Science Magazine Podcast

Latest Episodes:

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.

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[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.

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[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.

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[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.

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[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.

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[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.

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[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.

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[Image: (Text) Sculptor galaxy; (Image) ESO/J. Emerson/VISTA; Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

Authors: Joshua Sokol; Sarah Crespi

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Fighting outbreaks with museum collections, and making mice hallucinate Apr 01, 2021

Show notes

Podcast Producer Meagan Cantwell talks with Pamela Soltis, a professor and curator with the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida and the director of the University of Florida Biodiversity Institute, about how natural collections at museums can be a valuable resource for understanding future disease outbreaks. Read the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report Biological Collections: Ensuring Critical Research and Education for the 21st Century. This segment is part of our coverage of the 2021 AAAS Annual Meeting.

Also on this week’s show, Katharina Schmack, a research associate at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, joins producer Joel Goldberg to talk about giving mice a quiz that makes them hallucinate. Observing the mice in this state helps researchers make connections between dopamine, hallucinations, and mental illness.

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

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[Image: christopherhu/Flickr; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

Authors: Joel Goldberg; Meagan Cantwell

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Social insects as models for aging, and crew conflict on long space missions Mar 25, 2021

Show notes

Most research on aging has been done on model organisms with limited life spans, such as flies and worms. Host Meagan Cantwell talks to science writer Yao-Hua Law about how long-living social insects—some of which survive for up to 30 years—can provide new insights into aging.

Also in this episode, host Sarah Crespi talks with Noshir Contractor, the Jane S. & William J. White Professor of Behavioral Sciences at Northwestern University, about his AAAS session on keeping humans in harmony during long space missions and how mock missions on Earth are being applied to plans for a crewed mission to Mars.

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

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[Image:TerriAnneAllen/Unsplash ; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

Authors: Sarah Crespi; Yao Hua Law; Meagan Cantwell

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COVID-19 treatment at 1 year, and smarter materials for smarter cities Mar 18, 2021

Show notes

Science News Staff Writer Kelly Servick discusses how physicians have sifted through torrents of scientific results to arrive at treatments for SARS-CoV-2.

Sarah also talks with Wesley Reinhart of Pennsylvania State University’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering and Institute for Computational and Data Science, about why we should be building smart cities from smart materials, such as metamaterials that help solar panels chase the Sun, and living materials like self-healing concrete that keep buildings in good shape.

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

Listen to previous podcasts

About the Science Podcast

Download a transcript (PDF)

[Image: Singapore Esplanade/Travis/Flickr; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

Authors: Sarah Crespi; Kelly Servick

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