Science Magazine Podcast

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. About the Science Podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Image credit: Lorenzo Shoubridge Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

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. About the Science Podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

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. About the Science Podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

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. About the Science Podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. About the Science Podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy. About the Science Podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

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

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

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. About the Science Podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

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. About the Science Podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. About the Science Podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. About the Science Podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. About the Science Podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. About the Science Podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices