Follow the Science

What’s the world’s oldest surviving building? Language? Useful technology? The oldest living organism? The oldest species of living organism? The oldest rock on the planet and the oldest star in the cosmos? How do scientists measure the ages of ancient things?

In this podcast series, “The Oldest Everything”, I’ll go in search of the oldest things in the world, and along the way I’ll explore the physics of time’s passage, which is tied up with the concept of entropy, itself intertwined with the process of aging. I’ll explore the notion of endurance and what parts of our present world will be left standing in the far future.

In this pilot episode, I’ll be turning my attention to the universe – which is getting a lot of attention lately for amazing new discoveries, most recently that the whole cosmos is rippling with gravitational waves.

Those waves may be the weirdest thing in the universe, but what’s the very oldest thing in the universe? Is it something all around us, or something many light years away?

I’ll be hearing from four science superstars – Richard Gott, Sabine Hossenfelder, Hakeem Oluseye, and Nobel Laureate James Peebles.

Writer, Host, Producer: Faye Flam

Editor: Seth Gliksman

Music:

"Through The Wormhole" by Dilating Times is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY).

"Jam No. 1" by Dilating Times is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY).

Some scientists think long Covid is caused by lingering inflammation. Others think the virus might hide out in the body. Two years into the pandemic, scientists are scrambling to understand long Covid and find treatments. 

Bruce Levy is chief of the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He now heads the Recovery Center, which was set up to treat and study long Covid.

We talk about risk factors for long Covid, the most common lingering symptoms, the different theories for its cause, the hunt for treatments and how the threat of long covid should shape people’s risk calculations. 

“Follow the Science" is produced, written, and hosted by Faye Flam. Today’s episode was edited by Seth Gliksman with music by Kyle Imperatore. If you’d like to hear more "Follow the Science," please like, follow, and subscribe!

I think this February 2021 episode is more relevant than ever today. It explores the subjective, politicized way that some ideas get labelled as misinformation and why it’s so important for experts to explain why something is likely to be wrong rather than dismissing it out of hand - and why censorship can cause more harm than good.

Original Description:

Misinformation about the pandemic is flooding over social media and traditional news media as well. But it’s not obvious what constitutes misinformation when the we’re grappling with a new virus and the state of science changes weekly. I’ll be talking to physician and medical educator Roger Seheult about getting censored by YouTube, and about the way politics has shaped people’s perception of such seemingly neutral topics as drugs, vitamin D and vaccines.

Immunologist Florian Krammer will talk about how the pandemic has changed the way people consumer and create science news, so that legitimate scientific papers can be misinterpreted to create misinformation.

“Follow the Science" is produced, written, and hosted by Faye Flam. Today’s episode was edited by Seth Gliksman with music by Kyle Imperatore. If you’d like to hear more "Follow the Science," please like, follow, and subscribe!

Some people still have symptoms from a Covid-19 infection picked up in 2020 and are wondering if there’s any relief in sight. Many suffer months of debilitating fatigue and neurological problems, and Covid-19 can increase risk for heart disease. Scientists are scrambling to understand why, and how to prevent or treat what’s come to be called "long Covid". 

Ziyad Al-Aly has been a leader in research on long Covid. We talk about the symptoms he’s seeing in his patients,  leading ideas for what’s causing long Covid, how infection affects the brain, the challenge of estimating the frequency of long Covid, and why he thinks a “Long Covid moonshot” is warranted. 

Dr. Al-Aly is Chief of Research and Development at the VA Saint Louis Health Care System.

“Follow the Science" is produced, written, and hosted by Faye Flam. Today’s episode was edited by Seth Gliksman with music by Kyle Imperatore. If you’d like to hear more "Follow the Science," please like, follow, and subscribe!

Covid-19 has some weird long-term effects, including prolonged inability to taste or smell, and various neurological symptoms – difficulty concentrating, memory loss and crushing fatigue. Alzheimer’s Disease is also connected to changes in smell and ability to remember smells. My guest, neurologist Mark Albers of Massachusetts General Hospital will help explain what all this means. 

We talk about how to interpret a brain scanning study showing brain “shrinkage” in people who’d had Covid; How inflammation in the brain might have something to do with changes in smell and long Covid; How he’s devised a smell test that picks up risk of early Alzheimer’s Disease, and whether there’s any reason to be concerned that Covid-19 will increase the risk for dementia.  

“Follow the Science" is produced, written, and hosted by Faye Flam. Today’s episode was edited by Seth Gliksman with music by Kyle Imperatore. If you’d like to hear more "Follow the Science," please like, follow, and subscribe!

In the 1950s, 100 million rabbits were overrunning Australia – an invasive species crisis that led people to unleash germ warfare – infecting them with a deadly virus called myxomatosis. It was devastating – 99.9% of the rabbits across the continent died, according to Penn State University biologist Andrew Read.  But the survivors rebounded, and over the subsequent decades the virus became less virulent, and then deadlier, and the rabbits evolved resistance. I talk to Dr. Read about that episode, what scientists learned from it, and how those lessons might apply to understanding the evolution of SARS-CoV-2.

“Follow the Science" is produced, written, and hosted by Faye Flam. Today’s episode was edited by Seth Gliksman with music by Kyle Imperatore. If you’d like to hear more "Follow the Science," please like, follow, and subscribe!

We seem to be in Covid intermission now, with low cases but lots of warnings that the disease will stage a comeback, probably in some new mutated form. It’s a time to reflect back on the last two years, and consider the many misleading predictions and projections, including the notion that the pandemic would go away if enough people wore a mask. 

In this episode I’ll talk with epidemiologist Michael Osterholm, who heads the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. He’s worried about a next wave, and even more worried that public health squandered our trust with overconfident predictions about untested non-pharmaceutical interventions. We talk about mask policies, evolution of the virus, and why he’s still mystified by the steep rise and fall of pandemic waves. 

“Follow the Science" is produced, written, and hosted by Faye Flam. Today’s episode was edited by Seth Gliksman with music by Kyle Imperatore. If you’d like to hear more "Follow the Science," please like, follow, and subscribe!

Science can tell us something about the risks of Covid-19 but it can’t tell us how much risk to accept, or how much to sacrifice in the name of mitigation. Too often politicians used the phrase “Follow the Science” to silence much-needed public debate and create the illusion that science allowed no other alternatives to the policies they wanted to impose.

Rutgers University law professor Jacob Hale Russell has studied populism and the public’s attitude toward expertise. He questions the stereotype of populists as those who dislike knowledge and hate science. Instead, their grievances are against use of science to deflect legitimate concerns and questions. We talk about how our policies – especially universal making - came about and why follow the science may be a problematic policy slogan but it’s still a pretty good name for a podcast.

“Follow the Science" is produced, written, and hosted by Faye Flam. Today’s episode was edited by Seth Gliksman with music by Kyle Imperatore. If you’d like to hear more "Follow the Science," please like, follow, and subscribe!

There’s a lot of anxiety this week as the public, politicians and even some scientists are moving on from restrictions and mask-wearing that defined the last two years. And yet, SARS-CoV-2 is very much still with us, a sub-variant called BA.2 is still posing a threat, and new variants are likely to emerge. And there’s evidence that protection from our booster shots could wane. Immunologist Dan Barouch of Harvard and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center will talk about all these threats, address scientists’ new appreciation for “natural immunity” and explain how he and other scientists will continue to fight the pandemic in months to come. 

“Follow the Science" is produced, written, and hosted by Faye Flam. Today’s episode was edited by Seth Gliksman with music by Kyle Imperatore. If you’d like to hear more "Follow the Science," please like, follow, and subscribe!

In this episode I set off on a quest to find the oldest endemic human virus–the one that’s been riding along with our species the longest.  The answer is harder to get than I’d anticipated, but along the way I learn about some ancient viruses, and how viruses shape our evolution as they evolve themselves. 

I’ll also discuss where the omicron variant came from – including the possibility it jumped to another animal and back to humans. And I’ll get up to date on the latest worrisome variant – a sister of omicron called BA.2

Erin Bromage is a biologist and infectious disease expert at the UMass, Dartmouth

Bill Hanage is an epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health

David Sanders is a virologist at Purdue University 

Sarah Otto is an evolutionary biologist at the University of British Columbia

“Follow the Science" is produced, written, and hosted by Faye Flam. Today’s episode was edited by Seth Gliksman with music by Kyle Imperatore. If you’d like to hear more "Follow the Science," please like, follow, and subscribe!