Science, Spoken

Latest Episodes:

Scientists Reveal Ancient Social Networks Using AI—and X-Rays Mar 22, 2019

Show notes

Folded and sealed with a dollop of red wax, the will of Catharuçia Savonario Rivoalti lay in Venice’s State Archives, unread, for more than six and a half centuries. Scholars don’t know why the document, written in 1351, was never opened. But to physicist Fauzia Albertin, the three-page document—six pages, folded—was the perfect thickness for an experiment.

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The First Gene-Edited Food Is Now Being Served Mar 22, 2019

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Not long after Calyxt moved into its shiny new steel and glass headquarters on the outskirts of Minneapolis last summer, a woman pulled her car into its freshly poured parking lot and headed for the biotech firm’s front door. She caught the company’s chief science officer, Dan Voytas, just as he was leaving. “Um, is this a medical marijuana facility?” she asked, here eyes drifting to the rows of greenhouses at the back of the property and the high fences surrounding them.

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The WIRED Guide to Cannabis Mar 21, 2019

Show notes

Humanity just can’t make up its mind about cannabis. For thousands of years, humans have used the stuff as medicine or to travel on spiritual quests. That, though, didn’t quite suit the British, who banned cannabis in colonial India. Then in the 20th century, the United States government declared war on marijuana, and most of the world followed suit.

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Preparing to Unleash Crispr on an Unprepared World Mar 21, 2019

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Back in the 1980s, researchers began to notice a strange pattern in the genes of many microbes. There would be a stretch of DNA that read the same forward and backward, then a stretch of what looked like junk, then another palindrome, and so on. No one knew what the segments were for, but they were striking enough that a pair of scientists in Europe dubbed them “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats,” or Crispr for short.

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Women's Pain Is Different From Men's—the Drugs Could Be Too Mar 20, 2019

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Men and women can’t feel each other’s pain. Literally. We have different biological pathways for chronic pain, which means pain-relieving drugs that work for one sex might fail in the other half of the population. So why don’t we have pain medicines designed just for men or women? The reason is simple: Because no one has looked for them. Drug development begins with studies on rats and mice, and until three years ago, almost all that research used only male animals.

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DNA Crime-Solving Is Still New, Yet It May Have Gone Too Far Mar 19, 2019

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DNA is one of the most powerful substances in the universe. In the same structure it can encode the instructions to make uranium-munching microbes, giant flying lizards, or a stand of quaking aspens five miles wide. It can store every movie ever made in a single test tube. And it can stick around for tens of thousands of years. Just this week, Japanese scientists revealed they’d awakened some ancient wooly mammoth DNA by sticking it into mice embryos. What is dead may never die, indeed.

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The Uncanny Valley Nobody's Talking About: Eerie Robot Voices Mar 18, 2019

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Call it the Great Convergence of Creepiness. The first bit, the uncanny valley, we’re all familiar with by now: If a humanoid robot looks super realistic, but not quite realistic enough, it freaks us out. So far that idea has been applied almost entirely to robot faces and bodies, but it’s less known as a phenomenon in robot voices. Except, that is, to Kozminski University roboticist Aleksandra Przegalinska, also a research fellow at MIT.

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The Arctic's ‘Carbon Bomb’ Could Screw the Climate Even More Mar 15, 2019

Show notes

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Even in a dream-come-true scenario where we manage to stop all the world’s carbon emissions overnight, the Arctic would inevitably get hotter and hotter. That’s according to a new report by UN Environment, which says the the region is already “locked in” to wintertime warming of 4 to 5 degrees C (7.2 to 9 degrees F) over temperatures of the late 1900s.

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23andMe’s New Diabetes Test Has Experts Asking Who It’s For Mar 14, 2019

Show notes

On Sunday, the DNA testing company 23andMe revealed a new genetic analysis that it says will tell its customers if they have an elevated risk of developing the most common, and preventable, form of diabetes. The report—which has not been cleared by the FDA and is not intended to diagnose type 2 diabetes—arrives as the disease is becoming an intractable public health crisis in the US. One in four healthcare dollars goes to treating diabetes and its related complications.

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Trump's Budget Guts Science Agencies—But Favors the Moon Mar 13, 2019

Show notes

Despite two failed attempts in as many years, President Trump has not been moved to change his tactics. At least not when it comes to this year’s federal budget request, a $4.75 trillion spending plan that guts domestic programs and federal scientific research in favor of boosting the US military and building a wall along the Mexican border. For the third straight year, Trump has proposed big cuts to domestic programs—5 percent to most agencies.

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