Science Magazine Podcast

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[Image: Bill Douthitt/Science; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

Authors: Sarah Crespi; Ian Graber-Stiehl

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Cracking consciousness, and taking the temperature of urban heat islands May 27, 2021

Show notes

First this week, Lucia Melloni, a group leader in the department of neuroscience at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, talks with host Sarah Crespi about making the hard problem of consciousness easier by getting advocates of opposing theories to collaborate and design experiments to rule in or rule out their competing theories.

Next, TC Chakraborty, a Ph.D. candidate at Yale University, shares his Science Advances paper on why it’s important to measure air temperature on the ground rather than from satellites when trying to understand urban heat islands—how cities heat up more than the surrounding countryside.

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

[Image: Joe Wolf/Flickr; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

Authors: Sarah Crespi

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Ecstasy plus therapy for PTSD, and the effects of early childhood development programs on mothers May 20, 2021

Show notes

Staff Writer Kelly Servick talks with host Sarah Crespi about the pairing of a specific type of psychotherapy with the drug MDMA, commonly known as ecstasy, for treating post-traumatic stress disorder.

Also this week, Pamela Jakiela, an economics professor at Williams College, discusses the importance of knowing how early childhood development interventions like free day care or parenting classes have an effect on caregivers, particularly mothers.

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

[Image: Graham Crouch/World Bank; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

Authors: Kelly Servick; Sarah Crespi

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Cutting shipping air pollution may cause water pollution, and keeping air clean with lightning May 13, 2021

Show notes

News Staff Writer Erik Stokstad joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss possible harms from how the shipping industry is responding to air pollution regulations—instead of pumping health-harming chemicals into the air, they are now being dumped into oceans.

Also this week, William Brune, professor of meteorology and atmospheric science at Pennsylvania State University, University Park, talks about flying a plane into thunderstorms and how measurements from research flights revealed the surprising amount of air-cleaning oxidants created by lightning.

In a sponsored segment from the Science/AAAS Custom Publishing Office, Sean Sanders interviews Manfred Kraus, senior director and head of in vivo pharmacology oncology at Bristol Myers Squibb, about the impact of humanized mice on preclinical research. This segment is sponsored by the Jackson Laboratory.

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

[Image: Samantha Dellaert/Flickr; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

Authors: Erik Stokstad; Sarah Crespi

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Chernobyl’s ruins grow restless, and entangling macroscopic objects May 06, 2021

Show notes

Rich Stone, former international news editor at Science and current senior science editor at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Tangled Bank Studios, joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about concerning levels of fission reactions deep in an inaccessible area of the site of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Though nothing is likely to come of it anytime soon, scientists must decide what—if anything—they should do tamp down reactions in this hard-to-reach place.

Also on this week’s show, Shlomi Kotler, an assistant professor in the department of applied physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, joins Sarah to discuss the quantum entanglement of macroscopic objects. This hallmark of quantum physics has been confined—up until now—to microscopic items like atoms, ions, and photons. But what does it mean that two drums, each the width of a human hair, can be entangled?

Read a related insight.

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

[Image: Caption: New Safe Confinement structure built over Chernobyl ruins; Credit: URBEX Hungary/Flickr; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

Authors: Rich Stone; Sarah Crespi

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Storing wind as gravity, and well-digging donkeys Apr 29, 2021

Show notes

Contributing Correspondent Cathleen O’Grady joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about a company that stores renewable energy by hoisting large objects in massive “gravity batteries.”

Also on this week’s show, Erick Lundgren, a postdoctoral researcher at Aarhus University, talks about how water from wells dug by wild horses and feral donkeys provides a buffer to all different kinds of animals and plants during the driest times in the Sonora and Mojave deserts.

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

[Image: Tracy Hall/Flickr; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

Authors: Cathleen O’Grady; Sarah Crespi

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Rebuilding Louisiana’s coast, and recycling plastic into fuel Apr 22, 2021

Show notes

Host Sarah Crespi talks with Contributing Correspondent Warren Cornwall about a restoration project to add 54 square kilometers back to the coast of Louisiana by allowing the Mississippi River to resume delivering sediment to sinking regions.

Also on this week’s show, Dion Vlachos, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of Delaware, Newark, and director of the Delaware Energy Institute, joins Sarah to talk about his Science Advances paper on a low-temperature process to convert different kinds of plastic to fuels, like gasoline and jet fuel.

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

[Image: Shannon Dosemagen/Flickr; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

Authors: Warren Cornwall; Sarah Crespi

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Why muon magnetism matters, and a count of all the Tyrannosaurus rex that ever lived Apr 15, 2021

Show notes

Host Sarah Crespi talks with Staff Writer Adrian Cho about a new measurement of the magnetism of the muon—an unstable cousin of the electron. This latest measurement and an earlier one both differ from predictions based on the standard model of particle physics. The increased certainty that there is a muon magnetism mismatch could be a field day for theoretical physicists looking to add new particles or forces to the standard model.

Also on this week’s show, Charles Marshall, director of the University of California Museum of Paleontology and professor of integrative biology, joins Sarah to talk about his team’s calculation for the total number of Tyrannosaurus rex that ever lived.

In a sponsored segment from the Science/AAAS Custom Publishing Office, Sean Sanders interviews Imre Berger, professor of biochemistry at the University of Bristol, about his Science paper on finding a druggable pocket on the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 and how the work was accelerated by intensive cloud computing. This segment is sponsored by Oracle for Research.

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

[Image:Lewis Kelly/Flickr; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

Authors: Adrian Cho; Sarah Crespi

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Magnetar mysteries, and when humans got big brains Apr 08, 2021

Show notes

Host Sarah Crespi talks with Contributing Correspondent Joshua Sokol about magnetars—highly magnetized neutron stars. A recent intense outburst of gamma rays from a nearby galaxy has given astronomers a whole new view on these mysterious magnetic monsters.

Also on this week’s show, Christoph Zollikofer, a professor of anthropology at the University of Zurich, talks about the evolution of humanlike brains. His team’s work with brain-case fossils suggests the complex brains we carry around today were not present in the early hominins to leave Africa, but later developed in the cousins they left behind.

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.