To prepare for the moment his telescope landed on the moon, Brian read sports psychology books. "You're not going to read Kepler or Isaac Newton [to learn] about how to deal with high pressure situations," he said. It turned out he didn't actually need much help.

Brian Walsh is a space physicist and professor at Boston University, and he and his team created a telescope that landed on the moon last year. The telescope LEXI hitched a ride on a spacecraft built by Firefly Aerospace, and studied the interaction between the solar wind and Earth's magnetic field.

Solar wind and geomagnetic storms can meddle with, or even harm, human-made technologies like satellites, GPS, and the electrical grid; now, Brian wants to protect Earth from these space phenomena. His new research suggests that putting mass into certain regions of space could divert geomagnetic storms away from Earth. (Here's a preprint of his work.)

Brian is on Bluesky and his research center is on Instagram.

Sarah Kugel grew up smashing pokeweed berries to make her own paint and assembling intricate habitats for garter snakes. She was a kid who loved nature, and, when she went to college, she majored in resource ecology.

But Sarah always had an interest in business as well, and now she combines the two as the director of a nature center in Massachusetts. She considers the organization its own ecosystem, and works to serve the community while also ensuring the center has the resources it needs to function.

The South Shore YMCA Nature Center: https://ssymcanaturecenter.org/

I'm thankful for all of you, and for the scientists who make this podcast possible! I hope you have a relaxing and peaceful Thanksgiving.

If you'd like to email us with comments or suggestions, we'd love to hear them at  [email protected] .

Find us on the Socializing with Scientists website, or follow us on Instagram or Bluesky.

Thanks for listening!

Brad grew up in small town Illinois, playing outside all summer, building go-karts and tree houses in the woods. He went to the University of Illinois to study engineering and Carnegie Mellon for robotics. Later, he shrunk his focus: he began building tiny robots the size of a grain of sand.

Now, Brad Nelson, PhD, is a Professor of Robotics and Intelligent Systems at ETH Zurich. He just published research in which he and his team navigated tiny robots  to a precise spot in a large animal, where the robot released a drug. The idea is to send these drug delivery vehicles to a blood clot or a tumor, precisely targeting disease without the harmful side effects that happen when drugs course through the entire body. He hopes his microrobots will be able to deliver payloads of medicine to people within the next three years.

Melissa was born into a family of scientists, but she always wanted to be a historian. As she grew up, however, she realized that science allowed her to satisfy her infinite curiosity and desire for discovery, and so she "went into the family business."

Melissa Harrison, PhD, is now a molecular biologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and she studies how human cells turn particular genes on and off,  developing from a single cell into a full-grown person. She uses the fruit fly as an easy, inexpensive model. Her latest research with UW colleague Peter Lewis, PhD, uncovered a protein that plays a role in a pediatric cancer called diffuse midline glioma. No one knows what this new knowledge will bring as researchers continue to study the protein, but, as Melissa says, "biotech companies can’t invest in this sort of foundational research….and so it really falls on the academic institutions to do that sort of foundation-building knowledge.” 

Her passion for knowledge combined with her resilience has helped her prevail when the science is difficult: "You know, you have to be a fighter in some ways, right? I'm really stubborn and I think that helps in science a little bit."

Case was a regular California kid: he skateboarded, he surfed, and he also liked math. He tried a few different majors in college, but finally found his calling: environmental engineering. He went to graduate school, and a lucky encounter during the first week changed his whole life.

Case van Genuchten, PhD, now works for the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS) and just published research showing that arsenic from drinking water waste can be changed into a valuable commodity. He has studied how to remove arsenic from drinking water for years, but now, in this new paper in Science Advances, he has figured out how to turn arsenic waste into metallic arsenic, a raw material important for digital infrastructure and clean energy systems. Decrees in the EU and US over the past few years have declared metallic arsenic a Critical Raw Material, making his research even more important.

To see a beautiful video on Case's work, check out "King of Poison," from the Underground Channel.

Ever since she was a little girl, Cassia has loved playing the piano. Her mother made sure she had music lessons, and Cassia felt like she was fulfilling her mother's dream learning the instrument. 

But she also loved science and math, and after her undergrad years she found herself searching for a research field and a graduate program that inspired her. She happened to read a few studies linking neuroscience with music, and was hooked.

Now, Cassia Low Manting, PhD, is a neuroscientist at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, studying how the brain pays attention to music, and if it differs depending on whether the person has received musical training. Her new research paper was just published in Science Advances.

Charlie grew up in England, surrounded by books. At age 11, she declared that she wanted to be a research scientist. When she was a teenager, however, she started gravitating towards helping people more directly and went to medical school at age 18. After graduating, though, she realized her heart wasn't in medicine, and a remembered lecture from years earlier on post-stroke brain recovery inspired her to follow her childhood dream of doing research. 

Charlotte Stagg, MBChB, PhD is now a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford. She studies motor function in humans, and was part of a team that created a helmet that sends ultrasound pulses into very specific parts of the brain. She plans to study whether the helmet can non-invasively treat people with neurological, and even psychiatric, disorders. 

Bradley grew up in suburban Australia, fascinated by the scientists in movies like Jurassic Park. He also eagerly read biographies and memoirs, and his love of animals and people soon grew into a successful career as a comparative psychologist.

Bradley Smith, PhD, now teaches and researches at Central Queensland University in Australia, spending much of his time thinking, learning, and talking about dingoes. Dingoes are controversial creatures in Australia. Bradley explains why this is, how dingoes feature in aboriginal culture, where they came from, and why it all matters to the government. 

He also talks extensively about the world-wide phenomenon of the Australian kids' TV show, Bluey. Bradley just wrote a scientific paper with a student in which they study how the show builds resilience in children who watch its 150 episodes. 

As a child, Samuel enjoyed eating "potato smileys" and "turkey dinosaurs," even though most of his meals were homemade. As he grew up, he played sports and became interested in optimizing his nutrition to improve performance. But his first day on the job at a sports nutrition company convinced him to apply to graduate school to study nutrition, not sell it. 

Now, Samuel Dicken, PhD, is a research fellow at University College London, studying the foods people eat and how they affect their health and weight. In a new study published in Nature Medicine, he gave 55 people either an ultraprocessed or a minimally processed diet and watched how their bodies reacted. The results could someday change dietary guidelines.

Find Samuel on LinkedIn, X, or Instagram.