Cleaning up uranium mining, and how the heart avoids cancer
First up on the podcast, freelance science and environmental journalist Quentin Septer joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about a controversial uranium m...
The normals | Episode 3
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...
How to keep quantum computers cool, whether prediction markets harm public health, and podcasting on podcasting
First up on the podcast, quantum computers require extremely low temperatures—less than 1°C away from absolute zero. But getting down to those tempera...
The Normals | Episode 2
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 re...
A chimpanzee ‘civil war,’ and NASA plans for nuclear propulsion
First up on the podcast, freelance science journalist Hannah Richter joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss NASA’s plans to send a nuclear-powered spacecr...
The Normals | Episode 1
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...
Resolving the dispute over the speed of the expanding universe, and seeking new drug targets for cognitive dysfunction
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 on...
Resurrection plants, Project Hail Mary, and the trouble with sycophantic AI
First up on the podcast, Deputy News Editor Martin Enserink talks about so-called resurrection plants. These specialized plants can survive up to 95% ...
Rethinking the peopling of the Americas, and the best ways to get groundwater back
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...
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, freelance journalist Evan Howell traveled to Cape Blossom, Alaska, where the receding coastline has revealed an ancient trove...