JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
It's time now for our science news round up from Short Wave, NPR'S science podcast. I'm joined by the show's host Regina Barber and Nate Rott. Hey y'all.
REGINA BARBER, BYLINE: Hey.
NATE ROTT, BYLINE: Hey.
SUMMERS: As always, you've brought us three science stories that caught your attention recently. Tell us what they are.
ROTT: OK, Juana, we've got some science that's going to make you want to pick up a book.
BARBER: We asked the question, can our sun produce a dangerous superflare?
ROTT: And to end on a lighter note, T.rex footprints.
BARBER: (Laughter).
SUMMERS: OK, I have a lot of questions, a lot of questions here.
BARBER: Yeah.
SUMMERS: Let's start with reading science.
BARBER: OK, so the big takeaway from all this science we're going to talk about is not going to be all that surprising. Reading's good for you, like we've all been told since we were kids.
ROTT: Yes, Mom was right about everything. But what's really cool about this new research compiled in the journal Psychological Medicine is how specific it gets in looking at some of the benefits of reading.
BARBER: Specifically, reading for fun.
SUMMERS: I love reading for fun, particularly a good romance book or two.
BARBER: Yeah, definitely.
ROTT: That counts. Graphic novels count...
SUMMERS: Yes.
ROTT: ...History books, newspapers. What's important, Juana, is that you're choosing to do it for some kind of satisfaction.
BARBER: Which, as you may have heard, is increasingly rare.
CHRISTELLE LANGLEY: Reading rates among children and young people are on the decline and actually at the lowest levels since they started taking records.
ROTT: So that's Christelle Langley, an assistant professor at Cambridge University and one of the authors of this new review. And she's talking specifically about reading rates where she lives in the U.K., but reading rates and comprehension are also really low in the U.S. too.
SUMMERS: Oh, that's interesting. But, like, what are the consequences of that? What are the benefits that people are missing out on by not reading?
BARBER: Yeah. So studies they looked at focused on two age groups - youth and adolescent readers and then older readers.
ROTT: Yeah, one study, which looked at more than 10,000 young people in the U.S., found that children who began reading for pleasure earlier in life had better attention spans, memory, executive function as adolescents. They also had better sleeping habits and mental health. I could go on and on.
SUMMERS: Got to say, that's a pretty compelling list there.
BARBER: Yeah. And with older people, they found recreational reading might help keep the brain from aging and help us cut the risk of Alzheimer's disease and dementia.
ROTT: Christelle says that one study that really stood out to her was one that looked at grandparents reading to their grandchildren. It's very cute.
SUMMERS: Aw.
ROTT: Specifically looking at a part of the brain that's really important for learning and memory, the hippocampus.
LANGLEY: What the study found was that the hippocampus actually enlarged as the grandparents were reading to their grandchildren. And this might be one of the reasons why it seems to be protective of brain aging.
SUMMERS: OK, all you grandparents out there listening, read to your grandchildren. It is important.
ROTT: Yes.
BARBER: Yes.
SUMMERS: All right. Let's move on now to solar flares. I have a question. What is a superflare, and should I be worried or...
BARBER: Yeah, let's talk about a normal flare first. That's a sudden brightening of a star. When this happens on our sun, that can sometimes shoot a lot of energy towards Earth. This happened in May 2024 and caused, like, irregularities in power grids, disrupted some radio communications. It also created northern lights that could be seen in the southern U.S.
ROTT: Yeah, which were super pretty.
BARBER: Yeah.
ROTT: So imagine, though, a solar flare that is 10 to 100 times greater than that. That is a superflare, which could have more disastrous effects. And these superflares have been coming from other stars. So the question is, could our sun make them too?
SUMMERS: Can it?
ROTT: Possibly.
BARBER: (Laughter).
ROTT: So a new study published by the Royal Society looked at solar activity dating back millennia.
BARBER: Now, some of that data was recorded by humans, like old drawings of sunspots, which are associated with solar flares, but other data came from material all over the Earth.
JAMES DAVENPORT: We have things in the ice. We have things in tree rings. We have rocks. We have all this, like, geological evidence of what the sun is doing.
ROTT: That is astronomer James Davenport at the University of Washington, who is not a part of this new study, and he says we're lucky to have all this data about the sun's past.
DAVENPORT: It's the only star that we have that kind of historical record for that we'll never get for other stars.
BARBER: Looking at all these lines of evidence, the scientists behind this study say maybe the sun could produce these superflares like other stars do.
SUMMERS: OK, so what do we do if our sun makes one of these superflares?
BARBER: Well, first, Juana, it's not guaranteed. Just because our sun can doesn't mean it will. And just because a flare happens doesn't mean it will hit Earth. Earth orbits the sun. The sun rotates. The geometry has to be just right.
ROTT: Yeah, but I hear you, Juana. I have the same concern - what if - right?
SUMMERS: Right.
ROTT: So we asked James what would happen, and here's what he said.
DAVENPORT: It wouldn't send us back to the Stone Age. It wouldn't permanently knock out our technology, but it would disrupt everything, and we may all lose power for a while.
ROTT: And if we do, well, time to pick up a book, right?
BARBER: Yep (laughter).
SUMMERS: Hey, listen, I would not complain about it, with time to just sit and be away from the screens.
ROTT: (Laughter) Yeah.
BARBER: Talk to the sun.
SUMMERS: All right. And for our last topic, dinosaur tracks.
ROTT: Yes, every 6-year-old's favorite extinct group of animals. So this study has a really cool origin story, Juana.
BARBER: Yeah, it starts with a high school teacher from Colorado. His name is Kent Hups. And he was in North Dakota visiting this area called the Hill Creek Formation, which is really famous for fossils.
KENT HUPS: And I kind of looked to my left, and I thought, oh, my God, that looks like a track. And I got really excited because I know that the tracks in the Hill Creek are incredibly rare.
ROTT: Kent is also an associate at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, so he's spent a lot of time hunting for fossils. And he says finding these tracks...
HUPS: To find that really is, like, a pinnacle in your life or your career. It really is.
SUMMERS: And were these the prehistoric footprints of a T.rex?
BARBER: Yeah, exactly. So what was remarkable about this finding is that, as he says, T.rex tracks are really rare. This is the only trackway of an adult T.rex ever discovered, even though we've found tons of fossilized skeletons of these animals.
ROTT: And, Juana, these footprints, there's at least four of them. They're huge, about 3 1/2 feet long. They're the size of boulders.
SUMMERS: Whoa.
ROTT: Yeah.
BARBER: And by measuring the space between the tracks, the scientists were able to determine how fast the T.rex was walking, a leisurely three or four miles an hour, like a fast hiking speed. Here's Kent's colleague Tyler Lyson.
TYLER LYSON: I expected more out of T.rex, to be honest. They were in no hurry when they were walking around.
(LAUGHTER)
SUMMERS: OK, like, I love the movie "Jurassic Park" and remember it looked like they were running pretty fast in this, but it sounds like I might actually be able to outrun one of these.
BARBER: (Laughter).
ROTT: No, unfortunately not, Juana.
SUMMERS: Aw.
ROTT: So scientists think they could run at about 20 miles per hour. I don't know. Maybe you can run that fast.
SUMMERS: Definitely not.
BARBER: (Laughter).
ROTT: So yeah, they could still catch you for dinner. But this T.rex was just walking, chilling, according to the study in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
BARBER: Tyler said next, they're going to helicopter these giant stone footprints back to the museum to take a closer look.
LYSON: I really hope that there's skin impressions preserved on these tracks. I think there's a pretty reasonable chance that we will find scales. So I think that's what I'm most excited about.
ROTT: We have a lot more dinosaur skeletons than skin impressions. So finding scales would give us a better idea what the animals actually look like.
SUMMERS: Ooh, T.rex scales - that sounds fun.
BARBER: And, Juana, there's another bonus fact about T.rexes out in a different journal this week, which looked at a T.rex tooth and determined T.rexes were probably the same temperature as us, 97 degrees Fahrenheit.
ROTT: Which is surprising because people tend to think dinosaurs were like today's reptiles, you know, cold-blooded, but this shows they were actually warm-blooded and active.
SUMMERS: Got to say, when I walked into the studio, I was not expecting to get a full-blown dinosaur education, but thanks for that.
BARBER: (Laughter).
ROTT: Yeah, that's what we're here for.
BARBER: Yeah, no worries. Welcome anytime.
SUMMERS: Regina Barber and Nate Rott from NPR's science podcast, Short Wave, thanks so much.
ROTT: Yeah, thank you.
BARBER: Thank you.
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