Today, guest host Selena Simmons-Duffin is exploring a detail very personal to her: How the number of older brothers a person has can influence their sexuality.
Scientific research on sexuality has a dark history, with long-lasting harmful effects on queer communities. Much of the early research has also been debunked over time. But not this "fraternal birth order effect." The fact that a person's likelihood of being gay increases with each older brother has been found all over the world – from Turkey to North America, Brazil, the Netherlands and beyond. Today, Selena gets into all the details: What this effect is, how it's been studied and what it can (and can't) explain about sexuality.
Interested in the science of our closest relatives? Check out more stories in NPR's series on the Science of Siblings.
Email us at shortwave@npr.org — we'd love to hear from you.
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Short Wave
Around the world, the planet’s freshwater is getting saltier. And it’s because of people. For decades, salting roads, fertilizer run-off and evaporation driven by human-caused climate change have uppe...
Groundwater is responsible for about half of the water people use globally. It’s drying up. Hayes Kelman started noticing the family farm in western Kansas was slowly getting less water around the tim...
In honor of World Water Day, Short Wave is exploring the ways water touches our lives. From increasing water shortages around the world, to how it’s affecting agriculture and aquifers. We’re starting...
A multi-year megadrought in the Western U.S. has claimed untold populations of wild plants. Amid the conditions, some have survived. Scientists have produced a stunningly complete picture about how po...
The new food pyramid was released earlier this year. It emphasizes protein, full-fat dairy and what Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. calls “healthy fats.” These guidelines inf...
US-Israeli airstrikes on oil depots culminated in ‘black rain’ in Iran early last week – a phenomenon usually caused by large amounts of soot, carbon and other pollutants in the air. Usually, rain lea...
It’s likely you have at least one “guilty pleasure.” Maybe it’s romance novels. Or reality TV… Playing video games… or getting swept into obscure corners of TikTok. Neuroscientists say the pleasure re...
When producer Berly McCoy was out on her local frozen lake, she saw something she'd never seen before. There were dark spidery, star-shaped patterns in the ice and they freaked her out. So, we called...
In 1999 hundreds of gray whales washed up along the west coast of North America. More in 2000. They lost an estimated 25% of their population. But then the whale population recovered and people moved...
Today, guest host Selena Simmons-Duffin is exploring a detail very personal to her: How the number of older brothers a person has can influence their sexuality.Scientific research on sexuality has a d...
Paleontologists have often determined how old a dinosaur was by counting the growth rings in its bones. Just like with trees, it was thought that each ring corresponded to a single year of age. But re...
Teens aren’t getting enough sleep! And a two-decade study suggests it’s getting worse. Scientists found that the number of high schoolers getting insufficient sleep — less than seven hours a night — h...
In his role as Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is changing how the United States approaches vaccines. But those changes aren’t limited to the United States. NPR global h...
If you’ve been on the internet in the past few weeks, chances are you’ve seen him: a tiny gray-brown monkey dragging a big, stuffed orangutan around Japan’s Ichikawa Zoo. His name? Punch-kun, or Punch...
Lakes are freezing later, thawing earlier and experiencing dramatic temperature swings in between. And all that throws off the delicate balance of life below the surface. And that has a major impact o...
Over half a billion people live by lakes that freeze over in the winter. But as the climate warms, those lakes are losing whole days of ice cover. Winters are also getting weirder, with more intense t...
Folks over 65 are putting in a lot of screen time. In 2019, the Pew Research Center found that people 60 years and older spend more than half their daily leisure time in front of screens, mostly watch...
Helicopters. Cargo containers. Old washing machines. For years, fishermen dumped this waste into the Gulf of Mexico. But they weren’t just trying to get rid of junk; they were trying to create artific...
Bring up aliens and a lot of people will scoff. But not everyone is laughing. Around the turn of the century, 3.8 million people banded together in a real-time search for aliens -- with screensavers....
Almost 15% of adults suffer from a persistent, often intolerable sound... that is literally just in their heads. Why does the brain do this to us? We help one of our listeners get some answers.This is...
From TikTok and Instagram influencers to celebrities like Hugh Jackman and Kourtney Kardashian, intermittent fasting has gotten a lot of hype. The diet restricts what time you eat rather than what or...
The 2026 Winter Olympics are unfolding in Milan and Cortina, and we can’t look away: We’re watching athletes fly down mountains on skis and glide — sometimes slipping and falling — on the ice. Vikram...
Picture this: You’re at a pretend tea party, but instead of sitting across from toddlers in tiaras, you’re clinking cups with Kanzi—an ape with the incredible ability to communicate with humans. NPR s...
Early last year, a hundred researchers, clinicians and other experts on HIV discussed the development of an innovative vaccine that could prevent the disease. But just as the meeting was about to wrap...
The evolutionary purpose of kissing has long eluded scientists. Smooching is risky, given things like pointy teeth, and inherently gross, given an estimated 80 million bacteria are transferred in a 10...
It seems like artificial intelligence is everywhere in our virtual lives. It's in our search results and our phones. But what happens when AI moves out of the chat and into the real world? NPR science...
Watching a ski jumper fly through the air might get you wondering, “How do they do that?” The answer is – physics!That’s why this episode, we have two physicists – Amy Pope, a physicist from Clemson U...
In 1928, a chance contaminant in Scottish physician Alexander Fleming’s lab experiment led to a discovery that would change the field of medicine forever: penicillin. Since then, penicillin and other...
Rhythm is everywhere. Even if you don’t think you have it, it’s fundamental to humans’ biological systems. Our heartbeat is rhythmic. Speech is rhythmic. Even as babies, humans can track basic rhythm....
Olympic sliding sports – bobsled, luge and skeleton – are known for their speed. Athletes chase medals down a track of ice at up to 80 or 90 mph. With this thrill comes the risk of “sled head.” Athlet...