Could air pollution make your memory worse?
Short Wave
NPR
4.7 • 6.6K Ratings
🗓️ 16 June 2026
⏱️ 10 minutes
🔗️ Recording | Apple Podcasts | RSS
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Summary
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. |
| 0:05.4 | Hey, shortwavers, Emily Kwong here. |
| 0:07.8 | And Angela Zang. |
| 0:08.9 | With our bi-weekly science news roundup featuring Mary Louise Kelly from All Things Considered. |
| 0:14.2 | Hello. |
| 0:15.1 | Good to be back with you. |
| 0:16.9 | Oh, thank you so much for joining us. |
| 0:18.3 | We are going to start with something kind of serious today. I know, shocking, because we're such clowns. But we're going to be talking about air pollution and health, specifically brain health. How are you feeling about your memory these days? |
| 0:31.6 | I am great on things that happened years ago. I am not so great on where my car keys were left this morning. |
| 0:38.9 | It is some complex science. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Memory is a complex thing and our brains are fragile |
| 0:44.8 | instruments in that way. So we're going to talk about that. And our second and third topics are about |
| 0:48.5 | critters and what they can teach us about the world around them. We're going to dive deep to Will Graveyards, |
| 0:55.0 | and then we're going to zoom in to ancient squirrel droppings. |
| 0:58.4 | If you can believe that those words can even go together. |
| 1:01.8 | I will come to believe them after you share. |
| 1:04.2 | Share these two things I definitely did not have on my reader this week. |
| 1:07.9 | It is such show and tell. |
| 1:09.7 | Shortwave Roundup is like, |
| 1:11.3 | here's some treasures that we harvested for you. Yeah. Yeah, you know what they say. I mean, |
| 1:16.9 | you know, you are what you eat or at least poop out what you eat. And people may study it |
| 1:21.3 | hundreds of years later. So today on the show, we've got stories on air, land, and sea. |
| 1:26.3 | You're listening to Shortwave, |
... |
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