India and Russia: A tale of two lunar landing attempts

Listen to Short Wave on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts.

All Things Considered host Ailsa Chang joins Short Wave's Regina G. Barber and Aaron Scott to talk through some of the latest science news. They talk the latest lunar landing attempts, how scientists are reconstructing music from people's brains and lessons from wildfires that contributed to a mass extinction 13,000 years ago.

Two nations, two lunar attempts, two different results

It's been a big week for space news. First, there was an unsuccessful attempt by the Russian space agency to land the Luna-25 spacecraft. Then, Wednesday, the Indian Space Research Organisation successfully landed its Chandrayaan-3 probe near the moon's south pole, making it the first nation to do so. This follows a failed attempt by India in 2019. Landing on the moon isn't an easy feat. In recent years, Israel and Japan have also had failed missions.

Scientists hope to find frozen water in the area., which could provide clues about how the compound ended up in this part of the solar system. It would also be a valuable resource for future space missions: It could be used for rocket fuel or to create breathable air.

Listening to music? Scientists know from your brain activity

Recently, scientists hooked patients up to electrodes and then studied their brains as they listened to Pink Floyd's song, "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1." Afterwards, they were able to reconstruct the song based on direct neural recordings from the patients that were fed into a machine learning program. The researchers say the long-term goal is to create an implantable speech device, so that people who have trouble speaking could communicate by simply thinking about what they want to say. Plus, researchers think reconstructing music will enhance existing devices, shifting them from the robotic and monotone to the more emotive and human.

The findings were recently published in the journal PLOS Biology.

Unraveling a 13,000-year-old mass extinction mystery

For the last hundred years or so, researchers have been locked in a debate over what caused a major extinction event in North America that wiped out large mammals like the dire wolf, saber-toothed cats and the North American camel. Last week, scientists zeroed in on a top contender: major wildfires.

The study authors suggest that the shift towards a dry, fire-prone landscape was caused by both humans and a changing climate. To reach these findings, scientists dated and analyzed fossils found in the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, California and compared that with environmental samples from Lake Elsinore in California. The Lake Elsinore samples showed a 30-fold increase in charcoal — which occurs when materials like wood are burned — at the same time that the die-offs happened.

The findings were published last week in the journal Science.

Listen to Short Wave on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts.

Hear about some science news we haven't? Email us at shortwave@npr.org.

This episode was produced by Berly McCoy, Viet Le and Mia Venkat. It was edited by Patrick Jarenwattananon and Rebecca Ramirez, and fact checked by Rachel Carlson. The audio engineers were Josh Newell and Gilly Moon.