercise Helps Us Find Happiness, Hope, Connection, and Courage, the Stanford University lecturer offer new motivation to get moving that has less to do with how we look, or feeling duty-bound to exercise, and everything to do with how movement makes us feel. She shares with readers the often profound, yet lesser-known benefits of exercise that make it a worthy, lifelong activity whether you're young, old, fit or disabled."

"'I want them to understand [exercise] in a different way than the usual conversation we always have about weight loss, preventing disease and making our bodies look a certain way,' McGonigal tells NPR."

"Among its many life-altering rewards: the generation of hope, happiness, a sense of purpose, greater life satisfaction and rewarding connections with others."

"These benefits are seen throughout the life span," she writes. "They apply to every socioeconomic strata and appear to be culturally universal."

And they aren't activity-specific and they don't require you to be a superathlete. Whether you run, swim, dance, bike, lift weights, do yoga or participate in team sports — it doesn't matter, McGonigal says — moderate physical activity does far more than make us physically stronger and healthier.

Australians Brace For Flames As 'Frighteningly Quick' Bushfires Advance Toward Sydney

"Prime Minister Scott Morrison is calling up 3,000 reservists for operations related to the massive bushfires in eastern Australia that have forced mass evacuations and killed at least 11 people since Monday."

"Record heat has contributed to the ferocity of blazes. Flames now threaten the outskirts of the country's largest city, Sydney."

"Authorities are warning of worsening conditions over the weekend. The rural fire service deputy commissioner for New South Wales, Rob Rogers, has warned of the 'frighteningly quick' advance of the blazes."

"'With the fuel loads that we've got and the drought conditions and the current weather conditions that we have, frankly, we can't put these large fires out,' Mick Holton, president of the Volunteer Fire Fighters Association, told NPR's Morning Edition."

"Forecasters from Australia's Bureau of Meteorology expect the weather on Saturday to intensify the fire dangers in New South Wales and Victoria."

A Knotty Problem Solved

"Special fibers that change color when they are under strain have helped scientists come up with some simple rules that can predict how a knot will perform in the real world."

"There's a whole field of mathematics that studies knots, to explore abstract properties of idealized curves. 'But that's not what you care about if you are, for example, a sailor or a climber and you need to tie something which holds,' says Vishal Patil, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology whose new findings appear in the journal Science."

"People have used knots since ancient times, notes Patil, and thousands of knots have been invented. Yet scientists struggle to explain why knots do what they do. Most of what's known about them comes from long experience, rather than any theoretical understanding."

"For example, take the granny knot and the reef knot — two simple knots that look very similar but behave very differently."

The 2010s: A Decade Of Protests Around The World

"2019 has become known as a year of protest. But this year does not exist in isolation: Protests have been emblematic of the entire past decade."

"The 2010s began with the Arab Spring and Occupy protests, and are ending with a swell of anti-government demonstrations in India, Iraq, Lebanon, Hong Kong, Latin America, parts of Europe and beyond. The middle years likewise were marked by major protests on multiple continents, from Iran to Ukraine, South Korea, Zimbabwe and Greece.

"All decade long, people around the world — young, middle-aged and old, in places wealthy and not — poured into the streets, over and over again, insisting on economic and social equality, demanding better governance and action on a range of ills including corruption, racism, sexual abuse and climate change."

"The impact and legacy of these protests will become clear in the years to come. But all made their mark on a turbulent decade, throwing into relief the issues people cared about most. Starting in 2019 and moving back, here are some glimpses from around the world, outside the United States."

The Decade In Science

"As 2019 draws to a close, we enlisted the help of two NPR science correspondents — Nell Greenfieldboye and Joe Palca — to look back on some of the biggest science stories of the past 10 years. Follow host Maddie Sofia on twitter @maddie_sofia. Email the show at shortwave@npr.org."

'Disinformation' Is The Word Of The Year — And A Sign Of What's To Come

"As always, this year's word-of-the-year candidates came from all over. There were the viral memes like 'OK, boomer' and 'weird flex, but OK,' but they won't endure any longer than earlier years' candidates like FOMO and 'manbun.' 'Quid pro quo' had a moment, but the jury's still out on that one. And a surge in dictionary lookups led Merriam-Webster to pick nonbinary 'they.'"

"My choice of 'disinformation' needs some explaining. It isn't a new word — just one of the family of names we give to the malignancies that contaminate the public discourse, along with 'propaganda,' and in particular "'misinformation' and 'fake news.' Each of those last two was chosen as word of the year by some dictionary or organization in 2017."

"But over the last couple of years "disinformation" has been on a tear — it's 10 times as common in media headlines as it was five years ago, to the point where it's nudged its siblings aside. That rise suggests a basic shift in focus: What most troubles us now isn't just the plague of deceptive information on the Internet but the organized campaigns that are spreading the infection."

"Most of those headlines concerned the Russians. There was their weaponization of social media during the 2016 elections, which The New York Times called 'the Pearl Harbor of the social media age' and the fears it will be repeated next year. There were also the stories about their interference in recent elections in the UK, Italy and other nations. And most recently, there was the Russians' success in planting the conspiracy theory that it was Ukraine rather than Russia who interfered in our 2016 elections, despite its being debunked by U.S. intelligence agencies."

Tracing Your Family's Roots May Soon Get A Lot More Expensive

"Dec. 30 is the deadline to submit a comment to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services over a proposed fee hike to access some records, some of which date back more than 100 years and are useful to genealogists."

"The USCIS wants to increase the fee for obtaining immigration files by 500%, which means some people would have to pay more than $600 for the documents. The move would affect families of the millions of people who immigrated to the United States in the late 1800s and early 1900s."

"'This is immigration history,' Renée Carl, a genealogist in Washington, D.C., who works with clients who use the records, tells NPR's David Greene."

"'If someone is coming from a displaced persons camp in Europe, they would have filled out all this paperwork while still in Europe,' Carl says. 'Then you get the information on when they come in. You get a photograph if there's a visa file. You almost always get a photograph.'"

There are millions of records held at the agency, Carl says. These include alien registration files, files for certificates of naturalization and visa files, if one applied for a visa to come to the United States. "There might be something called a registry file if, during the process of naturalization, the government couldn't find you on a ship manifest, so they were trying to document how you entered the country in the first place," Carl says.

France Blocks Export Of $27 Million Medieval Painting Found In French Woman's Kitchen

"Officials in France are blocking the export of a remarkably rare medieval painting that was auctioned off after being discovered hanging in an elderly French woman's kitchen."

"The 10-inch panel portrait titled The Mocking of Christ by the Italian artist Cimabue, sold for nearly $27 million at an auction outside of Paris in October. A London collector purchased the piece on behalf of two unnamed collectors reportedly based in the U.S."

"But now, the French government has moved to stop the export, declaring the artwork a "national treasure" that belongs in the country in order to 'enrich our national collections.'"

"The intervention by French officials follows a miraculous discovery story."

"In September, word got out that a woman in her 90s living in northern France invited appraisers to her house to survey old furniture and other belongings before she sold her home."

"A stroll into the kitchen revealed the Cimabue painting hanging somewhat modestly above the woman's stove."

"To the woman, who has stayed anonymous, it was not anything special. In fact, she had no idea where she acquired the pioneering piece of 13th century Florentine art."

'Ring Of Fire' Eclipse Sweeps Across Skies In Middle East And Southeast Asia

"From the Middle East to Southeast Asia, people looked skyward for a chance to see an annular eclipse Thursday, as the unusual celestial event took place over a long but thin band of the world. The striking "ring of fire" phenomenon – with the moon blotting out all but a sliver of the sun — began in Saudi Arabia and ended northeast of Guam in the Pacific Ocean."

"An annular eclipse occurs when the moon is too far away from the Earth to block the entire sun during an eclipse. Instead of the sun's full bright disc, or a crescent of light, viewers in areas of complete annularity see a fiery halo around the moon."

"The event began in the early morning hours — in Oman, dramatic images showed the sun being obscured as it rose above the Gulf of Oman. Photographers captured similar scenes across the Middle East and in India."

"By the time the eclipse began happening further east, the sun was higher in the sky — and millions of people used protective eyewear to watch the moon partially blot out the sun."

"People outside of the roughly 73-mile-wide central path were still able to see at least a partial solar eclipse if their skies were clear. But even through light clouds, the bright halo effect was striking."

A Young Mississippi Woman's Journey Through A Pioneering Gene-Editing Experiment

"When Victoria Gray was just 3 months old, her family discovered something was terribly wrong."

"'My grandma was giving me a bath, and I was crying. So they took me to the emergency room to get me checked out,' Gray says. 'That's when they found out that I was having my first crisis.'"

"It was Gray's first sickle cell crisis. These episodes are one of the worst things about sickle cell disease, a common and often devastating genetic blood disorder. People with the condition regularly suffer sudden, excruciating bouts of pain."

"'Sometimes it feels like lightning strikes in my chest — and real sharp pains all over. And it's a deep pain. I can't touch it and make it better,' says Gray. 'Sometimes, I will be just balled up and crying, not able to do anything for myself.'"

"Gray is now 34 and lives in Forest, Miss. She volunteered to become the first patient in the United States with a genetic disease to get treated with the revolutionary gene-editing technique known as CRISPR."

Steam On, Steamboat: The World's Tallest Active Geyser Has Another Record Year

"Steamboat Geyser, the tallest active geyser in the world, erupted more times in 2019 than in any other year, baffling scientists who are trying to understand what triggered this unusual streak of activity."

"The geyser can shoot water more than 300 feet into the air, and this year it has erupted more than 45 times, surpassing the 32 eruptions recorded in 2018."

"In the three years before that, however, the geyser didn't erupt at all. Unlike Old Faithful, which is famous for its highly predictable eruptions, Steamboat is an erratic giant."

"'In the 1960s, there was another period where there were more than 20 eruptions per year,' says Erin White, Yellowstone National Park's hydrologist. 'Prior to that, there were dormant periods of more than 50 years.'"

"She has stood right next to Steamboat as it was venting steam. 'It is incredibly powerful,' White says. 'It's like standing next to a jet engine.'"

"Steamboat's reawakening is an opportunity for researchers to try to answer some fundamental questions about how geysers work."