Two Countries, Two Moon Landings — and Two Other Science Stories

One-liner: Short Wave hosts Regina Barber and Aaron Scott, joined by All Things Considered host Ailsa Chang filling in for the day, cover three stories: Russia and India both attempted robotic moon landings within days of each other — Russia failed, India succeeded; UC Berkeley researchers reconstructed a Pink Floyd song a patient was listening to straight from brain activity; and new fossil evidence from the La Brea Tar Pits ties a 13,000-year-old mass extinction of large North American mammals directly to wildfire.

Two Moon Landing Attempts, One Failure and One Success

Key findings: Russia and India each tried to land a robotic probe on the moon within days of one another. Russia went first, attempting over the weekend — and failed, losing contact with its lander as it prepared to touch down (the episode's title names the mission Luna-25, though the hosts don't say the name on air). Three days later, on Wednesday, India succeeded (named Chandrayaan-3 in the title), touching down near the moon's south pole.

The hosts point to reporting from NPR colleague Geoff Brumfiel: this region is notable because nearby craters sit in permanent darkness, and scientists hope they're hiding frozen water — useful directly as drinking water for future astronauts, or broken down into hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel or breathable air. That's part of why the south pole is such a popular target: China is planning a mission there, and the U.S. wants to send humans there as part of the Artemis program.

Russia's mission marked its first return to the moon since the Soviet era — decades in the planning, built on "a proven Soviet design" — yet it still lost contact just before landing. India's attempt was its second; its first lander crashed in 2019. Aaron Scott explains why landing is so hard: the moon has essentially no atmosphere, so a probe can't float down gently on a parachute the way it could on Mars. It has to rely on thrusters, which require a lot of sophisticated calculation — a tall order for a robot even with sophisticated sensors. A thruster issue partly caused India's 2019 crash; engineers learned from it, upgrading the lander's software and hardware, which likely contributed to this landing's success. India is now the fourth country to successfully land on the lunar surface, joining the U.S., China, and Russia.

Reading a Pink Floyd Song Out of Brain Activity

Key findings: A team at UC Berkeley wanted to know whether they could reconstruct a song a person is listening to purely from their brain activity. They picked Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 1" and played it for epilepsy patients who already had electrodes implanted in their brains for treatment. Principal investigator Bob Knight likened the process to watching a pianist play and reconstructing the tune from which keys they pressed: "We're treating the electrodes, in a way, like the piano keys. You know, the sound comes in, goes to your auditory regions, activates brain cells. They generate an electric field. We record that electric field. That's our piano key." The team fed all that electrode data into a machine-learning program to reconstruct what the patients were hearing — and got back a muffled, computer-generated rendition: "All in all it's just another brick in the wall." Knight says more electrodes per patient would sharpen the result. The Berkeley team says this is the first time scientists have reconstructed musical elements like melody, rhythm, and intonation purely from neural signals.

The long-term goal is an implantable speech device for people who struggle to speak because of ALS or stroke, letting them communicate just by thinking about what they want to say. Knight thinks the ability to reconstruct music could make these devices — currently pretty robotic-sounding — feel more human: "It would be like, (imitating robot) I love you, as opposed to I love you. And I think music, because of its prosodic, emotional, melodic elements, will actually make an eventual implantable assistive device more human."

What 13,000-Year-Old Wildfires Say About a Mass Extinction

Key findings: A new study published last week in Science wades into a debate that's raged for over a century: what caused a major extinction event that wiped out large North American mammals — dire wolves, North American camels, the saber-toothed cat — around 13,000 years ago. Researchers turned to the La Brea Tar Pits in Southern California, where bubbling pools of tar have trapped animals, and preserved them as fossils, for thousands of years. The team dated and analyzed 172 specimens spanning seven extinct species plus one still around today, coyotes, then compared them against environmental data from the same period to look for a link between die-offs and environmental change.

Co-author F. Robin O'Keefe, a paleontologist and evolutionary biologist, told Short Wave the data showed a clear overlap between mass deaths and wildfires — and not the gradual pattern he expected: "It was like a line in the sand. I thought we would see, like, a slow decline going down because people are getting more common, but that's not what happened. It was a kind of train wreck." The team inferred wildfire activity from charcoal buildup in core samples pulled from Lake Elsinore in California — charcoal accumulation spiked thirtyfold right at the point species began sharply disappearing. Paleoecologist Anthony Barnosky, who wasn't part of the study, drew a line to the present: "what we are seeing today, increasing human pressures combined with and actually causing climate change, is like this lesson from the past on steroids." Unless things change, the hosts note, we could be headed toward an even more intense repeat of that ancient story.

Rich Details & Trivia

• Chang is guest-hosting after stepping away from her usual chair at All Things Considered for the day; Scott thanks her for it right at the top.
• An archived clip plays someone cheering in a non-English language (marked simply "Non-English language spoken" in the transcript, left untranslated) — almost certainly a celebration clip tied to India's successful landing.
• Chang works in a groan-worthy transition from the moon's permanently dark craters to Pink Floyd's album The Dark Side of the Moon, then fishes for credit: "Did you see what I did there? Did you like that transition?"
• After the wildfire story, Chang sums up the mood as "brace for Armageddon"; Barber's only response is "Yeah. Sorry."
• In the outtakes, Barber teases Chang that "being able to sing and being able to sing professionally" are two different things, and the episode ends with the trio planning a karaoke outing.
• Production credits: produced by Berly McCoy, Viet Le, and Mia Venkat; edited by Patrick Jarenwattananon and managing producer Rebecca Ramirez; fact-checked by Rachel Carlson; audio engineering by Josh Newell; Beth Donovan is senior director, Anya Grundmann is senior VP of programming.

Cross-Domain Connections

None of this episode's three stories — a government moon-landing news roundup, an academic brain-computer-interface study, and paleontological fossil evidence — mentions any specific company or supply chain, so there's no real overlap with the acquired business-history domain. Within the science domain itself, an earlier Short Wave space roundup (shortwave-moon-robots) also touches lunar exploration and the Artemis program, but that episode's focus — lander-robot engineering and astronaut training — doesn't share a specific concept with this episode's landing-attempt news angle, so no link is forced here.

Pages to Build

• chandrayaan-3 — India's south-pole landing that made it the fourth country to land on the moon (the mission name appears only in the episode's title, not in on-air dialogue); a historic milestone likely to resurface in future space episodes.
• la-brea-tar-pits — the well-known Southern California fossil site used here for extinction-wildfire research; likely to recur in future paleontology or climate-history episodes.
• brain-computer-interface — the neural-decoding technology behind this episode's song reconstruction, pointing toward the ongoing pursuit of implantable speech devices; worth tracking across episodes.

Source · shortwave