On this week’s show: A special issue on grass, and revealing hot spots of ant diversity

This week’s special issue on grasses mainly focuses on the importance of these plants in climate change, in ecosystems, on land, and in the water. But for the podcast, Contributing Correspondent Warren Cornwall joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about their dark side: invasive grasses that feed fires and transform ecosystems.

Also this week on the show, Evan Economo, a professor in the biodiversity and biocomplexity unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, joins Sarah to discuss his Science Advances paper on creating a worldwide map of ant diversity. Such maps help us better understand where vertebrate and invertebrate diversity do and don’t overlap and what this means for conservation. If you want to explore the data, you can see them at antmaps.org. 

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

[Image: NTPFES; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

[alt: grassland fire in Northern Australia with podcast symbol overlay]

Authors: Sarah Crespi; Warren Cornwall  

Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ade2512

About the Science Podcast: https://www.science.org/content/page/about-science-podcast 
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Invasive grasses get help from fire, and a global map of ant diversity

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A different source of global warming, signs of a continentwide tradition of human sacrifice, and a virus that attacks the cholera bacteria
 
First up on the show this week, clearer skies might be accelerating global warming. Staff Writer Paul Voosen joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss how as air pollution is cleaned up, climate models need to consider the decrease in the planet’s reflectivity. Less reflectivity means Earth is absorbing more energy from the Sun and increased temps.
 
Also from the news team this week, we hear about how bones from across Europe suggest recurring Stone Age ritual killings. Contributing Correspondent Andrew Curry talks about how a method of murder used by the Italian Mafia today may have been used in sacrifices by early farmers, from Poland to the Iberian Peninsula.
 
Finally, Eric Nelson, an associate professor at the University of Florida’s Emerging Pathogens Institute, joins Sarah to talk about an infectious bacteria that’s fighting on two fronts. The bacterium that causes cholera—Vibrio cholerae—can be killed off with antibiotics but at the same time, it is hunted by a phage virus living inside the human gut. In a paper published in Science, Nelson and colleagues describe how we should think about phage as predator and bacteria as prey, in the savanna of our intestines. The ratio of predator to prey turns out to be important for the course of cholera infections.
 
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
 
About the Science Podcast
 
Authors: Sarah Crespi; Paul Voosen; Andrew Curry
 
Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.zhgw74e
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Ritual murders in the neolithic, why 2023 was so hot, and virus and bacteria battle in the gut

]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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Invasive grasses get help from fire, and a global map of ant diversity

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