Bringing historical seismic reports and modern seismic risk maps into alignment, and a roundup of stories from our newsletter, ScienceAdviser
First on the show this week, a roundup of stories with our newsletter editor, Christie Wilcox. Wilcox talks with host Sarah Crespi about the oldest ice ever found, how well conservation efforts seem to be working, and repelling mosquitoes with our skin microbes.
Next on this episode, evaluating seismic hazard maps. In a Science Advances paper this week, Leah Salditch, a geoscience peril adviser at risk and reinsurance company Guy Carpenter, compared modern seismic risk map predictions with descriptions of past quakes. The analysis found a mismatch: Reported shaking in the past tended to be stronger than modern models would have predicted. She talks with Crespi about where this bias comes from and how to fix it.
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
Authors: Sarah Crespi; Christie Wilcox
Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.zfj31xo
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Researchers try to identify effective loneliness interventions, making the Sandmeyer safer, and books that look to the future and don’t see doom and gloom
First up on the show, Deputy News Editor Kelly Servick explores the science of loneliness. Is loneliness on the rise or just our awareness of it? How do we deal with the stigma of being lonely?
Also appearing in this segment:
Next, producer Ariana Remmel talks with Tim Schulte, a graduate student at the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research and RWTH Aachen University, about making one of organic chemistry’s oldest reactions—the Sandmeyer reaction—both safer and more versatile.
Finally, we kick off this year’s book series with books editor Valerie Thompson and books host Angela Saini. They discuss this year’s theme: a future to look forward to.
Book segments come out the last episode of the month. Books in the series:
● Eve: The Disobedient Future of Birth by Claire Horn (May)
● Tokens: The Future of Money in the Age of the Platform by Rachel O’Dwyer (June)
● The Heart and the Chip: Our Bright Future with Robots by Daniela Rus and Gregory Mone (July)
● Climate Capitalism: Winning the Race to Zero Emissions and Solving the Crisis of Our Age by Akshat Rathi (August)
● Virtual You: How Building Your Digital Twin Will Revolutionize Medicine and Change Your Life by Peter Coveney and Roger Highfield (September)
● Imagination: A Manifesto by Ruha Benjamin (October)
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
Authors: Sarah Crespi; Kelly Servick; Ariana Remmel; Valerie Thompson; Angela Saini
Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.zqubta7
About the Science Podcast: https://www.science.org/content/page/about-science-podcast
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A different source of global warming, signs of a continentwide tradition of human sacrifice, and a virus that attacks the cholera bacteria
First up on the show this week, clearer skies might be accelerating global warming. Staff Writer Paul Voosen joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss how as air pollution is cleaned up, climate models need to consider the decrease in the planet’s reflectivity. Less reflectivity means Earth is absorbing more energy from the Sun and increased temps.
Also from the news team this week, we hear about how bones from across Europe suggest recurring Stone Age ritual killings. Contributing Correspondent Andrew Curry talks about how a method of murder used by the Italian Mafia today may have been used in sacrifices by early farmers, from Poland to the Iberian Peninsula.
Finally, Eric Nelson, an associate professor at the University of Florida’s Emerging Pathogens Institute, joins Sarah to talk about an infectious bacteria that’s fighting on two fronts. The bacterium that causes cholera—Vibrio cholerae—can be killed off with antibiotics but at the same time, it is hunted by a phage virus living inside the human gut. In a paper published in Science, Nelson and colleagues describe how we should think about phage as predator and bacteria as prey, in the savanna of our intestines. The ratio of predator to prey turns out to be important for the course of cholera infections.
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
Authors: Sarah Crespi; Paul Voosen; Andrew Curry
Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.zhgw74e
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]Researchers are testing HIV drugs and monoclonal antibodies against long-lasting COVID-19, and what it takes to turn a symbiotic friend into an organelle
First up on the show this week, clinical trials of new and old treatments for Long Covid. Producer Meagan Cantwell is joined by Staff Writer Jennifer Couzin-Frankel and some of her sources to discuss the difficulties of studying and treating this debilitating disease.
People in this segment:
· Shelley Hayden
Next: Move over mitochondria, a new organelle called the nitroplast is here. Host Sarah Crespi talks with Tyler Coale, a postdoctoral scholar in the University of California, Santa Cruz’s Ocean Sciences Department, about what exactly makes an organelle an organelle and why it would be nice to have inhouse nitrogen fixing in your cells.
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
Authors: Sarah Crespi; Meagan Cantwell; Jennifer Couzin-Frankel
Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.zof5fvk
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Tracing the arrival of rats using bones, isotopes, and a few shipwrecks; and what scientists have learned in 50 years about our famous ancestor Lucy
First on the show: Did rats come over with Christopher Columbus? It turns out, European colonists weren’t alone on their ships when they came to the Americas—they also brought black and brown rats to uninfested shores. Eric Guiry, a researcher in the Trent Environmental Archaeology Lab at Trent University, joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss how tiny slices of bone from early colony sites and sunken shipwrecks can tell us when these pesky rodents arrived.
Next, producer Meagan Cantwell talks with Contributing Correspondent Ann Gibbons about what has happened in the 50 years since anthropologists found Lucy—a likely human ancestor that lived 2.9 million to 3.3 million years ago. Although still likely part of our family tree, her place as a direct ancestor is in question. And over the years, her past has become less lonesome as it has become populated with other contemporaneous hominins.
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
Authors: Sarah Crespi; Meagan Cantwell; Ann Gibbons
Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.z4scrgk
About the Science Podcast: https://www.science.org/content/page/about-science-podcast
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Robots that can smile in synchrony with people, and what ends up in the letters section
First on this week’s show, a robot that can predict your smile. Hod Lipson, a roboticist and professor at Columbia University, joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss how mirrors can help robots learn to make facial expressions and eventually improve robot nonverbal communication.
Next, we have Margaret Handley, a professor in the department of epidemiology and biostatistics and medicine at the University of California San Francisco. She shares a letter she wrote to Science about how her past, her family, and a rare instrument relate to her current career focus on public health and homelessness. Letters Editor Jennifer Sills also weighs in with the kinds of letters people write into the magazine.
Other Past as Prologue letters:
A new frontier for mi familia by Raven Delfina Otero-Symphony
A uranium miner’s daughter by Tanya J. Gallegos
Embracing questions after my father’s murder by Jacquelyn J. Cragg
A family’s pride in educated daughters by Qura Tul Ain
One person’s trash: Another’s treasured education by Xiangkun Elvis Cao
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
Authors: Sarah Crespi; Jennifer Sills
Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.zy9w2u0
About the Science Podcast: https://www.science.org/content/page/about-science-podcast
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New clinical trials for treatments of an always fatal brain disease, and what happens with pests when a conventional and organic farm are neighbors
First up on this week’s show, a new treatment to stave off prion disease goes into clinical trials. Prions are misfolded proteins that clump together and chew holes in the brain. The misfolding can be switched on in a number of ways—including infection with a misfolded prion protein from an animal or person. Staff Writer Meredith Wadman talks with host Sarah Crespi about new potential treatments—from antisense nucleotides to small molecules that interfere with protein production—for these fatal neurodegenerative diseases.
Next on the show: Freelance producer Katherine Irving talks with Ashley Larsen, associate professor of agricultural and landscape ecology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, about the effects of organic farms on their neighbors. If there are lots of organic growers together, pesticide use goes down but conventional farms tend to use more pesticides when side by side with organic farms.
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
Authors: Sarah Crespi; Katherine Irving; Meredith Wadman
Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.z91m76v
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Investigating “infantile amnesia,” and how generalized fear after acute stress reflects changes in the brain
This week we have two neuroscience stories. First up, freelance science journalist Sara Reardon looks at why infants’ memories fade. She joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss ongoing experiments that aim to determine when the forgetting stops and why it happens in the first place.
Next on the show, Hui-Quan Li, a senior scientist at Neurocrine Biosciences, talks with Sarah about how the brain encodes generalized fear, a symptom of some anxiety disorders such as social anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder.
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
Authors: Sarah Crespi; Kevin McLean; Sara Reardon
Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.z9bqkyc
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What modern Indian genomes say about the region’s deep past, and how vitamin A influences stem cell plasticity
First up this week, Online News Editor Michael Price and host Sarah Crespi talk about a large genome sequencing project in India that reveals past migrations in the region and a unique intermixing with Neanderthals in ancient times.
Next on the show, producer Kevin McLean chats with Matthew Tierney, a postdoctoral fellow at Rockefeller University, about how vitamin A and stem cells work together to grow hair and heal wounds.
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
Authors: Sarah Crespi; Kevin McLean; Michael Price
Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.zfhqarg
About the Science Podcast: https://www.science.org/content/page/about-science-podcast
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Keeping water out of the stratosphere could be a low-risk geoengineering approach, and using magnets to drive medical robots inside the body
First up this week, a new approach to slowing climate change: dehydrating the stratosphere. Staff Writer Paul Voosen joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss the risks and advantages of this geoengineering technique.
Next on the show, Science Robotics Editor Amos Matsiko gives a run-down of papers in a special series on magnetic robots in medicine. Matsiko and Crespi also discuss how close old science fiction books came to predicting modern medical robots’ abilities.
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
Authors: Sarah Crespi; Paul Voosen; Amos Matsiko
Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.zvvddhw
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On this week’s show: Factors that pushed snakes to evolve so many different habitats and lifestyles, and news from the AAAS annual meeting
First up on the show this week, news from this year’s annual meeting of AAAS (publisher of Science) in Denver. News intern Sean Cummings talks with Danielle Wood, director of the Space Enabled Research Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, about the sustainable use of orbital space or how space exploration and research can benefit everyone.
And Newsletter Editor Christie Wilcox joins host Sarah Crespi with an extravaganza of meeting stories including a chat with some of the authors of this year’s Newcomb Cleveland Prize–winning Science paper on how horses spread across North America.
Voices in this segment:
William Taylor, assistant professor and curator of archaeology at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Museum of Natural History
Ludovic Orlando, director of the Centre for Anthropobiology and Genomics of Toulouse
University of Oklahoma archaeologists Sarah Trabert and Brandi Bethke
Yvette Running Horse Collin, post-doctoral researcher Paul Sabatier University (Toulouse III)
Next on the show: What makes snakes so special? Freelance producer Ariana Remmel talks with Daniel Rabosky, professor in ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Michigan, about the drivers for all the different ways snakes have specialized—from spitting venom to sensing heat.
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
Authors: Sarah Crespi; Ariana Remmel; Christie Wilcox; Sean Cummings
Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.zabhbwe
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