Short Wave
@shortwave · Podcast
Latest segments
- New US Dietary Guidelines, 2026-10-28
Adds critics' calorie-math objection to guidelines
Runs through the guideline changes as a MAHA scorecard item: higher protein, encouragement of full-fat dairy and beef tallow, and an unchanged saturated fat limit. Adds the critics' calorie-math objection, which the earlier coverage did not carry. - International Sauna Congress, 2026-10-19
Describes the floating sauna and mood case
Color from the Oslo harbor: a fragrance ritual and folk songs inside a floating sauna, then the case for mood benefits through social connection, nature, digital detox and a skin-heat-to-brain pathway. Stays inside the congress color already on the record. - International Sauna Congress, 2026-10-19
Walks through the cardiovascular evidence
Walks through the cardiovascular and metabolic case for heat: blood pressure, arterial stiffness, blood sugar and cholesterol, plus Ant Shepard's exercise-mimetic framing and Eric Lee's randomized trial adding sauna to exercise. It stays inside the symposium's evidence review rather than adding a development. - International Sauna Congress, 2026-10-19
Reports the field's hundred-plus protocols
Reports from the Norway gathering on the field's disarray: one scientist counted over a hundred protocols across heat studies, and Ashley Mason's Sauna Research Foundation is leading a consensus push on definitions and measurements. - Pike execution fails, 2026-10-07
Walks through pentobarbital and past autopsies
Van Norman walks through how pentobarbital works and why it is not a humane anesthetic, then widens to past botched executions - Diaz, Lockett - and the autopsies she has reviewed. The Pike case is the frame, but the segment's new material is the autopsy record and the closing news that Pike has regained consciousness. - Pike execution fails, 2026-10-07
Plays Van Norman's prediction the IV would fail
Opens on Christa Pike surviving her lethal injection in Tennessee, then plays anesthesiologist Gail Van Norman's pre-execution testimony that the IV would fail and the drug would go around the vein. Van Norman says the only thing she did not predict is that Pike would live.