International News Editor Martin Enserink talks with host Sarah Crespi about a moratorium on prion research after the fatal brain disease infected two lab workers in France, killing one.

Next, Abhay Goyal, a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University, talks with intern Claire Hogan about his Science Advances paper on figuring out how to reduce the massive carbon footprint of cement by looking at its molecular structure.

Finally, in a sponsored segment from the Science/AAAS Custom Publishing Office, Sean Sanders interviews Ansuman Satpathy, assistant professor in the department of pathology at Stanford University School of Medicine and 2018 winner of the Michelson Prize for Human Immunology and Vaccine Research, about the importance of supporting early-career research and diversity in science, technology, engineering, and math. This segment is sponsored by Michelson Philanthropies.

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

Listen to previous podcasts.

About the Science Podcast

Download a transcript (PDF).

[Image: Marquette LaForest/Flickr; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

Authors: Sarah Crespi; Martin Enserink

 

 
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A freeze on prion research, and watching cement dry

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]Researchers are testing HIV drugs and monoclonal antibodies against long-lasting COVID-19, and what it takes to turn a symbiotic friend into an organelle
 
First up on the show this week, clinical trials of new and old treatments for Long Covid. Producer Meagan Cantwell is joined by Staff Writer Jennifer Couzin-Frankel and some of her sources to discuss the difficulties of studying and treating this debilitating disease.
 
People in this segment:
·      Michael Peluso
·      Sara Cherry
·      Shelley Hayden
 
Next: Move over mitochondria, a new organelle called the nitroplast is here. Host Sarah Crespi talks with Tyler Coale, a postdoctoral scholar in the University of California, Santa Cruz’s Ocean Sciences Department, about what exactly makes an organelle an organelle and why it would be nice to have inhouse nitrogen fixing in your cells.
 
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
 
About the Science Podcast
 
Authors: Sarah Crespi; Meagan Cantwell; Jennifer Couzin-Frankel
 
Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.zof5fvk
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Trialing treatments for Long Covid, and a new organelle appears on the scene

Tracing the arrival of rats using bones, isotopes, and a few shipwrecks; and what scientists have learned in 50 years about our famous ancestor Lucy
 
First on the show: Did rats come over with Christopher Columbus? It turns out, European colonists weren’t alone on their ships when they came to the Americas—they also brought black and brown rats to uninfested shores. Eric Guiry, a researcher in the Trent Environmental Archaeology Lab at Trent University, joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss how tiny slices of bone from early colony sites and sunken shipwrecks can tell us when these pesky rodents arrived.
 
Next, producer Meagan Cantwell talks with Contributing Correspondent Ann Gibbons about what has happened in the 50 years since anthropologists found Lucy—a likely human ancestor that lived 2.9 million to 3.3 million years ago. Although still likely part of our family tree, her place as a direct ancestor is in question. And over the years, her past has become less lonesome as it has become populated with other contemporaneous hominins.
 
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
 
About the Science Podcast
 
Authors: Sarah Crespi; Meagan Cantwell; Ann Gibbons
LINKS FOR MP3 META
 
Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.z4scrgk
 
About the Science Podcast: https://www.science.org/content/page/about-science-podcast
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When did rats come to the Americas, and was Lucy really our direct ancestor?

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
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Teaching robots to smile, and the effects of a rare mandolin on a scientist’s career

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
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Hope in the fight against deadly prion diseases, and side effects of organic agriculture

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
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A freeze on prion research, and watching cement dry

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