PLOScast

In this month’s episode of the PLoS Biology Podcast, PLoS Biology Editor Megan Hall interviews Gerald Joyce, who is Professor of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, CA.

In the latest issue of PLoS Biology, Dr. Joyce has published an article entitled “Bit by Bit: The Darwinian Basis of Life”, where he discusses our search for new forms of life, and how we would know whether a new life form is truly alien or not. (http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001323)

In this podcast, we’ll discuss these topics with Dr. Joyce, and learn more about the probability of finding new life forms. We’ll also discuss the definition of life at the molecular level, and whether the emerging field of synthetic biology can actually lead to new definitions of life.

In this months episode of the PLoS Biology Podcast, PLoS Biology Editor Ruchir Shah interviews Sylvia Cremer, who is an evolutionary biologist at the Institute of Science and Technology in Austria. Her research team has published a new paper in PLoS Biology called “Social Transfer of Pathogenic Fungus promotes Active Immunization in Ant Colonies”. (http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001300)

Sylvia has been interested in how social behaviors of insects can actually help provide immunity against various diseases, in a process called social immunization. In this podcast, we'll hear about how they were able to study this process in ant colonies, and what evolutionary advantages this behavior might have. We'll also hear some interesting stories about “group-level immunity” in other insect colonies, like leaf-cutter ants and bumblebees.

In this edition of the PLoS Podcast, PLoS Biology Editor Ruchir Shah interviews Brian Pasley and Robert (Bob) Knight from UC Berkeley. Brian is a postdoc in Bob's lab, and Bob is the Director of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Center at Berkeley. Along with their collaborators at UCSF, their research team has published a new article in PLoS Biology called “Reconstructing speech from human auditory cortex”. (http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001251)

Essentially, they were able to decode activity in the human auditory system in order to guess the words that people were actually listening to. This technique, called “stimulus reconstruction”, has received a lot of media attention, particularly due to sensational claims of mind-reading. But in reality, there are some important practical applications of this type of research for neural prosthetics. For patients that can't speak, for example, being able to reconstruct words that they imagine would allow them to communicate through a new interface.

In this podcast, Brian and Bob discuss how they were able to reconstruct words using activity in a specific region of the human brain called the superior temporal gyrus, or STG. They then discuss the implications for neural prosthetics, and also the potential ethical implications for “mind-reading”.

Welcome to the PLoS Biology Podcast! For the first episode, PLoS Biology Editor Ruchir Shah interviews VS Ramachandran, who is the Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California San Diego. Dr. Ramachandran has written a number of books, including “Phantoms in the Brain” and “The Tell-Tale Brain”, about many of the neurological conditions his lab has been studying, which includes phantom limbs and synesthesia. Along with his graduate student David Brang, Dr. Ramachandran has written a new article for PLoS Biology called “Survival of the Synesthesia Gene: Why do people hear colors and taste words” (http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001205). In this podcast, Dr. Ramachandran and David Brang discuss the neural basis of multiple types of synesthesia, some other (rather bizarre) neurological conditions, and they even have time to discuss continental drift and the history of science.