Science Magazine Podcast Science Magazine
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- Ciencia
Weekly podcasts from Science Magazine, the world's leading journal of original scientific research, global news, and commentary.
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Teaching robots to smile, and the effects of a rare mandolin on a scientist’s career
Robots that can smile in synchrony with people, and what ends up in the letters section
First on this week’s show, a robot that can predict your smile. Hod Lipson, a roboticist and professor at Columbia University, joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss how mirrors can help robots learn to make facial expressions and eventually improve robot nonverbal communication.
Next, we have Margaret Handley, a professor in the department of epidemiology and biostatistics and medicine at the University of California San Francisco. She shares a letter she wrote to Science about how her past, her family, and a rare instrument relate to her current career focus on public health and homelessness. Letters Editor Jennifer Sills also weighs in with the kinds of letters people write into the magazine.
Other Past as Prologue letters:
A new frontier for mi familia by Raven Delfina Otero-Symphony
A uranium miner’s daughter by Tanya J. Gallegos
Embracing questions after my father’s murder by Jacquelyn J. Cragg
A family’s pride in educated daughters by Qura Tul Ain
One person’s trash: Another’s treasured education by Xiangkun Elvis Cao
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
About the Science Podcast
Authors: Sarah Crespi; Jennifer Sills
Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.zy9w2u0
About the Science Podcast: https://www.science.org/content/page/about-science-podcast -
Hope in the fight against deadly prion diseases, and side effects of organic agriculture
New clinical trials for treatments of an always fatal brain disease, and what happens with pests when a conventional and organic farm are neighbors
First up on this week’s show, a new treatment to stave off prion disease goes into clinical trials. Prions are misfolded proteins that clump together and chew holes in the brain. The misfolding can be switched on in a number of ways—including infection with a misfolded prion protein from an animal or person. Staff Writer Meredith Wadman talks with host Sarah Crespi about new potential treatments—from antisense nucleotides to small molecules that interfere with protein production—for these fatal neurodegenerative diseases.
Next on the show: Freelance producer Katherine Irving talks with Ashley Larsen, associate professor of agricultural and landscape ecology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, about the effects of organic farms on their neighbors. If there are lots of organic growers together, pesticide use goes down but conventional farms tend to use more pesticides when side by side with organic farms.
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
About the Science Podcast
Authors: Sarah Crespi; Katherine Irving; Meredith Wadman
LINKS FOR MP3 META
Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.z91m76v -
Why babies forget, and how fear lingers in the brain
Investigating “infantile amnesia,” and how generalized fear after acute stress reflects changes in the brain
This week we have two neuroscience stories. First up, freelance science journalist Sara Reardon looks at why infants’ memories fade. She joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss ongoing experiments that aim to determine when the forgetting stops and why it happens in the first place.
Next on the show, Hui-Quan Li, a senior scientist at Neurocrine Biosciences, talks with Sarah about how the brain encodes generalized fear, a symptom of some anxiety disorders such as social anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder.
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
About the Science Podcast
Authors: Sarah Crespi; Kevin McLean; Sara Reardon
Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.z9bqkyc -
A dive into the genetic history of India, and the role of vitamin A in skin repair
What modern Indian genomes say about the region’s deep past, and how vitamin A influences stem cell plasticity
First up this week, Online News Editor Michael Price and host Sarah Crespi talk about a large genome sequencing project in India that reveals past migrations in the region and a unique intermixing with Neanderthals in ancient times.
Next on the show, producer Kevin McLean chats with Matthew Tierney, a postdoctoral fellow at Rockefeller University, about how vitamin A and stem cells work together to grow hair and heal wounds.
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
About the Science Podcast
Authors: Sarah Crespi; Kevin McLean; Michael Price
Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.zfhqarg
About the Science Podcast: https://www.science.org/content/page/about-science-podcast -
The sci-fi future of medical robots is here, and dehydrating the stratosphere to stave off climate change
Keeping water out of the stratosphere could be a low-risk geoengineering approach, and using magnets to drive medical robots inside the body
First up this week, a new approach to slowing climate change: dehydrating the stratosphere. Staff Writer Paul Voosen joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss the risks and advantages of this geoengineering technique.
Next on the show, Science Robotics Editor Amos Matsiko gives a run-down of papers in a special series on magnetic robots in medicine. Matsiko and Crespi also discuss how close old science fiction books came to predicting modern medical robots’ abilities.
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
About the Science Podcast
Authors: Sarah Crespi; Paul Voosen; Amos Matsiko
Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.zvvddhw -
What makes snakes so special, and how space science can serve all
On this week’s show: Factors that pushed snakes to evolve so many different habitats and lifestyles, and news from the AAAS annual meeting
First up on the show this week, news from this year’s annual meeting of AAAS (publisher of Science) in Denver. News intern Sean Cummings talks with Danielle Wood, director of the Space Enabled Research Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, about the sustainable use of orbital space or how space exploration and research can benefit everyone.
And Newsletter Editor Christie Wilcox joins host Sarah Crespi with an extravaganza of meeting stories including a chat with some of the authors of this year’s Newcomb Cleveland Prize–winning Science paper on how horses spread across North America.
Voices in this segment:
William Taylor, assistant professor and curator of archaeology at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Museum of Natural History
Ludovic Orlando, director of the Centre for Anthropobiology and Genomics of Toulouse
University of Oklahoma archaeologists Sarah Trabert and Brandi Bethke
Yvette Running Horse Collin, post-doctoral researcher Paul Sabatier University (Toulouse III)
Next on the show: What makes snakes so special? Freelance producer Ariana Remmel talks with Daniel Rabosky, professor in ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Michigan, about the drivers for all the different ways snakes have specialized—from spitting venom to sensing heat.
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
About the Science Podcast
Authors: Sarah Crespi; Ariana Remmel; Christie Wilcox; Sean Cummings
Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.zabhbwe