The Webb Space Telescope’s first images, and why scratching sometimes makes you itchy

On this week’s show: The first images from the James Webb Space Telescope hint at the science to come, and disentangling the itch-scratch cycle

After years of delays, the James Webb Space Telescope launched at the end of December 2021. Now, NASA has released a few of the first full-color images captured by the instrument’s enormous mirror. Staff Writer Daniel Clery joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss these first images and what they mean for the future of science from Webb.

Next on the podcast, Jing Feng, principal investigator at the Center for Neurological and Psychiatric Research and Drug Discovery at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’s Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, discusses his Science Translational Medicine paper on why scratching sometimes triggers itching. It turns out, in cases of chronic itch there can be a miswiring in the skin. Cells that normally detect light touch instead connect with nerve fibers that convey a sensation of itchiness. This miswiring means light touches (such as scratching) are felt as itchiness—contributing to a vicious itch-scratch cycle.

Also this week, in a sponsored segment from Science and the AAAS Custom Publishing Office, Sean Sanders, director and senior editor for the Custom Publishing Office, interviews Paul Bastard, chief resident in the department of pediatrics at the Necker Hospital for Sick Children in Paris and a researcher at the Imagine Institute in Paris and Rockefeller University. They talk about his work to shed light on susceptibility to COVID-19, which recently won him the Michelson Philanthropies & Science Prize for Immunology. This segment is sponsored by Michelson Philanthropies.

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

[Image: NASA; ESA; CSA; STSCI; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

[alt: James Webb Space Telescope image of image of galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 with podcast symbol overlay]

Authors: Sarah Crespi; Daniel Clery

Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.add9123

About the Science Podcast: https://www.science.org/content/page/about-science-podcast

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