Science Magazine Podcast

Latest Episodes:

Ancient artifacts on the beaches of Northern Europe, and how we remember music Mar 19, 2020

Show notes

On this week’s show, host Joel Goldberg talks with science journalist Andrew Curry about recent archaeological finds along the shores of Northern Europe. Curry outlines the rich history of the region that scientists, citizen scientists, and energy companies have helped dredge up.

Also this week, from a recording made at this year’s AAAS annual meeting, host Meagan Cantwell speaks with Elizabeth Margulis, a professor at Princeton University, about musical memory. Margulis dives into several music cognition studies, as well as her own study on how Western and non-western audiences interpret the same song differently.

This week’s episode was edited by Podigy.

Download a transcript (PDF)

Listen to previous podcasts

About the Science Podcast

[Image: Sebastian Reinecke/Flickr; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

Authors: Meagan Cantwell, Joel Goldberg, Andrew Curry

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

Science’s leading role in the restoration of Notre Dame and the surprising biology behind how our body develops its tough skin Mar 12, 2020

Show notes

On this week’s show, freelance writer Christa Lesté-Lasserre talks with host Sarah Crespi about the scientists working on the restoration of Notre Dame, from testing the changing weight of wet limestone, to how to remove lead contamination from four-story stained glass windows. As the emergency phase of work winds down, scientists are also starting to use the lull in tourist activity to investigate the mysteries of the cathedral’s construction.

Also this week, Felipe Quiroz, an assistant professor in the biomedical engineering department at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University, talks with Sarah about his paper on the cellular mechanism of liquid-liquid phase separation in the formation of the tough outer layer of the skin. Liquid-liquid phase separation is when two liquids “demix,” or separate, like oil and water. In cells, this process created membraneless organelles that are just now starting to be understood. In this work, Quiroz and colleagues create a sensor for phase separation in the cell that works in living tissue, and show how phase separation is tied to the formation of the outer layers of skin in mice. Read the related Insight.

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

Listen to previous podcasts.

About the Science Podcast

Download a transcript (PDF).

[Image: r. nial bradshaw/Flickr; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

Authors: Sarah Crespi; Christa Lesté-Lasserre

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

Dog noses detect heat, the world faces coronavirus, and scientists search for extraterrestrial life Mar 05, 2020

Show notes

On this week’s show, Online News Editor David Grimm joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss how dogs’ cold noses may be able to sense warm bodies. Read the research.

International News Editor Martin Enserink shares the latest from our reporters covering coronavirus.

And finally, from a recording made at this year’s AAAS annual meeting, host Meagan Cantwell talks with Jill Tarter, chair emeritus at the SETI Institute, about the newest technologies being used to search for alien life, what a positive signal would look like, and how to inform the public if extraterrestrial life ever were detected.

Episode page: https://www.sciencemag.org/podcast/dog-noses-detect-heat-world-faces-coronavirus-and-scientists-search-extraterrestrial-life

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

Listen to previous podcasts.

About the Science Podcast

Download a transcript (PDF).

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

An ancient empire hiding in plain sight, and the billion-dollar cost of illegal fishing Feb 27, 2020

Show notes

This week on the podcast, Contributing Correspondent Lizzie Wade joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss a turning point for one ancient Mesoamerican city: Tikal. On 16 January 378 C.E., the Maya city lost its leader and the replacement may have been a stranger. We know from writings that the new leader wore the garb of another culture—the Teotihuacan—who lived in a giant city 1000 kilometers away. But was this new ruler of a Maya city really from a separate culture? New techniques being used at the Tikal and Teotihuacan sites have revealed conflicting evidence as to whether Teotihuacan really held sway over a much larger region than previously estimated.

Sarah also talks with Rashid Sumaila, professor and Canada research chair in interdisciplinary ocean and fisheries economics at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries. You may have heard of illegal fishing being bad for the environment or bad for maintaining fisheries—but as Sumaila and colleagues report this week in Science Advances, the illegal fishing trade is also incredibly costly—with gross revenues of between $8.9 billion and $17.2 billion each year.

In the books segment this month, Kiki Sanford interviews Gaia Vince about her new book Transcendence

How Humans Evolved through Fire, Language, Beauty, and Time.

This week’s episode was edited by Podigy.

Listen to previous podcasts.

About the Science Podcast

Download a transcript (PDF).

[Image: Christian Hipólito; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

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

Brickmaking bacteria and solar cells that turn ‘waste’ heat into electricity Feb 20, 2020

Show notes

On this week’s show, staff writer Robert F. Service talks with host Sarah Crespi about manipulating microbes to make them produce building materials like bricks—and walls that can take toxins out of the air.

Sarah also talks with Paul Davids, principal member of the technical staff in applied photonics & microsystems at Sandia National Laboratories, about an innovation in converting waste heat to electricity that uses similar materials to solar cells but depends on quantum tunneling.

And in a bonus segment, producer Meagan Cantwell talks with online news editor David Grimm on stage at the AAAS annual meeting in Seattle. They discuss how wildfires can harm your lungs, crime rates in so-called sanctuary states, and how factors such as your gender and country of origin influence how much trust you put in science.

This week’s episode was edited by Podigy.

Listen to previous podcasts

About the Science Podcast

Download a transcript (PDF)

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

NIH’s new diversity hiring program, and the role of memory suppression in resilience to trauma Feb 13, 2020

Show notes

On this week’s show, senior correspondent Jeffrey Mervis joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss a new National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant program that aims to encourage diversity at the level of university faculty with the long-range goal of increasing the diversity of NIH-grant recipients.

Sarah also talks with Pierre Gagnepain, a cognitive neuroscientist at INSERM, the French biomedical research agency, about the role of memory suppression in post-traumatic stress disorder. Could people that are better at suppressing memories be more resilient to the aftermath of trauma?

This week’s episode was edited by Podigy.

Listen to previous podcasts

About the Science Podcast

Download a transcript (PDF)

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

Fighting cancer with CRISPR, and dating ancient rock art with wasp nests Feb 06, 2020

Show notes

On this week’s show, Staff Writer Jennifer Couzin-Frankel joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about a Science paper that combines two hot areas of research-link—CRISPR gene editing and immunotherapy for cancer—and tests it in patients.

Sarah also talks with Damien Finch, a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Melbourne, about the Kimberly region of Australia and dating its ice age cave paintings using charcoal from nearby wasp nests.

Episode page

This week’s episode was edited by Podigy.

Listen to previous podcasts.

About the Science Podcast

Download a transcript (PDF).

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

A cryo–electron microscope accessible to the masses, and tracing the genetics of schizophrenia Jan 30, 2020

Show notes

Structural biologists rejoiced when cryo–electron microscopy, a technique to generate highly detailed models of biomolecules, emerged. But years after its release, researchers still face long queues to access these machines. Science’s European News Editor Eric Hand walks host Meagan Cantwell through the journey of a group of researchers to create a cheaper, more accessible alternative.

Also this week, host Joel Goldberg speaks with psychiatrist and researcher Goodman Sibeko, who worked with the Xhosa people of South Africa to help illuminate genetic details of schizophrenia.

Though scientists have examined this subject among Western populations, much less is known about the underlying genetics of people native to Africa.

This week’s episode was edited by Podigy.

Listen to previous podcasts.

About the Science Podcast

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

Getting BPA out of food containers, and tracing minute chemical mixtures in the environment Jan 23, 2020

Show notes

As part of a special issue on chemicals for tomorrow’s Earth, we’ve got two green chemistry stories. First, host Sarah Crespi talks with contributing correspondent Warren Cornwell about how a company came up with a replacement for the popular can lining material bisphenol A and then recruited knowledgeable critics to test its safety.

Sarah is also joined by Beate Escher of the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research and the University of Tübingen to discuss ways to trace complex mixtures of humanmade chemicals in the environment. They talk about how new technologies can help detect these mixtures, understand their toxicity, and eventually connect their effects on the environment, wildlife, and people.

This week’s episode was edited by Podigy.

Listen to previous podcasts.

About the Science Podcast

Download a transcript (PDF)

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

Researchers flouting clinical reporting rules, and linking gut microbes to heart disease and diabetes Jan 16, 2020

Show notes

Though a U.S. law requiring clinical trial results reporting has been on the books for decades, many researchers have been slow to comply. Now, 2 years after the law was sharpened with higher penalties for noncompliance, investigative correspondent Charles Piller took a look at the results. He talks with host Sarah Crespi about the investigation and a surprising lack of compliance and enforcement.

Also this week, Sarah talks with Brett Finlay, a microbiologist at the University Of British Columbia, Vancouver, about an Insight in this week’s issue that aims to connect the dots between noncommunicable diseases like heart disease, diabetes, and cancer and the microbes that live in our guts. Could these diseases actually spread through our microbiomes?

This week’s episode was edited by Podigy.

Listen to previous podcasts.

About the Science Podcast

Download a transcript (PDF).

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

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