Science Magazine Podcast

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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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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

First up, Staff Writer Paul Voosen talks with host Sarah Crespi about the Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) mission to the asteroid Bennu. After OSIRIS-REx’s up-close surveys of the surface revealed fewer likely touchdown points than expected, its sampling mission has been rejiggered. Paul talks about the prospects for a safe sampling in mid-October and what we might learn when the craft returns to Earth in 2023.

Sarah also talks with Hubert Lim, from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and Neuromod Devices Limited, about his Science Translational Medicine paper on a new treatment for tinnitus. The team showed that bimodal stimulation—playing sounds in the ear and buzzes on the tongue—was able to change the brain and turn down the tinnitus in a large clinical trial.

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

Extra audio credits: Tinnitus sound samples courtesy of the American tinnitus Association. Treatment samples courtesy of Neuromod Ltd.

Listen to previous podcasts.

About the Science Podcast

Download a transcript (PDF).

[Image: Stuart Rankin/Flickr/NASA/Goddard; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

Authors: Sarah Crespi; Paul Voosen

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This week we’re dedicating the whole show to the 20th anniversary of the publication of the human genome. Today, about 30 million people have had their genomes sequenced. This remarkable progress has brought with it issues of data sharing, privacy, and inequality.

Host Sarah Crespi spoke with a number of researchers about the state of genome science, starting with Yaniv Erlich, from the Efi Arazi School of Computer Science and CEO of Eleven Biotherapeutics, who talks about privacy in the age of easily obtainable genomes.

Next up Charles Rotimi, director of the Center for Research on Genomics and Global Health at the National Human Genome Research Institute, discusses diversity—or lack thereof—in the field and what it means for the kinds of research that happens.

Finally, Dorothy Roberts, professor in the departments of Africana studies and sociology and the law school at the University of Pennsylvania, talks about the seemingly never-ending project of disentangling race and genomes.

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

Listen to previous podcasts.

About the Science Podcast

Download a transcript (PDF).

[Image: Holly Gramazio/Flickr; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

Authors: Sarah Crespi;

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Science Senior Correspondent Daniel Clery regales host Sarah Crespi with tales about the most important work to come from 57 years of research at the now-defunct Arecibo Observatory and plans for the future of the site. Sarah also talks with Toman Barsbai, an associate professor in the school of economics at the University of Bristol, about the influence of ecology on human behavior—can we figure out how many of our behaviors are related to the different environments where we live? Barsbai and colleagues took on this question by comparing behaviors around finding food, reproduction, and social hierarchy in three groups of animals living in the same places: foraging humans, nonhuman mammals, and birds. This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy. Listen to previous podcasts. About the Science Podcast Download a transcript (PDF).