Science Magazine Podcast

First up on the podcast, U.S. aid helped two African countries rein in HIV. Then came President Donald Trump. Senior News Correspondent Jon Cohen talks with producer Kevin McLean about how in Lesotho and Eswatini, treatment and prevention cutbacks are hitting pregnant people, children, and teens especially hard.

This story is part of a series about the impacts of U.S. funding cuts on global health, supported by the Pulitzer Center.

Next on the show, host Sarah Crespi is joined by Robin Wordsworth, the Gordon McKay Professor in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. They discuss the challenges and potential of microbes to grow plastics, drugs, and food on the surface of Mars or other bodies in the Solar System.

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

About the Science Podcast

Authors: Sarah Crespi; Kevin McLean; Jon Cohen

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First up on the podcast, Contributing Correspondent Andrew Curry joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss a pair of Science papers on kinship and culture in Neolithic Anatolia. The researchers used ancient DNA and isotopes from 8000 to 9000 years ago to show how maternal lines were important in Çatalhöyük culture.  

●     E. Yüncü et al., Female lineages and changing kinship patterns in Neolithic Çatalhöyük, 2025

●     D. Koptekin et al., Out-of-Anatolia: Cultural and genetic interactions during the Neolithic expansion in the Aegean, 2025

Next on the show, researchers were able to make a synthetic material that changes color in the same way squids do. Georgii Bogdanov, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of California, Irvine, talks about how his lab was able to discover the subcellular arrangement of proteins in the squid cells and mimic this structure synthetically using titanium dioxide deposition.

Finally, the latest book in our series on science and death. Books host Angela Saini talks with Tamara Kneese about her book Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond and whether our families can turn us into chatbots after we die.

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

About the Science Podcast

Authors: Sarah Crespi; Andrew Curry; Angela Saini

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First up on the podcast, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is just coming online, and once fully operational, it will take a snapshot of the entire southern sky every 3 days. Producer Meagan Cantwell guides us through Staff Writer Daniel Clery’s trip to the site of the largest camera ever made for astronomy.

Next on the show, probing the impact of plastic bag regulations. Environmental economist Anna Papp joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss her work comparing litter collected by shore cleanup efforts before and after the onset of plastic bag bans.

In a sponsored segment from the Science/AAAS Custom Publishing Office, Erika Berg, senior editor of custom publishing, interviews professors Deepak Bhatt and Filip Swirski about advances in the science of heart health. This segment is sponsored by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

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

Authors: Sarah Crespi; Meagan Cantwell; Daniel Clery

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First up on the podcast, Staff Writer Erik Stokstad talks with host Sarah Crespi about how scientists are probing the world’s hottest forests to better understand how plants will cope with climate change. His story

Next on the show, “convergent” antibodies may underlie the growing number of people allergic to peanuts. Sarita Patil, co-director of the Food

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

About the Science Podcast

Authors: Sarah Crespi; Erik Stokstad

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First up on the podcast, we hear from Staff Writer Paul Voosen about the tricky problem of regional climate prediction. Although global climate change models have held up for the most part, predicting what will happen at smaller scales, such as the level of a city, is proving a stubborn challenge. Just increasing the resolution of global models requires intense computing power, so researchers and city planners are looking

Next on the show, a visit to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where researchers have found evidence that the Indigenous Menominee people cultivated maize for 600 years, even during an ice age. Madeleine McLeester, assistant professor in the department of anthropology at Dartmouth College, talks about using lidar to search among the heavily forested lands for striations that indicate corn farming and the anthropological conundrums raised by such extensive agriculture without nearby urban centers.

Finally in this episode, producer Kevin McLean quizzes host Sarah Crespi on some mysterious sounds that have appeared on the site as part of news stories. No clues here so be sure to play along.

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

About the Science Podcast

Authors: Sarah Crespi; Paul Voosen; Kevin McLean

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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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