JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
It's time now for our science news roundup from Short Wave, NPR's science podcast. I'm joined by Jessica Yung and Emily Kwong. Hi, y'all.
JESSICA YUNG, BYLINE: Hi.
EMILY KWONG, BYLINE: Hi.
SUMMERS: So I know that you have brought us three science stories that caught your attention this week. What are they?
KWONG: OK, we're going to talk about how the longevity of a vaccine may be driven by our bone marrow.
YUNG: And then we're going to talk about the math and science behind Hula-Hooping.
KWONG: And get a glimpse of the next year of space missions.
SUMMERS: OK, I want to start with vaccines because it's feeling a little germy out there, y'all. There's so much flu and COVID going around. I am very glad I'm vaccinated.
KWONG: Yeah. Vaccines are so powerful. They train your immune system to recognize and fight germs. And one of the ways they do so is by prompting your B cells to create antibodies. You can think of antibodies like security guards. So the COVID mRNA vaccine generates enough of an antibody response to protect against infection for three months and severe disease for six months. But other vaccines offer yearslong, even lifelong immunity.
SUMMERS: Lifetime security, like the measles vaccine.
YUNG: Yeah, exactly, or the yellow fever vaccine - and this contrast is actually what led Stanford Medicine Professor Bali Pulendran to wonder, like, why? Why are some vaccines able to stimulate immunity for a few months, but others last a lifetime?
BALI PULENDRAN: If you could understand the immunology underlying these effects, then surely we could apply that immunological insight to devising new vaccines, perhaps synthetic vaccines that could effectively recapitulate the high degree of efficacy of this yellow fever vaccine.
YUNG: And it was through this basic research question that Bali and a team at Stanford Medicine uncovered a major insight having to do with megakaryocytes.
SUMMERS: What are those?
KWONG: OK, megakaryocytes - I'm now a fan of them. They are these big, beefy cells chilling in our bone marrow, and they're responsible for making platelets, the things that help your blood clot. But these big cells may have another role. It appears that megakaryocytes create a hospitable environment for those antibody-producing B cells to survive for years, and for the resulting antibody response to persist, almost like a pro security guard environment. And that means that vaccines that are better able to activate megakaryocytes should stimulate immunity for a longer period of time. The team published these findings in the journal Nature Immunology this month.
SUMMERS: OK, so I'm curious. Is there a way for future vaccines to recruit these bone marrow cells to spur a longer-lasting vaccine?
KWONG: Yeah. That's one possibility, right? If megakaryocytes are some kind of bellwether for measuring how well a vaccine is doing, that's useful information for doctors to know when their patient may need a booster or for vaccine developers to estimate how long their vaccine might last. Immunology experts I spoke to, including George Lewis at the University of Maryland and Deepta Bhattacharya at the University of Arizona, see the potential. More research is required, but viral outbreaks are more likely in the future, and Bali wants us to be prepared.
PULENDRAN: It's not a question of if the next pandemic will emerge. It's a question of when the next pandemic is going to emerge.
YUNG: So ultimately, Bali wants this basic research to lead to better vaccines for everyone.
SUMMERS: OK, y'all that was pretty serious. Let's move on to something joyful and one of the purest sources of childhood joy. That is Hula-Hooping.
KWONG: What a pivot.
YUNG: (Laughter).
SUMMERS: Indeed. What is the physics of keeping a Hula-Hoop swirling around our hips?
KWONG: OK, so this research began when Leif Ristroph, a math professor at NYU, was admiring some Hula-Hoopers at a park in New York City. And he wondered if there were any mathematical studies showing how Hula-Hoops counteract gravity and levitate. And seeing none, he and two of his students set out to study this and learn some Hula-Hooping themselves.
SUMMERS: OK, this is pretty funny. But how do you actually study this in a mathematical way?
YUNG: It involves lots of mathematical modeling and physics too. They created these little Hula-Hooping robots using 3D-printed models of different shapes. Some robots had cylinder shapes - others, cones. Others were hourglass-like. They wiggled all of these shapes with a tiny little hoop just under 6 inches across. These shapes, of course, were meant to represent a simplified, scaled-down version of a human Hula-Hooping.
KWONG: And from watching the robot shapes and gathering data, Leif and his collaborators developed a bunch of mathematical equations and published those findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
SUMMERS: OK, the suspense is killing me. What shapes were the best for Hula-Hooping?
KWONG: Well, all body shapes can Hula-Hoop. But some do have an easier time, you know, keeping that Hula-Hoop up and spinning. And the one that appeared to work the best was the hourglass shape.
SUMMERS: Well, now I am concerned that people will think, you know, if I don't have an hourglass figure, I can't Hula-Hoop.
YUNG: No, totally. I was worried about that too. But the researchers said that you can actually just give the Hula-Hoop more energy by moving your hips more quickly - like, upping the frequency of that circular motion. And also, obviously, Hula-Hooping isn't just for the waist. You can Hula-Hoop on your neck or wrist or ankles.
KWONG: David Hu, an applied mathematician who did not work on this project, loves how this study teaches people to Hula-Hoop better, and thinks it would be an awesome opportunity to combine PE and math courses for kids.
SUMMERS: I love that idea. OK, to close us out, I am so ready to hear about all of the exciting space news that I should be looking forward to this year.
KWONG: We have our colleague Chandelis Duster to thank, who gathered data on all of the major missions of 2025. And there are a ton of exciting ones.
YUNG: Yeah, starting as early as this month. In January, there are two missions expected to launch for the moon. One is called RESILIENCE Mission 2, and the other is called Blue Ghost.
SUMMERS: All right. I love the names. But what is it up with these missions?
KWONG: Both these missions are commercial missions, meaning they're spacecraft that are built by private companies, and they're trying to pull off moon landings. So it'll be exciting to see if they're successful. There's been a lot of recent history of commercial missions to the moon crashing or failing.
SUMMERS: And I am assuming these are uncrewed missions.
KWONG: Yeah, uncrewed - if they land, these spacecraft will also collect some scientific data, like lunar soil for testing, or they'll take photos of the lunar sunset. And the RESILIENCE Mission 2 is going to contain food production experiments and deep space radiation monitors.
YUNG: And then sometime early this year, NASA's Lunar Trailblazer will launch to look for water on the moon for future moonwalkers, probably for splitting into hydrogen and oxygen to make rocket fuel on the moon. So this mission is going to be looking for where the water is on the moon and also the nature of it because there's just still a lot that we don't know. And we're going to have to find out a lot more about water on the moon if future astronauts are going to be using it for drinking water and fuel.
SUMMERS: Very cool. That's a whole lot of moon information for me...
YUNG: Yeah.
SUMMERS: ...To download. So...
KWONG: Big year for the moon.
SUMMERS: Big year for the moon. But tell us what else is happening out there.
KWONG: Well, let's see. There's also a lot of updates we'll probably get from ongoing missions, like the Proba-3 Mission, which launched in December. It's trying to observe the corona, the sun's outer atmosphere. And the first results will probably be available in a few months.
YUNG: And then, of course, there's the Europa Clipper. Short Wave actually reported on its launch in October. This is the mission that will be looking for evidence of whether Jupiter's moon, Europa, could support life. It should get there around 2030. But this March, it will get a little energy boost when it flies by Mars by using the planet's gravity to help it accelerate towards Jupiter.
KWONG: It's like it's Hula-Hooping.
(LAUGHTER)
SUMMERS: That's Emily Kwong and Jessica Yung from NPR's science podcast, Short Wave. Subscribe now for new discoveries, everyday mysteries and the science behind the headlines. Thanks to both of you.
YUNG: Thank you, Juana.
KWONG: Thank you.
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