The abrupt defunding of USAID in 2025 caused global shockwaves. The cuts thrust recipient countries who were dependent on foreign aid for medical care into health crises. One area that has been particularly hard hit is Malawi, a country in southeastern Africa where doctors and community organizers are struggling to fill the gaps in essential services left in the wake of the USAID cuts. The loss of local outreach clinics and lack of fuel for ambulances has caused severe delays—and sometimes tragic outcomes—in providing care to mothers and children. A year out from the cuts, we look at how Malawi is rethinking its relationship to foreign aid as it considers how to continue providing vital health services. 

In the first of a series supported by the nonprofit Pulitzer Center and in collaboration with Science Magazine, we provide an on-the-ground look at the impact of USAID defunding on health services in key spots across the globe.  

Guests:  

Catherine Offord – journalist, Science Magazine. Her article, “An Uncertain Path,” appeared in the July 16 issue of the magazine  

Voices heard in the show:  

Fanizo Simenti – community health worker at Katenje Health Post, Kasungu district  

Emily Mvula – former recipient of services provided by USAID MOMENTUM  

Issah Omar Nicks – nursing officer overseeing the maternity ward at the Makiyoni Health Center, Salima District  

Aran Nkhata – medical clinician in charge of Makiyoni Health Center, Salima District  

Flywell Elenesto – cold chain technician for Salima District, Malawi  

Sungeni Thole – nurse midwife technician at Makiyoni Health Center, Salima District  

Anthony Masamba – MP and chair of The Parliamentary Committee on Health  

Show theme by Jun Miyake. Episode image by Thoko Chikondi. 

You can get early access to ad-free versions of every episode by joining us on Patreon. Thanks for your support! 

Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact [email protected] to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science. 

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They are known for holding branches in their paws and gnawing on them like corn cobs. They build lodges and dams which occasionally flood roads. Cute, comical, and considered pests, beavers were nearly hunted to extinction for their pelts before conservation efforts allowed their populations to rebound. Now environmentalists and engineers are reintroducing North America’s largest rodent to drought-prone habitats across the country. As the paddle-tailed animals’ dam-building has revealed itself to be a potent bulwark against climate change-induced water scarcity, the beaver is being hailed as an ecological hero.  

Join us as we stomp through soggy meadows getting to know the OG geoengineers. From their water pressure-sensing tails to their intricate branch-weaving, find out why, as our nation’s wetlands disappear, and new federal policies strip protection for many of those that remain, many think that partnership with a wild species could help build ecological resiliency. 

Guests: 

Leila Philip – Journalist and author of “Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America” 

Denise Burchsted – research scientist, and engineer, Keene State College 

Clay Frazer – restoration ecologist with Native Range Ecological 

Michael Waasegiizhig Price – traditional ecological knowledge specialist at the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission. He is Anishinaabe and a longtime tribal college educator serving at Leech Lake Tribal College and White Earth Tribal and Community College. 

Originally aired July 28, 2025 

You can get early access to ad-free versions of every episode by joining us on Patreon. Thanks for your support! 

Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact [email protected] to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science. 

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Whether in miles or pounds, meters or kilograms, we take daily measure out our lives. But how did these units ever come to be, and why do we want to change them? From light-years to leap seconds, we look at the history of efforts to quantify our lives and why there’s always room for greater precision. Plus, we debate the virtues of staying imperial measurements vs. going metric. 

 Guest: 

James Vincent - Author of Beyond Measure, the Hidden History of Measurement 

Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake 

Originally aired March 24, 2023 

Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact [email protected] to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science. 

You can get early access to ad-free versions of every episode by joining us on Patreon. Thanks for your support! 

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Are we alone in the universe? Is there other intelligence out there? COSMIC, the most ambitious SETI search yet, hopes to answer that. We hear updates on this novel signal detection project being conducted on the Very Large Array in the desert of New Mexico. Also, we chat with award-winning science fiction writer Ted Chiang about how he envisions making contact with aliens in his stories, including the one that was the basis for the movie Arrival. And find out why some scientists don’t want only to listen for signals, they want to deliberately transmit messages to aliens. Is that wise and, if we did it, what would we say?  

Guests: 

Chenoa Tremblay – Postdoc researcher in radio astronomy for the SETI Institute and member of COSMIC science team 

Ted Chiang – Nebula and Hugo award-winning science fiction writer, best known for his collections, Stories of Your Life and Others and Exhalation 

Douglas Vakoch – Founder and president of METI International, a nonprofit research and educational organization devoted to transmitting intentional signals to extraterrestrial civilizations 

Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake 

Originally aired April 3, 2023 

Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact [email protected] to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science. 

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What physical activity gives you joy? Whether it’s walking, running, dancing or swimming, your body evolved to do it. We are made for movement. But there’s a cost, as anyone with a sore neck or aching back knows. From the tiny muscles in our skin, which raise the hair on our arms, to the intricate mix of bone, blood vessels, and nerves in our neck, natural selection has struck a delicate and sometimes wacky balance between utility and form. In this episode, we explore how parts of the body - our muscles, neck and feet - came to be, and what forces prompted the evolution of efficient yet imperfect bodies. 

Guests: 

Kent Dunlap - Professor of biology at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut and author of “The Neck: A Natural and Cultural History” 

Bonnie Tsui - Journalist and author of “On Muscle: The Stuff That Moves Us and Why It Matters” 

Jeremy DeSilva - Anthropologist at Dartmouth College and author of “First Steps, How Upright Walking Made Us Human” 

Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake 

Originally aired June 30, 2025 

You can get early access to ad-free versions of every episode by joining us on Patreon. Thanks for your support! 

Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact [email protected] to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science. 

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Electricity plays an important role in our everyday lives, including allowing our bodies to communicate internally. But some research claims electricity may be used to diagnose and treat disease? Could electric pulses one day replace medications?

We speak with experts about the growing field of bioelectric medicine and the evidence for electricity’s healing abilities. Their comments may shock you.

Guests:

Sally Adee – Science journalist, author of “We Are Electric: Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body’s Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds"

Samantha Payne – Assistant Professor of Biomedical Sciences at University of Guelph

Kevin Tracey – Neurosurgeon and President of the Feinstein Institutes at Northwell Health

Descripción en español

originally aired June 5, 2023

Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake

Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact [email protected] to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.

You can get early access to ad-free versions of every episode by joining us on Patreon. Thanks for your support!

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Earthworms may be small, limbless, and blind but, as Darwin observed nearly 150 years ago, they play a critical role in soil ecology. Darwin’s 19th century insights about the slimy invertebrates are far-reaching, serving as the backbone of modern ecology as a whole. In recent years, scientists are putting their ears to the ground, listening to worms to monitor soil health. Meanwhile, laboratory studies on another kind of worms—flatworms—are providing insights about how memories are stored, and how stem cells self-renew. We get our hands dirty for this episode about the biology and ecology of worms.  

Guests: 

Philip Ball – science reporter, author of “Beautiful Experiments: An Illustrated History of Experimental Science”  

Jacqueline Stroud – soil scientist, University of Warwick, U.K. 

Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado  – molecular biologist at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research, whose focus is on stem cells and regeneration 

Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact [email protected] to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science. 

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The Arctic serves as the world’s refrigerator, keeping the planet cool. But temperatures in the Arctic are rising nearly four times faster than the rest of the world and its sea ice is near a historic low. We put out a call to scientists aboard research vessels currently sailing in the Arctic Ocean, and two answered “aye.” Hear our ship-to-shore conversations with them about how warmer temperatures affect life on land and sea. Plus, a biologist who recently returned from the field describes how he inadvertently stumbled upon surprising data during his decades-long study of polar bears. 

Guests:

Autun Purser – Marine biologist at the Alfred- Wegener Institute and the current Chief Scientist on the Arctic research vessel, the Polarstern 

Andrew Derocher – Zoologist at the University of Alberta in Canada who is leading a decades-long study on polar bears of the West Hudson Bay region, in the high Canadian North   

Jonathan Nash – Oceanographer, Oregon State University, and member of the GIANT team sailing near Greenland aboard the RRS Sir David Attenborough 

Descripción en español

Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact [email protected] to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.

You can get early access to ad-free versions of every episode by joining us on Patreon. Thanks for your support!

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Another scorching summer has us blasting the AC and grabbing a chilled drink. Air conditioning and refrigeration may beat the heat, but they also present a dilemma. The more we use them, the more greenhouse gases we emit, the hotter the planet becomes, and the more we require artificial cooling.  Can we escape this feedback loop?  We look at the origins of these chilling technologies, tour the extensive chain of cold that keeps food from perishing, and consider how a desert city like Phoenix could not exist without AC.

Guests:

Nicola Twilley – co-host of the Gastropod podcast, a contributing writer at The New Yorker, and the author of  “Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves”

Erik Morrison – Chief cooling engineer at Transaera, Somerville, Massachusetts

Stan Cox – Lead scientist at the Land Institute, author of “Losing Our Cool: The Uncomfortable Truths about our Air-Conditioned World”

Descripción en español

Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake

Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact a[email protected] to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.

You can get early access to ad-free versions of every episode by joining us on Patreon. Thanks for your support!

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The powerful gene editing tool CRISPR is already being tested on animal and plant cells. It has even been used on humans. How might this revolutionary tool change our lives? On the one hand, it could cure inherited diseases and rid the world of malaria-spreading mosquitoes. On the other hand, scientists using it are accelerating evolution and introducing novel genetic combinations that could transform our biological landscape in unforeseen ways. We explore the ramifications of this revolutionary technology.

Guests:

Nathan Rose – Molecular biologist and head of malaria programs at U.K. based biotech company, Oxitec.

Hank Greely – Law professor and director of the Center for Law in the Biosciences at Stanford University and author of “CRISPR People: The Science and Ethics of Editing Humans.”

Antonio Regalado – Senior Editor for Biomedicine, MIT Technology Review.

originally posted April 17, 2023

Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact [email protected] to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.

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Many of us know the feeling: we intend to go to bed but pull out our phones for one last scroll. Setting them aside hours later, we’re wide awake, unable to fall asleep. For years, scientists have singled out blue light emitted from our devices as the key culprit behind our post-scrolling insomnia, but the scientific consensus is shifting. Although blue light signals to brains that its daytime, surprising new research suggests that our glowing screens may play a smaller role than previously thought.

We present the fascinating science around biological mechanisms of sleep and wakefulness, why circadian rhythms have more in common with your grandfather’s clock than you might think, and why scientists who question the role of blue light in causing nighttime restlessness, still don’t let our phones off the hook completely.

Guests:

Michael Gradisar – clinical psychologist and sleep researcher, former professor at Flinders University in Australia. Currently serves a head of Sleep Science at Sleep Cycle, a sleep tracking app company

Jay Dunlap – geneticist and molecular geneticist at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth who works the molecular basis of circadian rhythms

Mariana Figueiro – photobiologist, Director of the Light and Health Research Center and Professor of Population Health Science and Policy at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact [email protected] to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.

You can get early access to ad-free versions of every episode by joining us on Patreon. Thanks for your support!

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