Science Magazine Podcast

First up on the podcast, a peek into the roiling seas of U.S. science policy. ScienceInsider Editor Jocelyn Kaiser talks about shifting leadership at the National Science Foundation and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as well as a dip in funding rates by the National Institutes of Health. Staff Writer Robert F. Service covers proposed restrictions on access by international researchers and students to the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Contributing Correspondent Warren Cornwall talks about the Department of Energy’s rush to loosen radiation exposure standards. Senior International Correspondent Richard Stone discusses why an accusation of nuclear weapons testing in China could spark a new round of weapons testing in the United States and Russia. Next on the show, this year’s children’s book roundup features everything from a look at space law to a clever wartime spider farmer. Senior Editor Valerie Thompson joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss the books and the reviews of them, written by Science staffers (and sometimes their kids). This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy. About the Science Podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up on the podcast, producer Meagan Cantwell talks to Contributing Correspondent Warren Cornwall about his visit to Brazil, where he observed firsthand what it takes for researchers to understand why bird populations in the Amazon and beyond are shrinking. Next on the show, Raouf Belkhir, an M.D.-Ph.D. student at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and Carnegie Mellon University, joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss his Science Advances paper on a newly refined way to map awake patients’ brains during neurosurgery. This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy. About the Science Podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up on the podcast, Newsletter Editor Christie Wilcox, Associate Online News Editor Michael Greshko, and intern Perri Thaler share their experiences from the AAAS annual meeting in Phoenix. Christie recorded on location with David Rand regarding his prize-winning Science paper on using a large language model to combat conspiracy theories. Check out the live version of his team’s Debunk Bot. Michael chats with host Sarah Crespi about the foggy outlook of science in the United States as funding levels and graduate positions decline, and the bright sunshine of young students presenting science posters. And finally, Perri shares her reporting on OpenAI’s contribution to theoretical physics announced at the meeting. Next on the show, we hear about the “bouba-kiki” effect—the tendency for people, no matter their language, to associate round shapes with the nonword bouba and spiky shapes with the nonword kiki. Maria Loconsole, a postdoctoral researcher in the Comparative Cognition Lab at the University of Padova, joins the podcast to discuss why her team looked for this effect in freshly hatched chickens. It turns out these baby birds also make these associations, which suggests the effect has less to do with language and more to do with how vertebrate brains are set up to experience the world. This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy. About the Science Podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up on the podcast, more than half of all dogs going through service animal training don’t make it to graduation. Producer Kevin McLean journeys with Online News Editor David Grimm to Canine Companions, one of the biggest organizations in the United States for training working dogs. At the facility, they meet puppies in preparation and learn about the behavioral testing and genetics that could be used to improve service animal schooling. Also appearing in this segment: Emily Bray, assistant professor in the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Arizona Brenda Kennedy, chief veterinary and research officer at Canine Companions Next on the show, Kishalay De, assistant professor at Columbia University and associate research scientist at the Flatiron Institute, talks about observing the birth of a stellar black hole in the nearby Andromeda galaxy. He recounts how his team looked for this elusive event and describes what we can learn from observing it in the decades to come. This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy. About the Science Podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up on the podcast, host Sarah Crespi and Staff Writer Adrian Cho talk football and the latest science behind helmets engineered to reduce head injuries. Have better materials and testing led to fewer concussions and chronic traumatic encephalopathy in players? Next on the show, more than 100,000 people die from opioid overdoses in North America per year. Although much study has gone into addiction research, less attention has been paid to the biological details of overdose itself. John Strang, a professor in the National Addiction Centre at King’s College London, joins the podcast to discuss the questions researchers could be asking about overdose, and how to partner with drug addicted people to find solutions. This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up on the podcast, how do we protect astronauts when they leave the shelter of Earth’s protective magnetic fields and face the slow, constant bombardment of space radiation? Freelance science journalist Elie Dolgin joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss what we know about the damage from high-velocity particles and the research being done to curb their biological toll. Next on the show, modeling the fall of fossil fuels during the decarbonization of energy systems, with civil engineer and environmental sociologist Emily Grubert and historian and engineer Joshua Lappen, both at the University of Notre Dame. The pair wrote a policy forum on predicting chokepoints or “minimum viable scales” in the decline of fossil fuel networks—in effect, when a system might get too small to maintain its function. Understanding how to keep things online until they are no longer needed is important to maintain energy for all, as renewables grow and mines, pipelines, and refineries shrink. This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy. About the Science Podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up with Jennie Erin Smith, Science’s new senior biomedicine reporter, we delve into: autobrewery syndrome, when microbes inside the human gut make too much alcohol; how doctors can use a public repository, the Mexican Biobank, to guide patient care; and preliminary findings that surgery on the brain’s plumbing shows promise for Alzheimer’s disease. Next on the show, it’s tough to calculate when and where deorbiting spacecraft might enter the upper atmosphere and then eventually hit the ground. Benjamin Fernando, a seismologist and planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University, has shown that sonic booms created by fast-moving space debris shake seismic sensors, giving clues to angle of re-entry, breakup dynamics, and final location. This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy. About the Science Podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up on the podcast, freelance science journalist Sofia Quaglia talks about her visit to the Galápagos archipelago and how researchers there are working to restore the islands to their former ecological glory. *Note this episode has been updated to reflect that the Ecuadorian government is not responsible for primarily funding these efforts. Next on the show, Antarctica’s deep ice coating obscures the hills and valleys on its surface, making the continent’s response to climate change one of the biggest unknowns in predicting sea level rise over the next century. Helen Ockenden, a glaciologist at Grenoble Alpes University, joins the podcast to discuss how her team used satellite imagery and the physics of ice flows to fill in the missing details of Antarctica’s subglacial surface. This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy. About the Science Podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up on the podcast, scholars are on a quest to find Leonardo da Vinci’s DNA. With no direct descendants, the hunt involves sampling the famous polymath’s papers, paintings, and distant cousins. Contributing Correspondent Richard Stone talks with host Sarah Crespi about what researchers hope to learn from Leonardo’s genes and the new field of “arteomics.” Next on the show, new evidence for poisoned arrows from 60,000 years ago complicates our picture of hunting during the Pleistocene. Sven Isaksson, a professor of archaeological science at Stockholm University, joins the podcast to discuss the discovery of poisonous residues on microliths—the tiny, worked stone points used on arrows and spearheads. These findings could push back the origins of this toxic technology by 50,000 years. This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy. About the Science Podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up on the podcast, the best images of exoplanets right now are basically bright dots. We can’t see possible continents, potential oceans, or even varying colors. To improve our view, scientists are proposing a faraway fleet of telescopes that would use light bent by the Sun’s gravity to magnify a distant exoplanet. Staff Writer Daniel Clery joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss where to aim such a magnificent telescope and all the technological pieces needed to put it together. Next on the show, expert voices columnist and Johns Hopkins University mathematician Emily Riehl discusses her recent essay on communication woes in the math community. The complex concepts, jargon, and the slow pace of understanding a proof all add up to siloed subdisciplines and potentially more errors in the literature. Alex Kontorovich, a professor in the math department at Rutgers University, also joins to discuss how proof assistant computer programs and machine learning could help get mathematicians all on the same page. This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy. About the Science Podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up on the podcast, Online News Editor David Grimm joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about this year’s best online news stories—top performers and staff picks alike. Together they journey the scientific gamut, from bird feeders’ influence on hummingbird beak evolution to the use of “artificial spacetimes” to guide tiny robots through their environments. Next on the show, a discussion of this year’s pick for Breakthrough of the Year with producer Meagan Cantwell and News editor Greg Miller. They also touch on some other top finds from this year, including the first confirmed Denisovan skull, rice that can beat the heat, custom gene editing, and progress on xenotransplantation. This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy. About the Science Podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up on the podcast, we’ve likely only found about half the so-called city-killer asteroids (objects more than 140 meters in diameter). Freelance science journalist Robin George Andrews joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss the upcoming launch of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Surveyor, an asteroid hunter that will improve our ability to look for large objects that might crash into Earth, particularly those hiding in the Sun’s glare. Next on the show, freelancer producer Elah Feder talks with Wendy Valencia-Montoya, an organismic and evolutionary biology Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University, about heated conversations between plants and their pollinators. Her work suggests infrared radiation might be the oldest cue for animals to come hither, more ancient than color. This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy. About the Science Podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up on the podcast, Science celebrates 100 years of quantum mechanics with a special issue covering the past, present, and future of the field. News Contributing Correspondent Zack Savitsky joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about a more philosophical approach to quantum physics and the mysterious measurement problem. Next on the show we have Anne Goujon, program director at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria. She talks about her Expert Voices column on the uncertain future of demography and how the field is grappling with new theories on what happens after the global population peaks. How will different countries deal with falling populations? Will they try to reverse the trend? What are the goals going into the next century? This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy. About the Science Podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up on the podcast, when will the world hit peak carbon emissions? It’s not an easy question to answer because emissions cannot be directly measured in real time. Instead, there are proxies, satellite measures, and many, many calculations. Staff Writer Paul Voosen joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss how close we are to the top of carbon mountain and the tough road to come after the peak passes. Vani Rajendran, senior researcher in the cognitive neuroscience department at the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s Institute of Cellular Physiology, talks about macaques that can keep the beat. She explains how this intriguing ability challenges a long-standing view that animals with complex vocalizations and rhythm are inextricably linked. This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy. About the Science Podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up on the podcast: the mysterious fate of Europe’s Neolithic farmers. They arrived from Anatolia around 5500 B.C.E. and began farming fertile land across Europe. Five hundred years later, their buildings, cemeteries, and pottery stopped showing up in the archaeological record, and mass graves with headless bodies started to appear across the continent. Contributing Correspondent Andrew Curry talks with host Sarah Crespi about what this strange transition might mean. Next on the show, Editor for Life Sciences Sacha Vignieri discusses recent dog research published in Science, including tracing the movement of dogs alongside ancient human populations, examining when dogs first diversified, and probing the relationship between modern dogs’ breeds and their dispositions. This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy. About the Science Podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up on the podcast, Online News Editor David Grimm joins host Sarah Crespi for a rundown of online news stories. They talk about lichen that dine on dino bones, the physics of the lip-out problem in golf, and a brain-computer interface that can decode a tonal language (Chinese) from brain waves. Next on the show, Jeremy Munday, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at University of California, Davis, talks about generating mechanical power using a heat engine aimed at the night sky. Heat engines typically generate power by harnessing a temperature difference between two things—but by using space as the cold part and the ground as the warm part, Munday’s device can generate energy at night. This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy. About the Science Podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up on the podcast, Contributing Correspondent Sofia Moutinho visited the Xingu Indigenous territory in Brazil to learn about a long-standing collaboration between scientists and the Kuikuro to better understand early Amazon communities. Next on the show, we visit the Pacific pocket mouse recovery program at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance to talk with researchers about the tricky process of increasing genetic diversity in an endangered species. Researcher Aryn Wilder talks about a long-term project to interbreed mice from isolated populations in order to add more genetic diversity across the species—despite a mismatch in chromosome numbers between some of the groups. Debra Shier, associate director of the recovery ecology program at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, takes us on a tour of the breeding facility. This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy. About the Science Podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up on the podcast, increased carbon dioxide emissions sink more acidity into the ocean, but checking pH all over the world, up and down the water column, is incredibly challenging. Staff Writer Paul Voosen joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss a technique that takes advantage of how sound moves through the water to detect ocean acidification. Next on the show, we visit the lab of University of California San Diego professor Alysson Muotri at the Sanford Consortium, where he grows human brain organoids—multicellular structures that function like underdeveloped brains. Muotri used organoids to compare a protein that appears to be protective in human brains against the effects of lead toxicity with the archaic version of the protein that was present in our extinct cousins, like Denisovans and Neanderthals. His work suggests lead exposure differently affected our ancestors and our archaic cousins, possibly helping us survive to the present day. Finally, stay tuned for the last in our six-part series on books exploring the science of death. This month, host Angela Saini talks with astrophysicist Katie Mack about how the universe might end and her 2021 book The End of Everything: (Astrophysically Speaking). This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up on the podcast, the Bering Sea’s snow crabs are bouncing back after a 50-billion-crab die-off in 2020, but scientists are racing to predict what’s going to happen to this important fishery. Contributing Correspondent Warren Cornwall joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss what’s next for snow crabs. Next on the show, freelance producer Elah Feder talks with Fei Peng, a professor in the department of psychology in the School of Public Health at Southern Medical University in Guangzhou, China, and principal investigator at the Great Bay Area Brain Science and Brain Inspired Research Center, about detecting emotions—or more scientifically “affect”—in bumble bees. His group observed how a bumble bee that appears to be hopeful can share this state with other bees. This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy. About the Science Podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up on the podcast, Contributing Correspondent Kai Kupferschmidt takes a trip to Svalbard, an Arctic archipelago where ancient RNA viruses may lie buried in the permafrost. He talks with host Sarah Crespi about why we only have 100 years of evolutionary history for viruses such as coronavirus and influenza, and what we can learn by looking deeper back in time. Next on the show, Nathalie Stroeymeyt, senior lecturer at the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Bristol, joins freelancer producer Elah Feder to talk about how humans aren’t the only species that takes public health measures to stop outbreaks. To keep their colonies healthy when threatened with infectious disease, ants socially distance and even make architectural changes to their nests’ organization. This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy. About the Science Podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up on the podcast, producer Kevin McLean talks with Associate Online News Editor Michael Greshko about the impact of wildfires on wine; a couple horse stories, one modern, one ancient; and why educators are racing to archive government materials.   Next on the show, research that took advantage of a natural experiment in unnatural lighting. Host Sarah Crespi talks with Ph.D. student Liz Aguilar and Kimberly Rosvall, an associate professor, both in the department of biology at Indiana University Bloomington, about a citizen-science initiative that captured bird behavior before, during, and after a total solar eclipse in April 2024.      This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   Authors: Sarah Crespi; Kevin McLean; Michael Greshko Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up on the podcast, Staff Writer Robert F. Service joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about a boom in nuclear medicine, from new and more powerful radioisotopes to improved precision in cancer cell targeting.   Next on the show, we talk about why we sigh. Maria Clara Novaes-Silva, a doctoral student at ETH Zürich, discusses how deep breaths cause minute rearrangements at the special interface where air meets lung. The lung flexibility granted by these deeper inhalations suggest people on ventilators might have better lung health if they were served a larger draught of air from time to time. This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy. Authors: Sarah Crespi; Robert Service Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up on the podcast, Science News Editor Tim Appenzeller joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss why a salty layer of permafrost undergirding Arctic ice is turning frozen landscapes into boggy morasses.    Next on the show, glucose isn’t the only molecule in the body that can be monitored in real time; proteins can be, too. Freelancer producer Zakiya Whatley talks with Jane Donnelly, an MD/Ph.D. candidate at Northwestern University, about what we could learn from the live monitoring of key proteins, from the status of a transplanted organ to the early signs of a flare up in autoimmune disease. Finally, philologist Robert Garland joins books host Angela Saini to talk about ancient cultures and their death practices in his book What to Expect When You’re Dead: An Ancient Tour of Death and the Afterlife. This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.  Authors: Sarah Crespi; Angela Saini; Tim Appenzeller Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up on the podcast, freelance science journalist Leslie Roberts joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about the long journey to a vaccine for group B streptococcus, a microbe that sickens 400,000 babies a year and kills at least 91,000. Next on the show, there are about 250,000 agricultural drones employed on farms in China. Countries such as South Korea, Turkey, and Thailand are swiftly increasing agricultural drone use, whereas the United States and Russia are proceeding more slowly. Food policy researcher Ben Belton discusses what appears to drive drone use in agriculture and how they might make farming more productive and sustainable. Finally, Science Books Editor Valerie Thompson brings books on the secrets rocks have to tell about humanity and the mystery surrounding a Druid preserved in a bog for thousands of years. This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy. Authors: Sarah Crespi; Valerie Thompson; Leslie Roberts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up on the podcast, aggressive tumors have a secret cache of DNA that may help them beat current drug treatments. Freelance journalist Elie Dolgin joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about targeting so-called extrachromosomal DNA—little gene-bearing loops of DNA—that help difficult-to-treat cancers break the laws of inheritance.   Next on the show, producer Meagan Cantwell talks with Weidong Sun, director of the Center of Deep Sea Research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, about the discovery of a hydrogen-rich system so large it makes up at least 5% of current estimates for global hydrogen emissions from abiotic sources. They discuss how hydrogen gas rising from the mantle reacting with oxygen could have triggered an explosion that formed holes hundreds of meters across and dozens of meters deep.  This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy. Authors: Sarah Crespi; Elie Dolgin; Meagan Cantwell Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up on the podcast, despite so many advances in treatment, HIV drugs can suppress the virus but can’t cure the infection. Where does suppressed HIV hide within the body? Staff Writer Jon Cohen joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about the Last Gift Study, in which people with HIV donate their bodies for rapid autopsy to help find the last reservoirs of the virus.   Next on the show, Christine Elliott, a doctoral candidate in the department of entomology at Purdue University, talks about the Bug Bowl—an annual public outreach event that highlights all the wonders and benefits of insects. We also get to hear the sounds of violins trying to be crickets and learn how music connects people to bugs in ways that posters and public lectures can’t.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy. About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi; Jon Cohen Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up on the podcast, Staff Writer Rodrigo Pérez Ortega joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about a megafauna megafind that rivals the La Brea Tar Pits. In addition to revealing tens of thousands of bones from everything from dire wolves to an ancient human, the site has yielded the first DNA from ammoths that lived in a warm climate.    Next on the show, the Tijuana River crosses the U.S.-Mexican border from Tijuana to San Diego—bringing with it sewage, industrial waste, and stinky smells. News Intern Nazeefa Ahmed talks with Kimberly Prather, an atmospheric chemist at the University of California San Diego about detecting both air and water pollution around the river and the steps needed for cleanup.   Finally, the latest in our series of books exploring the science of death. This month, host Angela Saini talks with philosopher Susana Monsó about her ook Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death. Content warning for this segment: The interview contains descriptions of dead baby animals.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi; Rodrigo Perez Ortega; Angela Saini Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up on the podcast, Staff Writer Meredith Wadman joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss recent advances in understanding endometriosis—a disease where tissue that resembles the lining of the uterus grows outside the uterus, causing pain and other health effects. The pair talk about how investigating the role of the immune system in this disease is leading researchers to new potential diagnostic tools and treatments.   Next on the show, why are there good dengue years and bad dengue years? This week in Science Translational Medicine, Talia Quandelacy and colleagues map the synchrony and spread of this mosquito-borne disease in Latin America. She joins the podcast to talk about how the seasons, rainfall, and even El Niño connect with dengue levels and how this understanding can help with prediction and preparation.   Quandelacy is an assistant professor in the department of epidemiology at the University of Colorado School of Public Health.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi; Meredith Wadman Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up on the podcast, producer Meagan Cantwell and Contributing Correspondent Sara Reardon discuss alternative approaches to animal testing, from a heart on a chip to a miniorgan in a dish.   Next on the show, Expert Voices columnist Melanie Mitchell and host Sarah Crespi dig into AI lies. Why do chatbots fabricate answers and pretend to do math? Mitchell describes the stress tests large language models undergo—called red teaming—and the steps needed to better understand how they “think.”   Melanie Mitchell is a professor at the Santa Fe Institute. You can read all her Expert Voices columns here.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi; Meagan Cantwell; Melanie Mitchell; Sara Reardon Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up on the podcast, Online News Editor David Grimm brings stories on peacock feathers’ ability to emit laser light, how anteaters have evolved at least 12 times, and why we should be thanking ketchup for our French fries.   Next on the show, rorqual whales, such as the massive blue whale, use a lunging strategy to fill their monster maws with seawater and prey, then filter out the tasty parts with baleen sieves. Lunging for food when you weigh 100 tons seems like it would be an energetically expensive way to meet your dietary needs. But as Ashley Blawas, a postdoctoral researcher at the Hopkins Marine Station at Stanford University, describes in Science Advances this week, lunge-feeding whales have a few tricks up their sieves and use much less energy than predicted.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi; David Grimm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up on the podcast, Contributing Correspondent Richard Stone joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about the toll of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine and how researchers have been mobilized to help the war effort. In June, Stone visited the basement labs where Ukrainian students modify off-the-shelf drones for war fighting and the facilities where biomedical researchers develop implants and bandages for wounded soldiers.   Next on the show, the isotopic ratios in our teeth and bones record the chemistry of what we eat. When anthropologists recently applied this technique to Neanderthals, they were surprised to find that when it comes to eating meat, our hominin cousins appeared to be on par with lions. Melanie Beasley, assistant professor of anthropology at Purdue University, has an explanation for why Neanderthals chemically look like hypercarnivores: They were just eating a lot of maggots. She talks about how she tested this idea by studying maggots that were fed putrefying human flesh.   Last up on this episode, a new installment of our series of books on death and science. This month’s books host Angela Saini talks with Ravi Nandan Singh, a sociologist at Shiv Nadar University, about his book Dead in Banaras: An Ethnography of Funeral Travelling.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi; Angela Saini; Rich Stone Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up on the podcast, South Africa’s Cradle of Humankind is home to the world’s greatest concentration of ancestral human remains, including our own genus, Homo, Australopithecus, and a more robust hominin called Paranthropus. Proving they were there at the same time is challenging, but new fossil evidence seems to point to coexistence. Producer Kevin McLean discusses what a multihominin landscape might have looked like with Contributing Correspondent Ann Gibbons.   Next on the show, should robots grow and adapt like babies? Host Sarah Crespi talks with roboticist Philippe Wyder about a platform for exploring this idea. In his Science Advances paper, Wyder and his team demonstrate how simple stick-shaped robots with magnets at either end can join up for more complicated tasks and shed parts to adapt to new ones.   Philippe Wyder was at Columbia University and the University of Washington when he completed this work, and he has now moved on to a company called Distyl AI.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy. About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi; Kevin McLean; Ann Gibbons Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up on the podcast, Réunion Island had a shark attack crisis in 2011 and closed its beaches for more than a decade. Former News Intern Alexa Robles-Gil joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about how researchers have used that time to study the island’s shark populations and test techniques for preventing attacks, in the hopes of protecting lives and reopening the island’s shores.   Next on the show, engineering gut microbes to break down the precursors of kidney stones. Weston Whitaker, a research scientist at Stanford University, joins the podcast to discuss how he and his team created a stable niche for these useful microbes in the human gut and overcame some of the challenges of controlling them once inside.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi; Alexa Robles-Gil Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up on the podcast, Newsletter Editor Christie Wilcox joins host Sarah Crespi to celebrate the 2-year anniversary of ScienceAdviser with many stories about the amazing water bear. They also discuss links between climate change, melting glaciers, and earthquakes in the Alps, as well as what is probably the first edible laser.   Next on the show, freelance producer Elah Feder talks with Tatiana Feuerborn, a postdoctoral fellow in the cancer genetics and comparative genomics branch of the National Institutes of Health, about the evolutionary history of the Greenland sled dog. Her team’s work sequencing 98 genomes from modern and ancient sled dogs reveals the canine’s current diversity and suggests approaches for conservation.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi; Elah Feder; Christie Wilcox  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up on the podcast, U.S. aid helped two African countries rein in HIV. Then came President Donald Trump. Senior News Correspondent Jon Cohen talks with producer Kevin McLean about how in Lesotho and Eswatini, treatment and prevention cutbacks are hitting pregnant people, children, and teens especially hard.   This story is part of a series about the impacts of U.S. funding cuts on global health, supported by the Pulitzer Center.   Next on the show, host Sarah Crespi is joined by Robin Wordsworth, the Gordon McKay Professor in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. They discuss the challenges and potential of microbes to grow plastics, drugs, and food on the surface of Mars or other bodies in the Solar System.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi; Kevin McLean; Jon Cohen Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up on the podcast, Contributing Correspondent Andrew Curry joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss a pair of Science papers on kinship and culture in Neolithic Anatolia. The researchers used ancient DNA and isotopes from 8000 to 9000 years ago to show how maternal lines were important in Çatalhöyük culture.   ●     E. Yüncü et al., Female lineages and changing kinship patterns in Neolithic Çatalhöyük, 2025 ●     D. Koptekin et al., Out-of-Anatolia: Cultural and genetic interactions during the Neolithic expansion in the Aegean, 2025   Next on the show, researchers were able to make a synthetic material that changes color in the same way squids do. Georgii Bogdanov, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of California, Irvine, talks about how his lab was able to discover the subcellular arrangement of proteins in the squid cells and mimic this structure synthetically using titanium dioxide deposition.   Finally, the latest book in our series on science and death. Books host Angela Saini talks with Tamara Kneese about her book Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond and whether our families can turn us into chatbots after we die.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.  About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi; Andrew Curry; Angela Saini Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up on the podcast, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is just coming online, and once fully operational, it will take a snapshot of the entire southern sky every 3 days. Producer Meagan Cantwell guides us through Staff Writer Daniel Clery’s trip to the site of the largest camera ever made for astronomy.   Next on the show, probing the impact of plastic bag regulations. Environmental economist Anna Papp joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss her work comparing litter collected by shore cleanup efforts before and after the onset of plastic bag bans.   In a sponsored segment from the Science/AAAS Custom Publishing Office, Erika Berg, senior editor of custom publishing, interviews professors Deepak Bhatt and Filip Swirski about advances in the science of heart health. This segment is sponsored by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy. Authors: Sarah Crespi; Meagan Cantwell; Daniel Clery Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up on the podcast, Staff Writer Erik Stokstad talks with host Sarah Crespi about how scientists are probing the world’s hottest forests to better understand how plants will cope with climate change. His story is part of a special issue on plants and heat, which includes reviews and perspectives on the fate of plants in a warming world.   Next on the show, “convergent” antibodies may underlie the growing number of people allergic to peanuts. Sarita Patil, co-director of the Food Allergy Center at Massachusetts General Hospital and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, joins the podcast to discuss her research on allergies and antibodies. She explains how different people appear to create antibodies with similar gene sequences and 3D structures that react to peanut proteins—a big surprise given the importance of randomness in the immune system’s ability to recognize harmful invaders.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi; Erik Stokstad Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up on the podcast, we hear from Staff Writer Paul Voosen about the tricky problem of regional climate prediction. Although global climate change models have held up for the most part, predicting what will happen at smaller scales, such as the level of a city, is proving a stubborn challenge. Just increasing the resolution of global models requires intense computing power, so researchers and city planners are looking to other approaches to find out what’s in store for cities.   Next on the show, a visit to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where researchers have found evidence that the Indigenous Menominee people cultivated maize for 600 years, even during an ice age. Madeleine McLeester, assistant professor in the department of anthropology at Dartmouth College, talks about using lidar to search among the heavily forested lands for striations that indicate corn farming and the anthropological conundrums raised by such extensive agriculture without nearby urban centers.   Finally in this episode, producer Kevin McLean quizzes host Sarah Crespi on some mysterious sounds that have appeared on the site as part of news stories. No clues here so be sure to play along.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi; Paul Voosen; Kevin McLean Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up on the podcast, Online News Editor Michael Greshko joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about stories set high above our heads. They discuss capturing fungal spores high in the stratosphere, the debate over signs of life on the exoplanet K2-18b, and a Chinese contender for world’s oldest star catalog.   Next on the show, a look into long-standing questions on why and how our bodies respond to tickling. Producer Meagan Cantwell talks to Konstantina Kilteni, an assistant professor at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour and the Department of Neuroscience at the Karolinska Institute. They discuss how standardizing approaches to testing tickling in the lab could get us closer to answers.   Finally in this episode, the first in our book series on the science of death, with books host Angela Saini. Saini interviews Nobel Prize–winning biologist Venki Ramakrishnan about developments in longevity research and his book Why We Die: The New Science of Aging and the Quest for Immortality.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast Authors: Sarah Crespi, Angela Saini, Michael Greshko, Meagan Cantwell Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up on the podcast, freelance journalist Zack Savitsky joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about the strange metal state. Physicists are probing the behavior of electrons in these materials, which appear to behave like a thick soup rather than discrete charged particles. Many suspect insights into strange metals might lead to the creation of room-temperature superconductors, highly desired materials that promise lossless energy delivery and floating trains. A few years ago, researcher Nora Zannoni came on the show to talk about our oxidation fields: zones of highly reactive radicals our bodies naturally produce that surround us and interact with nearby chemicals. Now she’s back to discuss how our personal oxidation fields interact with personal care products—such as hand lotion, for example—and the resulting effects those products can end up having on the air we breathe indoors. Zannoni is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate of Italy’s National Research Council. The work for the paper was done when she was a postdoc scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry. This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy. About the Science Podcast Authors: Sarah Crespi; Zack Savitsky Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up on the podcast, freelance journalist Jonathan Moens talks with host Sarah Crespi about a forensic test called brain electrical oscillation signature (BEOS) profiling, which police in India are using along with other techniques to try to tell whether a suspect participated in a crime, despite these technologies’ extremely shaky scientific grounding.   Next on the show, scientists have recently made strides in our understanding of horses, from identifying the mutations that make horses amazing athletes to showing how climate shaped intercontinental horse migrations 50,000 years ago. Science life sciences editor Sacha Vignieri joins us to discuss new horse-related studies published in Science—and how equine research has broader implications. Other papers mentioned in this segment: W. Taylor et al., Science 2023 C. Gaunitz et al., Science 2018 A. Outram et al., Science 2009   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy. About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi; Sacha Vignieri; Jonathan Moens Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up on the podcast, producer Meagan Cantwell worked with the Science News team to review how the first 100 days of President Donald Trump’s administration have impacted science. In the segment, originally produced for video, we hear about how the workforce, biomedical research, and global health initiatives all face widespread, perhaps permanent damage, with News staffers David Malakoff, Jocelyn Kaiser, and Rachel Bernstein.  Next on the show, acoustical analysis of ancient music from Greece and Rome shows different musical notation styles for different instruments. Dan Baciu, a professor at the Münster School of Architecture at the Münster University of Applied Sciences, talks with host Sarah Crespi about his analysis.  This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy. About the Science Podcast Authors: Sarah Crespi; Meagan Cantwell; David Malakoff; Jocelyn Kaiser; Rachel Bernstein Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up on the podcast, Contributing Correspondent Andrew Curry talks with host Sarah Crespi about his visit to 17th century crypts under an old hospital in Italy. Researchers are examining tooth plaque, bone lesions, and mummified brains to learn more about the health, diet, and drug habits of Milan’s working poor 400 years ago. Next on the show, a mechanism for driving growth in fat stores with age. Or, the source of the “dad bod” trope. Producer Zakiya Whatley talks with Qiong “Annabel” Wang, associate professor in the department of molecular and cellular endocrinology at City of Hope, about her work showing how middle-age mice gain fat via dedicated progenitor cells that actually become more active as the animals age. Similar cells are also present in people, suggesting it’s not just lack of willpower or sedentary habits that give us gains as we get older. This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy. About the Science Podcast Authors: Sarah Crespi; Zakiya Whatley; Andrew Curry Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up on the podcast, bringing Gregor Mendel’s peas into the 21st century. Back in the 19th century Mendel, a friar and naturalist, tracked traits in peas such as flower color and shape over many generations. He used these observations to identify basic concepts about inheritance such as recessive and dominant traits. Staff Writer Erik Stokstad talks with host Sarah Crespi about the difficulty of identifying genes for these phenotypes all these years later. We also hear some other stories from the plant world, including evidence that wavy fields are more attractive to insects and a tree benefits from being struck by lightning.   Next on the show, a carnivorous caterpillar that haunts spiderwebs, camouflaged in its insect prey’s body parts. Producer Kevin McLean talks with Daniel Rubinoff, a professor in the department of plant and environmental protection sciences at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, about how such an adaptation might have evolved and the overlooked importance of insect conservation.    Finally, we kick off our 2025 books series on the science of death and dying. Books host Angela Saini and books editor Valerie Thompson talk about the challenges of putting this year’s list together and the reads they are looking forward to.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi; Erik Stokstad; Kevin McLean; Valerie Thompson; Angela Saini  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up on the podcast, Online News Editor David Grimm joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about how an Egyptian cult that killed cats may have also tamed them.   Next on the show, we hear about when the aurorae wandered. About 41,000 years ago, Earth’s magnetic poles took an excursion. They began to move equatorward and decreased in strength to one-tenth their modern levels. Agnit Mukhopadhyay, a research affiliate at the University of Michigan, talks about how his group mapped these magnetic changes, and what it would be like if such a big change took place today.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi; David Grimm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up on the podcast, ScienceInsider Editor Jocelyn Kaiser joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss big changes in science funding and government jobs this month, including an order to cut billions in contracts, lawsuits over funding caps and grant funding cancellations, and mass firings at the National Institutes of Health.   Next on the show, taking sleep loss more seriously. Jennifer Tudor, an associate professor of biology at Saint Joseph’s University, talks about how skipping out on sleep has many metabolic consequences, from reducing protein synthesis in our brains to making our muscles less efficient at using ATP. Her new review in Science Signaling suggests that given these impacts, we should stop putting sleep last on our to-do lists.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi; Jocelyn Kaiser Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Geoengineering experiments face an uphill battle, and a way to combat the pregnancy complication hyperemesis gravidarum First up on the podcast, climate engineers face tough conversations with the public when proposing plans to test new technologies. Freelance science journalist Rebekah White joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss the questions people have about these experiments and how researchers can get collaboration and buy-in for testing ideas such as changing the atmosphere to reflect more sunlight or altering the ocean to suck up more carbon dioxide.   Next on the show, hyperemesis gravidarum—severe nausea and vomiting during pregnancy—is common in many pregnant people and can have lasting maternal and infant health effects. This week, Marlena Fejzo wrote about her path from suffering hyperemesis gravidarum to finding linked genes and treatments for this debilitating complication. For her essay, Fejzo was named the first winner of the BioInnovation Institute & Science Translational Medicine Prize for Innovations in Women’s Health. Fejzo is a scientist at the Center for Genetic Epidemiology in the department of population and public health sciences at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi; Rebekah White Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up this week, urban wildfires raged in Los Angeles in January. Contributing Correspondent Warren Cornwall discusses how researchers have come together to study how pollution from buildings at such a large scale impacts the environment and health of the local population.   Next on the show, Mingze Chen, a graduate student in the mechanical engineering department at the University of Michigan, talks with host Sarah Crespi about the challenges of placing artificial intelligence in small robots. As you add more sensors and data, the demand for computing power and energy goes up. To reduce the power demand, Chen’s team tried a different kind of physics for collecting and processing data using a type of resistance switching memory device called a “memristor.”   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi; Warren Cornwall Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up this week, Newsletter Editor Christie Wilcox joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss stories from the sea, including why scientists mounted cameras on seabirds, backward and upside-down; newly discovered organisms from the world’s deepest spot, the Mariana Trench; and how extremely venomous, blue-lined octopus males use their toxin on females in order to mate. Read more or subscribe at science.org/scienceadviser.   Next on the show, J. Chris McKnight, a senior research fellow in the Sea Mammal Research Unit at the University of St. Andrews, talks about testing free-living seals to see how they respond to different carbon dioxide or oxygen levels in the air. It turns out they don’t respond like other mammals, which go into panic under high carbon dioxide; instead, seals appear to directly detect oxygen, a safer bet when your life is mostly spent diving deep underwater.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi; Christie Wilcox Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up this week, science policy editor Jocelyn Kaiser joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss the latest news about the National Institutes of Health—from reconfiguring review panels to canceled grants to confirmation hearings for a new head, Jay Bhattacharya.   Next, although cochlear implants can give deaf children access to sound, it doesn’t always mean they have unrestricted access to language. Producer Meagan Cantwell talks with Contributing Correspondent Cathleen O’Grady about why some think using sign language with kids with cochlear implants gives them the best chance at communicating fully and fluently.   Finally, using a pain illusion to better understand how the brain modulates pain. Francesca Fardo, an associate professor in the department of clinical medicine at Aarhus University, talks with host Sarah Crespi about the role of learning and uncertainty in pain perception. It turns out, the more uncertain we are about a sensation that could be painful, the more pain we feel.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi; Meagan Cantwell; Cathleen O’Grady; Jocelyn Kaiser Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up this week, International News Editor David Malakoff joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss the most recent developments in U.S. science under Donald Trump’s second term, from the impact of tariffs on science to the rehiring of probationary employees at the National Science Foundation.   Next, we tackle the question of extra-pair paternity in people—when marriage or birth records of parentage differ from biological parentage. Contributing Correspondent Andrew Curry writes about researchers looking into the question of how often children are genetically unrelated to their presumed fathers by using genealogy and genetic testing.   Finally, Susanne Schweizer, Scientia associate professor at the University of New South Wales, talks about her article on intrusive thoughts in the perinatal period as part of a special issue on women’s health in Science Advances. Almost all pregnant and recent mothers experience intrusive thoughts about harm coming to their offspring. Schweizer and colleagues suggest gaining a better understanding of intrusive thoughts during this highly predictable window could help explain the phenomenon more broadly.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up this week, Kata Karáth, a freelance journalist based in Ecuador, talks with host Sarah Crespi about an effort to identify traditionally prepared shrunken heads in museums and collections around the world and potentially repatriate them.   Next, genetically modified Bt corn has helped farmers avoid serious crop damage from insects, but planting it everywhere all the time can drive insects to adapt to the bacterial toxin made by the plant. Christian Krupke, an entomology professor at Purdue University, talks about the economics of planting Bt corn and how farmers could save money and extend the usefulness of this transgenic plant by being selective about where and when they plant it.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi; Kata Karáth Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up this week, researchers face impossible decisions as U.S. aid freeze halts clinical trials. Deputy News Editor Martin Enserink joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about how organizers of U.S. Agency for International Development–funded studies are grappling with ethical responsibilities to trial participants and collaborators as funding, supplies, and workers dry up.   Next, freelance science journalist Sandeep Ravindran talks about creating tiny machine learning devices for bespoke use in the Global South. Farmers and medical clinics are using low-cost, low-power devices with onboard machine learning for spotting fungal infections in tree plantations or listening for the buzz of malaria-bearing mosquitoes.   Finally, Michael Barnett, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, joins the podcast to discuss evolving evolvability. His team demonstrated a way for organisms to become more evolvable in response to repeated swings in the environment.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi; Sandeep Ravindran; Martin Enserink  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up this week, International News Editor David Malakoff joins the podcast to discuss the big change in NIH’s funding policy for overhead or indirect costs, the outrage from the biomedical community over the cuts, and the lawsuits filed in response.   Next, what can machines understand about pets and livestock that humans can’t? Christa Lesté-Lasserre, a freelance science journalist based in Paris, joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss training artificial intelligence on animal facial expressions. Today, this approach can be used to find farm animals in distress; one day it may help veterinarians and pet owners better connect with their animal friends.   Finally, Keya Ghonasgi, a postdoctoral fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology, talks about a recent Science Robotics paper on the case against machine vision for the control of wearable robotics. It turns out the costs of adding video cameras to exoskeletons—such as loss of privacy—may outweigh the benefits of having robotic helpers on our arms and legs.    This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi; Christa Lesté-Lasserre; David Malakoff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up this week, Staff Writer Paul Voosen joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss mapping clogs and flows in Earth’s middle layer—the mantle. They also talk about recent policy stories on NASA’s reactions to President Donald Trump’s administration’s executive orders.   Next, the mantis shrimp is famous for its powerful club, a biological hammer it uses to crack open hard shells. The club applies immense force on impact, but how does it keep itself together blow after blow? Nicolas Alderete is an associate researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, but at the time of the work he was a graduate researcher in theoretical and applied mechanics at Northwestern University. He joins the podcast to discuss the makeup of the mantis shrimp’s club and how it uses “phononics”—specialized microstructures that can reduce or change high-frequency vibrations—to reduce wear and tear when smashing and bashing.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi; Paul Voosen Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up this week, we catch up with the editor of ScienceInsider, Jocelyn Kaiser. She talks about changes at the major science agencies that came about with the transition to President Donald Trump’s second administration, such as hiring freezes at the National Institutes of Health and the United States’s departure from the World Health Organization.   Next, producer Kevin McLean talks with Dan Kaplan, a professor in the departments of immunology and dermatology at the University of Pittsburgh, about why it sometimes pays to scratch that itch. It turns out scratching may be our bodies’ end run around pests and pathogens attempting to steal blood or invade the body.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi; Kevin McLean; Jocelyn Kaiser Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up this week, although long touted as a green fuel, the traditional approach to hydrogen production is not very sustainable. Staff writer Robert F. Service joins producer Meagan Cantwell to discuss how researchers are aiming to improve electrolyzers—devices that split water into hydrogen and oxygen—with more efficient and durable designs.   Next, Robert Rogers, who was a postdoctoral fellow in molecular biology at Massachusetts General Hospital when this work was conducted, talks with host Sarah Crespi about the idea of chronic hypoxia as medicine. Efficacious in mouse disease models, the big question now is whether long-lasting reduced oxygen could help people with certain serious conditions, such as mitochondrial defects or brain inflammation. The pair discuss what we know so far about this potential treatment and the challenges of delivering low levels of oxygen around the clock.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi; Meagan Cantwell; Robert Service Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up this week, growing numbers of Valley fever cases, also known as coccidioidomycosis, has researchers looking into the disease-causing fungus. They’re exploring its links to everything from drought and wildfires to climate change and rodent populations. Staff Writer Meredith Wadman joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss her visit to a Valley fever research site in the desert near Bakersfield, California, where researchers are sampling air and soil for the elusive fungus.   Next up, scientists are trying to pin down when meat eating became a habit for human ancestors. It’s long been hypothesized that eating meat drove big changes in our family tree—such as bigger brains and more upright posture. Tina Lüdecke, a group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and honorary research fellow at the Evolutionary Studies Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand, investigated the diet of our ancient hominin relatives Australopithecus. Her team used nitrogen isotope ratios from the tooth enamel in seven Australopithecus individuals in South Africa to determine what predominated in their diets at the time—meat or veg.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi; Meredith Wadman https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.zulg8oo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up this week, as preprint publications ramped up during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, so did media attention for these pre–peer-review results. But what do the readers of news reports based on preprints know about them? Associate News Editor Jeff Brainard joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss studies that look at the public perception of preprints in the news and how to inject skepticism into stories about them.   Next, placing tiny tags on bats to follow them across central Europe. Former Science intern Edward Hurme—now a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Migration at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior—revisits the podcast after 13 years. He discusses the difficulty of tracking bats as they fly long distances at night and what new tagging technology is revealing about their migration patterns.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi; Jeff Brainard Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up this week, Newsletter Editor Christie Wilcox talks with host Sarah Crespi about truffle hunting for science. Wilcox accompanied Heather Dawson, a Ph.D. student at the University of Oregon, and her sister Hilary Dawson, a postdoctoral researcher at Australian National University, on a hunt for nonculinary truffles—the kind you don’t eat—with the help of a specially trained dog. These scientists and their dog are digging up many new species of these hard-to-find fungi with the ultimate aim of cataloging and conserving them.    Next, producer Ariana Remmel talks with R. Keller Kopf, an ecologist and lecturer at Charles Darwin University, about the importance of conserving older plants and animals. For example, as certain fish age they produce many more eggs than younger fish. Or in a forest, older trees may provide different ecosystem services than saplings.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi; Christie Wilcox; Ariana Remmel  About the Science Podcast: https://www.science.org/content/page/about-science-podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up this week, Online News Editor David Grimm shares a sampling of stories that hit big with our audience and staff in this year, from corpse-eating pets to the limits of fanning ourselves.   Next, host Sarah Crespi tackles some unfinished business with Producer Kevin McLean. Three former guests talk about where their research has taken them since their first appearances on the podcast.   Erick Lundgren, a researcher at the Centre for Open Science and Research Synthesis at the University of Alberta, revisits his paper on donkeys that dig wells in deserts. Lundgren first appeared on the podcast in April 2021.   Katie Hampson, a professor of infectious disease ecology at the University of Glasgow, discusses where her Tanzanian rabies research has spread. Hampson first appeared on the podcast in April 2022.   Ashley Thomas, an assistant professor of psychology in the Laboratory for Development Studies at Harvard University, talks about why it’s important to plumb the depths of baby minds and the big questions behind her work on children’s understanding of social relationships. Thomas first appeared on the podcast in January 2022.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi; Kevin McLean; David Grimm  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up this week, Breakthroughs Editor Greg Miller joins producer Meagan Cantwell to discuss Science’s 2024 Breakthrough of the Year. They also discuss some of the other scientific achievements that turned heads this year, from ancient DNA and autoimmune therapy, to precision pesticides, and the discovery of a new organelle.   Next, host Sarah Crespi is joined by news staffers to catch up on threads they’ve been following all year. First a bumpy road for certain medicines. Editor Kelly Servick discusses the regulatory hurdles for psychedelic drugs and immunotherapy treatments for Alzheimer’s disease. Then we hear from Staff Writer Paul Voosen about why scientists think this will be the hottest year on record. Finally, what happened with fusion power this year? Staff Writer Daniel Clery brings updates.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi; Greg Miller; Meagan Cantwell; Kelly Servick; Daniel Clery; Paul Voosen Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up this week, freelance science journalist Sofia Moutinho joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss making open-access journals from South and Latin America visible to the rest of the world by creating platforms that help with the publishing process and discovery of journal articles. This story is part of a News series about global equity in science.   Next on the show, departing Physical Sciences Editor Brent Grocholski discusses highlights from his career at Science, particularly his work on cooling technologies. Related papers:   ●     A self-regenerative heat pump based on a dual-functional relaxor ferroelectric polymer ●     High cooling performance in a double-loop electrocaloric heat pump ●     High-performance multimode elastocaloric cooling system ●     Colossal electrocaloric effect in an interface-augmented ferroelectric polymer ●     Sizing up caloric devices   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi; Brent Grocholski; Sofia Moutinho   About the Science Podcast: https://www.science.org/content/page/about-science-podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up this week, making electronics greener with leaves. Host Sarah Crespi talks with Newsletter Editor Christie Wilcox about using the cellulose skeletons of leaves to create robust, biodegradable backings for computer chips. This sustainable approach can be used for printing circuits and making organic light-emitting diodes and if widely adopted, could massively reduce the carbon footprint of electronics.  Next on the show, Kevin Hatala, a biology professor at Chatham University, joins producer Meagan Cantwell to discuss fossil footprints unearthed in the Turkana Basin of Kenya. A 13-step long track with three perpendicular footprints likely show two different species of early humans, Homo erectus and Paranthropus boisei, walked on the same shorelines. This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy. About the Science Podcast Authors: Sarah Crespi; Meagan Cantwell; Christie Wilcox  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up this week, where on Earth do people live the longest? What makes those places or people so special? Genes, diet, life habits? Or could it be bad record keeping and statistical flukes? Freelance science journalist Ignacio Amigo joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss the controversies around so-called blue zones—regions in the world where clusters of people appear to have extreme longevity.   Next on the show, producer Kevin Mclean talks with Dorian Houser, director of conservation biology at the National Marine Mammal Foundation. Houser and colleagues temporarily captured juvenile minke whales and tested their hearing. It turns out these baleen whales have more sensitive hearing than predicted from vocalizations and anatomical modeling, which could change our understanding of how they are affected by underwater noise pollution.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi; Ignacio Amigo; Kevin McLean Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up this week, a ship that flips for science. Sean Cummings, a freelance science journalist, joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about the resurrection of the Floating Instrument Platform (R/V FLIP), a research vessel built by the U.S. Navy in the 1960s and retired in 2023. FLIP is famous for turning vertically 90° so the bulk of the long ship is underwater, stabilizing it for data gathering. Additional audio from Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Watch FLIP flipping here.   Next on the show, viewing past lives using bones from medieval London cemeteries. Samantha Yaussy, a professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at James Madison University, joins Sarah to talk about a bony paradox. Do lesions or scars on buried bones mean the person was frail and ill when they lived or were they strong and resilient because they survived long enough for disease to damage their bones?   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi; Sean Cummings Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up this week, Staff Writer Paul Voosen talks with host Sarah Crespi about his travel to meet up with a lead researcher in the field, Folarin Kolawole, and the subtle signs of rifting on the African continent.   Next on the show, Nik Dennler, a Ph.D. student in the Biocomputation Group at the University of Hertfordshire and the International Center for Neuromorphic Systems at Western Sydney University, discusses speeding up electronic noses. These fast sniffing devices could one day be mounted on drones to help track down forest fires before they are large enough to spot with a satellite. This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi; Paul Voosen Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up this week, Contributing Correspondent Kai Kupferschmidt joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss the difficulties of studying misinformation. Although misinformation seems like it’s everywhere, researchers in the field don’t agree on a common definition or shared strategies for combating it.   Next, what can Wikipedia tell us about human curiosity? Dani Bassett, a professor in the department of bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania, observed three different curiosity styles in people browsing the online encyclopedia—hunter, busybody, and dancer. They explain characteristics of each style and how which approach you use could depend on where you live.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy. Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.zpuwynf  About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi; Kai Kupferschmidt Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Using robots to study evolution, the last installment of our series of books on a future to look forward to, and did reintroducing wolves really restore an ecosystem? First up this week, a new study of an iconic ecosystem doesn’t support the “landscape of fear” concept. This is the idea that bringing back apex predators has a huge impact on the behavior of their prey, eventually altering the rest of the ecosystem. Host Sarah Crespi talks with Contributing Correspondent Virginia Morell about the findings.   Next, using bioinspired robotics to explore deep time. Michael Ishida, a postdoctoral researcher in the Bio-Inspired Robotics Lab at the University of Cambridge, talks about studying key moments in evolutionary history, such as the transition from water to land by creating robotic versions of extinct creatures.   Finally in the last in our series of books on an optimistic future, books host Angela Saini talks with Ruha Benjamin, a professor of African American studies at Princeton University and recently named MacArthur Fellow. The two discuss Benjamin’s latest book, Imagination: A Manifesto, which explores the part that imagination plays in creating new and radical futures.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.zu8ch5j  Authors: Sarah Crespi; Angela Saini; Virginia Morell Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up this week, host Sarah Crespi talks to Jon Chu, a presidential young professor in international affairs at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, about how people around the world define democracy. Does democracy mean elections, freedom of the press, social mobility, or something else? Chu’s team found there was common ground across six countries. In many places with backsliding democracies, leaders may be tempted to change the definition of democracy to their own ends—this study suggests the people they rule won’t be fooled.   Next, when staying at home meant choosing between chemistry and basketball, Lena Svanholm sought an opportunity in the U.S. to pursue both. She joins producer Kevin McLean to discuss her next steps in balancing dual careers in science and professional sports.   In a sponsored segment from the Science/AAAS Custom Publishing Office, Erika Berg, director and senior editor of Custom Publishing, interviews Michal Elovitz about gaps in women’s health research. This segment is sponsored by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi; Kevin McLean; Lena E. H. Svanholm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up this week, we celebrate 20 years of graphene—from discovery, to hype, and now reality as it finally finds its place in technology and science. Science journalist Mark Peplow joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss graphene’s bumpy journey.   Next, producer Meagan Cantwell talks with Seth Darling, chief science and technology officer for the Advanced Energy Technologies Directorate at Argonne National Laboratory, about two new ways to harvest lithium from water. One approach harnesses sunlight to pull water up through a membrane and collect lithium, whereas the other uses an electrochemical cell to selectively suck lithium up. Finding efficient ways to extract lithium from sources where it’s lower in concentration, such as the ocean, will be crucial as demand increases.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi; Meagan Cantwell; Mark Peplow   Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.zn17zjt Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up this week, online editor David Grimm joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about how cats think about their own bodies. Do cats think of themselves as a liquid, as much the internet appears to believe? New experiments suggest they may—but only in one dimension.   Next, freelance producer Ariana Remmel is joined by Ted Schultz, a research entomologist at the Smithsonian Institution, to discuss the evolution of ant-fungus farming. It turns out, ants and fungus got together when the earth was going through some really tough times around 66 million years ago.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi; Ariana Remmel; David Grimm Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.zlav1o2 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The gene variant APOE4 is finally giving up some of its secrets, how putting dead trees underground could make carbon sequestration cheap and scalable, and the latest in our series of books on an optimistic future   First up this week, Staff Writer and Editor Jocelyn Kaiser joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss APOE4, a gene linked with a higher risk of Alzheimer’s disease. They talk about new research into why APOE4 might be a good target for preventing or treating this dreaded neurodegenerative disease.   Next, Ning Zeng, a professor in the Department of Atmospheric & Oceanic Science and at the Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center at the University of Maryland, joins the show to discuss an unusual approach to carbon sequestration and a very old piece of wood. He talks about how an unearthed 3000-year-old log that has held on to most of its carbon is pretty good proof that we can efficiently put carbon underground at low cost by burying trees.   Finally, we have the latest in our series of books on a future to look forward to. Books host Angela Saini talks with Peter Coveney and Roger Highfield, the two authors of the book Virtual You: How Building Your Digital Twin Will Revolutionize Medicine and Change Your Life.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.z8oerdq   Authors: Sarah Crespi; Jocelyn Kaiser; Angela Saini Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up this week, a preview of a NASA mission to Jupiter’s icy moon Europa. Science journalist Robin Andrews joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about the Clipper mission and what it could reveal about the habitability of the world that lies beneath Europa’s chaotic, icy surface.   Next, what does it feel like to be a rat? This week Science has a special issue on rats, focusing on their contributions to science, their history as invasives and disease carriers, and more. But Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal, a professor in the School of Psychological Sciences and the Sagol School of Neuroscience at Tel Aviv University, is here to talk about their capacity for empathy and other positive emotions.   In a sponsored segment from the Science/AAAS Custom Publishing Office, Erika Berg, director and senior editor of custom publishing, interviews University of Manchester professor Sarah Haigh about the past, present, and future of graphene. This segment is sponsored by Zeiss.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi; Robin Andrews Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.zapddvc Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Why don’t we know what is happening with hail? It’s extremely destructive and costs billions of dollars in property damage every year. We aren’t great at predicting hailstorms and don’t know much about how climate change will affect them, but scientists are working to change that. News Intern Hannah Richter joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss deploying new technologies in this long-neglected area of research. Next on the show, ultrasound—it’s not just for looking inside the body anymore. Meaghan O’Reilly is a senior scientist in physical sciences at the Sunnybrook Research Institute, an associate professor of medical biophysics at the University of Toronto, and is the Canada Research Chair in biomedical ultrasound. She talks about how researchers are using focused sound waves to disrupt tumors, change the permeability of the blood-brain barrier, stimulate the immune system, and more. This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy. About the Science Podcast Authors: Sarah Crespi; Hannah Richter Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.zm3x6zq  About the Science Podcast: https://www.science.org/content/page/about-science-podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The latest in our series on global equity in science, and how better memory helps chickadees live longer  First up this week, as part of our series on global equity in science, Contributing Correspondent Vaishnavi Chandrashekhar joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about an initiative in India intended to increase education about early “Indian knowledge systems” amid concerns about homogenization and misinformation. Next, producer Kevin McLean climbs a mountain to visit a test bed for intelligence. He met up with Joe Welklin and Vladimir Pravosudov of the University of Nevada, Reno to talk about their research on how memory helps mountain chickadees survive. This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy. About the Science Podcast Authors: Sarah Crespi; Kevin McLean; Vaishnavi Chandrashekhar   Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.zbfmymg Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up this week on the podcast, the latest conservation news with Staff Writer Erik Stokstad. Stokstad and host Sarah Crespi talk about the fate of snow crabs in the Bering Sea, how much we have been overestimating fishing stocks worldwide, and invasive snakes in Guam that bite off more than they can chew.   Next, a fungus takes the wheel. Anand Mishra, a research associate in the department of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Cornell University, discusses a method of integrating electronics with fungal cells in a biohybrid robot. By using the hardy cells from a mushroom instead of the delicate cells of an animal, Mishra and colleagues hope to durably introduce the sensing and signaling capacity of these living organisms into robots.   Finally, the fourth installment of our six-part series on books that look to an optimistic future. This month, host Angela Saini talks with science writer Akshat Rathi about how capitalism might just save us from climate change and his book Climate Capitalism: Winning the Race to Zero Emissions and Solving the Crisis of Our Age.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi; Erik Stokstad; Angela Saini   Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.zt21ifv Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up this week on the show, uncounted kilometers of fences are strung across the globe. Researchers know they interfere with wildlife migrations and sometimes make finding food and safety difficult for animals. But they don’t know where all these fences are. Freelancer science journalist Christine Peterson joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss how artificial intelligence and aerial photos could help create fence inventories and eventually reopen spaces for native species.   Next, Azizi Seixas, interim chair of the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine’s department of informatics and health data science and a professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, discusses his review on decentralized randomized trials. Randomized, controlled trials based in a research center or centers have long been the gold standard for determining the effectiveness of a medical intervention. This week on the podcast, Seixas argues that distributed research designs with home-based measurements and reporting have the potential to speed up research, allow greater participation, and make the results of studies more equitable.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi, Christine Peterson   About the Science Podcast: https://www.science.org/content/page/about-science-podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up this week, Deputy News Editors Elizabeth Culotta and Shraddha Chakradhar join host Sarah Crespi to talk about the launch of a new series highlighting the latest in postcolonial science. They cover how researchers around the world, but especially in the Global South, are reckoning with colonial legacies and what is in store for the rest of the series.   Next, producer Meagan Cantwell talks with Mario Fischer-Gödde, a research scientist at the University of Cologne about the origins of the giant asteroid thought to have killed off the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy. About the Science Podcast  Authors: Sarah Crespi, Elizabeth Culotta, Shraddha Chakradhar, Meagan Cantwell Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.zjugpvu About the Science Podcast: https://www.science.org/content/page/about-science-podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Researchers debate if humidity makes heat more deadly, and finding excess diabetes cases in Ukrainian people that were born right after the 1930s famine First up this week, which is worse: the heat or the humidity? Staff writer Meredith Wadman joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about conflicting reports on the risk of increased mortality when humidity compounds heat, and how to resolve the debate in the field.     Next, LH Lumey, a professor of epidemiology at the Columbia University Medical Center, discusses what the catastrophe of a famine can teach us about the importance of maternal and fetal health for the long term. His work focuses on records of a 1930s Ukrainian famine painstakingly reconstructed by Ukrainian demographers after being obscured by the former Soviet Union. The famine records combined with newer data show that babies gestated during famine are more likely to acquire type 2 diabetes later in life.    This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi, Meredith Wadman    Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.z6yms94   About the Science Podcast: https://www.science.org/content/page/about-science-podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up this week, we hear about caves on the Moon, a shake-up at Pompeii, and the iron-lined teeth of the Komodo dragon. Reporter Phie Jacobs joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss these news stories and more from our daily newsletter, ScienceAdviser.   Next on the show, electron microscopes allow us to view a world inaccessible to light—at incredible resolution and tiny scales. But bombarding samples with a beam of electrons has downsides. The high-energy electrons used for visualizing minute structures can cause damage to certain materials. Jonathan Peters, a research fellow in the School of Physics at Trinity College Dublin, joins the podcast to talk about a new approach that protects samples while keeping resolution sharp.    This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi, Phie Jacobs,   Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.zeecyfw Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tackling air pollution—indoors and outdoors, how burned-up satellites in the atmosphere could destroy ozone, and the latest in our series of books on a future to look forward to First up this week, Science Senior Editor Michael Funk joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about the magazine’s special issue on air pollution. The two discuss the broad scope of air pollution, from home cooking to transmissible disease.   Next, how burned-up satellites may cause pollution problems as megaconstellations take to the skies. Staff Writer Daniel Clery talks about how metals from deorbiting spacecrafts might change the chemistry of the upper atmosphere.   Finally, books host Angela Saini is joined by author Daniela Rus, a roboticist and professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They discuss Rus’s book The Heart and the Chip: Our Bright Future with Robots for this year’s books series that takes an optimistic look at the future.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi, Micheal Funk, Angela Saini; Daniel Clery   Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.z01x70o Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up this week, Staff Writer Adrian Cho talks with host Sarah Crespi about a fusion company that isn’t aiming for net energy. Instead, it’s looking to sell off the high-energy neutrons from its fusion reactors for different purposes, such as imaging machine parts and generating medical isotopes. In the long run, the company hopes to use money from these neutron-based enterprises for bigger, more energetic reactors that may someday make fusion energy. Next, we hear from Tian Du, a Ph.D. candidate in the Dr John and Anne Chong Lab for Functional Genomics at the University of Sydney. She talks about finding antivenom treatments by screening all the genes in the human genome. Her Science Translational Medicine paper focuses on a strong candidate for treating spitting cobra bites, but the technique may prove useful for many other venomous animal bites and stings, from jellyfish to spiders. This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy. About the Science Podcast Authors: Sarah Crespi, Adrian Cho Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rodenticides are building up inside unintended targets, including birds, mammals, and insects; and bringing bioacoustics and artificial intelligence together for ecology First up this week, producer Kevin McLean and freelance science journalist Dina Fine Maron discuss the history of rodent control and how rat poisons are making their way into our ecosystem.   Next on the episode, host Sarah Crespi talks with Jeppe Rasmussen, a postdoctoral fellow in the behavior ecology group at the University of Copenhagen, about why researchers are training artificial intelligence to listen for seals, frogs, and whales.   Additional sound in this segment (some played, some mentioned):   ·      Monk seal noises care of Jeppe Rasmussen ·      Frog and crickets from Pond5  ·      Lyrebird sounds (Youtube link) ·      Cod fish sounds (Fishbase link)   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Kevin McLean, Sarah Crespi, Dina Fine Maron    Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.zq42hy5 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up this week, guest host Kevin McLean talks to freelance writer Andrew Zaleski about recent advancements in the world of synthetic blood. They discuss some of the failed attempts over the past century that led many to abandon the cause altogether, and a promising new option in the works called ErythroMer that is both shelf stable and can work on any blood type.   Next on the episode, producer Zakiya Whatley talks to Aaron Weimann from the University of Cambridge about the evolutionary history of the deadly bacterial pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa. They discuss how more than a century’s worth of samples from all over the world contributed to new insights on the emergence and expansion of the pathogen known for its ability to develop antimicrobial resistance.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Kevin McLean, Andrew Zaleski, Zakiya Whatley   Episode Page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.z1jhbqi   About the Science Podcast: https://www.science.org/content/page/about-science-podcast   [Image: Matt Roth, Music: Jeffrey Cook and Nguyen Khoi Nguyen] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Guest host Meagan Cantwell talks to Staff Writer Erik Stokstad about a new weapon against crop-destroying beetles. By making pesticides using RNA, farmers can target pests and their close relatives, leaving other creatures unharmed.  Next, freelance producer Katherine Irving talks to hydrologist Craig Brinkerhoff about a recent analysis of ephemeral streams—which are only around temporarily—throughout the United States. Despite their fleeting presence, Brinkerhoff and his colleagues found these streams play a major role in keeping rivers flowing and clean. Brinkerhoff is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University, and completed this work as a Ph.D. student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.   Finally, the next segment in our books series on a future to look forward to. Books host Angela Saini talks with author Rachel O’Dwyer about her recent book Tokens: The Future of Money in the Age of the Platform. They’ll discuss new and old ideas of currency, and what it means to have our identities tied to our money as we move toward a more cashless society. This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy. About the Science Podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this week’s show: Scientists are expanding the hunt for habitable exoplanets to bigger worlds, and why improvements in air quality have stagnated in Los Angeles, especially during summer, despite cleaner cars and increased regulations Staff Writer Daniel Clery joins producer Meagan Cantwell to talk through the major contenders for habitable exoplanets—from Earth-like rocky planets to water worlds. Preliminary results from two rocky exoplanets have some researchers concerned about whether they will be able to detect atmospheres around planets orbiting turbulent stars.   Next, producer Ariana Remmel talks with Eva Pfannerstill, an atmospheric chemist at the Jülich Research Center, about how volatile organic compounds, mostly from plants, are causing an increase in air pollution during hot days in Los Angeles.    This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy. This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy. About the Science Podcast   Authors: Daniel Clery; Meagan Cantwell; Arianna Remmel   Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.zxi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this week’s show: Companion animals such as dogs occupy the same environment we do, which can make them good sentinels for human health, and DNA gives clues to ancient Maya rituals and malaria’s global spread Contributing Correspondent Andrew Curry joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss two very different studies that used DNA to dig into our past. One study reveals details of child sacrifices in an ancient Maya city. The other story is on the surprising historical reach of malaria, from Belgium to the Himalayas to South America.   Next on the show, using our canine companions to track human health. Courtney Sexton, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Population Health Sciences at the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine, talks about what we can learn from these furry friends that tend to be exposed to many of the same things we are such as pesticides and cleaning chemicals.   Finally, in a sponsored segment from the Science/AAAS Custom Publishing Office, Jackie Oberst, associate editor of custom publishing, interviews professors Miriam Merad and Brian Brown about the evolution of immunology in health care. This segment is sponsored by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi; Andrew Curry   Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.zxgwbqo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Despite not having a known function, cellular “vaults” are on the verge of being harnessed for all kinds of applications, and looking at the evolution of brown fat into a heat-generating organ   First on this week’s show, Managing News Editor John Travis joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss mysterious cellular complexes called “vaults.” First discovered in the 1980s, scientists have yet to uncover the function of these large, common, hollow structures. But now some researchers are looking to use vaults to deliver cancer drugs and viruses for gene therapy.   Next, what can we learn about the evolution of brown fat from opossums? Unlike white fat, which stores energy in many mammals, brown fat cells use ATP to generate heat, helping babies maintain their body temperature and hibernators kick-start their summers. Susanne Keipert, a researcher in the Department of Molecular Biosciences at Stockholm University’s Wenner-Gren Institute, talks about when in evolutionary history brown fat took on this job of burning energy.   Finally, this week we are launching our music refresh! If you are interested in what happened to our music—where it came from and how it’s different (and the same)—stay tuned for a chat with artist Nguyên Khôi Nguyễn.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi; John Travis  Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.zpoy92t Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Studying color vision in with children who gain sight later in life, joining a cancer trial doesn’t improve survival odds, and the first in our books series this year First on this week’s show, Staff Writer Jennifer Couzin-Frankel joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss the pros and cons of participating in clinical trials. Her story challenges the common thinking that participating in a trial is beneficial—even in the placebo group—for cancer patients.   Next, Lukas Vogelsang, a postdoctoral fellow in the department of brain and cognitive sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, talks about research into color vision with “late-sighted” kids. Studying children who were born blind and then later gained vision gave researchers new insights into how vision develops in babies and may even help train computers to see better.   Last up on the show is the first in our series of books podcasts on a future to look forward to. Books host Angela Saini talks with author Claire Horn, a researcher based at Dalhousie University’s Health Justice Institute. They discuss the implications of growing babies from fertilized egg to newborn infant—completely outside the body—and Horn’s book Eve: The Disobedient Future of Birth.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi; Angela Saini; Jennifer Couzin-Frankel   Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.z6gdgb4 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A roundup of online news stories featuring animals, and researchers get crows to “count” to four   This week’s show is all animals all the time. First, Online News Editor Dave Grimm joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss stepping on venomous snakes for science, hunting ice age cave bears, and demolishing lizardlike buildings.   Next, producer Kevin McLean talks with Diana Liao, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Tübingen, about teaching crows to count out loud. They discuss the complexity of this behavior and how, like the famous band, these counting corvids have all the right vocal skills to do it.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi; Kevin McLean; David Grimm   Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ztje4j6 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this week’s show: What happens when the body’s own immune system attacks the brain, and how otters’ use of tools expands their diet   First on the show this week, when rogue antibodies attack the brain, patients can show bizarre symptoms—from extreme thirst, to sleep deprivation, to outright psychosis. Contributing Correspondent Richard Stone joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss the hunt for biomarkers and treatments for this cluster of autoimmune disorders that were once mistaken for schizophrenia or even demonic possession.   Next on this episode, producer Katherine Irving talks with Chris Law, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington and the University of Texas at Austin, about how sea otters gain energy benefits (and dental benefits) when they use tools to tackle tougher prey such as snails or large clams.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi; Richard Stone; Katherine Irving Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.z4pdg62 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jupiter’s moon Io has likely been volcanically active since the start of the Solar System, and a proposal to safeguard healthy human subjects in clinical trials First on the show this week, a look at proposed protections for healthy human subjects, particularly in phase 1 clinical trials. Deputy News Editor Martin Enserink joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss the risks healthy participants face when involved in early testing of drugs for safety and tolerance. Then, we hear about a project to establish a set of global standards initiated by the Ethics Committee of France’s national biomedical research agency, INSERM.   Next on this episode, a peek at the history of the most volcanically active body in the Solar System, Jupiter’s moon Io. Because the surface of Io is constantly being remodeled by its many volcanoes, it’s difficult to study its past by looking at craters or other landmarks. Katherine de Kleer, assistant professor of planetary science and astronomy at the California Institute of Technology, talks about using isotopic ratios in the moon’s atmosphere to estimate how long it’s been spewing matter into space.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi; Martin Enserink   Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.zyq2ig8 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bringing historical seismic reports and modern seismic risk maps into alignment, and a roundup of stories from our newsletter, ScienceAdviser   First on the show this week, a roundup of stories with our newsletter editor, Christie Wilcox. Wilcox talks with host Sarah Crespi about the oldest ice ever found, how well conservation efforts seem to be working, and repelling mosquitoes with our skin microbes.   Next on this episode, evaluating seismic hazard maps. In a Science Advances paper this week, Leah Salditch, a geoscience peril adviser at risk and reinsurance company Guy Carpenter, compared modern seismic risk map predictions with descriptions of past quakes. The analysis found a mismatch: Reported shaking in the past tended to be stronger than modern models would have predicted. She talks with Crespi about where this bias comes from and how to fix it.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi; Christie Wilcox   Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.zfj31xo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Researchers try to identify effective loneliness interventions, making the Sandmeyer safer, and books that look to the future and don’t see doom and gloom   First up on the show, Deputy News Editor Kelly Servick explores the science of loneliness. Is loneliness on the rise or just our awareness of it? How do we deal with the stigma of being lonely?   Also appearing in this segment: ●     Laura Coll-Planas ●     Julianne Holt-Lunstad ●     Samia Akhter-Khan   Next, producer Ariana Remmel talks with Tim Schulte, a graduate student at the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research and RWTH Aachen University, about making one of organic chemistry’s oldest reactions—the Sandmeyer reaction—both safer and more versatile.   Finally, we kick off this year’s book series with books editor Valerie Thompson and books host Angela Saini. They discuss this year’s theme: a future to look forward to.   Book segments come out the last episode of the month. Books in the series: ●     Eve: The Disobedient Future of Birth by Claire Horn (May) ●     Tokens: The Future of Money in the Age of the Platform by Rachel O’Dwyer (June) ●     The Heart and the Chip: Our Bright Future with Robots by Daniela Rus and Gregory Mone (July) ●     Climate Capitalism: Winning the Race to Zero Emissions and Solving the Crisis of Our Age by Akshat Rathi (August) ●     Virtual You: How Building Your Digital Twin Will Revolutionize Medicine and Change Your Life by Peter Coveney and Roger Highfield (September) ●     Imagination: A Manifesto by Ruha Benjamin (October)     This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi; Kelly Servick; Ariana Remmel; Valerie Thompson; Angela Saini LINKS FOR MP3 META   Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.zqubta7   About the Science Podcast: https://www.science.org/content/page/about-science-podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A different source of global warming, signs of a continentwide tradition of human sacrifice, and a virus that attacks the cholera bacteria   First up on the show this week, clearer skies might be accelerating global warming. Staff Writer Paul Voosen joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss how as air pollution is cleaned up, climate models need to consider the decrease in the planet’s reflectivity. Less reflectivity means Earth is absorbing more energy from the Sun and increased temps.   Also from the news team this week, we hear about how bones from across Europe suggest recurring Stone Age ritual killings. Contributing Correspondent Andrew Curry talks about how a method of murder used by the Italian Mafia today may have been used in sacrifices by early farmers, from Poland to the Iberian Peninsula.   Finally, Eric Nelson, an associate professor at the University of Florida’s Emerging Pathogens Institute, joins Sarah to talk about an infectious bacteria that’s fighting on two fronts. The bacterium that causes cholera—Vibrio cholerae—can be killed off with antibiotics but at the same time, it is hunted by a phage virus living inside the human gut. In a paper published in Science, Nelson and colleagues describe how we should think about phage as predator and bacteria as prey, in the savanna of our intestines. The ratio of predator to prey turns out to be important for the course of cholera infections.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi; Paul Voosen; Andrew Curry   Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.zhgw74e Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

]Researchers are testing HIV drugs and monoclonal antibodies against long-lasting COVID-19, and what it takes to turn a symbiotic friend into an organelle   First up on the show this week, clinical trials of new and old treatments for Long Covid. Producer Meagan Cantwell is joined by Staff Writer Jennifer Couzin-Frankel and some of her sources to discuss the difficulties of studying and treating this debilitating disease.   People in this segment: ·      Michael Peluso ·      Sara Cherry ·      Shelley Hayden   Next: Move over mitochondria, a new organelle called the nitroplast is here. Host Sarah Crespi talks with Tyler Coale, a postdoctoral scholar in the University of California, Santa Cruz’s Ocean Sciences Department, about what exactly makes an organelle an organelle and why it would be nice to have inhouse nitrogen fixing in your cells.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi; Meagan Cantwell; Jennifer Couzin-Frankel   Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.zof5fvk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tracing the arrival of rats using bones, isotopes, and a few shipwrecks; and what scientists have learned in 50 years about our famous ancestor Lucy   First on the show: Did rats come over with Christopher Columbus? It turns out, European colonists weren’t alone on their ships when they came to the Americas—they also brought black and brown rats to uninfested shores. Eric Guiry, a researcher in the Trent Environmental Archaeology Lab at Trent University, joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss how tiny slices of bone from early colony sites and sunken shipwrecks can tell us when these pesky rodents arrived.   Next, producer Meagan Cantwell talks with Contributing Correspondent Ann Gibbons about what has happened in the 50 years since anthropologists found Lucy—a likely human ancestor that lived 2.9 million to 3.3 million years ago. Although still likely part of our family tree, her place as a direct ancestor is in question. And over the years, her past has become less lonesome as it has become populated with other contemporaneous hominins.   This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.   About the Science Podcast   Authors: Sarah Crespi; Meagan Cantwell; Ann Gibbons LINKS FOR MP3 META   Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.z4scrgk   About the Science Podcast: https://www.science.org/content/page/about-science-podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices