Support for NPR and the following message come from SAP Concur, a leading brand for integrated travel expense and invoice management solutions.

With SAP Concur solutions, you'll be ready to take on whatever the market throws at you next.

Learn more at concur.com.

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.

The last time we saw Paul Atreidi from NPR.

The last time we saw Paul Atreides, he was stranded on the harsh desert planet Arrakis,

trying to outrun a giant sandworm to stay alive.

Run!

Paul is the hero in the novel and now film Dune.

Said in the future, Paul is the heir to the fiefdom of Arrakis, aka Dune.

This planet is the only place an important space travel good, Spice exists.

And in part one, Paul joins local Fremen, the people of Arrakis, against his mother's

wishes, and he tries to continue his late father's mission of bringing peace to the planet

of Arrakis. A journey he continues in Dune Part 2, out in theaters now.

It's a science fiction tale of mythology,

interstellar politics, and living in a harsh world.

But I gotta admit, any time I've read or watched Dune, I'm plagued by one train of thought.

What about the science?

How would a giant sandworm live on a planet like Arrakis? Lucky for me, Mohammed Noor has also spent a lot of time thinking about all of this.

Dune, like many other science fiction shows, seems to have these singular biome planets and this one was very much a sort of sandy

desert biome as you saw there. In terms of life there two of the things that we saw in addition of

course to the the Fremen the people who were living there were

...