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Science Magazine Podcast

Weekly podcasts from Science Magazine, the world's leading journal of original scientific research, global news, and commentary.

Science Magazine

First up on the podcast, as the planet warms and forests burn, can we replant them with new trees that will thrive in the decades ahead? Associate Editor Katie Langin joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss research into “assisted migration” for replenishing forests after wildfires.

Next on the show, Susana Monsó, an associate professor in the Department of Logic, History and Philosophy of Science at the Spanish National University of Distance Education, shares her latest Expert Voices column. She discusses how philosophy can play a role in the scientific process—from defining terms to formulating questions. 

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

Image: Dirk Hobman
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Can ‘assisted migration’ save forests? And the role of philosophy in science

First up on the podcast, producer Meagan Cantwell and freelance journalist Andrew Lawler discuss how psychoactive drugs might have shaped culture in pre-Inca Andean societies. They chat about how technical advances and an increasingly open research environment have allowed scientists to detect traces of substances such as vilca, which contains dimethyl­tryptamine, the psychoactive compound also found in ayahuasca.

Next on the show, host Sarah Crespi is joined by Noam Angrist, academic director of the What Works Hub for Global Education at the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government. Angrist wrote a Policy Forum piece on the need to move on from small, controlled trials of education interventions to better address educational needs in lower and middle-income countries. To move forward, he explains, we need to learn how to make sure these interventions work at scale and that governments can readily implement them.

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

About the Science Podcast 



Image credit: John Bigelow Taylor/Division of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History/Catalog number 41.2/7768 
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Psychoactive substances helped spur Andean civilization, and breaking barriers to education

First up on the podcast, Senior International Correspondent Richard Stone joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss how climate is pushing the disease-carrying tick Hyalomma marginatum out of its comfort zone. Stone reports from Kosovo, where the tick has long been endemic, on how surveillance can uncover hidden circulation—and help countries prepare before human cases appear.

Next on the show, researchers have long known ambient temperatures cause some species of amphibians to reverse sex. In the case of the agile frog (Rana dalmatina), genetically female frogs take on male characteristics at elevated temperatures—including the ability to sire offspring. Veronika Bókony, an evolutionary ecologist at the Center for Agricultural Science in Hungary, examined what happens to the offspring of sex-reversed agile frogs, which will probably make up more of the species’ population as the planet warms. 

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.



Image: Danny Laps/NiS/Minden Pictures
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Sex-reversing frogs, and Europe’s rising rates of a deadly tick-borne disease

First up on the podcast, will it ever make economic sense to produce drugs and biomedical supplies in space? Associate Online News Editor Michael Greshko discusses his story on the researchers attempting to make biomanufacturing in space a reality, with News intern Julia Vaz.

Next on the show, producer Kevin McLean chats with Mads Peter Heide-Jørgensen, a professor in the department of birds and mammals at the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources, about how narwhals have helped collect hard-to-reach oceanographic samples. Data collected by these long-toothed cetaceans revealed far more warm Atlantic water is pressing into the fjords of East Greenland than previously thought.

Finally, the latest in our book series on biographies. This month, books host Angela Saini talks with writer Priyambada Jayakumar about her biography of M. S. Swaminathan.

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

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Making drugs in space, the man who fed India, and what narwhals can teach us about changing seas

First up on the podcast, the News team’s Diverse Voices in Science Journalism interns Mona Patterson and Laura Martín Agudelo join host Sarah Crespi to talk over some of their reporting from the summer. They chat about several stories, including why it’s so difficult to track the food-borne illness cyclosporiasis and a new map for a major highway of the human nervous system.

Check out all of Patterson’s and Martín Agudelo’s stories.

Next on the show, Leslie Chan, assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Emory School of Medicine, describes an ingestible metabolic probe for the gut microbiome. Her team tested the pill in mice and showed they could detect an enzyme made by the microbiome that causes toxicity during some chemotherapy treatments. The signal is read from volatiles in the breath, making the test a noninvasive way to check on the activity of gut microbes. 

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

Image credit: Melanie Moser/Centers for Disease Control and Prevention



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Why tracing cyclosporiasis is so tough, and a digestible probe for the microbiome

First up on the podcast, ScienceInsider Editor Jocelyn Kaiser joins host Sarah Crespi for the latest science policy news. The two discuss recent grant cancellations by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the likelihood that the agency will spend its budget by the end of its fiscal year on 30 September.

Next on the show, crew aboard spacecraft that enter deep space are likely to be exposed to a radiation source we don’t often encounter on Earth’s surface: high-speed protons coming from solar storms or cosmic rays. So to protect astronauts, researchers are using plastics to defend against this dangerous form of radiation. Jordan Houri, lead scientist for space exploration at StemRad, talks about testing the protective capabilities of specially designed vests aboard NASA’s Artemis I mission. 

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

Image credit: ​NASA/Lockheed Martin/DLR/StemRad
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A vest for blocking cosmic rays, and updates on NIH funding

First up on the podcast, Deputy News Editor Michael Price discusses the history of the North American bison population, its decline, and resurrection—and links to Indigenous cultures. He’s joined by University of California, Santa Cruz evolutionary molecular biologist Beth Shapiro and Greg Wilson, a wildlife ecologist with Parks Canada. They talk about their Science paper on the genetic diversity of modern bison after near extermination during European colonization. Shapiro and Wilson also explain how these findings can be used to inform conservation efforts.

Next on the show, Jennie Brand-Miller, professor emeritus in the School of Life and Environmental Sciences and Charles Perkins Centre at the University of Sydney, joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about what our ancient ancestors were eating and a big question—was hunting key to evolving big brains? Brand-Miller argues instead that fruit was the key factor in the expansion of hominin brains. She points to the high sugar demands of large brains, about 100 to 120 grams per day, and how this level of sugar intake was likely only achievable by consuming things such as fruit and honey before our ancestors’ mastery of cooking and fire. 

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

About the Science Podcast 

Image credit: Mike Price 
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Did meat or fruit give people big brains, and protecting bison diversity using ancient DNA

First up on the podcast, we catch up with Celina Zhao, a staff reporter for Science’s AI In Science reporting initiative. She talks with host Sarah Crespi about artificial intelligence’s knack for finding legal loopholes and how philosophers are navigating conflicts of interest around advising companies on AI.

Next on the show, it’s hard to figure out how much force a muscle is exerting without sticking invasive probes into the body. Christopher Bird, a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Queensland, discusses a new way to use ultrawideband radar to measure muscle forces that could prove useful for assistive devices and rehabilitation.

Finally, the third in our limited six-part series on scientific biographies. This month, host Angela Saini talks with zoologist Matthew Cobb about his new book on the life of Francis Crick, Crick: A Mind in Motion.

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.    

Image credit: Chiara Vercesi
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AI’s influence on society, measuring muscles, and a Crick biography

First up on the podcast, freelance science journalist Brendan Borrell talks about his work reporting on the previously undisclosed death of a 6-year-old girl in a gene-editing clinical trial in China and the reasons her parents came forward.

This story was produced in collaboration with Retraction Watch and supported by the Science Fund for Investigative Reporting.

Next on the show, Producer Meagan Cantwell talks with Evan McKenzie, a researcher at the University of British Columbia, about an insect that evolved to avoid predators by modifying its respiratory system to withstand high pressure at depth.

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

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Death in a gene-editing trial, and insect larvae surviving in deep waters

First up on the podcast, we continue our coverage of the fallout from cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), this time focusing on how one of the largest recipients of aid is coping 18 months later. Contributing Correspondent Catherine Offord talks about her trip to Malawi and the efforts to strengthen their health infrastructure in the wake of funding shocks.

Next on the show, Collin Cherubim, Ph.D. candidate in the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department at Harvard University, discusses what it means to find helium escaping from the atmosphere of a rocky planet in the habitable zone of a nearby red dwarf. 

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

About the Science Podcast 



Image credit: Thoko Chikondi
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Health care in Malawi after USAID’s end, and a rocky exoplanet with an atmosphere

First up on the podcast, Contributing Correspondent Warren Cornwall goes on an owl hunt in the woods of Northern California. After surviving logging and habitat destruction in the 1990s, the endangered Northern spotted owl has put conservationists in a bind: In order to protect the spotted owl, the only solution may be shooting barred owls.

Next on the show, looking back at the first 10 years of the journal Science Immunology. Editor Seth Thomas Scanlon explores how the field has changed since the inception of the journal and talks about a special series of reviews on immune memory. 

Check out the special issue cover here. 

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

Image credit: Danny Hofstadter
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Owl wars and the immune system’s memory

First up on the podcast, relationships turn chilly in the polar research haven of Svalbard in Norway. Senior International Correspondent Richard Stone joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss the impacts of geopolitical shifts on the scientific output of this region so important to the study of climate change.

Next on the show, producer Meagan Cantwell talks with Thomas Gernon, a geologist at the University of Southampton, about how ice sheets formed in Antarctica during a time when the temperatures were relatively warm. 

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

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How Antarctica got its ice sheets, and what happens when geopolitical relationships turn chilly in the Arctic

First up on the podcast, ScienceInsider editor Jocelyn Kaiser joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss big policy stories from the past month, including a proposal from President Donald Trump’s administration to increase the involvement of politicians in grantmaking.

Next on the show, Science Senior Editor Michael Funk joins to discuss a trio of papers on the light-detecting proteins responsible for color vision. 


   Ohashi et al., Science 2026


   Peng et al., Science 2026


   Schmidt et al., Science 2026



Finally, in our books segment for this month, host Angela Saini talks with science writer Georgina Ferry, who wrote a biography about crystallographer Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, the first and only woman scientist from the United Kingdom to win a Nobel Prize. 

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

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Cracking color vision, U.S. science policy changes, and a trailblazing biography

First up on the podcast, wrangling wolves in Europe. After near extermination in much of the continent, wolf numbers have surged up to about 20,000 individuals. Contributing Correspondent Gretchen Vogel joins podcast host Sarah Crespi to discuss the conflicts that have risen as the wolf population grows.

Next on the show, Ph.D. student Carla Bassil talks about designing an e-nose that can hone in on important food smells such as chicken that has gone bad or the presence of allergens including peanuts. 

Finally, in a sponsored segment from the Science/AAAS Custom Publishing Office, Erika Berg, director and senior editor of custom publishing, interviews professors Eimear Kenny and Alex Charney about how genomic medicine, artificial intelligence, and large-scale sequencing are transforming the future of patient care. This segment is sponsored by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

About the Science Podcast 

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An electronic nose that detects spoiled chicken, and wolves make a spectacular comeback in Europe

First up on the podcast, producer Kevin McLean talks with Staff Writer Paul Voosen about the latest on the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC. Researchers have long been concerned that global warming could cause a collapse in the AMOC, which would trigger dramatic cooling in Northern Europe. But recent data and models suggest the AMOC may be more resilient than previously thought.

Next on the show, Scott Marek, assistant professor in the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology at Washington University School of Medicine, talks with host Sarah Crespi about brainwide association studies (BWAS) for childhood brain development. BWAS measure structure and function across many brains and look for correlations between these measures and behavior, disease, and environment. In this work, Marek and colleagues focus on how socioeconomic factors—captured by zip code—are strongly correlated with certain brain differences in more than 4000 children ages 9.5 to 11. The work also suggests lack of sleep and excess screen time could mediate the influence of socioeconomic conditions on differences in brain structure and function. 

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

About the Science Podcast



Photo: P. Voosen/Science
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How childhood environments shape the brain, and how susceptible is the Atlantic Ocean’s current to climate change?

First up on the podcast, freelance science journalist Joshua Sokol talks about the intense discussion happening in the astrophysics community as artificial intelligence and machine learning become increasingly powerful—could “astronomer” stop being a job one day?

Next on the show, as the Trump administration makes moves to regulate ultraprocessed foods, host Sarah Crespi talks with Faidon Magkos, a professor in obesity and metabolism in the department of nutrition, exercise, and sports at the University of Copenhagen, about what studies say about their health effects.

Finally this week, a behind-the-scenes look at our recent limited series “The normals.” Producer Kevin McLean talks about the experience of joining a study as a healthy subject, and Crespi talks about what didn’t make it into the episodes. Listen to “The normals” here.

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.      

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Will AI replace astronomers, how healthy are ultraprocessed foods, and a peek behind the scenes of ‘The Normals’

First up on the podcast, a company is using whole brains—maintained with specialized life support—to study new drugs. Freelance science journalist Sara Reardon joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about the advantages and ethical considerations of keeping brains intact but inactive.

Next on the show, when some lizards lose their tails, they might regenerate new ones. But what happens to the old tail? Whereas a castoff lizard tail quickly decomposes, this isn’t the case for the castoff tube feet of the sea cucumber, Psolus fabricii. Sara Miller Jobson, a Ph.D. student at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, describes how these “living” limbs healed after amputation and then survived for more than 3 years in just seawater. Their survival in such simple conditions, while maintaining a complex tissue with a functioning immune response, could make amputated tube feet a useful model system for studying regeneration. 

Finally this week, the first in our book series on science biographies. Books host Angela Saini talks with historian Anna-Luna Post about her recent book, Galileo’s Fame: Science, Credibility, and Memory in the Seventeenth Century, which explores how fame shaped the scientific fortunes of Galileo Galilei.

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

About the Science Podcast

 
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Disembodied human brains, immortal bits of sea cucumber, and fame in Galileo’s time

First up on the podcast, Senior International Correspondent Richard Stone joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss the surprising commonalities between our immune systems and the tools bacteria use to defend themselves against viruses. These unexpected parallels have become rich ground for researchers investigating new molecular biology tools and model systems for immune research.

Next on the show, Dominic Rohner, a professor of economics at the Geneva Graduate Institute and University of Lausanne, talks about the impact of cuts in international aid on violent conflict in Africa. His team harnessed the natural experiment of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) work stoppage ordered by the Trump administration in early 2025 to find links between the sudden withdrawal of high levels of aid to increases in conflict. 

See also Science’s 2025 news series on the impact of USAID cuts on children.

Finally, Valerie Thompson, Science’s books and media editor, interviews undergraduate student and author Theo Baker. Baker wrote the book How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University, which covers the heavy involvement of Silicon Valley investors in Stanford University and his investigation of research misconduct by former Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne. See the full review here. 

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

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USAID cuts linked to violence, unexpected parallels between humans and bacteria, and how to rule the world

First up on the podcast, Meagan Cantwell produced a segment with Contributing Correspondent Kai Kupferschmidt on the fight against deepfakes. Kupferschmidt talks with Hany Farid, professor at the University of California, Berkeley, about the never-ending battle against fake imagery and why Farid is not giving up.

Next on the show, building a tough, bio-compatible capsule for engineered bacteria. Tetsuhiro Harimoto talks about the challenges of keeping living bacteria inside a hydrogel capsule and the advantages of using engineered bacteria as sensors and medicine dispensers inside the body. (Harimoto completed this work as a postdoc at Harvard University and will start as a professor at Cornell University in the fall.) 

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

About the Science Podcast


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Fighting deepfakes, and using bacteria to deliver medicine inside the body

First up on the podcast, along Brazil’s Juruá River, local residents have been working with scientists to manage a giant fish called the arapaima—affecting the land, the people, and the economy. Contributing Correspondent Warren Cornwall joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about this collaborative effort.

Next on the show, how moonlight affects nocturnal animals. Carlos Camacho, a researcher at the Doñana Biological Station, talks about the Moon-inflected habits of a nighttime foraging bird, the red-necked nightjar. His team found that the extra light provided by the full Moon allows these birds to consume more insects at night. And the timing of their long-haul migration between Europe and Africa is linked to the cycles of the Moon. 

Last up this week, Science Editor-in-Chief Holden Thorp talks with Timothy Snyder, historian and author of the book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. They discuss the role of institutions, professional ethics, and personal beliefs for scientists in tough political times. 

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

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A team effort to save a giant fish, the power of moonlight, and how scientists can navigate a tough political environment

First up on the podcast, Online News Editor David Grimm shares a batch of fun stories with podcast host Sarah Crespi—from spider hearts racing when traffic gets loud to a disease-preventing house. Staff Writer Adrian Cho hops in to help discuss the possibility of black holes without singularities at their center. 

Next on the show, epigenetics has become a hot topic in pop science but the ethical conversation is not keeping up. The idea that parents can pass down epigenetic marks from environmental toxins or trauma to their children—without changes in DNA—has been around for decades but the research in people is lacking. Jackie Leach Scully, a professor of bioethics and director of the Disability Innovation Institute at the University of New South Wales, discusses where the research actually is and the concerns that may arise if such marks do appear to impact the young. 

Last up this week, we are launching our 2026 biography books series with books host Angela Saini and Science books editor Valerie Thompson. The pair discusses the difficulty of picking biographies and what can be learned about science, fame, and researchers as people from reading these types of books.  

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy. 

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Watching a spiders’ heart beat, epigenetic ethics, and what science biographies reveal about fame

First up on the podcast, freelance science and environmental journalist Quentin Septer joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about a controversial uranium mine getting fast-tracked in South Dakota. Septer chatted with locals, scientists, and regulators to learn more about the geology of the region and the promise of cleanup after the miners go home. 

Next on the show, looking at cells that don’t get cancer. Giulio Ciucci, a postdoctoral researcher at the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, talks about the infrequency of heart cancer and how the mechanical load that heart cells endure makes them resist turning cancerous. 

*CORRECTION: In the on this site summary in this episode, the book author in the review by Kai Kupferschmidt was listed incorrectly. The correct information is: True Color by Kory Stamper, Knopf, 2026.  



This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

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Cleaning up uranium mining, and how the heart avoids cancer

The final of a three-part limited Science Podcast series that looks at the history of normal human subjects in research

In episode two, we heard what happened to the normals program after church volunteers came to the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s Clinical Center—and were surprisingly happy despite going through sometimes-painful procedures. In the decades to follow, the program got bigger as government funding expanded and started to recruit more broadly, stepping away from specific religious groups toward recruiting from colleges, universities, and unions.

In this episode, we hear about how normal human subjects experience research today and the ways the normals project influenced oversight and safety for these sometimes vulnerable people.

All episodes in this series

Appearing in this episode:


  
Laura Stark, history professor at the Center for Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University

  
Jill Fisher, professor of social medicine in the Center for Bioethics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  
Kaviya Manoharan, lecturer and clinical research program manager in the Centre for Clinical Pharmacology, SRM Medical College Hospital and Research Centre

  
Martin Enserink, deputy news editor at Science


  
Kevin McLean, Science multimedia managing producer

  Sarah Crespi, Science Podcast senior host and producer


Additional resources:

BOOKS


  
The Normals: A People’s History of Modern America in Five Human Experiments by Laura Stark

  
Adverse Events: Race, Inequality, and the Testing of New Pharmaceuticals by Jill Fisher


NEWS STORIES


  
Global effort aims to protect health and safety of human ‘guinea pigs’ in drug trials by Martin Enserink

  
Key global bioethics guidelines get ‘dramatic’ update by Cathleen O’Grady


WEBSITES


  Volrethics


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The normals | Episode 3

First up on the podcast, quantum computers require extremely low temperatures—less than 1°C away from absolute zero. But getting down to those temperatures has usually required dilution fridges using the extremely rare and increasingly expensive isotope helium-3. Freelance science journalist Zack Savitsky joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss up-and-coming technologies that can drive down temperatures while staying helium-3–free. 

Next on the show, Nizan Packin, a professor of law at the Zicklin School of Business at Baruch College, talks about prediction markets as a public health threat. Early on, prediction markets were proposed as a way to make reliable forecasts from crowdsourced wisdom. With the appearance of commercial, for-profit prediction markets linked with cryptocurrency and sports betting, Nizan and colleagues ask what studies should be done to better understand potential harms to the public. 

Finally, in a Working Life column this week, recent Ph.D. graduate Filippo Dall’Armellina wrote about how his foray into science podcasting helped him regain enjoyment of research. He talks about why having a science-adjacent hobby was life changing.

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

About the Science Podcast
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How to keep quantum computers cool, whether prediction markets harm public health, and podcasting on podcasting

Last time on The Normals, we learned that in the 1950s, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) wanted to recruit many healthy volunteers for basic research. Two peace churches, the Mennonites and the Church of the Brethren, had an excess of healthy human volunteers. The “Normals” recruited from these Anabaptist churches were surprisingly happy, even as they went through sometimes painful procedures.

In this follow-up episode, we hear about how the sources of normal human subjects changed in the 1960s and why NIH researchers felt they needed to expand their search for normal people. We also learn about the first death in the program and the shifting motives on the parts of the researchers and volunteers. Final episode drops next Tuesday, April 21. 

All Normals episodes

In this episode:


  
Laura Stark, history professor at the Center for Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University

  Ken Naas, former Normal patient

  Cindy Jansen, former Normal patient 

  Dale Horst, former Normal patient

  Sarah Crespi, Science Podcast senior host and producer


Additional resources:

The Normals: A People’s History of Modern America in Five Human Experiments by Laura Stark
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The Normals | Episode 2

First up on the podcast, freelance science journalist Hannah Richter joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss NASA’s plans to send a nuclear-powered spacecraft to Mars in less than 3 years. Having not launched a fission reactor to space in more than 60 years, the organization faces many technical and bureaucratic hurdles to make that deadline. 

Next on the show, Aaron Sandel, associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin and co-director of the Ngogo Chimpanzee Project, reports this week in Science on what looks like a chimpanzee civil war. The unprecedented violent split occurred in a large chimp colony that has been tracked by researchers for decades. Now, scientists are asking: What can the lethal division of a chimp community teach us about human conflict?

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

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A chimpanzee ‘civil war,’ and NASA plans for nuclear propulsion

How do we know what's normal in a person? In the early 1950s, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) set out to do something unprecedented. It wanted to start studying normal humans on a grand scale. It had pretty much everything in place: It had the building, it had recruited all of these amazing researchers—it was the healthy human bodies NIH didn't have. How do we know what’s normal in a person? In the early 1950s, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) set out to do something unprecedented. It wanted to start to study normal humans on a grand scale. It had pretty much everything in place: It had the building, it had recruited all of these amazing researchers—it was the healthy human bodies NIH didn’t have. When the healthy subjects arrived, experimenters tested LSD, sleep devrivation, rice-only diets, and more risky intervetions on them. Where it found those volunteers and what happened next is the story of The Normals. 

Starting on 7 April, the Science Podcast will be releasing a new three-part limited series called The Normals.

We'll hear from some of the original “Normals,” follow the program through the decades, and see what's happening with healthy human subject research today.

All Normals episodes

Appearing in this episode:


  
Laura Stark, history professor at the Center for Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University

  Dale Horst, former Normal patient

  Shirley Burry Geissinger, former Normal patient 

  Sarah Crespi, Science Podcast senior host and producer


Additional resources:

The Normals: A People’s History of Modern America in Five Human Experiments by Laura Stark

 
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The Normals | Episode 1

First up on the podcast, a new path to calculating the Hubble constant. This value for the universe’s speed of expansion is typically determined in one of two ways, one favored by cosmologists, the other by astronomers. But the resulting values from these methods are consistently different. Staff Writer Daniel Clery joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss how reappearing bursts from deep space, lensed by gravity, could resolve the dispute over the speed of the expanding universe. 

Next on the show, freelance producer Elah Feder talks with Mauro Costa-Mattioli, principal investigator at Altos Labs’ Institutes of Science, about tuning the “integrated stress response” (ISR) in mouse brains. The ISR pathway turns off much of protein synthesis in cells as a response to stressors such as viral infections or oxygen deprivation. The ISR is overactive in some models of cognitive dysfunction—suggesting the downregulated protein synthesis may hamper brain functions such as memory formation. In his paper, Costa-Mattioli and colleagues show turning on the ISR pathway causes memory problems in mice and turning off the ISR can restore function in mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease and Down syndrome. Although this research was in mice, it suggests cognitive dysfunction associated with many different disorders may involve the ISR—making it a good therapeutic target. 

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

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Resolving the dispute over the speed of the expanding universe, and seeking new drug targets for cognitive dysfunction

First up on the podcast, Deputy News Editor Martin Enserink talks about so-called resurrection plants. These specialized plants can survive up to 95% water loss, whereas most plants struggle when their water levels dip below 60%. We also hear from Jill Farrant, a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of Cape Town, about her work dissecting the desiccation survival pathways in resurrection plants and how they might be repurposed to protect crop plants from drought. 

Next on the show, we’ve all heard of chatbots praising their users for asking the most basic of questions. This bias toward sycophancy extends beyond pleasantries into relationship advice the artificial intelligence (AI) doles out to users. Myra Cheng, a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at Stanford University, joins the show to talk about how this tendency for AIs to be agreeable can lead users to have more confidence in their opinions, to the detriment of their relationships with others. 

Warning, this last segment contains spoilers for the movie and book Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. If you’ve seen the movie or don’t mind a bit of extra context, you will hear an analysis of planetary science in the film with astrophysicist and associate curator at the American Museum of Natural History, Jacqueline Faherty. Read the full film review. 

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

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Resurrection plants, Project Hail Mary, and the trouble with sycophantic AI

First up on the podcast, we discuss a finding that’s likely to reignite debate over how humans first spread through the Americas. In the late 1990s, a site in southern Chile called Monte Verde forced archaeologists to adjust their views of the peopling of South America because it dated to about 14,500 years before present, which challenged the prevailing idea of when human inhabitants appeared on the continent. Contributing Correspondent Lizzie Wade joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss new results published in Science that suggest Monte Verde is nowhere near that old.

See the paper and related commentary.

Next on the show, we talk about groundwater, a vital source of water for both drinking and agriculture that’s often overused and depleted. Producer Meagan Cantwell talks with Scott Jasechko, a professor of water resources with the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, about the many different approaches to improving groundwater supplies and what has worked where, which he reviews in this week’s issue of Science.

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

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Rethinking the peopling of the Americas, and the best ways to get groundwater back

First up on the podcast, freelance journalist Evan Howell traveled to Cape Blossom, Alaska, where the receding coastline has revealed an ancient trove of glacial ice that may have survived for 350,000 years—making it the oldest ice in the Northern Hemisphere. Now researchers just need to figure out how to date it.

Next on the show, tracking wolves and ravens in Yellowstone National Park shows the birds don’t follow the wolves in hope of a meal, but instead remember and revisit frequent wolf kill sites. Matthias-Claudio Loretto, assistant professor in the Research Institute of Wildlife Ecology at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, discusses how this might change the way we think about scavengers’ strategies for finding their ephemeral food sources. 

Finally, Claire Bedbrook, the Helen Hay Whitney and Wu Tsai neuroscience postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, discusses her work tracking African turquoise killifish over their life span. By capturing behaviors over the course of the fish’s entire lives, her team was able to observe behaviors that could be used to predict whether a fish would live a short or long life.

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

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What Alaska’s eroding coastline says about Earth’s future, and how Yellowstone ravens use their smarts to find wolf kills

First up on the podcast, a peek into the roiling seas of U.S. science policy.


  
ScienceInsider Editor Jocelyn Kaiser talks about shifting leadership at the National Science Foundation and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as well as a dip in funding rates by the National Institutes of Health.

  Staff Writer Robert F. Service covers proposed restrictions on access by international researchers and students to the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

  Contributing Correspondent Warren Cornwall talks about the Department of Energy’s rush to loosen radiation exposure standards.

  Senior International Correspondent Richard Stone discusses why an accusation of nuclear weapons testing in China could spark a new round of weapons testing in the United States and Russia.


Next on the show, this year’s children’s book roundup features everything from a look at space law to a clever wartime spider farmer. Senior Editor Valerie Thompson joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss the books and the reviews of them, written by Science staffers (and sometimes their kids).

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

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An alleged nuclear blast may reignite weapons testing, and who owns the Moon

First up on the podcast, producer Meagan Cantwell talks to Contributing Correspondent Warren Cornwall about his visit to Brazil, where he observed firsthand what it takes for researchers to understand why bird populations in the Amazon and beyond are shrinking.

Next on the show, Raouf Belkhir, an M.D.-Ph.D. student at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and Carnegie Mellon University, joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss his Science Advances paper on a newly refined way to map awake patients’ brains during neurosurgery.

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

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Tropical birds’ ‘silent spring,’ and mapping people’s brains during surgery

First up on the podcast, Newsletter Editor Christie Wilcox, Associate Online News Editor Michael Greshko, and intern Perri Thaler share their experiences from the AAAS annual meeting in Phoenix.

Christie recorded on location with David Rand regarding his prize-winning Science paper on using a large language model to combat conspiracy theories. Check out the live version of his team’s Debunk Bot.

Michael chats with host Sarah Crespi about the foggy outlook of science in the United States as funding levels and graduate positions decline, and the bright sunshine of young students presenting science posters.

And finally, Perri shares her reporting on OpenAI’s contribution to theoretical physics announced at the meeting.

Next on the show, we hear about the “bouba-kiki” effect—the tendency for people, no matter their language, to associate round shapes with the nonword bouba and spiky shapes with the nonword kiki. Maria Loconsole, a postdoctoral researcher in the Comparative Cognition Lab at the University of Padova, joins the podcast to discuss why her team looked for this effect in freshly hatched chickens. It turns out these baby birds also make these associations, which suggests the effect has less to do with language and more to do with how vertebrate brains are set up to experience the world.

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

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Matching sounds to shapes, and stories from the AAAS annual meeting

First up on the podcast, more than half of all dogs going through service animal training don’t make it to graduation. Producer Kevin McLean journeys with Online News Editor David Grimm to Canine Companions, one of the biggest organizations in the United States for training working dogs. At the facility, they meet puppies in preparation and learn about the behavioral testing and genetics that could be used to improve service animal schooling.

Also appearing in this segment:


  
Emily Bray, assistant professor in the College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Arizona

  
Brenda Kennedy, chief veterinary and research officer at Canine Companions


Next on the show, Kishalay De, assistant professor at Columbia University and associate research scientist at the Flatiron Institute, talks about observing the birth of a stellar black hole in the nearby Andromeda galaxy. He recounts how his team looked for this elusive event and describes what we can learn from observing it in the decades to come.

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

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Building better working dogs, and watching a black hole form

First up on the podcast, host Sarah Crespi and Staff Writer Adrian Cho talk football and the latest science behind helmets engineered to reduce head injuries. Have better materials and testing led to fewer concussions and chronic traumatic encephalopathy in players?

Next on the show, more than 100,000 people die from opioid overdoses in North America per year. Although much study has gone into addiction research, less attention has been paid to the biological details of overdose itself. John Strang, a professor in the National Addiction Centre at King’s College London, joins the podcast to discuss the questions researchers could be asking about overdose, and how to partner with drug addicted people to find solutions.

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.  
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Engineering safer football helmets, and the science behind drug overdoses

First up on the podcast, how do we protect astronauts when they leave the shelter of Earth’s protective magnetic fields and face the slow, constant bombardment of space radiation? Freelance science journalist Elie Dolgin joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss what we know about the damage from high-velocity particles and the research being done to curb their biological toll.

Next on the show, modeling the fall of fossil fuels during the decarbonization of energy systems, with civil engineer and environmental sociologist Emily Grubert and historian and engineer Joshua Lappen, both at the University of Notre Dame. The pair wrote a policy forum on predicting chokepoints or “minimum viable scales” in the decline of fossil fuel networks—in effect, when a system might get too small to maintain its function. Understanding how to keep things online until they are no longer needed is important to maintain energy for all, as renewables grow and mines, pipelines, and refineries shrink.

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

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Shielding astronauts from cosmic rays, and planning the end of fossil fuels

First up with Jennie Erin Smith, Science’s new senior biomedicine reporter, we delve into: autobrewery syndrome, when microbes inside the human gut make too much alcohol; how doctors can use a public repository, the Mexican Biobank, to guide patient care; and preliminary findings that surgery on the brain’s plumbing shows promise for Alzheimer’s disease.

Next on the show, it’s tough to calculate when and where deorbiting spacecraft might enter the upper atmosphere and then eventually hit the ground. Benjamin Fernando, a seismologist and planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University, has shown that sonic booms created by fast-moving space debris shake seismic sensors, giving clues to angle of re-entry, breakup dynamics, and final location.

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

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Tracking falling space debris via sonic booms, and getting drunk off your own microbes

First up on the podcast, freelance science journalist Sofia Quaglia talks about her visit to the Galápagos archipelago and how researchers there are working to restore the islands to their former ecological glory.

*Note this episode has been updated to reflect that the Ecuadorian government is not responsible for primarily funding these efforts. 

Next on the show, Antarctica’s deep ice coating obscures the hills and valleys on its surface, making the continent’s response to climate change one of the biggest unknowns in predicting sea level rise over the next century. Helen Ockenden, a glaciologist at Grenoble Alpes University, joins the podcast to discuss how her team used satellite imagery and the physics of ice flows to fill in the missing details of Antarctica’s subglacial surface.

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

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Reversing ecological destruction in the Galápagos, and finally mapping Antarctica’s surface

First up on the podcast, scholars are on a quest to find Leonardo da Vinci’s DNA. With no direct descendants, the hunt involves sampling the famous polymath’s papers, paintings, and distant cousins. Contributing Correspondent Richard Stone talks with host Sarah Crespi about what researchers hope to learn from Leonardo’s genes and the new field of “arteomics.”

Next on the show, new evidence for poisoned arrows from 60,000 years ago complicates our picture of hunting during the Pleistocene. Sven Isaksson, a professor of archaeological science at Stockholm University, joins the podcast to discuss the discovery of poisonous residues on microliths—the tiny, worked stone points used on arrows and spearheads. These findings could push back the origins of this toxic technology by 50,000 years.

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

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The real da Vinci code, and the world’s oldest poison arrows

First up on the podcast, the best images of exoplanets right now are basically bright dots. We can’t see possible continents, potential oceans, or even varying colors. To improve our view, scientists are proposing a faraway fleet of telescopes that would use light bent by the Sun’s gravity to magnify a distant exoplanet. Staff Writer Daniel Clery joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss where to aim such a magnificent telescope and all the technological pieces needed to put it together.

Next on the show, expert voices columnist and Johns Hopkins University mathematician Emily Riehl discusses her recent essay on communication woes in the math community. The complex concepts, jargon, and the slow pace of understanding a proof all add up to siloed subdisciplines and potentially more errors in the literature. Alex Kontorovich, a professor in the math department at Rutgers University, also joins to discuss how proof assistant computer programs and machine learning could help get mathematicians all on the same page.

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

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Looking for continents on exoplanets, and math is hard for mathematicians, too

First up on the podcast, Online News Editor David Grimm joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about this year’s best online news stories—top performers and staff picks alike. Together they journey the scientific gamut, from bird feeders’ influence on hummingbird beak evolution to the use of “artificial spacetimes” to guide tiny robots through their environments.

Next on the show, a discussion of this year’s pick for Breakthrough of the Year with producer Meagan Cantwell and News editor Greg Miller. They also touch on some other top finds from this year, including the first confirmed Denisovan skull, rice that can beat the heat, custom gene editing, and progress on xenotransplantation.

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

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This year’s biggest breakthrough and top news stories

First up on the podcast, we’ve likely only found about half the so-called city-killer asteroids (objects more than 140 meters in diameter). Freelance science journalist Robin George Andrews joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss the upcoming launch of NASA’s Near-Earth Object Surveyor, an asteroid hunter that will improve our ability to look for large objects that might crash into Earth, particularly those hiding in the Sun’s glare.

Next on the show, freelancer producer Elah Feder talks with Wendy Valencia-Montoya, an organismic and evolutionary biology Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University, about heated conversations between plants and their pollinators. Her work suggests infrared radiation might be the oldest cue for animals to come hither, more ancient than color.

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

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Hunting asteroids from space, and talking to pollinators with heat

First up on the podcast, Science celebrates 100 years of quantum mechanics with a special issue covering the past, present, and future of the field. News Contributing Correspondent Zack Savitsky joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about a more philosophical approach to quantum physics and the mysterious measurement problem.

Next on the show we have Anne Goujon, program director at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria. She talks about her Expert Voices column on the uncertain future of demography and how the field is grappling with new theories on what happens after the global population peaks. How will different countries deal with falling populations? Will they try to reverse the trend? What are the goals going into the next century?

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

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Grappling with declining populations, and the future of quantum mechanics

First up on the podcast, when will the world hit peak carbon emissions? It’s not an easy question to answer because emissions cannot be directly measured in real time. Instead, there are proxies, satellite measures, and many, many calculations. Staff Writer Paul Voosen joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss how close we are to the top of carbon mountain and the tough road to come after the peak passes.

Vani Rajendran, senior researcher in the cognitive neuroscience department at the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s Institute of Cellular Physiology, talks about macaques that can keep the beat. She explains how this intriguing ability challenges a long-standing view that animals with complex vocalizations and rhythm are inextricably linked.

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

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When we’ll hit peak carbon emissions, and macaques that keep the beat

First up on the podcast: the mysterious fate of Europe’s Neolithic farmers. They arrived from Anatolia around 5500 B.C.E. and began farming fertile land across Europe. Five hundred years later, their buildings, cemeteries, and pottery stopped showing up in the archaeological record, and mass graves with headless bodies started to appear across the continent. Contributing Correspondent Andrew Curry talks with host Sarah Crespi about what this strange transition might mean.

Next on the show, Editor for Life Sciences Sacha Vignieri discusses recent dog research published in Science, including tracing the movement of dogs alongside ancient human populations, examining when dogs first diversified, and probing the relationship between modern dogs’ breeds and their dispositions.

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

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A headless mystery, and a deep dive on dog research

First up on the podcast, Online News Editor David Grimm joins host Sarah Crespi for a rundown of online news stories. They talk about lichen that dine on dino bones, the physics of the lip-out problem in golf, and a brain-computer interface that can decode a tonal language (Chinese) from brain waves.

Next on the show, Jeremy Munday, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at University of California, Davis, talks about generating mechanical power using a heat engine aimed at the night sky. Heat engines typically generate power by harnessing a temperature difference between two things—but by using space as the cold part and the ground as the warm part, Munday’s device can generate energy at night.

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

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Solving the ‘golfer’s curse’ and using space as a heat sink

First up on the podcast, Contributing Correspondent Sofia Moutinho visited the Xingu Indigenous territory in Brazil to learn about a long-standing collaboration between scientists and the Kuikuro to better understand early Amazon communities.

Next on the show, we visit the Pacific pocket mouse recovery program at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance to talk with researchers about the tricky process of increasing genetic diversity in an endangered species. Researcher Aryn Wilder talks about a long-term project to interbreed mice from isolated populations in order to add more genetic diversity across the species—despite a mismatch in chromosome numbers between some of the groups. Debra Shier, associate director of the recovery ecology program at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, takes us on a tour of the breeding facility.

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

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Understanding early Amazon communities and saving the endangered pocket mouse

First up on the podcast, increased carbon dioxide emissions sink more acidity into the ocean, but checking pH all over the world, up and down the water column, is incredibly challenging. Staff Writer Paul Voosen joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss a technique that takes advantage of how sound moves through the water to detect ocean acidification.

Next on the show, we visit the lab of University of California San Diego professor Alysson Muotri at the Sanford Consortium, where he grows human brain organoids—multicellular structures that function like underdeveloped brains. Muotri used organoids to compare a protein that appears to be protective in human brains against the effects of lead toxicity with the archaic version of the protein that was present in our extinct cousins, like Denisovans and Neanderthals. His work suggests lead exposure differently affected our ancestors and our archaic cousins, possibly helping us survive to the present day.

Finally, stay tuned for the last in our six-part series on books exploring the science of death. This month, host Angela Saini talks with astrophysicist Katie Mack about how the universe might end and her 2021 book The End of Everything: (Astrophysically Speaking).

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
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Detecting the acidity of the ocean with sound, the role of lead in human evolution, and how the universe ends

First up on the podcast, the Bering Sea’s snow crabs are bouncing back after a 50-billion-crab die-off in 2020, but scientists are racing to predict what’s going to happen to this important fishery. Contributing Correspondent Warren Cornwall joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss what’s next for snow crabs.

Next on the show, freelance producer Elah Feder talks with Fei Peng, a professor in the department of psychology in the School of Public Health at Southern Medical University in Guangzhou, China, and principal investigator at the Great Bay Area Brain Science and Brain Inspired Research Center, about detecting emotions—or more scientifically “affect”—in bumble bees. His group observed how a bumble bee that appears to be hopeful can share this state with other bees.

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

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The contagious buzz of bumble bee positivity, and when snow crabs vanish

First up on the podcast, Contributing Correspondent Kai Kupferschmidt takes a trip to Svalbard, an Arctic archipelago where ancient RNA viruses may lie buried in the permafrost. He talks with host Sarah Crespi about why we only have 100 years of evolutionary history for viruses such as coronavirus and influenza, and what we can learn by looking deeper back in time.

Next on the show, Nathalie Stroeymeyt, senior lecturer at the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Bristol, joins freelancer producer Elah Feder to talk about how humans aren’t the only species that takes public health measures to stop outbreaks. To keep their colonies healthy when threatened with infectious disease, ants socially distance and even make architectural changes to their nests’ organization.

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

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Hunting ancient viruses in the Arctic, and how ants build their nests to fight disease

First up on the podcast, producer Kevin McLean talks with Associate Online News Editor Michael Greshko about the impact of wildfires on wine; a couple horse stories, one modern, one ancient; and why educators are racing to archive government materials.

 

Next on the show, research that took advantage of a natural experiment in unnatural lighting. Host Sarah Crespi talks with Ph.D. student Liz Aguilar and Kimberly Rosvall, an associate professor, both in the department of biology at Indiana University Bloomington, about a citizen-science initiative that captured bird behavior before, during, and after a total solar eclipse in April 2024.    

 

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

 

Authors: Sarah Crespi; Kevin McLean; Michael Greshko
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How birds reacted to a solar eclipse, and keeping wildfire smoke out of wine

First up on the podcast, Staff Writer Robert F. Service joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about a boom in nuclear medicine, from new and more powerful radioisotopes to improved precision in cancer cell targeting. 

 

Next on the show, we talk about why we sigh. Maria Clara Novaes-Silva, a doctoral student at ETH Zürich, discusses how deep breaths cause minute rearrangements at the special interface where air meets lung. The lung flexibility granted by these deeper inhalations suggest people on ventilators might have better lung health if they were served a larger draught of air from time to time.

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.



Authors: Sarah Crespi; Robert Service
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A new generation of radiotherapies for cancer, and why we sigh

First up on the podcast, Science News Editor Tim Appenzeller joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss why a salty layer of permafrost undergirding Arctic ice is turning frozen landscapes into boggy morasses.   

Next on the show, glucose isn’t the only molecule in the body that can be monitored in real time; proteins can be, too. Freelancer producer Zakiya Whatley talks with Jane Donnelly, an MD/Ph.D. candidate at Northwestern University, about what we could learn from the live monitoring of key proteins, from the status of a transplanted organ to the early signs of a flare up in autoimmune disease.

Finally, philologist Robert Garland joins books host Angela Saini to talk about ancient cultures and their death practices in his book What to Expect When You’re Dead: An Ancient Tour of Death and the Afterlife.


This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy. 

Authors: Sarah Crespi; Angela Saini; Tim Appenzeller


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Salty permafrost’s role in Arctic melting, the promise of continuous protein monitoring, and death in the ancient world

First up on the podcast, freelance science journalist Leslie Roberts joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about the long journey to a vaccine for group B streptococcus, a microbe that sickens 400,000 babies a year and kills at least 91,000.

Next on the show, there are about 250,000 agricultural drones employed on farms in China. Countries such as South Korea, Turkey, and Thailand are swiftly increasing agricultural drone use, whereas the United States and Russia are proceeding more slowly.  Food policy researcher Ben Belton discusses what appears to drive drone use in agriculture and how they might make farming more productive and sustainable. 

Finally, Science Books Editor Valerie Thompson brings books on the secrets rocks have to tell about humanity and the mystery surrounding a Druid preserved in a bog for thousands of years. 



This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

Authors: Sarah Crespi; Valerie Thompson; Leslie Roberts
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Protecting newborns from an invisible killer, the rise of drones for farming, and a Druid mystery

First up on the podcast, aggressive tumors have a secret cache of DNA that may help them beat current drug treatments. Freelance journalist Elie Dolgin joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about targeting so-called extrachromosomal DNA—little gene-bearing loops of DNA—that help difficult-to-treat cancers break the laws of inheritance.  

Next on the show, producer Meagan Cantwell talks with Weidong Sun, director of the Center of Deep Sea Research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, about the discovery of a hydrogen-rich system so large it makes up at least 5% of current estimates for global hydrogen emissions from abiotic sources. They discuss how hydrogen gas rising from the mantle reacting with oxygen could have triggered an explosion that formed holes hundreds of meters across and dozens of meters deep. 

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

Authors: Sarah Crespi; Elie Dolgin; Meagan Cantwell
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An aggressive cancer’s loophole, and a massive field of hydrogen beneath the ocean floor

First up on the podcast, despite so many advances in treatment, HIV drugs can suppress the virus but can’t cure the infection. Where does  suppressed HIV hide within the body? Staff Writer Jon Cohen joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about the Last Gift Study, in which people with HIV donate their bodies for rapid autopsy to help find the last reservoirs of the virus.  

Next on the show, Christine Elliott, a doctoral candidate in the department of entomology at Purdue University, talks about the Bug Bowl—an annual  public outreach event that highlights all the wonders and benefits of insects. We also get to hear the sounds of violins trying to be crickets and learn how music connects people to bugs in ways that posters and public lectures can’t.  

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.



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Authors: Sarah Crespi; Jon Cohen
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Finding HIV’s last bastion in the body, and playing the violin like a cricket

First up on the podcast, Staff Writer Rodrigo Pérez Ortega joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about a megafauna megafind that rivals the La Brea Tar Pits. In addition to revealing tens of thousands of bones from everything from dire wolves to an ancient human, the site has yielded the first DNA from  ammoths that lived in a warm climate.  

 

Next on the show, the Tijuana River crosses the U.S.-Mexican border from Tijuana to San Diego—bringing with it sewage, industrial waste, and stinky smells. News Intern Nazeefa Ahmed talks with Kimberly Prather, an atmospheric chemist at the University of California San Diego about detecting both air and water pollution around the river and the steps needed for cleanup. 

 

Finally, the latest in our series of books exploring the science of death. This month, host Angela Saini talks with philosopher Susana Monsó about her  ook Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death. Content warning for this segment: The interview contains descriptions of dead baby animals.

 

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

 

About the Science Podcast

 

Authors: Sarah Crespi; Rodrigo Perez Ortega; Angela Saini 
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A mother lode of Mexican mammoths, how water pollution enters the air, and a book on playing dead

First up on the podcast, Staff Writer Meredith Wadman joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss recent advances in understanding endometriosis—a disease where tissue that resembles the lining of the uterus grows outside the uterus, causing pain and other health effects. The pair talk about how investigating the role of the immune system in this disease is leading researchers to new potential diagnostic tools and treatments. 

 

Next on the show, why are there good dengue years and
bad dengue years? This week in Science Translational Medicine, Talia Quandelacy and colleagues map the synchrony and spread of this mosquito-borne disease in Latin America. She joins the podcast to talk about how the seasons, rainfall, and even El Niño connect with dengue levels and how this understanding can help with prediction and preparation. 

 

Quandelacy is an assistant professor in the department of epidemiology at the University of Colorado School of Public Health.

 

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

 

About the Science Podcast

 

Authors: Sarah Crespi; Meredith Wadman 
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New insights into endometriosis, and mapping dengue in Latin America

First up on the podcast, producer Meagan Cantwell and Contributing Correspondent Sara Reardon discuss alternative approaches to animal testing, from a heart on a chip to a miniorgan in a dish. 

 

Next on the show, Expert Voices columnist Melanie Mitchell and host Sarah Crespi dig into AI lies. Why do chatbots fabricate answers and pretend to do math? Mitchell describes the stress tests large language models undergo—called red teaming—and the steps needed to better understand how they “think.”  

Melanie Mitchell is a professor at the Santa Fe Institute. You can read all her Expert Voices columns here.
 

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

 

About the Science Podcast

 

Authors: Sarah Crespi; Meagan Cantwell; Melanie Mitchell; Sara Reardon
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Why chatbots lie, and can synthetic organs and AI replace animal testing?

First up on the podcast, Online News Editor David Grimm brings stories on peacock feathers’ ability to emit laser light, how anteaters have evolved at least 12 times, and why we should be thanking ketchup for our French fries.

 

Next on the show, rorqual whales, such as the massive blue whale, use a lunging strategy to fill their monster maws with seawater and prey, then filter out the tasty parts with baleen sieves. Lunging for food when you weigh 100 tons seems like it would be an energetically expensive way to meet your dietary needs. But as Ashley Blawas, a postdoctoral researcher  at the Hopkins Marine Station at Stanford University, describes in Science Advances this week, lunge-feeding whales have a few tricks up their sieves and use much less energy than predicted. 

 

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

 

About the Science Podcast

 

Authors: Sarah Crespi; David Grimm
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Why anteaters keep evolving, and how giant whales get enough food to live

First up on the podcast, Contributing Correspondent Richard Stone joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about the toll of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine and how researchers have been mobilized to help the war effort. In June, Stone visited the basement labs where Ukrainian students modify off-the-shelf drones for war fighting and the facilities where biomedical researchers develop implants and bandages for wounded soldiers. 

 

Next on the show, the isotopic ratios in our teeth and bones record the chemistry of what we eat. When anthropologists recently applied this technique to Neanderthals, they were surprised to find that when it comes to eating meat, our hominin cousins appeared to be on par with lions. Melanie Beasley, assistant professor of anthropology at Purdue University, has an explanation for why Neanderthals chemically look like hypercarnivores: They were just eating a lot of maggots. She talks about how she tested this idea by studying maggots that were fed putrefying human flesh.

 

Last up on this episode, a new installment of our series of books on death and science. This month’s books host Angela Saini talks with Ravi Nandan Singh, a sociologist at Shiv Nadar University, about his book Dead in Banaras: An Ethnography of Funeral Travelling. 

 

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

 

About the Science Podcast

 

Authors: Sarah Crespi; Angela Saini; Rich Stone
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Wartime science in Ukraine, what Neanderthals really ate, and visiting the city of the dead

First up on the podcast, South Africa’s Cradle of Humankind is home to the world’s greatest concentration of ancestral human remains, including our own genus, Homo, Australopithecus, and a more robust hominin called Paranthropus. Proving they were there at the same time is challenging, but new fossil evidence seems to point to coexistence. Producer Kevin McLean discusses what a multihominin landscape might have looked like with Contributing Correspondent Ann Gibbons. 

 

Next on the show, should robots grow and adapt like babies?  Host Sarah Crespi talks with roboticist Philippe Wyder about a platform for
exploring this idea. In his Science Advances paper, Wyder and his team demonstrate how simple stick-shaped robots with magnets at either end can join up for more complicated tasks and shed parts to adapt to new ones. 

 

Philippe Wyder was at Columbia University and the University of Washington when he completed this work, and he has now moved on to a company called Distyl AI. 

 

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.



About the Science Podcast

 
Authors: Sarah Crespi; Kevin McLean; Ann Gibbons
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Robots that eat other robots, and an ancient hot spot of early human relatives

First up on the podcast, Réunion Island had a shark attack crisis in
2011 and closed its beaches for more than a decade. Former News Intern Alexa Robles-Gil joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about how researchers have used that time to study the island’s shark populations and test techniques for preventing attacks, in the hopes of protecting lives and reopening the island’s shores. 

 

Next on the show, engineering gut microbes to break
down the precursors of kidney stones. Weston Whitaker, a research scientist at Stanford University, joins the podcast to discuss how he and his team created a stable niche for these useful microbes in the human gut and overcame some of the challenges of controlling them once inside. 

 

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

 

About the Science Podcast

 

Authors: Sarah Crespi; Alexa Robles-Gil


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Studying a shark-haunted island, and upgrading our microbiomes with engineered bacteria

First up on the podcast, Newsletter Editor Christie Wilcox joins host Sarah Crespi to celebrate the 2-year anniversary of ScienceAdviser with many stories about the amazing water bear. They also discuss links between climate change, melting glaciers, and earthquakes in the Alps, as well as what is probably the first edible laser. 

 

Next on the show, freelance producer Elah Feder talks with Tatiana Feuerborn,  a postdoctoral fellow in the cancer genetics and comparative genomics branch of the National Institutes of Health, about the evolutionary history of the Greenland sled dog. Her team’s work sequencing 98 genomes from modern and ancient sled dogs reveals the canine’s current diversity and suggests approaches for conservation. 

 

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

 

About the Science Podcast

 

Authors: Sarah Crespi; Elah Feder; Christie
Wilcox  


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A tardi party for the ScienceAdviser newsletter, and sled dog genomes

First up on the podcast, U.S. aid helped two African countries rein in HIV. Then came President Donald Trump. Senior News Correspondent Jon Cohen talks with producer Kevin McLean about how in Lesotho and Eswatini, treatment and prevention cutbacks are hitting pregnant people, children, and teens especially hard. 

 

This story is part of a series about the impacts of U.S. funding cuts on global health, supported by the Pulitzer Center. 

 

Next on the show, host Sarah Crespi is joined by Robin Wordsworth, the Gordon McKay Professor in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. They discuss the challenges and potential of microbes to grow plastics, drugs, and food on the surface of Mars or other bodies in the Solar System.

 

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

 

About the Science Podcast

 

Authors: Sarah Crespi; Kevin McLean; Jon Cohen 


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Losing years of progress against HIV, and farming plastic on Mars

First up on the podcast, Contributing Correspondent Andrew Curry joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss a pair of Science papers on kinship and culture in Neolithic Anatolia. The researchers used ancient DNA and isotopes from 8000 to 9000 years ago to show how maternal lines were important in Çatalhöyük culture.  

●     E. Yüncü et al., Female lineages and changing kinship patterns in Neolithic Çatalhöyük, 2025

●     D. Koptekin et al., Out-of-Anatolia: Cultural and genetic interactions during the Neolithic expansion in the Aegean, 2025

 

Next on the show, researchers were able to make a synthetic material that changes color in the same way squids do. Georgii Bogdanov, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of California, Irvine, talks about how his lab was able to discover the subcellular arrangement of proteins in the squid cells and mimic this structure synthetically using titanium dioxide deposition.

 

Finally, the latest book in our series on science and death. Books host Angela Saini talks with Tamara Kneese about her book Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond and whether our families can turn us into chatbots after we die. 

 

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy. 

About the Science Podcast

 

Authors: Sarah Crespi; Andrew Curry; Angela Saini 
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Will your family turn you into a chatbot after you die? Plus, synthetic squid skin, and the sway of matriarchs in ancient Anatolia

First up on the podcast, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is just coming online, and once fully operational, it will take a snapshot of the entire southern sky every 3 days. Producer Meagan Cantwell guides us through Staff Writer Daniel Clery’s trip to the site of the largest camera ever made for astronomy.

 

Next on the show, probing the impact of plastic bag regulations. Environmental economist Anna Papp joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss her work comparing litter collected by shore cleanup efforts before and after the onset of plastic bag bans. 

 

In a sponsored segment from the Science/AAAS Custom Publishing Office, Erika Berg, senior editor of custom publishing, interviews professors Deepak Bhatt and Filip Swirski about advances in the science of heart health. This segment is sponsored by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

 

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.



Authors: Sarah Crespi; Meagan Cantwell; Daniel Clery 
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How effective are plastic bag bans? And a whole new way to do astronomy

First up on the podcast, Staff Writer Erik Stokstad talks with host Sarah Crespi about how scientists are probing the world’s hottest forests to better understand how plants will cope with climate change. His story
is part of a special issue on plants and heat, which includes reviews and perspectives on the fate of plants in a warming world. 

 

Next on the show, “convergent” antibodies may underlie the growing number of people allergic to peanuts. Sarita Patil, co-director of the Food
Allergy Center at Massachusetts General Hospital and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, joins the podcast to discuss her research on allergies and antibodies. She explains how different people appear to create antibodies with similar gene sequences and 3D structures that react to peanut proteins—a big surprise given the importance of randomness in the immune system’s ability to recognize harmful invaders.

 

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

 

About the Science Podcast

 

Authors: Sarah Crespi; Erik Stokstad 
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Why peanut allergy is so common and hot forests as test beds for climate change

First up on the podcast, we hear from Staff Writer Paul Voosen about the tricky problem of regional climate prediction. Although global climate change models have held up for the most part, predicting what will happen at smaller scales, such as the level of a city, is proving a stubborn challenge. Just increasing the resolution of global models requires intense computing power, so researchers and city planners are looking
to other approaches to find out what’s in store for cities.

 

Next on the show, a visit to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where researchers have found evidence that the Indigenous Menominee people cultivated maize for 600 years, even during an ice age. Madeleine McLeester, assistant professor in the department of anthropology at Dartmouth College, talks about using lidar to search among the heavily forested lands for striations that indicate corn farming and the anthropological conundrums raised by such extensive agriculture without nearby urban centers. 

 

Finally in this episode, producer Kevin McLean quizzes host Sarah Crespi on some mysterious sounds that have appeared on the site as part of news stories. No clues here so be sure to play along. 

 

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

 

About the Science Podcast

 

Authors: Sarah Crespi; Paul Voosen; Kevin McLean 
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Farming maize in ice age Michigan, predicting the future climate of cities, and our host takes a quiz on the sounds of science

First up on the podcast, Online News Editor Michael Greshko joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about stories set high above our heads. They discuss capturing fungal spores high in the stratosphere, the debate over signs of
life on the exoplanet K2-18b, and a Chinese contender for world’s oldest star catalog.

 

Next on the show, a look into long-standing questions
on why and how our bodies respond to tickling. Producer Meagan Cantwell talks to Konstantina Kilteni, an assistant professor at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour and the Department of Neuroscience at the Karolinska Institute. They discuss how standardizing
approaches to testing tickling in the lab could get us closer to answers.

 

Finally in this episode, the first in our book series
on the science of death, with books host Angela Saini. Saini interviews Nobel Prize–winning biologist Venki Ramakrishnan about developments in longevity research and his book Why We Die: The New Science of Aging and the Quest for
Immortality.

 

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

 

About the Science Podcast



Authors: Sarah Crespi, Angela Saini, Michael Greshko, Meagan Cantwell


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Tickling in review, spores in the stratosphere, and longevity research

First up on the podcast, freelance journalist Zack Savitsky joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about the strange metal state. Physicists are probing the
behavior of electrons in these materials, which appear to behave like a thick soup rather than discrete charged particles. Many suspect insights into strange metals might lead to the creation of room-temperature superconductors, highly desired materials that promise lossless energy delivery and floating trains. 

A few years ago, researcher Nora Zannoni came on the show to talk about our oxidation fields: zones of highly reactive radicals our bodies naturally produce that surround us and interact with nearby chemicals.
Now she’s back to discuss how our personal oxidation fields interact with personal care products—such as hand lotion, for example—and the resulting effects those products can end up having on the air
we breathe indoors.

Zannoni is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate of Italy’s National Research Council. The work for the paper was done when she was a postdoc scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry.

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

About the Science Podcast

Authors: Sarah Crespi; Zack Savitsky
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Strange metals and our own personal ‘oxidation fields’

First up on the podcast, freelance journalist Jonathan Moens talks with host Sarah Crespi about a forensic test called brain electrical oscillation signature (BEOS) profiling, which police in India are using along with other techniques to try to tell whether a suspect participated in a crime, despite these technologies’ extremely shaky scientific grounding.

 

Next on the show, scientists have recently made strides in our understanding of horses, from identifying the mutations that make horses amazing athletes to showing how climate shaped intercontinental horse migrations 50,000 years ago. Science life sciences editor Sacha Vignieri  joins us to discuss new horse-related studies published in Science—and how equine research has broader implications.

Other papers mentioned in this segment: 

W. Taylor et al., Science 2023

C. Gaunitz et al., Science 2018

A. Outram et al., Science 2009

 

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.



About the Science Podcast

 

Authors: Sarah Crespi; Sacha Vignieri; Jonathan Moens 
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A horse science roundup and using dubious brain scans as evidence of crimes

First up on the podcast, producer Meagan Cantwell worked with the Science News team to review how the first 100 days of President
Donald Trump’s administration have impacted science. In the segment, originally produced for video, we hear about how the workforce, biomedical research, and global health initiatives all face widespread, perhaps permanent damage, with News staffers David Malakoff, Jocelyn Kaiser, and Rachel Bernstein.

 Next on the show, acoustical analysis of ancient music from Greece and Rome shows different musical notation styles for different instruments. Dan Baciu, a professor at the Münster School of Architecture at the Münster University of Applied Sciences, talks with host Sarah Crespi about his analysis. 

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

About the Science Podcast

Authors: Sarah Crespi; Meagan Cantwell; David Malakoff; Jocelyn Kaiser; Rachel Bernstein 
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Analyzing music from ancient Greece and Rome, and the 100 days that shook science

First up on the podcast, Contributing Correspondent Andrew Curry talks with host Sarah Crespi about his visit to 17th century crypts under an old hospital in Italy. Researchers are examining tooth plaque, bone lesions, and mummified brains to learn more about the health, diet, and drug habits of Milan’s working poor 400 years ago. 

Next on the show, a mechanism for driving growth in fat stores with age. Or, the source of the “dad bod” trope. Producer Zakiya Whatley talks with Qiong “Annabel” Wang, associate professor in the department of molecular and cellular endocrinology at City of Hope, about her work showing how middle-age mice gain fat via dedicated progenitor cells that actually become more active as the animals age. Similar cells are also present in people, suggesting it’s not just lack of willpower or sedentary habits that give us gains as we get older. 








This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.



About the Science Podcast



Authors: Sarah Crespi; Zakiya Whatley; Andrew Curry
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Tales from an Italian crypt, and the science behind ‘dad bods’

First up on the podcast, bringing Gregor Mendel’s peas into the 21st century. Back in the 19th century Mendel, a friar and naturalist, tracked traits in peas such as flower color and shape over many generations. He used these observations to identify basic concepts about inheritance such as recessive and dominant traits. Staff Writer Erik Stokstad talks with host Sarah Crespi about the difficulty of identifying genes for these phenotypes all these years later. We also hear some other stories from the plant world, including evidence that wavy fields are more attractive to insects and a tree benefits from being struck by lightning.
 
Next on the show, a carnivorous caterpillar that haunts spiderwebs, camouflaged in its insect prey’s body parts. Producer Kevin McLean talks with Daniel Rubinoff, a professor in the department of plant and environmental protection sciences at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, about how such an adaptation might have evolved and the overlooked importance of insect conservation. 
 
Finally, we kick off our 2025 books series on the science of death and dying. Books host Angela Saini and books editor Valerie Thompson talk about the challenges of putting this year’s list together and the reads they are looking forward to.
 
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
 
About the Science Podcast
 
Authors: Sarah Crespi; Erik Stokstad; Kevin McLean; Valerie Thompson; Angela Saini 
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A caterpillar that haunts spiderwebs, solving the last riddles of a famed friar, and a new book series

First up on the podcast, Online News Editor David Grimm joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about how an Egyptian cult that killed cats may have also tamed them.
 
Next on the show, we hear about when the aurorae wandered. About 41,000 years ago, Earth’s magnetic poles took an excursion. They began to move equatorward and decreased in strength to one-tenth their modern levels. Agnit Mukhopadhyay, a research affiliate at the University of Michigan, talks about how his group mapped these magnetic changes, and what it would be like if such a big change took place today.
 
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
 
About the Science Podcast
 
Authors: Sarah Crespi; David Grimm
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Linking cat domestication to ancient cult sacrifices, and watching aurorae wander

First up on the podcast, ScienceInsider Editor Jocelyn Kaiser joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss big changes in science funding and government jobs this month, including an order to cut billions in contracts, lawsuits over funding caps and grant funding cancellations, and mass firings at the National Institutes of Health.
 
Next on the show, taking sleep loss more seriously. Jennifer Tudor, an associate professor of biology at Saint Joseph’s University, talks about how skipping out on sleep has many metabolic consequences, from reducing protein synthesis in our brains to making our muscles less efficient at using ATP. Her new review in Science Signaling suggests that given these impacts, we should stop putting sleep last on our to-do lists.
 
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
 
About the Science Podcast
 
Authors: Sarah Crespi; Jocelyn Kaiser
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The metabolic consequences of skipping sleep, and cuts and layoffs slam NIH

Geoengineering experiments face an uphill battle, and a way to combat the pregnancy complication hyperemesis gravidarum

First up on the podcast, climate engineers face tough conversations with the public when proposing plans to test new technologies. Freelance science journalist Rebekah White joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss the questions people have about these experiments and how researchers can get collaboration and buy-in for testing ideas such as changing the atmosphere to reflect more sunlight or altering the ocean to suck up more carbon dioxide.
 
Next on the show, hyperemesis gravidarum—severe nausea and vomiting during pregnancy—is common in many pregnant people and can have lasting maternal and infant health effects. This week, Marlena Fejzo wrote about her path from suffering hyperemesis gravidarum to finding linked genes and treatments for this debilitating complication. For her essay, Fejzo was named the first winner of the BioInnovation Institute & Science Translational Medicine Prize for Innovations in Women’s Health. Fejzo is a scientist at the Center for Genetic Epidemiology in the department of population and public health sciences at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine.
 
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
 
About the Science Podcast
 
Authors: Sarah Crespi; Rebekah White
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Talking about engineering the climate, and treating severe nausea and vomiting during pregnancy

First up this week, urban wildfires raged in Los Angeles in January. Contributing Correspondent Warren Cornwall discusses how researchers have come together to study how pollution from buildings at such a large scale impacts the environment and health of the local population.
 
Next on the show, Mingze Chen, a graduate student in the mechanical engineering department at the University of Michigan, talks with host Sarah Crespi about the challenges of placing artificial intelligence in small robots. As you add more sensors and data, the demand for computing power and energy goes up. To reduce the power demand, Chen’s team tried a different kind of physics for collecting and processing data using a type of resistance switching memory device called a “memristor.”
 
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
 
About the Science Podcast
 
Authors: Sarah Crespi; Warren Cornwall
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Studying urban wildfires, and the challenges of creating tiny AI robots

First up this week, Newsletter Editor Christie Wilcox joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss stories from the sea, including why scientists mounted cameras on seabirds, backward and upside-down; newly discovered organisms from the world’s deepest spot, the Mariana Trench; and how extremely venomous, blue-lined octopus males use their toxin on females in order to mate. Read more or subscribe at science.org/scienceadviser.
 
Next on the show, J. Chris McKnight, a senior research fellow in the Sea Mammal Research Unit at the University of St. Andrews, talks about testing free-living seals to see how they respond to different carbon dioxide or oxygen levels in the air. It turns out they don’t respond like other mammals, which go into panic under high carbon dioxide; instead, seals appear to directly detect oxygen, a safer bet when your life is mostly spent diving deep underwater.
 
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
 
About the Science Podcast
 
Authors: Sarah Crespi; Christie Wilcox
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Why seals don’t drown, and tracking bird poop as it enters the sea

First up this week, science policy editor Jocelyn Kaiser joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss the latest news about the National Institutes of Health—from reconfiguring review panels to canceled grants to confirmation hearings for a new head, Jay Bhattacharya.
 
Next, although cochlear implants can give deaf children access to sound, it doesn’t always mean they have unrestricted access to language. Producer Meagan Cantwell talks with Contributing Correspondent Cathleen O’Grady about why some think using sign language with kids with cochlear implants gives them the best chance at communicating fully and fluently.
 
Finally, using a pain illusion to better understand how the brain modulates pain. Francesca Fardo, an associate professor in the department of clinical medicine at Aarhus University, talks with host Sarah Crespi about the role of learning and uncertainty in pain perception. It turns out, the more uncertain we are about a sensation that could be painful, the more pain we feel.
 
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
 
About the Science Podcast
 
Authors: Sarah Crespi; Meagan Cantwell; Cathleen O’Grady; Jocelyn Kaiser
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Why sign language could be crucial for kids with cochlear implants, studying the illusion of pain, and recent political developments at NIH

First up this week, International News Editor David Malakoff joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss the most recent developments in U.S. science under Donald Trump’s second term, from the impact of tariffs on science to the rehiring of probationary employees at the National Science Foundation.
 
Next, we tackle the question of extra-pair paternity in people—when marriage or birth records of parentage differ from biological parentage. Contributing Correspondent Andrew Curry writes about researchers looking into the question of how often children are genetically unrelated to their presumed fathers by using genealogy and genetic testing.
 
Finally, Susanne Schweizer, Scientia associate professor at the University of New South Wales, talks about her article on intrusive thoughts in the perinatal period as part of a special issue on women’s health in Science Advances. Almost all pregnant and recent mothers experience intrusive thoughts about harm coming to their offspring. Schweizer and colleagues suggest gaining a better understanding of intrusive thoughts during this highly predictable window could help explain the phenomenon more broadly.
 
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
 
About the Science Podcast
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Intrusive thoughts during pregnancy, paternity detectives, and updates from the Trump Tracker

First up this week, Kata Karáth, a freelance journalist based in Ecuador, talks with host Sarah Crespi about an effort to identify traditionally prepared shrunken heads in museums and collections around the world and potentially repatriate them.
 
Next, genetically modified Bt corn has helped farmers avoid serious crop damage from insects, but planting it everywhere all the time can drive insects to adapt to the bacterial toxin made by the plant. Christian Krupke, an entomology professor at Purdue University, talks about the economics of planting Bt corn and how farmers could save money and extend the usefulness of this transgenic plant by being selective about where and when they plant it.
 
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
 
About the Science Podcast
 
Authors: Sarah Crespi; Kata Karáth
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Keeping transgenic corn sustainable, and sending shrunken heads home

First up this week, researchers face impossible decisions as U.S. aid freeze halts clinical trials. Deputy News Editor Martin Enserink joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about how organizers of U.S. Agency for International Development–funded studies are grappling with ethical responsibilities to trial participants and collaborators as funding, supplies, and workers dry up.
 
Next, freelance science journalist Sandeep Ravindran talks about creating tiny machine learning devices for bespoke use in the Global South. Farmers and medical clinics are using low-cost, low-power devices with onboard machine learning for spotting fungal infections in tree plantations or listening for the buzz of malaria-bearing mosquitoes.
 
Finally, Michael Barnett, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, joins the podcast to discuss evolving evolvability. His team demonstrated a way for organisms to become more evolvable in response to repeated swings in the environment.
 
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
 
About the Science Podcast
 
Authors: Sarah Crespi; Sandeep Ravindran; Martin Enserink 
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Shrinking AI for use in farms and clinics, ethical dilemmas for USAID researchers, and how to evolve evolvability

First up this week, International News Editor David Malakoff joins the podcast to discuss the big change in NIH’s funding policy for overhead or indirect costs, the outrage from the biomedical community over the cuts, and the lawsuits filed in response.
 
Next, what can machines understand about pets and livestock that humans can’t? Christa Lesté-Lasserre, a freelance science journalist based in Paris, joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss training artificial intelligence on animal facial expressions. Today, this approach can be used to find farm animals in distress; one day it may help veterinarians and pet owners better connect with their animal friends.
 
Finally, Keya Ghonasgi, a postdoctoral fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology, talks about a recent Science Robotics paper on the case against machine vision for the control of wearable robotics. It turns out the costs of adding video cameras to exoskeletons—such as loss of privacy—may outweigh the benefits of having robotic helpers on our arms and legs. 
 
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
 
About the Science Podcast
 
Authors: Sarah Crespi; Christa Lesté-Lasserre; David Malakoff
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Training AI to read animal facial expressions, NIH funding takes a big hit, and why we shouldn’t put cameras in robot pants

First up this week, Staff Writer Paul Voosen joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss mapping clogs and flows in Earth’s middle layer—the mantle. They also talk about recent policy stories on NASA’s reactions to President Donald Trump’s administration’s executive orders.
 
Next, the mantis shrimp is famous for its powerful club, a biological hammer it uses to crack open hard shells. The club applies immense force on impact, but how does it keep itself together blow after blow? Nicolas Alderete is an associate researcher at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, but at the time of the work he was a graduate researcher in theoretical and applied mechanics at Northwestern University. He joins the podcast to discuss the makeup of the mantis shrimp’s club and how it uses “phononics”—specialized microstructures that can reduce or change high-frequency vibrations—to reduce wear and tear when smashing and bashing.
 
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
 
About the Science Podcast
 
Authors: Sarah Crespi; Paul Voosen
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How the mantis shrimp builds its powerful club, and mysteries of middle Earth

First up this week, we catch up with the editor of ScienceInsider, Jocelyn Kaiser. She talks about changes at the major science agencies that came about with the transition to President Donald Trump’s second administration, such as hiring freezes at the National Institutes of Health and the United States’s departure from the World Health Organization.
 
Next, producer Kevin McLean talks with Dan Kaplan, a professor in the departments of immunology and dermatology at the University of Pittsburgh, about why it sometimes pays to scratch that itch. It turns out scratching may be our bodies’ end run around pests and pathogens attempting to steal blood or invade the body.
 
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
 
About the Science Podcast
 
Authors: Sarah Crespi; Kevin McLean; Jocelyn Kaiser
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Why it pays to scratch that itch, and science at the start of the second Trump administration

First up this week, although long touted as a green fuel, the traditional approach to hydrogen production is not very sustainable. Staff writer Robert F. Service joins producer Meagan Cantwell to discuss how researchers are aiming to improve electrolyzers—devices that split water into hydrogen and oxygen—with more efficient and durable designs.
 
Next, Robert Rogers, who was a postdoctoral fellow in molecular biology at Massachusetts General Hospital when this work was conducted, talks with host Sarah Crespi about the idea of chronic hypoxia as medicine. Efficacious in mouse disease models, the big question now is whether long-lasting reduced oxygen could help people with certain serious conditions, such as mitochondrial defects or brain inflammation. The pair discuss what we know so far about this potential treatment and the challenges of delivering low levels of oxygen around the clock.
 
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
 
About the Science Podcast
 
Authors: Sarah Crespi; Meagan Cantwell; Robert Service
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Unlocking green hydrogen, and oxygen deprivation as medicine

First up this week, growing numbers of Valley fever cases, also known as coccidioidomycosis, has researchers looking into the disease-causing fungus. They’re exploring its links to everything from drought and wildfires to climate change and rodent populations. Staff Writer Meredith Wadman joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss her visit to a Valley fever research site in the desert near Bakersfield, California, where researchers are sampling air and soil for the elusive fungus.
 
Next up, scientists are trying to pin down when meat eating became a habit for human ancestors. It’s long been hypothesized that eating meat drove big changes in our family tree—such as bigger brains and more upright posture. Tina Lüdecke, a group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and honorary research fellow at the Evolutionary Studies Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand, investigated the diet of our ancient hominin relatives Australopithecus. Her team used nitrogen isotope ratios from the tooth enamel in seven Australopithecus individuals in South Africa to determine what predominated in their diets at the time—meat or veg.
 
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
 
About the Science Podcast
 
Authors: Sarah Crespi; Meredith Wadman

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.zulg8oo
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Rising infections from a dusty devil, and nailing down when our ancestors became meat eaters

First up this week, as preprint publications ramped up during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, so did media attention for these pre–peer-review results. But what do the readers of news reports based on preprints know about them? Associate News Editor Jeff Brainard joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss studies that look at the public perception of preprints in the news and how to inject skepticism into stories about them.
 
Next, placing tiny tags on bats to follow them across central Europe. Former Science intern Edward Hurme—now a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Migration at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior—revisits the podcast after 13 years. He discusses the difficulty of tracking bats as they fly long distances at night and what new tagging technology is revealing about their migration patterns.
 
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
 
About the Science Podcast
 
Authors: Sarah Crespi; Jeff Brainard
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Bats surf storm fronts, and public perception of preprints

First up this week, Newsletter Editor Christie Wilcox talks with host Sarah Crespi about truffle hunting for science. Wilcox accompanied Heather Dawson, a Ph.D. student at the University of Oregon, and her sister  Hilary Dawson, a postdoctoral researcher at Australian National University, on a hunt for nonculinary truffles—the kind you don’t eat—with the help of a specially trained dog. These scientists and their dog are digging up many new species of these hard-to-find fungi with the ultimate aim of cataloging and conserving them. 
 
Next, producer Ariana Remmel talks with R. Keller Kopf, an ecologist and lecturer at Charles Darwin University, about the importance of conserving older plants and animals. For example, as certain fish age they produce many more eggs than younger fish. Or in a forest, older trees may provide different ecosystem services than saplings.
 
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
 
About the Science Podcast
 
Authors: Sarah Crespi; Christie Wilcox; Ariana Remmel

 About the Science Podcast: https://www.science.org/content/page/about-science-podcast
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On the trail with a truffle-hunting dog, and why we should save elderly plants and animals

First up this week, Online News Editor David Grimm shares a sampling of stories that hit big with our audience and staff in this year, from corpse-eating pets to the limits of fanning ourselves.
 
Next, host Sarah Crespi tackles some unfinished business with Producer Kevin McLean. Three former guests talk about where their research has taken them since their first appearances on the podcast.
 
Erick Lundgren, a researcher at the Centre for Open Science and Research Synthesis at the University of Alberta, revisits his paper on donkeys that dig wells in deserts. Lundgren first appeared on the podcast in April 2021.
 
Katie Hampson, a professor of infectious disease ecology at the University of Glasgow, discusses where her Tanzanian rabies research has spread. Hampson first appeared on the podcast in April 2022.
 
Ashley Thomas, an assistant professor of psychology in the Laboratory for Development Studies at Harvard University, talks about why it’s important to plumb the depths of baby minds and the big questions behind her work on children’s understanding of social relationships. Thomas first appeared on the podcast in January 2022.
 
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
 
About the Science Podcast
 
Authors: Sarah Crespi; Kevin McLean; David Grimm 
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Science’s Breakthrough of the Year, and psychedelic drugs, climate, and fusion technology updates

First up this week, freelance science journalist Sofia Moutinho joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss making open-access journals from South and Latin America visible to the rest of the world by creating platforms that help with the publishing process and discovery of journal articles. This story is part of a News series about global equity in science.
 
Next on the show, departing Physical Sciences Editor Brent Grocholski discusses highlights from his career at Science, particularly his work on cooling technologies. Related papers:
 
●     A self-regenerative heat pump based on a dual-functional relaxor ferroelectric polymer
●     High cooling performance in a double-loop electrocaloric heat pump
●     High-performance multimode elastocaloric cooling system
●     Colossal electrocaloric effect in an interface-augmented ferroelectric polymer
●     Sizing up caloric devices
 
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
 
About the Science Podcast
 
Authors: Sarah Crespi; Brent Grocholski; Sofia Moutinho
 
About the Science Podcast: https://www.science.org/content/page/about-science-podcast
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Making Latin American science visible, and advances in cooling tech

First up this week, making electronics greener with leaves. Host Sarah Crespi talks with Newsletter Editor Christie Wilcox about using the cellulose skeletons of leaves to create robust, biodegradable backings for computer chips. This sustainable approach can be used for printing circuits and making organic light-emitting diodes and if widely adopted, could massively reduce the carbon footprint of electronics. 

Next on the show, Kevin Hatala, a biology professor at Chatham University, joins producer Meagan Cantwell to discuss fossil footprints unearthed in the Turkana Basin of Kenya. A 13-step long track with three perpendicular footprints likely show two different species of early humans, Homo erectus and Paranthropus boisei, walked on the same shorelines.

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

About the Science Podcast

Authors: Sarah Crespi; Meagan Cantwell; Christie Wilcox 
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Leaf-based computer chips, and evidence that two early human ancestors coexisted

First up this week, where on Earth do people live the longest? What makes those places or people so special? Genes, diet, life habits? Or could it be bad record keeping and statistical flukes? Freelance science journalist Ignacio Amigo joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss the controversies around so-called blue zones—regions in the world where clusters of people appear to have extreme longevity.
 
Next on the show, producer Kevin Mclean talks with Dorian Houser, director of conservation biology at the National Marine Mammal Foundation. Houser and colleagues temporarily captured juvenile minke whales and tested their hearing. It turns out these baleen whales have more sensitive hearing than predicted from vocalizations and anatomical modeling, which could change our understanding of how they are affected by underwater noise pollution.
 
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
 
About the Science Podcast
 
Authors: Sarah Crespi; Ignacio Amigo; Kevin McLean
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Testing whales’ hearing, and mapping clusters of extreme longevity

First up this week, a ship that flips for science. Sean Cummings, a freelance science journalist, joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about the resurrection of the Floating Instrument Platform (R/V FLIP), a research vessel built by the U.S. Navy in the 1960s and retired in 2023. FLIP is famous for turning vertically 90° so the bulk of the long ship is underwater, stabilizing it for data gathering. Additional audio from Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Watch FLIP flipping here.
 
Next on the show, viewing past lives using bones from medieval London cemeteries. Samantha Yaussy, a professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at James Madison University, joins Sarah to talk about a bony paradox. Do lesions or scars on buried bones mean the person was frail and ill when they lived or were they strong and resilient because they survived long enough for disease to damage their bones?
 
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
 
About the Science Podcast
 
Authors: Sarah Crespi; Sean Cummings
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Resurrecting a ‘flipping ship,’ and solving the ‘bone paradox’ in ancient remains

First up this week, Staff Writer Paul Voosen talks with host Sarah Crespi about his travel to meet up with a lead researcher in the field, Folarin Kolawole, and the subtle signs of rifting on the African continent.
 
Next on the show, Nik Dennler, a Ph.D. student in the Biocomputation Group at the University of Hertfordshire and the International Center for Neuromorphic Systems at Western Sydney University, discusses speeding up electronic noses. These fast sniffing devices could one day be mounted on drones to help track down forest fires before they are large enough to spot with a satellite.

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
 
About the Science Podcast
 
Authors: Sarah Crespi; Paul Voosen
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