In this episode:

00:37 Evidence that Stonehenge's Altar Stone travelled by glacier

BBC Science Focus: We may have just cracked one of Stonehenge's greatest mysteries

05:44 Fossilized faeces reveal DNA from ancient ecosystem

Nature: Ancient ground squirrels feasted on carcasses like ‘zombies of the Pleistocene’

Subscribe to Nature Briefing, an unmissable daily round-up of science news, opinion and analysis free in your inbox every weekday.

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In this episode:

00:46 A giant, ancient whale necropolis

Research article: Peng et al.

News & Views: A vast whale necropolis has been found

08:52 Research Highlights

Nature: Babies’ birth weight improves with help of payments to parents

Nature: Earliest signs of vision recorded in ancient sea-floor tracks

11:11 Turning plant material into chemical building-blocks

Research article: Mains et al.

Subscribe to Nature Briefing, an unmissable daily round-up of science news, opinion and analysis free in your inbox every weekday.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode:

00:23 Fossil evidence that spinosaurs had an aquatic lifestyle

Science: Some spinosaurs cried salty tears to thrive in brackish waters

04:57 The explosive immune cells that kill in minutes

Nature: Bang! Exploding immune cells splatter potent toxins everywhere

Subscribe to Nature Briefing, an unmissable daily round-up of science news, opinion and analysis free in your inbox every weekday.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode:

00:57 How your smartphone’s camera could measure your heart rate

Research article: Liao et al.

08:55 Research Highlights

Nature: A star gone rogue tears through the Galaxy

Nature: Gold keeps glittering courtesy of surface chemistry

11:04 Should you try something new in a restaurant? Maths has the answer

Nature: Feynman solved the ‘restaurant dilemma’ 50 years ago — now a study confirms his mathematics

Subscribe to Nature Briefing, an unmissable daily round-up of science news, opinion and analysis free in your inbox every weekday.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode:

00:21 When witnesses identify suspects from police line-ups, confidence matters

Nature: Memory on trial: the new science of when to trust eyewitness testimony

07:15 Registered Reports: how this ‘double peer review’ process could benefit scientists and their results

Nature: Nature is expanding Registered Reports to all the fields in which we publish

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On 17 May the World Health Organization (WHO) declared an ongoing Ebola outbreak a public health emergency of international concern. Centred on the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda, the outbreak has seen mounting numbers of suspected cases and deaths linked to the rare Bundibugyo species of Ebola virus.

In this podcast we hear what's currently known about the outbreak and the efforts of clinicians, researchers and public health officials to halt its progress.

Nature: Ebola outbreak is a global health emergency: what happens next

Nature: Race begins to trial Ebola drugs amid current outbreak

Nature: Ebola outbreak spirals out of control: how might it have started?

Nature: Will this Ebola outbreak be the biggest yet?

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode:

00:46 Meet the AI scientists designed to accelerate research

Research article: Ghareeb et al.

Research article: Gottweis et al.

Nature: Teams of AI agents boost speed of research

Editorial: Why AI cannot do good science without humans

Nature: Do you hate or love AI? Take Nature’s poll

13:25 Research Highlights

Nature: Dried to survive: desiccated tardigrades tolerate high heat

Nature: Pristine Antarctic ice records the Solar System’s travels

15:35 Using LiDAR to look around corners

Research article: Somasundaram et al.

Subscribe to Nature Briefing, an unmissable daily round-up of science news, opinion and analysis free in your inbox every weekday.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode:

00:34 What questions remain about the hantavirus outbreak?

Nature: Hantavirus outbreak exposes uncertainty about how disease spreads

Nature: There is no vaccine for deadly hantavirus: what that means for future outbreaks

Subscribe to Nature Briefing, an unmissable daily round-up of science news, opinion and analysis free in your inbox every weekday.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode:

00:42 Is red-light therapy all hype?

Disclaimer: The opinions and assertions expressed herein by Juanita Anders are those of the speaker and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences or the Department of War.

Nature: The surprising science behind red-light therapy — and how it really works

10:52 Research Highlights

Nature: Trafficked pangolins can be traced to their source by DNA — even to a specific forest

Nature: A wispy wrapper for a chilly, Pluto-like world

13:11 The complex story of global obesity rates

Research article: NCD Risk Factor Collaboration

Subscribe to Nature Briefing, an unmissable daily round-up of science news, opinion and analysis free in your inbox every weekday.

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Although scientists have long been able to gather DNA from water and soil, it's only recently that they've started to see the air as a source of genetic information.

Airborne DNA is already being used to monitor individual species, but researchers hope its abundance could have multiple uses, including judging the success of conservation efforts or attacks with biological weapons.

However, there remains much to understand, such as how far DNA travels in the air, and the ethics involved in the potential identification of a person's genetic information.

This is an audio version of our Feature: The air is full of DNA — here’s what scientists are using it for

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00:31 The science of attention spans

Nature Feature: Are attention spans really shrinking? What the science says

04:54 Data centres in space?

Nature News Explainer: AI data hubs in space: when will they take flight?

Nature Comment: Space diplomacy: bridging the operating gaps between myriad missions

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