Episodios

  • Riding the Jet Streak

    Riding the Jet Streak
    Mar 23 2026
    When passengers boarded a British Airways flight from New York to London on February 8, 2020, they had no idea they were about to make history. Once their 747 reached cruising altitude, the pilots directed the plane into a jet streak, a fast-moving current of air that sometimes occurs in winter. The streak rocketed the plane to a ground speed of 825 miles an hour, cutting travel time by 25 percent and setting a record for subsonic aircraft making the trip. The surprised passengers arrived in London in less than 5 hours—an hour and 40 minutes ahead of schedule. One hundred EarthDate episodes ago we talked about the jet stream, the west-to-east currents of air that circle the globe. It’s common in winter for the Northern Polar Jet to drift southward into what pilots call the North Atlantic Tracks, the routes they fly from the U.S. to Europe. When other factors, like a storm system, increase its velocity, the jet stream can create jet streaks—rivers of wind more than twice as fast, at up to 250 miles an hour, like the one that carried that February 2020 flight. Faster trips like these save time and fuel and reduce exposure to cosmic radiation for passengers and crew, which happens on any flight. So, if you’re looking for a quick, efficient, safe trip to Europe—and your own chance to land in the record books—plan one for a stormy winter night… but don’t plan to sleep!
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    2 m
  • Equinox Alignments

    Equinox Alignments
    Mar 23 2026
    Around September 23rd and March 20th each year, visitors gather at ancient monuments to witness the equinox. On these two days, day and night are equal everywhere on the planet. The sun rises exactly in the east and sets exactly in the west. Ancient architects, astronomers, and priests collaborated to align many structures with the equinox sun to create spectacular light effects. In a 5,000-year-old underground Celtic temple, the rising sun penetrates a long shaft to light an engraved wall. At a 4,000-year-old Egyptian monument, sunlight travels an east–west hallway to illuminate chosen statues. A thousand-year-old Mayan pyramid casts a shadow in the form of a snake down its entire face, which joins a giant carved serpent head. There are equinox sun alignments at Stonehenge, Machu Picchu, Angkor Wat, and many other ancient places, across nearly every culture. They created these solar light shows to determine and celebrate the autumn equinox—the start of the harvest and shortening days—and the spring equinox—the start of the planting season and a ceremonial time of rebirth. Religious holidays, like Easter, were set according to the equinox and still are. You may not have to travel far to see your own equinox sun alignment. In big cities with exact east–west street grids, the equinox sun rises and sets precisely at the ends of a canyon of skyscrapers. In Chicago, they call it Chicagohenge.
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    2 m
  • Sunspot Strandings

    Sunspot Strandings
    Mar 23 2026
    California gray whales, like several other whale species, migrate from arctic feeding grounds in summer to warm equatorial waters in winter to birth their young. This migration can be more than 13,000 miles—the longest on Earth. Scientists think they may use magnetoreception, navigating according to Earth’s magnetic field. New findings somewhat corroborate that, but with a wrinkle we can’t explain. It’s not uncommon that whales will get lost or injured along the route, strand themselves on the coast, and die. A third of the dead whales found are emaciated, suggesting they starved. Some researchers hypothesize that their population, which, remarkably, has rebounded to pre-whaling numbers, has simply reached the carrying capacity of their environment. Others suggest warming polar seas might be producing less food for them. But some of these dead whales were perfectly healthy and may have simply become disoriented. Scientists wondered why. They studied stranding events going back 30 years and found nearly 200 healthy whales had beached. Looking for correlations, they found this was four times as likely to happen during periods of high sunspot activity. Sunspots that merely disrupted Earth’s magnetic field didn’t appear unusually fatal. But sunspots that also released bursts of radio static seemed to interfere with the whales’ sense of navigation, perhaps blocking their ability to read magnetic signals… Or interfering with some new navigational sense we don’t yet understand.
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    2 m
  • Nickel Farming

    Nickel Farming
    Mar 22 2026
    Nickel is in demand because it’s used in lithium ion batteries, common alloys such as stainless steel, and new super alloys for the aerospace and wind turbine industry. But mining and smelting nickel is energy intensive, using a great deal of diesel fuel and coal. And the after-products are environmentally dangerous. Luckily, we’ve found that nickel can grow on trees. Or more specifically, shrubs. Metals are toxic to most plants, which don’t grow in metal-rich soils. But some 700 species are hyperaccumulators—they actually pull metal from the ground and concentrate it in their tissues. It’s thought they do this to ward off pests or to help absorb potassium from poor soil. Of these species, over 400 accumulate nickel. Their blue-green sap can be up to 25% nickel—a concentration twenty times greater than the nickel ore mined for smelting. These shrubs can be farmed and the metal harvested in a technique called phytomining. Farmers cut back the shrubs once or twice a year and either squeeze sap from the foliage or burn it and gather the ash. The farms can be sited on nickel-rich soils that have been corrupted with mine tailings or are otherwise unfit for agriculture. After a couple decades, the plants will deplete the nickel in the soil through a process called bioremediation, and the land can grow food crops. Nickel farming will never replace large-scale mining, but it can help small farmers earn a living in areas with toxic soils.
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    2 m
  • Honeybee Blight

    Honeybee Blight
    Mar 22 2026
    On another EarthDate you heard that bees are dying. While it’s common for a hive to lose 15% of its bees each winter, rates since 2007 have sometimes hit 40%. This has scientists concerned, and after a decade of research, they’ve traced the bees’ troubles to several factors. First, stress. A decrease in wild acreage means fewer wild bees, so that more commercial bees are needed for pollination. This has the hives traveling farther and more frequently. Rising temperatures also have an impact, making it harder for bees to maintain the constant temperature needed in the hive. Second, pesticides. A recent study of honey samples found most of them were contaminated. While the concentrations were too low to affect humans, they impacted the bees’ ability to navigate and find nectar. Finally, pests. The Asian Varroa mite has infested some U.S. and European bee colonies. They feed on larvae and bees, weakening their immunity systems and making them more susceptible to disease, like the viruses the mite carries—including one that renders bees flightless. But there is some good news on the horizon. Scientists are working on new bacteria for the bees’ microbiome that would kill the Varroa mite. And, since mites, disease, pesticides, and stress work synergistically, eliminating one or more of them may allow the colony to better manage the others. Humans need to get on the bee team so bees can continue to pollinate our global food supply.
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    2 m
  • The Business of Bees

    The Business of Bees
    Mar 21 2026
    Bees make over $300 million worth of honey, beeswax, propolis, and other products each year in the U.S., which we eat and use in medicines, cosmetics, even varnishes. But the real big business of bees is the billions of dollars keepers earn pollinating crops. Bee colonies are treated, and valued, like livestock. The keepers move the hives to the best positions for most effective pollination on a strict schedule, following the flowering of crops across the country. They start in February, in California, where almond growers need 2 million hives to pollinate their trees. A typical farmer could pay several hundred thousand dollars for this service. In March, keepers transport their colonies to pollinate plums, cherries, and apples in the Pacific Northwest and Midwest. In early April, the hives go to Maine to pollinate blueberries. And in late April, down to Florida to work the citrus crop. Finally, in May, bee colonies retire to the Dakotas, where they’ll spend the quiet rest of the year on fields of clover and sunflower. Here, the bees make most of their honey. North Dakota produces twice as much honey as any other state. Honeybees and other insects are the only pollinators for all these and many other crops—about a third of our agricultural harvest—putting food on the table around the world. But bees have come under threat recently from pesticides, pests, and disease. We’ll look at these dangers and possible solutions in our final episode on honeybees.
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    2 m
  • How Bees Make Honey

    How Bees Make Honey
    Mar 21 2026
    Honey is a miraculous substance, containing enzymes, vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants. But it’s not the only amazing thing bees make in the hive. Honey starts as nectar that bees gather from thousands of flowers on foraging flights. The bees store the nectar in a special sac next to the stomach. On returning to the hive, they transfer it to the mouths of waiting worker bees. Workers ingest and regurgitate the nectar over and over for several minutes. Their digestive enzymes convert the sucrose in the nectar to other forms of sugar and add gluconic acid and hydrogen peroxide that act as preservatives. Finally, they deposit the liquid in storage cells where other workers fan it with their wings to reduce its water content, till it takes on the thick consistency of honey. Honey provides the carbohydrate energy that powers the colony. But the hive requires other products too. Some bees gather water, which will be used for evaporative cooling. They’ll fan air across it to maintain a constant 93 degrees Fahrenheit within the hive. Others gather pollen, which is mixed with honey to ferment and create “bee bread,” the hive’s main source of protein. Still others gather tree resin, which they mix with wax and saliva to produce “bee glue,” or propolis. It’s used to mend the hive and line the brood area to keep it clean, since it has antibiotic qualities.
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    2 m
  • The Buzzy Life of HoneyBees

    The Buzzy Life of HoneyBees
    Mar 21 2026
    Even if you’ve watched documentaries about honeybees, you may know little of their remarkable life within the hive. A queen will lay a million eggs in her 5-year lifetime, which she places in wax brood cells. Fertilized eggs grow into sterile female workers. Unfertilized eggs become male drones. When the queen gets old, nurse bees bathe regular female larvae in royal jelly, which turns them into queen larvae. The queen that emerges first will kill the other larvae to become sole heir to the throne. Her first duty is to fly away and mate with up to a dozen drones, to ensure genetic diversity. She’ll store their sperm in her abdomen for the rest of her life, to fertilize eggs. When she returns to the hive, she takes the place of the old queen. Worker bees go through an apprenticeship of sorts. Their first job is to clean the nursery. Once they develop the glands that produce royal jelly, they become nurse bees, feeding and caring for larvae. When they develop wax glands, they become engineers, building and repairing the hive. Finally, they graduate to gathering nectar, and that’s when the work really begins. A field bee never sleeps and will work herself to death flying hundreds of miles in a thousand trips to and from the hive, carrying the precious cargo that will sustain the colony. We’ll have more on the fascinating process of how bees make honey—and how essential they are to our lives—on future EarthDates.
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    2 m