00:56 How the paths to professorship vary

A huge analysis of hiring practices has revealed that criteria to get a promotion to full professorship is hugely variable around the world. The authors suggest that this variability results in researchers from countries that value one type of metric being locked out of professor positions in others. They hope that the database of hiring practices created in this study could help institutions adjust their hiring policies to create a more diverse science workforce.

Research Article: Lim et al.

News: Want to become a professor? Here’s how hiring criteria differ by country

21:48 Research Highlights

Lasers reveal hidden tattoos on ancient mummified-skin, and a new pill that cuts flu symptoms and viral levels in the body.

Research Highlight: Hidden tattoos on mummy skin emerge under a laser’s light

Research Highlight: Got flu? Promising drug shortens symptoms

12:13 Cancer cells’ broken mitochondria could poison immune cells

Researchers have shown that cancer cells can slip their dysfunctional mitochondria into T cells, limiting the immune system’s cancer-fighting capabilities. Cancer cells are known to steal healthy mitochondria from immune cells to help tumours survive and thrive. Now, researchers have shown mitochondria can move in the opposite direction too, with the donor T cells showing signs of various stress responses that make them less effective when inside a tumour. The team showed that blocking this transfer limited this effect, and hopes that this mechanism could offer a new avenue for boosting the immune system’s response to cancer.

Research Article: Ikeda et al.

News & Views: Mitochondrial swap from cancer to immune cells thwarts anti-tumour defences

21:12 Science and the Gaza conflict

Noah Baker and Ehsan Masood turn to the war in Gaza, and discuss what comes next for science as a ceasefire comes into force.

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00:46 Designing new antivenoms to treat snakebites

Researchers have shown that machine learning can quickly design antivenoms that are effective against lethal snake-toxins, which they hope will help tackle a serious public health issue. Thousands of people die as a result of snakebites each year, but treatment options are limited, expensive and often difficult to access in the resource-poor settings where most bites occur. The computer-aided approach allowed researchers to design two proteins that provided near total protection against individual snake toxins in mouse experiments. While limited in scope, the team behind the work believe these results demonstrate the promise of the approach in designing effective and cheaper treatments for use in humans.

Research Article: Vázquez Torres et al.

11:28 Research Highlights

How male wasp spiders use hairs on their legs to sniff out mates, and how noradrenaline drives waves of cleansing fluid through the brain.

Research Highlight: ​​​​​​​Male spiders smell with their legs

Research Highlight: ​​​​​​​How the brain cleans itself during deep sleep

13:53 Earth breaches 1.5 °C climate limit for the first time

News broke last week that in 2024, Earth’s average temperature climbed to more than 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels for the first time. Although this is only a single year so far, we discuss what breaking this significant threshold means for the 2015 Paris climate agreement and what climate scientists understand about the speed that Earth is heating up.  

Nature: ​​​​​​​Earth breaches 1.5 °C climate limit for the first time: what does it mean?

23:39 Briefing Chat

NASA delays deciding its strategy for collecting and returning Mars rocks to Earth, and why papers on a handful of bacterial species dominate the scientific literature.

Nature: ​​​​​​​NASA still has no plan for how to bring precious Mars rocks to Earth

Nature: ​​​​​​​These are the 20 most-studied bacteria — the majority have been ignored

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In this episode of the Nature Podcast, we catch up on some science stories from the holiday period by diving into the Nature Briefing.

00:53 The retraction of a controversial COVID study that promoted unproven treatment

A much-critiqued study demonstrating the now-disproven idea that hydroxychloroquine can treat COVID-19 has been retracted — more than four-and-a-half years after it was published.

Nature: Controversial COVID study that promoted unproven treatment retracted after four-year saga

09:10 The skin’s unexpected immune system

Researchers have discovered that healthy skin — once thought to be a passive barrier — can actually produce antibodies that fight off infections. It’s hoped that the finding could one day lead to the development of needle-free vaccines that can be applied to the skin.

Nature: The skin’s ‘surprise’ power: it has its very own immune system

13:02 Researchers fear Europa’s icy crust may be much thicker than thought

New estimates, based on data collected by NASA’s Juno spacecraft, suggest that the ice on the surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa may be significantly thicker than previously thought. If these estimates prove accurate it could reduce the chances of Europa being habitable for extraterrestrial life.

Science: Surprisingly thick ice on Jupiter’s moon Europa complicates hunt for life

20:11 Modelling the running prowess of our ancient relatives

3D computer simulations of Australopithecus afarensis — an ancient hominin that lived more than three million years ago — reveals that while our relatives could run on two legs, they likely did so at a far slower pace than modern humans.

Nature: Humans evolved for distance running — but ancestor ‘Lucy’ didn’t go far or fast

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In this episode, reporter Miryam Naddaf joins us to talk about the big science events to look out for in 2025. We’ll hear about: the latest Moon missions, 30 years of the United Nations' COP climate summits, the return of Donald Trump, and more.

Nature: Science in 2025: the events to watch for in the coming year

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Marc Abrahams created the Ig Nobel prizes in 1991, after years of collecting examples of weird research that he included in the Journal of Irreproducible Results. The aim of these satirical awards is to honour achievements that “make people laugh, then think”.

While the initial response from the scientific community was mixed, last year the prize received more than 9,000 nominations. Several researchers who have won an ‘Ig’ say that it has improved their careers by helping them to reach wider audiences, and spend more time engaging with the public about their work.

This is an audio version of our Feature: How a silly science prize changed my career

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00:36 How melting ice is affecting global timekeeping

Nature Podcast: 27 March 2024

Research article: Agnew

09:19 Sex and gender discussions don't need to be toxic

Podcast extra: 01 May 2024

Collection: Sex and gender in science

18:10 Research Highlights

Research Highlight: How to train your crocodile

Research Highlight: Ancient fish dined on bats — or died trying

21:09 ChatGPT has a language problem — but science can fix it

Podcast extra: 09 August 2024

26:59 A simple solution to tackle a deadly frog disease

Nature Podcast: 03 July 2024

Research Article: Waddle et al.

News and Views: Mini saunas save endangered frogs from fungal disease

39:57 Briefing Chat

Nature News: Your brain on shrooms — how psilocybin resets neural networks

Nature News: NASA cancels $450-million mission to drill for ice on the Moon — surprising researchers

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02:54 The death star moon and a win for the little guys

The shifting orbit of one of Saturn’s moons indicates that the satellite has a subsurface ocean, contradicting theories that its interior is entirely solid. The finding calls for a fresh take on what constitutes an ocean moon.

Nature Podcast: 14 February 2024

News and Views: Mimas’s surprise ocean prompts an update of the rule book for moons

07:05 Could red mud make green steel?

Millions of tonnes of ‘red mud’, a hazardous waste of aluminium production, are generated annually. A potentially sustainable process for treating this mud shows that it could become a source of iron for making steel.

Nature Podcast: 24 Jan 2024

News and Views: Iron extracted from hazardous waste of aluminium production

12:09 A hierarchy of failure

A design principle for buildings incorporates components that can control the propagation of failure by isolating parts of the structure as they fail — offering a way to prevent a partial collapse snowballing into complete destruction.

Nature podcast: 15 May 2024

Nature video: Controlled failure: The building designed to limit catastrophe

News and Views: Strategic links save buildings from total collapse

17:57 Programable enzyme for genpme editing

RNA-guided recombinase enzymes have been discovered that herald a new chapter for genome editing — enabling the insertion, inversion or deletion of long DNA sequences at user-specified genome positions.

News and Views: Programmable RNA-guided enzymes for next-generation genome editing

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01:11 “Ozempic you’re able”

In the first of our annual festive songs celebrating the science of the past year, we pay homage to Ozempic, or Semaglutide, that's able to tackle obesity, diabetes and potentially a whole lot more.

05:20 A very scientific quiz

We gather an all-star cast and see how well they can remember some of the big science stories from 2024 in our annual festive quiz.

21:31 “CAR T Cells”

In the second of our festive songs, we look at CAR-T cells. These engineered immune cells have shown great promise at tackling cancer, but these treatments are not without their drawbacks.

25:43 Nature’s 10

Every year, Nature’s 10 highlights some of the people who have helped shape science over the past 12 months. We hear about a few of the people who made the 2024 list, including an economist who now needs to run a country, a Russian science-sleuth, a researcher who’s been sounding the alarm on Mpox, and a PhD student who won a salary bump for researchers in Canada.

News Feature: Nature’s 10

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Categorizing things is central to science. And there are dozens of systems scientists have created to name everything from the trenches on the sea bed to the stars in the sky.

But names have consequences — unintended or otherwise. In our new series What’s in a name we’ll explore naming in science and how names impact the world — whether that’s how the names of storms impact public safety, how the names of diseases impact patient care, or even how the names of scientific concepts can drive the direction of research itself.

In this first episode we’re looking at species names. The modern system of species naming began in the 1700s and has played a vital role in standardizing academic communication, ensuring that scientists are on the same page when they talk about an organism. However, this system is not without its issues. For example, there has been much debate around whether species with names considered offensive — such as those named after historical racists — should be changed, and what rule changes need to be made to allow this to happen.

We speak to researchers about the history of this naming system, how it’s applied and how it might evolve in the face of growing pressures.

Sources

For a full list of sources, please visit https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-04200-9

Music credits

Premiumaudio/Pond5

Alon Marcus/Pond5

Groove Committee/Pond5

Opcono/Pond5

Erik Mcnerny/Pond5

Earless Pierre/Pond5

Richard Smithson/Triple Scoop Music/Getty Images

​​​​​​​Douglas Romayne/Triple Scoop Music/Getty Images

Sound effects via Pond5

Thick-billed Longspur/​​​​​​​Andrew Spencer via ​​​​​​​CC BY-NC-ND 2.5

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00:45 A potential treatment for pre-eclampsia

Researchers have shown in mice experiments that an mRNA-based therapy can reverse the underlying causes of pre-eclampsia, a deadly complication of pregnancy for which treatment options are limited. Inspired by the success of mRNA vaccines, the team behind the work designed a method to deliver the genomic instructions for a blood-vessel growth factor directly into mouse placentas. This stimulated the production of extra blood vessels reducing the very high-blood pressure associated with the condition. Pre-eclampsia causes 15% of maternal deaths and 25% of foetal and newborn deaths worldwide and although the work is early and human trials will be required, the team hope that this work demonstrates the potential of using this approach to treat pre-eclampsia.

Research Article: Swingle et al.

11:00 Research Highlights

Stacks of, mass-produced bowls suggest that people founded, but then abandoned an ancient Mesopotamian civilization, and analysis of Venus’s gases suggests that the planet was always dry.

Research Highlight: Ancient stacks of dishes tell tale of society’s dissolution

Research Highlight: Has Venus ever had an ocean? Its volcanoes hint at an answer

13:29 Programmable cellular switches

A team of scientists have created cellular switches on the surface of cells, allowing them to control their behaviour. Creating these switches has been a long-term goal for synthetic biologists — especially a group of proteins called G-protein-coupled receptors that already control many cellular processes. However, engineering these proteins has been challenging, as modifications can ruin their function. Instead, the team added another molecular component that blocked the receptors activity, but could be removed in response to specific signals. This allowed the researchers to activate these receptors on command, potentially opening up a myriad of new ways to control cell behaviour, such as controlling when neurons fire.

Research Article: Kalogriopoulos et al.

19:35 Google reaches a milestone in quantum computing

A team at Google has shown it is possible to create a quantum computer that becomes more accurate as it scales up, a goal researchers have been trying to achieve for decades. Quantum computing could potentially open up applications beyond the capabilities of classical computers, but these systems are error-prone, making it difficult to scale them up without introducing errors into calculations. The team showed that by increasing the quality of all the components in a quantum computer they could create a system with fewer errors, and that this trend of improvement continued as the system became larger. This breakthrough could mean that quantum computers are getting very close to realising the useful applications that their proponents have long promised.

Nature: ‘A truly remarkable breakthrough’: Google’s new quantum chip achieves accuracy milestone

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Zoologist Arik Kershenbaum has spent his career studying animals and how they communicate in the wild. In his book Why Animals Talk: The New Science of Animal Communication, Arik takes a deep dive into the various forms of communication, from wolf howls to gibbon songs, to look at how different species get their points across, why they do it the way they do, and what insights they provide into our own use of language.

Why Animals Talk: The New Science of Animal Communication Arik Kershenbaum Penguin (2024)

Music supplied by SPD/Triple Scoop Music/Getty Images

Wolf howl via NPS & MSU Acoustic Atlas/Jennifer Jerrett

Slowed down dolphin whistle via Arik Kershenbaum

Hyrax song via Arik Kershenbaum

Pileated gibbon song via Rushenb CC BY-SA 4.0

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