Emily Kwong takes us to science camp

Grab your telescopes because this week on Endless Thread Ben and NPR Short Wave host Emily Kwong take us down two science-related internet wormholes. First, Emily introduces us to the intergalactic world of astronaut fan fiction, starring the crew of the 2026 Artemis II moon mission. Then, Ben takes us through the r/Science discourse on a new LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) study mapping an ancient Amazonian civilization. Show notes: Short Wave https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510351/short-wave (NPR) Between change and upgrade https://www.wattpad.com/story/412137646-between-change-and-upgrade (Artemis II fan fiction, Wattpad) Scientists Uncover Hundreds of Hidden Structures Beneath The Amazon https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/1va1yj2/scientists_uncover_hundreds_of_hidden_structures/ (r/Science) This content was originally created for audio. An auto-generated transcript is available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Heads up that some elements (i.e. music, sound effects, tone) are harder to translate to text.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questram School of Business. A recent episode looks at what the rise of the gig economy means for workers, businesses, and the future of work. Stick around until the end of this podcast to preview the episode.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  Are your ad campaigns lighting up the dashboard? But not the pipeline? That's bullspend, and marketers are calling it out in. Dashboard Confessions.

• 0:29Speaker 02

  My boss asked for results, so I opened my dashboard for the only positive sounding metric I had: impressions.

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• 1:20Speaker 01

  WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

• 1:31Ben Brock Johnson?

  Emily Kwong, what's up?

• 1:33Speaker 01

  Ben Brock Johnson, what is up? I'm so happy to be here.

• 1:35Ben Brock Johnson?

  I'm happy you're here.

• 1:37Speaker 01

  Fellow video game nerd, as I recall.

• 1:39Ben Brock Johnson?

  That's right. That's right. Nerds unite. You co-host a podcast called Short Wave from NPR. What is the Short Wave short description?

• 1:49Speaker 01

  New discoveries, everyday mysteries, and the science behind the headlines. And then our theme song goes like doo doo doo doo doo doo doo.

• 1:57Ben Brock Johnson?

  Heck, yeah.

• 1:57Speaker 01

  This is Short Wave from NPR. That's us.

• 2:00Ben Brock Johnson?

  Well done. Well done.

• 2:05Ben Brock Johnson?

  And you guys are doing something special this summer. So summer is stretching on for a few more days. I hear you've been at camp, tech camp?

• 2:14Speaker 01

  Yes. Every summer, we go to camp. We went to space for space camp.

• 2:19Ben Brock Johnson?

  Nice.

• 2:19Speaker 01

  We went under the ocean for sea camp. This time, we are going deep into our tech fascination. What is the future of of anything?

• 2:29Ben Brock Johnson?

  Cool.

• 2:30Speaker 01

  So we talk about sky taxis. We talk about AI in the military. We talk about cybersecurity. We talk about human consciousness. It's really fun. Episodes come out on Mondays.

• 2:41Ben Brock Johnson?

  You're going to co-host Endless Thread with me today. Thank you for being willing to do this.

• 2:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:46Ben Brock Johnson?

  Take over.

• 2:47Speaker 01

  I'm so excited. I love internet rabbit holes. So this is, this is like

• 2:50Ben Brock Johnson?

  We're in.

• 2:51Speaker 01

  A chat between friends, you know?

• 2:53Ben Brock Johnson?

  Love it.

• 2:56Ben Brock Johnson?

  You have something for me about fanfiction, which sold. Tell me more.

• 3:03Speaker 01

  Do you read fanfiction?

• 3:05Ben Brock Johnson?

  I'm embarrassed to say I do not.

• 3:07Speaker 01

  Why are you embarrassed?

• 3:09Ben Brock Johnson?

  I don't know. Like, I feel like that's a nerd thing that I should do, but I don't do. You know what I mean?

• 3:13Speaker 01

  You can't, you can't tick all the boxes. There's just not enough time.

• 3:17Ben Brock Johnson?

  That's true.

• 3:17Speaker 01

  This is a story about fanfiction, which is funny because Short Wave is thoroughly nonfiction. But of course, every once in a while in science news, something captures people's minds and their imaginations run wild. And that has absolutely happened with the Artemis 2 mission. People are extrapolating beyond reality into the imagined lives of these astronauts, and it's all over the internet. And I found a whole bunch of Artemis 2 fanfiction that I want to talk about today because it's so good.

• 3:49Ben Brock Johnson?

  Please tell me more. I'm, again, I'm in, I will read this fanfiction with you.

• 3:53Speaker 01

  Okay, I'm going to read excerpts.

• 3:55Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay, please. I can't wait.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  I guess just to take a step back, did you follow Artemis 2 at all?

• 4:01Ben Brock Johnson?

  So this is the one that that recently landed in the water?

• 4:05Speaker 01

  They did. This is a crew of four people. They did land in the ocean because they were coming back from?

• 4:11Ben Brock Johnson?

  They were coming back from the moon.

• 4:13Speaker 01

  Ding ding ding.

• 4:14Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  That's right. Yes.

• 4:15Ben Brock Johnson?

  For some reason, I got nervous about those questions. I was like, do I, is, am I crazy? What's Artemis? Oh, God, I forgot.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 4:21Ben Brock Johnson?

  And there was a guy, there was, there was a guy wearing a turnstile shirt on, like, one of the NASA people was wearing a turnstile shirt. And I was like, okay, this guy thinks he's pretty cool. That's cool.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  It's amazing what details stick out when you're watching, honestly, history being made. Like, this was NASA's first crewed, so with people, lunar flyby in 50 years, 10-day mission, four astronauts. They didn't land on the moon. They went around the moon, came back to Earth, splashed in the ocean. You saw it, video footage.

• 4:51Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yes.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  Integrity Splashdown sending post-landing command now. Splashdown confirmed at 7:07 PM Central Time, 5:07 PM Pacific Time. Integrity's astronauts back on Earth.

• 5:07Ben Brock Johnson?

  I feel like it restores your faith in humanity whenever, like, a mission like this happens and you're like, all right, a bunch of people worked together to do something really cool, and now we're like all watching it and feeling like it's really cool. That's cool.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like, oh, humans, we did something together in a cooperative way.

• 5:26Ben Brock Johnson?

  Good job, us.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  Honestly, I think the fascination, obsession, fanfictionalizing of these astronauts has entirely to do with them as people.

• 5:35Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay.

• 5:35Speaker 01

  Like, it's just stacked, this crew. So you have the pilot, Victor Glover. He's the first person of color to travel to the vicinity of the moon.

• 5:44Ben Brock Johnson?

  We call amazing things that humans do moonshots for a reason. Love it.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  Then you have mission specialist Christina Cook, who's the first woman in human history to do this. Houston, we have you the same, and it is so great to hear from Earth again. There's this amazing photo of her in front of a window with her braid just free floating.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  And I saw so many artistic representations of, like, Christina's braid.

• 6:10Ben Brock Johnson?

  Wow.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  And people being like, wow, I wish I could be a woman far away from, far away from Earth, far away in the moon. Then you have Commander Reed Wiseman dedicating a crater of the moon to his late wife, which was very beautiful. Here's actually a clip of it, of everyone honoring Carol.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  It's a bright spot on the moon. And we would like to call it Carol. And you spell that C-A-R-R-O-L-L.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  And to round it all out, mission specialist Jeremy Henson, just being a very lovable Canadian. It was unifying. It was multinational, multicultural, and reminded us truly through, through their work that we are one. We are of one human group on this planet. And this very winning group of humans reflecting our humanity back to us inspired droves of fanfiction. And it's on Tumblr, it's on Wattpad, it's on fanfiction.net. I would love to read you some.

• 7:17Ben Brock Johnson?

  Please.

• 7:21Speaker 01

  I wanted to give you a story you could sink into. So

• 7:24Ben Brock Johnson?

  Okay.

• 7:24Speaker 01

  I'm only going to read the preamble. Let's call it, like, the book jacket.

• 7:29Ben Brock Johnson?

  Not even the prologue. We're book jacket level. Okay.

• 7:32Speaker 01

  This is on wattpad.com. It's written by Blues Drafts. It's four parts. The most recent part was published just a few weeks ago.

• 7:45Speaker 01

  It's been two months since launch day, nearly five weeks since their return, and barely three weeks since their last press tour. Slowly, their group chat is getting quieter and quieter. Not that they didn't text at all, but slowly, everyone is getting settled back into their lives, their hobbies, family gatherings, quiet mornings on their veranda,

• 8:03Speaker 01

  church, whatever is important to them.

• 8:06Ben Brock Johnson?

  Wow.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  And it feels good, right? Why is it then that Christina suddenly begins to feel lonely, even despite all of the online love she slowly accepts? Does she know? That's what I'm wondering. I don't know. No, she's very good about being online. What or who is missing that has been around every day prior to their return? Question mark. Then a note from the author. Not a ship, just them being besties. So this is just a fanfiction about these four friends missing each other.

• 8:36Ben Brock Johnson?

  That's so lovely.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  Like, coming back from camp and being like, guys, our friendship bracelets.

• 8:41Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, my God. That could have gone in so many different directions. And so I'm really glad that it went in the direction that it went in. I love just a story about friendship. I mean, what's, what great story is not ultimately about friendship? So this sounds really nice.

• 8:56Speaker 01

  Ben, I did bring a fanfiction that is going exactly the direction you fear. It is a romance.

• 9:00Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, boy.

• 9:01Speaker 01

  Fanfiction featuring Christina Cook. And a lot of this fanfiction does. She, she seems to play a starring role in people's imaginations. They just love imagining her fall in love. The disclaimer says, in this story, Christina is portrayed as a lesbian. This is purely fictional and is not meant to reflect her real-life sexuality. I fully respect Christina and her relationship with Bob. They seem genuinely happy together, and I wish them nothing but the best. Heart emoji. That being said, here is the prologue for We Were Never Just Friends.

• 9:28Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, boy.

• 9:32Speaker 01

  A small group of people was gathered near a conference room, flight directors, engineers, support staff. And among them stood a woman Sarah recognized instantly. For a moment, the world seemed to slow.

• 9:42Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, boy.

• 9:43Speaker 01

  Christina Cook. Sarah hadn't seen her in years. The last time they'd stood in the same room, they'd been teenagers wearing matching cheerleading uniforms, laughing about

• 9:54Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, my God.

• 9:58Speaker 01

  Laughing about homework and weekend plans. I think so many teenagers write these. All they can relate to is verandas and homework.

• 10:07Ben Brock Johnson?

  Can't remember the last time a veranda was even like in my head. Anyway, go on.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  Back then, they had spent nearly every day together. Now Christina stood confidently among NASA's finest, dressed in a flight suit bearing her name and mission insignia. That's an SAT word.

• 10:24Ben Brock Johnson?

  Wow.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  She looked older, of course, but more experienced, more accomplished, but unmistakably the same. This fanfic has 42 chapters.

• 10:36Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, my God.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  Has been viewed thousands of times.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  People love these astronauts. They love imagining them in situations. There's even fanfiction that crosses over into the Percy Jackson universe.

• 10:52Ben Brock Johnson?

  OK.

• 10:53Speaker 01

  Did you ever read those books?

• 10:54Ben Brock Johnson?

  No, but I know of them.

• 10:55Speaker 01

  Percy Jackson, I don't read them. He's like the son of a god, like the Greek myth gods.

• 11:01Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, yeah. He's like the son of Poseidon. It's in the Greek myth zone. My kids read this stuff.

• 11:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this one is fanfiction.net. The author's Kitson A. Mason. So in in fanfic culture, I guess Percy Jackson has like an established fanfic sister that doesn't exist in the books named Chloe.

• 11:22Ben Brock Johnson?

  Whoa.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  They're basically in Yellowstone. And they're kind of sitting around at the edge of camp.

• 11:30Ben Brock Johnson?

  OK.

• 11:30Speaker 01

  And they're talking about the Artemis mission.

• 11:34Ben Brock Johnson?

  So far, makes total sense.

• 11:36Speaker 01

  Chloe tipped her face up toward the afternoon sky. Artemis II, first woman and first person of color to fly a lunar mission. A short pause. I think it's kind of perfect.

• 11:46Ben Brock Johnson?

  Wow.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  So Artemis II has not only made an impact in our universe, it has made an impact in fictional universes, including existing IP.

• 11:54Ben Brock Johnson?

  I love that. And I love that it's like, you know, we think about representation, right? And and it's kind of cool to see this like extra layer of representation that's happening in fanfic because kids are like, this is so cool. Well, OK, I'm making an assumption that some teenagers are writing this fanfic, which maybe they're not, who knows?

• 12:13Speaker 01

  Apologies if it's you and you're a middle aged person. You keep on your craft.

• 12:19Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yeah, do it. But like, it's cool that people are, they're so inspired by this sort of multicultural aspect of the crew that they are now like expanding that universe, which, you know, again, like results in more representation. And that's cool and sounds fun.

• 12:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, people can like see themselves more in these astronauts, which I think is why we're getting this phenomenon.

• 12:45Ben Brock Johnson?

  Emily, thank you for exposing me responsibly to to astronaut fanfic. I appreciate it.

• 12:51Speaker 01

  I did keep it safe for work.

• 12:53Ben Brock Johnson?

  That's true.

• 12:53Speaker 01

  There, don't even look what else is out there.

• 12:58Ben Brock Johnson?

  All right, so in a minute, we're going to talk some more. And I'm going to bring you a story of the so called lost cities of ancient history.

• 13:29Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken? A podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questram School of Business. What gets lost when work stops looking like a nine to five job?

• 13:42Ben Brock Johnson?

  If I am not committing to be working with you exclusively at a particular point in time for a certain amount of time to do certain types of work, then you can't necessarily expect the employer on the other side to provide guarantees either.

• 13:55Speaker 00

  Follow Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts and stick around until the end of this podcast for a preview of a recent episode about the changing dynamics of the gig economy.

• 14:09Speaker 01

  Are your ad campaigns lighting up the dashboard? But not the pipeline? That's bullspend and marketers are calling it out in. Dashboard, confessions.

• 14:18Speaker 02

  My boss asked for results, so I opened my dashboard for the only positive sounding metric I had. Impressions.

• 14:25Speaker 01

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• 14:39Speaker 03

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• 15:14Ben Brock Johnson?

  So we are back with Emily Kwong.

• 15:16Speaker 01

  Hi.

• 15:16Ben Brock Johnson?

  Fanfic lover.

• 15:17Speaker 01

  I never said that. I said fanfic appreciator.

• 15:22Ben Brock Johnson?

  Fanfic appreciator, NPR shortwave nerd.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 15:26Ben Brock Johnson?

  I got a story for you. You ready?

• 15:28Speaker 01

  I'm ready.

• 15:29Ben Brock Johnson?

  I'm thinking a lot about time right now. I just had a birthday, I'm a Leo. As I get older, I find myself recognizing kind of like the echoes of history a lot more in the world around me. What does the natural environment look like where you live?

• 15:44Speaker 01

  Because of urban development, I feel like I don't know. It's like hidden from me. And that's sad because before I came to NPR, I worked in Sitka, Alaska for a community radio station. And I knew very intimately what was up with the land, the shape of it, the mountains, the buildings were all very low. But where I live now is kind of a mystery because it's covered.

• 16:07Ben Brock Johnson?

  OK, that's a great answer. I will say that in the Northeast where I live, if you spend any time in the woods, you're likely to come across, you know, these stone walls crisscrossing the middle of the forest.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  Oh, yes. I'm from Connecticut.

• 16:20Ben Brock Johnson?

  Oh, yeah, that's right. We're both Connecticutians. So I feel like I've been thinking about these stone walls recently. It's easy to forget that they are just piles of rocks like plowed up from fields. And those fields were actually farmland, which means the forest wasn't a thing where the stone walls currently are, right? Like it wasn't, it didn't used to be forest.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, humans were here doing their thing.

• 16:45Ben Brock Johnson?

  We were here and it looked very different in in some of these environments because of what we were doing. So I've become more interested in history than I used to be. And I'm not talking so much about the Roman Empire here as I am civilizations. We, or at least I, know less about, which is why I got interested in this Reddit post from several weeks ago now.

• 17:03Speaker 01

  OK.

• 17:03Ben Brock Johnson?

  I was in r/science, which I'm sure you've been in before, Emily, as the co host of of Shortwave. It's a pretty large subreddit where all kinds of things get posted. But according to the subreddit rules, everything posted has to be peer reviewed research. No summaries of summaries, no editorialized or sensationalized titles. We will come back to that idea.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  This is why I love them, though, that they hold themselves to that standard, which is rare on the internet.

• 17:29Ben Brock Johnson?

  Right?

• 17:30Speaker 01

  Truth is not a premium.

• 17:32Ben Brock Johnson?

  Exactly, same. I love this. So there was a post there that really popped off recently. 20,000 upvotes, more than 500 comments at the time of taping. I want you to read this post title.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  Scientists uncover hundreds of hidden structures beneath the Amazon. That's the headline. Quote, "The scale of the archaeological record suggests that many other regions across Amazonia may have been far more densely populated and intensively modified than previously assumed."

• 18:02Ben Brock Johnson?

  So how do you feel about this title? Does it feel sensationalized to you? It feels pretty measured, right?

• 18:08Speaker 01

  I would say so, yes. The words suggests, may have, then previously assumed are all the kinds of like yellow lights that science writers like myself put up to say like, we don't know for sure.

• 18:21Ben Brock Johnson?

  Exactly.

• 18:22Speaker 01

  Quote us too much.

• 18:25Ben Brock Johnson?

  OK, so the paper that all of this is based on is the work of archaeoanthropologists at the University of Helsinki in Finland. But they were looking at the Amazon rainforest with LiDAR technology, which, as we all know, Emily, stands for LiDAR is?

• 18:43Speaker 01

  Long Infrared Detection Analysis Radiography.

• 18:47Ben Brock Johnson?

  That was an amazing guess and I I couldn't have done it. It's much still less cool sounding than the one you just gave it. It is, it is light detection and ranging.

• 19:01Speaker 01

  Oh, right, ranging.

• 19:02Ben Brock Johnson?

  So, you know, lasers and stuff, we're shooting lasers at things and measuring the time it takes for the lasers to bounce back towards their origin. Self driving cars use this, right? They use this in building scans.

• 19:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 19:13Ben Brock Johnson?

  Mapping elevations of land. These archaeoanthropologists conducted a LiDAR survey and found 400 new human made structures beneath heavy rainforest.

• 19:25Speaker 01

  That is so cool.

• 19:28Ben Brock Johnson?

  It's so cool, right? Can you guess why we think they're human made?

• 19:33Speaker 01

  At the New York Post, I'm looking at the pictures, which is what's really making me say it's so cool because they look like crop circles just in their geometry, like these, this footprint of a building foundation? I don't know, but it's like perfectly square.

• 19:49Ben Brock Johnson?

  Right?

• 19:50Speaker 01

  What the LiDAR is showing. Or circular, some of them are circles, some of them are squares, some of them are rectangles. Yeah.

• 19:57Ben Brock Johnson?

  And I think that's the perfect answer. Like, it's the way that they look that makes us think that they are human made.

• 20:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:03Ben Brock Johnson?

  Right?

• 20:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:04Ben Brock Johnson?

  These massive square shapes and extremely straight pathways, some of them really wide, almost like avenues.

• 20:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:11Ben Brock Johnson?

  And part of what this apparently suggests is perhaps like the stone walls in the forest in the Northeast in Connecticut, is the landscape wasn't always incredibly dense rainforest. It actually looked quite different because of human intervention. So when you look at the data images the LiDAR survey returned, you can see these kind of huge areas of rainforest, and they're interrupted by these very square 90-degree angled structures and lines. And really, what apparently we mean here by structures is that, you know, this is like changes to the earth, and it's sort of like ditches and flat areas. And the people studying this think that these structures are the remnants of the Akiri civilization. Have you ever heard of this civilization?

• 20:55Speaker 01

  Mm-mm.

• 20:56Ben Brock Johnson?

  So this is apparently a pre-Columbian network of communities, and they were apparently this kind of interconnected web of communities throughout the jungle. The Akiri civilization apparently existed in southwestern Amazonia from roughly 600 BCE to 850 CE. So before the Common Era, and then the Common Era, which is about, I guess, 1,500 years, apparently, that this civilization existed. So one interesting aspect, Emily, of this civilization is how abruptly it disappeared.

• 21:31Speaker 01

  Mysterious.

• 21:34Ben Brock Johnson?

  One theory, as you probably might guess, considering what we know about the history of this part of the world, one theory is disease. We know about the devastation brought on by smallpox, brought over by Spanish colonists in the Americas hundreds of years later. So Reddit is this place I find a lot of value in the user comments, believe it or not. Usually, you don't read the comments, but I always like to read the comments. There's also a lot of trash, as we know. But this is this place where you can learn a lot from commenters and other Redditors. So the thread on this post is a good example of that for me. Some top comments talk about a New York Times bestselling book called "The Lost City

• 22:17Ben Brock Johnson?

  of the Monkey God" by Douglas Preston. Have you ever heard of this book?

• 22:21Speaker 01

  Mm-mm.

• 22:23Ben Brock Johnson?

  I hadn't either. I did not read the book in the last three days preparing for this conversation. But maybe I will now. Some of the author's work was published in The New Yorker, also National Geographic. Douglas Preston's book looks at a group of documentarians, Honduran and American archaeologists, looking for rumored lost cities in what is now eastern Honduras, and using LiDAR to do it. This most recent paper, published in the journal Nature, the one that we're talking about with all these 400 new structures that they've found, one of the big takeaways was that the Akiri civilization was maybe much larger than previously thought, overturning assumptions with data from this

• 23:08Ben Brock Johnson?

  new LiDAR survey that discovered these 400 new structures. When "The Lost City of the Monkey God" came out, a group of about two dozen scholars, archaeologists, and anthropologists wrote an open letter. This is according to The Guardian. They criticized the project.

• 23:26Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 23:27Ben Brock Johnson?

  I'm going to read from The Guardian here. "The scholars criticized National Geographic and the media for what they describe as the aggrandizement of a single expedition at the expense of years of research by scientists and decades of support from indigenous people of the dense rainforests in Honduras's Mesquite region."

• 23:48Speaker 01

  I wish I could say that this is an anomaly in science, but it often is true. But some new technology comes along, and LiDAR is very cool. Let's be very clear.

• 23:57Ben Brock Johnson?

  Yes.

• 23:58Speaker 01

  Some new technology comes along and makes significant contribution to understanding something, and then indigenous science says, "We knew all along." And their methods for knowing are not recognized by Western science, and it can create a lot of tension. Again, I go back also to Sitka, Alaska, where I lived. It was a community that was on the flingit land. And what I learned from that experience was, like, what does it really mean to know something? That is a cultural question. It's a social question. And what the standards are for something to be knowable and researchable depends on who you are.

• 24:38Speaker 01

  And scientists could stand to like step outside themselves and recognize that. So the paper itself seems very well-done, restrained. It's in Nature, which is a really credible journal. But yeah, the sensationalizing by the media does add to the narrative that, like, "Oh, if it weren't for science, people wouldn't even know what was right in front of them," when actually, that's not true.

• 24:59Ben Brock Johnson?

  I should say, I learned about this aspect of things from a Redditor in that r/science thread about this paper.

• 25:06Speaker 01

  Shout out to them.

• 25:07Ben Brock Johnson?

  Shout out. I think it's Gindabine1 is the user's name. They posted a review from Cambridge University Press, looking at how scientific archaeological publications that use digital technologies like LiDAR to support or prove or find things, these things can get sensationalized for the public. So I feel like we can endeavor to have wonder about these things. We can

• 25:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:30Ben Brock Johnson?

  look at our physical environment and be tickled and excited and fascinated by the fact that they look different than they used to. And we can find civilizations and communities like really mysterious. That's okay, right? And good. Like, that's how we explore the world. But we should balance that with this understanding that, you know, many of our discoveries are actually just personal.

• 25:50Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 25:51Ben Brock Johnson?

  That what we're discovering is something that other people have known all along or been living amongst. And I can, I hope that we can keep finding that balance. And yeah, that's my obvious, quote-unquote, "discovery" through this Reddit thread.

• 26:09Speaker 01

  Look at you adding yourself. No, the best scientists I know, and just to bring it back to Artemis and the excitement over, honestly, the diversity of the scientists who were there, the best scientists I know balance their exploration and their wonder with humility and respect. Oh, man, I have to spend more time on Science Reddit, because this is like, pretty nuanced.

• 26:33Ben Brock Johnson?

  It's not bad, right?

• 26:34Speaker 01

  For the internet?

• 26:35Ben Brock Johnson?

  For the internet, not bad.

• 26:36Speaker 01

  Go internet.

• 26:37Ben Brock Johnson?

  Well, you said it beautifully, Emily.

• 26:38Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 26:39Ben Brock Johnson?

  This has been the Brojogan Experience. Thank you for joining us today.

• 26:45Speaker 01

  Thanks for joining this Quang-along. It was so great.

• 26:49Ben Brock Johnson?

  That's a better name.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  I just came up with that.

• 26:53Ben Brock Johnson?

  Seriously, thank you, Emily, co-host of Short Wave, for coming to hang on Endless Thread.

• 26:57Speaker 01

  It was a blast. Yeah, this is a great show. I've loved being on it. I've loved listening to it. So keep up the good work.

• 27:04Ben Brock Johnson?

  Thanks.

• 27:05Speaker 01

  Keep finding those nuanced takes on the internet.

• 27:07Ben Brock Johnson?

  Likewise.

• 27:17Ben Brock Johnson?

  Short Wave's tech camp series can be found in the Short Wave feed from NPR and on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. We will also put links in our show notes for show. This episode was spun up by myself and Emily Quang. It was produced by Grace Tatter and Franny Monahan. Sound design by Emily Jankowski. Our editor is Dave Shaw. Our managing producer is Sumit Joshi. Our production manager is Paul Vikes. The rest of our team is Emery Sivertson and Dean Russell. Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between the dense Amazonian jungle and some, hopefully not true, problematic fanfic. If you have an unsolved mystery, an untold history, or another wild story from

• 27:58Ben Brock Johnson?

  the internet that you want us to tell, you can hit us up [email protected]. Also, by the way, that guy, the NASA guy with the turnstile shirt, if you want to see a picture of that man, he's almost Ken Bone-ish in a way, if that makes sense. You can go to our subreddit, r/EndlessThread.

• 28:50Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken?, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at BU Questram School of Business. Follow Is Business Broken wherever you get your podcasts, and listen on for a preview of a recent episode featuring Brandeis University Professor David Weil on a question at the heart of the gig economy. When an app controls how you work, is it really just a platform, or is it your employer?

• 29:16Speaker 05

  It is very true that the platforms allow, let's say, drivers to find riders much more easily in a way that would be impossible absent the Uber or Lyft technology. Yes, the technology is connecting people, but the technology is also doing all the kinds of things that we usually associate with management. Setting the rate of pay, setting the pace of work, deciding on who gets the job and who doesn't, monitoring the performance of that party. There's a lot that these technologies do that are all about what we would call "management."

• 29:57Speaker 00

  Find the full episode by searching for Is Business Broken? wherever you get your podcasts. And learn more about the Marotra Institute for Business, Markets, and Society at ibms.bu.edu.

• 30:12Speaker 03

  Hey, Bose here. On your next track, listen for the decisions. Distortion on the bass, the vocal right up front. Every choice deliberate. With Bose, you'll hear it all. Your music deserves Bose.

• 30:28Speaker 03

  Whenever fall comes back around, it always feels like a fresh start. This year, I've been layering in some styles from the new Lululemon fall drop, because the weather is shifting and I find I have to be ready for the entire day and not just one part of it. Lululemon's fall line has some really versatile transitional pieces, so I can just wake up, throw on a matching set, add a jacket or a fleece, and head out, knowing that I'll feel comfortable enough to go wherever the day takes me. Check out the new fall arrivals in store and online now at lululemon.com.