Science Magazine Podcast

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How to keep quantum computers cool, whether prediction markets harm public health, and podcasting on podcasting Apr 16, 2026

Show notes

First up on the podcast, quantum computers require extremely low temperatures—less than 1°C away from absolute zero. But getting down to those temperatures has usually required dilution fridges using the extremely rare and increasingly expensive isotope helium-3. Freelance science journalist Zack Savitsky joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss up-and-coming technologies that can drive down temperatures while staying helium-3–free.

Next on the show, Nizan Packin, a professor of law at the Zicklin School of Business at Baruch College, talks about prediction markets as a public health threat. Early on, prediction markets were proposed as a way to make reliable forecasts from crowdsourced wisdom. With the appearance of commercial, for-profit prediction markets linked with cryptocurrency and sports betting, Nizan and colleagues ask what studies should be done to better understand potential harms to the public.

Finally, in a Working Life column this week, recent Ph.D. graduate Filippo Dall’Armellina wrote about how his foray into science podcasting helped him regain enjoyment of research. He talks about why having a science-adjacent hobby was life changing.

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

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The Normals | Episode 2 Apr 14, 2026

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Last time on The Normals, we learned that in the 1950s, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) wanted to recruit many healthy volunteers for basic research. Two peace churches, the Mennonites and the Church of the Brethren, had an excess of healthy human volunteers. The “Normals” recruited from these Anabaptist churches were surprisingly happy, even as they went through sometimes painful procedures.

In this follow-up episode, we hear about how the sources of normal human subjects changed in the 1960s and why NIH researchers felt they needed to expand their search for normal people. We also learn about the first death in the program and the shifting motives on the parts of the researchers and volunteers. Final episode drops next Tuesday, April 21.

All Normals episodes

In this episode:

Laura Stark, history professor at the Center for Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University
Ken Naas, former Normal patient
Cindy Jansen, former Normal patient
Dale Horst, former Normal patient
Sarah Crespi, Science Podcast senior host and producer

Additional resources:

The Normals: A People’s History of Modern America in Five Human Experiments by Laura Stark

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A chimpanzee ‘civil war,’ and NASA plans for nuclear propulsion Apr 09, 2026

Show notes

First up on the podcast, freelance science journalist Hannah Richter joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss NASA’s plans to send a nuclear-powered spacec raft to Mars in less than 3 years. Having not launched a fission reactor to space in more than 60 years, the organization faces many technical and bureaucratic hurdles to make that deadline.

Next on the show, Aaron Sandel, associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin and co-director of the Ngogo Chimpanzee Project, reports this week in Science on what looks like a chimpanzee civil war. The unprecedented violent split occurred in a large chimp colony that has been tracked by researchers for decades. Now, scientists are asking: What can the lethal division of a chimp community teach us about human conflict?

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

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The Normals | Episode 1 Apr 07, 2026

Show notes

How do we know what's normal in a person? In the early 1950s, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) set out to do something unprecedented. It wanted to start studying normal humans on a grand scale. It had pretty much everything in place: It had the building, it had recruited all of these amazing researchers—it was the healthy human bodies NIH didn't have. How do we know what’s normal in a person? In the early 1950s, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) set out to do something unprecedented. It wanted to start to study normal humans on a grand scale. It had pretty much everything in place: It had the building, it had recruited all of these amazing researchers—it was the healthy human bodies NIH didn’t have. When the healthy subjects arrived, experimenters tested LSD, sleep devrivation, rice-only diets, and more risky intervetions on them. Where it found those volunteers and what happened next is the story of The Normals.

Starting on 7 April, the Science Podcast will be releasing a new three-part limited series called The Normals.

We'll hear from some of the original “Normals,” follow the program through the decades, and see what's happening with healthy human subject research today.

All Normals episodes

Appearing in this episode:

Laura Stark, history professor at the Center for Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University
Dale Horst, former Normal patient
Shirley Burry Geissinger, former Normal patient
Sarah Crespi, Science Podcast senior host and producer

Additional resources:

The Normals: A People’s History of Modern America in Five Human Experiments by Laura Stark

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Resolving the dispute over the speed of the expanding universe, and seeking new drug targets for cognitive dysfunction Apr 02, 2026

Show notes

First up on the podcast, a new path to calculating the Hubble constant. This value for the universe’s speed of expansion is typically determined in one of two ways, one favored by cosmologists, the other by astronomers. But the resulting values from these methods are consistently different. Staff Writer Daniel Clery joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss how reappearing bursts from deep space, lensed by gravity, could resolve the dispute over the speed of the expanding universe.

Next on the show, freelance producer Elah Feder talks with Mauro Costa-Mattioli, principal investigator at Altos Labs’ Institutes of Science, about tuning the “integrated stress response” (ISR) in mouse brains. The ISR pathway turns off much of protein synthesis in cells as a response to stressors such as viral infections or oxygen deprivation. The ISR is overactive in some models of cognitive dysfunction—suggesting the downregulated protein synthesis may hamper brain functions such as memory formation. In his paper, Costa-Mattioli and colleagues show turning on the ISR pathway causes memory problems in mice and turning off the ISR can restore function in mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease and Down syndrome. Although this research was in mice, it suggests cognitive dysfunction associated with many different disorders may involve the ISR—making it a good therapeutic target.

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

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Resurrection plants, Project Hail Mary, and the trouble with sycophantic AI Mar 26, 2026

Show notes

First up on the podcast, Deputy News Editor Martin Enserink talks about so-called resurrection plants. These specialized plants can survive up to 95% water loss, whereas most plants struggle when their water levels dip below 60%. We also hear from Jill Farrant, a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of Cape Town, about her work dissecting the desiccation survival pathways in resurrection plants and how they might be repurposed to protect crop plants from drought.

Next on the show, we’ve all heard of chatbots praising their users for asking the most basic of questions. This bias toward sycophancy extends beyond pleasantries into relationship advice the artificial intelligence (AI) doles out to users. Myra Cheng, a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at Stanford University, joins the show to talk about how this tendency for AIs to be agreeable can lead users to have more confidence in their opinions, to the detriment of their relationships with others.

Warning, this last segment contains spoilers for the movie and book Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. If you’ve seen the movie or don’t mind a bit of extra context, you will hear an analysis of planetary science in the film with astrophysicist and associate curator at the American Museum of Natural History, Jacqueline Faherty. Read the full film review.

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

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Rethinking the peopling of the Americas, and the best ways to get groundwater back Mar 19, 2026

Show notes

First up on the podcast, we discuss a finding that’s likely to reignite debate over how humans first spread through the Americas. In the late 1990s, a site in southern Chile called Monte Verde forced archaeologists to adjust their views of the peopling of South America because it dated to about 14,500 years before present, which challenged the prevailing idea of when human inhabitants appeared on the continent. Contributing Correspondent Lizzie Wade joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss new results published in Science that suggest Monte Verde is nowhere near that old.

See the paper and related commentary.

Next on the show, we talk about groundwater, a vital source of water for both drinking and agriculture that’s often overused and depleted. Producer Meagan Cantwell talks with Scott Jasechko, a professor of water resources with the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, about the many different approaches to improving groundwater supplies and what has worked where, which he reviews in this week’s issue of Science.

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

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What Alaska’s eroding coastline says about Earth’s future, and how Yellowstone ravens use their smarts to find wolf kills Mar 12, 2026

Show notes

First up on the podcast, freelance journalist Evan Howell traveled to Cape Blossom, Alaska, where the receding coastline has revealed an ancient trove of glacial ice that may have survived for 350,000 years—making it the oldest ice in the Northern Hemisphere. Now researchers just need to figure out how to date it.

Next on the show, tracking wolves and ravens in Yellowstone National Park shows the birds don’t follow the wolves in hope of a meal, but instead remember and revisit frequent wolf kill sites. Matthias-Claudio Loretto, assistant professor in the Research Institute of Wildlife Ecology at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, discusses how this might change the way we think about scavengers’ strategies for finding their ephemeral food sources.

Finally, Claire Bedbrook, the Helen Hay Whitney and Wu Tsai neuroscience postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, discusses her work tracking African turquoise killifish over their life span. By capturing behaviors over the course of the fish’s entire lives, her team was able to observe behaviors that could be used to predict whether a fish would live a short or long life.

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

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An alleged nuclear blast may reignite weapons testing, and who owns the Moon Mar 05, 2026

Show notes

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.

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Tropical birds’ ‘silent spring,’ and mapping people’s brains during surgery Feb 26, 2026

Show notes

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.

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