First up on the podcast, Online News Editor Michael Greshko joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about stories set high above our heads. They discuss capturing fungal spores high in the stratosphere, the debate over signs of

Next on the show, a look into long-standing questions

Finally in this episode, the first in our book series

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

About the Science Podcast

Authors: Sarah Crespi, Angela Saini, Michael Greshko, Meagan Cantwell

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First up on the podcast, freelance journalist Zack Savitsky joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about the strange metal state. Physicists are probing the

A few years ago, researcher Nora Zannoni came on the show to talk about our oxidation fields: zones of highly reactive radicals our bodies naturally produce that surround us and interact with nearby chemicals.

Zannoni is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Atmospheric Sciences and Climate of Italy’s National Research Council. The work for the paper was done when she was a postdoc scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry.

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

About the Science Podcast

Authors: Sarah Crespi; Zack Savitsky

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First up on the podcast, freelance journalist Jonathan Moens talks with host Sarah Crespi about a forensic test called brain electrical oscillation signature (BEOS) profiling, which police in India are using along with other techniques to try to tell whether a suspect participated in a crime, despite these technologies’ extremely shaky scientific grounding.

Next on the show, scientists have recently made strides in our understanding of horses, from identifying the mutations that make horses amazing athletes to showing how climate shaped intercontinental horse migrations 50,000 years ago. Science life sciences editor Sacha Vignieri joins us to discuss new horse-related studies published in Science—and how equine research has broader implications.

Other papers mentioned in this segment:

W. Taylor et al., Science 2023

C. Gaunitz et al., Science 2018

A. Outram et al., Science 2009

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

About the Science Podcast

Authors: Sarah Crespi; Sacha Vignieri; Jonathan Moens

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First up on the podcast, producer Meagan Cantwell worked with the Science News team to review how the first 100 days of President

 Next on the show, acoustical analysis of ancient music from Greece and Rome shows different musical notation styles for different instruments. Dan Baciu, a professor at the Münster School of Architecture at the Münster University of Applied Sciences, talks with host Sarah Crespi about his analysis. 

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

About the Science Podcast

Authors: Sarah Crespi; Meagan Cantwell; David Malakoff; Jocelyn Kaiser; Rachel Bernstein

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First up on the podcast, Contributing Correspondent Andrew Curry talks with host Sarah Crespi about his visit to 17th century crypts under an old hospital in Italy. Researchers are examining tooth plaque, bone lesions, and mummified brains to learn more about the health, diet, and drug habits of Milan’s working poor 400 years ago.

Next on the show, a mechanism for driving growth in fat stores with age. Or, the source of the “dad bod” trope. Producer Zakiya Whatley talks with Qiong “Annabel” Wang, associate professor in the department of molecular and cellular endocrinology at City of Hope, about her work showing how middle-age mice gain fat via dedicated progenitor cells that actually become more active as the animals age. Similar cells are also present in people, suggesting it’s not just lack of willpower or sedentary habits that give us gains as we get older.

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

About the Science Podcast

Authors: Sarah Crespi; Zakiya Whatley; Andrew Curry

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First up on the podcast, bringing Gregor Mendel’s peas into the 21st century. Back in the 19th century Mendel, a friar and naturalist, tracked traits in peas such as flower color and shape over many generations. He used these observations to identify basic concepts about inheritance such as recessive and dominant traits. Staff Writer Erik Stokstad talks with host Sarah Crespi about the difficulty of identifying genes for these phenotypes all these years later. We also hear some other stories from the plant world, including evidence that wavy fields are more attractive to insects and a tree benefits from being struck by lightning.

Next on the show, a carnivorous caterpillar that haunts spiderwebs, camouflaged in its insect prey’s body parts. Producer Kevin McLean talks with Daniel Rubinoff, a professor in the department of plant and environmental protection sciences at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, about how such an adaptation might have evolved and the overlooked importance of insect conservation. 

Finally, we kick off our 2025 books series on the science of death and dying. Books host Angela Saini and books editor Valerie Thompson talk about the challenges of putting this year’s list together and the reads they are looking forward to.

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

About the Science Podcast

Authors: Sarah Crespi; Erik Stokstad; Kevin McLean; Valerie Thompson; Angela Saini 

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First up on the podcast, Online News Editor David Grimm joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about how an Egyptian cult that killed cats may have also tamed them.

Next on the show, we hear about when the aurorae wandered. About 41,000 years ago, Earth’s magnetic poles took an excursion. They began to move equatorward and decreased in strength to one-tenth their modern levels. Agnit Mukhopadhyay, a research affiliate at the University of Michigan, talks about how his group mapped these magnetic changes, and what it would be like if such a big change took place today.

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

About the Science Podcast

Authors: Sarah Crespi; David Grimm

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First up on the podcast, ScienceInsider Editor Jocelyn Kaiser joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss big changes in science funding and government jobs this month, including an order to cut billions in contracts, lawsuits over funding caps and grant funding cancellations, and mass firings at the National Institutes of Health.

Next on the show, taking sleep loss more seriously. Jennifer Tudor, an associate professor of biology at Saint Joseph’s University, talks about how skipping out on sleep has many metabolic consequences, from reducing protein synthesis in our brains to making our muscles less efficient at using ATP. Her new review in Science Signaling suggests that given these impacts, we should stop putting sleep last on our to-do lists.

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

About the Science Podcast

Authors: Sarah Crespi; Jocelyn Kaiser

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Geoengineering experiments face an uphill battle, and a way to combat the pregnancy complication hyperemesis gravidarum

First up on the podcast, climate engineers face tough conversations with the public when proposing plans to test new technologies. Freelance science journalist Rebekah White joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss the questions people have about these experiments and how researchers can get collaboration and buy-in for testing ideas such as changing the atmosphere to reflect more sunlight or altering the ocean to suck up more carbon dioxide.

Next on the show, hyperemesis gravidarum—severe nausea and vomiting during pregnancy—is common in many pregnant people and can have lasting maternal and infant health effects. This week, Marlena Fejzo wrote about her path from suffering hyperemesis gravidarum to finding linked genes and treatments for this debilitating complication. For her essay, Fejzo was named the first winner of the BioInnovation Institute & Science Translational Medicine Prize for Innovations in Women’s Health. Fejzo is a scientist at the Center for Genetic Epidemiology in the department of population and public health sciences at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine.

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

About the Science Podcast

Authors: Sarah Crespi; Rebekah White

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First up this week, urban wildfires raged in Los Angeles in January. Contributing Correspondent Warren Cornwall discusses how researchers have come together to study how pollution from buildings at such a large scale impacts the environment and health of the local population.

Next on the show, Mingze Chen, a graduate student in the mechanical engineering department at the University of Michigan, talks with host Sarah Crespi about the challenges of placing artificial intelligence in small robots. As you add more sensors and data, the demand for computing power and energy goes up. To reduce the power demand, Chen’s team tried a different kind of physics for collecting and processing data using a type of resistance switching memory device called a “memristor.”

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

About the Science Podcast

Authors: Sarah Crespi; Warren Cornwall

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