Science Magazine Podcast

The Normals | Episode 1

How do we know what's normal in a person? In the early 1950s, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) set out to do something unprecedented. It wanted to start studying normal humans on a grand scale. It had pretty much everything in place: It had the building, it had recruited all of these amazing researchers—it was the healthy human bodies NIH didn't have. How do we know what’s normal in a person? In the early 1950s, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) set out to do something unprecedented. It wanted to start to study normal humans on a grand scale. It had pretty much everything in place: It had the building, it had recruited all of these amazing researchers—it was the healthy human bodies NIH didn’t have. When the healthy subjects arrived, experimenters tested LSD, sleep devrivation, rice-only diets, and more risky intervetions on them. Where it found those volunteers and what happened next is the story of The Normals.  Starting on 7 April, the Science Podcast will be releasing a new three-part limited series called The Normals. We'll hear from some of the original “Normals,” follow the program through the decades, and see what's happening with healthy human subject research today. All Normals episodes [http://science.org/normals] Appearing in this episode: * Laura Stark [https://as.vanderbilt.edu/history/bio/laura-stark/], history professor at the Center for Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University * Dale Horst, former Normal patient * Shirley Burry Geissinger, former Normal patient * Sarah Crespi, Science Podcast senior host and producer Additional resources: The Normals: A People’s History of Modern America in Five Human Experiments [https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/N/bo279251899.html] by Laura Stark   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices [https://megaphone.fm/adchoices]

Resolving the dispute over the speed of the expanding universe, and seeking new drug targets for cognitive dysfunction

First up on the podcast, a new path to calculating the Hubble constant. This value for the universe’s speed of expansion is typically determined in one of two ways, one favored by cosmologists, the other by astronomers. But the resulting values from these methods are consistently different. Staff Writer Daniel Clery joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss how reappearing bursts from deep space, lensed by gravity, could resolve the dispute over the speed of the expanding universe [/doi/10.1126/science.z8h9yll]. Next on the show, freelance producer Elah Feder [https://www.clippings.me/users/elah] talks with Mauro Costa-Mattioli [https://costamattiolilab.org/], principal investigator at Altos Labs’ Institutes of Science, about tuning the “integrated stress response” (ISR) in mouse brains. The ISR pathway turns off much of protein synthesis in cells as a response to stressors such as viral infections or oxygen deprivation. The ISR is overactive in some models of cognitive dysfunction—suggesting the downregulated protein synthesis may hamper brain functions such as memory formation. In his paper, Costa-Mattioli and colleagues show turning on the ISR pathway causes memory problems in mice and turning off the ISR can restore function in mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease and Down syndrome. Although this research was in mice, it suggests cognitive dysfunction associated with many different disorders may involve the ISR [/doi/10.1126/science.aea8782]—making it a good therapeutic target. This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy [https://podigy.co/]. About the [/content/page/about-science-podcast]Science [/content/page/about-science-podcast] Podcast [/content/page/about-science-podcast] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices [https://megaphone.fm/adchoices]

Resurrection plants, Project Hail Mary, and the trouble with sycophantic AI

First up on the podcast, Deputy News Editor Martin Enserink talks about so-called resurrection plants. These specialized plants can survive up to 95% water loss, whereas most plants struggle when their water levels dip below 60%. We also hear from Jill Farrant [https://science.uct.ac.za/department-mcb/jill-farrant-plant-stress-lab], a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of Cape Town, about her work dissecting the desiccation survival pathways in resurrection plants [/doi/10.1126/science.znozssc] and how they might be repurposed to protect crop plants from drought. Next on the show, we’ve all heard of chatbots praising their users for asking the most basic of questions. This bias toward sycophancy extends beyond pleasantries into relationship advice the artificial intelligence (AI) doles out to users. Myra Cheng [https://myracheng.github.io/], a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at Stanford University, joins the show to talk about how this tendency for AIs to be agreeable can lead users to have more confidence in their opinions [/doi/10.1126/science.aec8352], to the detriment of their relationships with others. Warning, this last segment contains spoilers for the movie and book Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. If you’ve seen the movie or don’t mind a bit of extra context, you will hear an analysis of planetary science in the film with astrophysicist and associate curator at the American Museum of Natural History, Jacqueline Faherty [https://www.jackiefaherty.com/]. Read the full film review [/doi/10.1126/science.aeg6276]. This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy [https://podigy.co/]. About the [/content/page/about-science-podcast]Science [/content/page/about-science-podcast] Podcast [/content/page/about-science-podcast] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices [https://megaphone.fm/adchoices]

Rethinking the peopling of the Americas, and the best ways to get groundwater back

First up on the podcast, we discuss a finding that’s likely to reignite debate over how humans first spread through the Americas [https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.zlrsdxr]. In the late 1990s, a site in southern Chile called Monte Verde forced archaeologists to adjust their views of the peopling of South America because it dated to about 14,500 years before present, which challenged the prevailing idea of when human inhabitants appeared on the continent. Contributing Correspondent Lizzie Wade joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss new results published in Science that suggest Monte Verde is nowhere near that old. See the paper [/doi/10.1126/science.adw9217] and related commentary [/doi/10.1126/science.aef9954]. Next on the show, we talk about groundwater, a vital source of water for both drinking and agriculture that’s often overused and depleted. Producer Meagan Cantwell talks with Scott Jasechko [https://www.jasechko.com/bio.html], a professor of water resources with the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, about the many different approaches to improving groundwater supplies [/doi/10.1126/science.adu1370] and what has worked where, which he reviews in this week’s issue of Science. This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy [https://podigy.co/]. About the [/content/page/about-science-podcast]Science [/content/page/about-science-podcast] Podcast [/content/page/about-science-podcast] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices [https://megaphone.fm/adchoices]

What Alaska’s eroding coastline says about Earth’s future, and how Yellowstone ravens use their smarts to find wolf kills

First up on the podcast, freelance journalist Evan Howell [https://www.evanhowellwriter.com/] traveled to Cape Blossom, Alaska, where the receding coastline has revealed an ancient trove of glacial ice [/doi/10.1126/science.zzzjl41] that may have survived for 350,000 years—making it the oldest ice in the Northern Hemisphere. Now researchers just need to figure out how to date it. Next on the show, tracking wolves and ravens in Yellowstone National Park shows the birds don’t follow the wolves in hope of a meal, but instead remember and revisit frequent wolf kill sites [/doi/10.1126/science.adz9467]. Matthias-Claudio Loretto [https://www.vetmeduni.ac.at/fiwi-forschungsinstitut-fuer-wildtierkunde-und-oekologie/ueber-uns/unser-team/wissenschaftlerinnen/loretto-matthias-claudio], assistant professor in the Research Institute of Wildlife Ecology at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, discusses how this might change the way we think about scavengers’ strategies for finding their ephemeral food sources.  Finally, Claire Bedbrook [https://lsi.princeton.edu/people/claire-bedbrook], the Helen Hay Whitney and Wu Tsai neuroscience postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, discusses her work tracking African turquoise killifish over their life span. By capturing behaviors over the course of the fish’s entire lives [/doi/10.1126/science.aea9795], her team was able to observe behaviors that could be used to predict whether a fish would live a short or long life. This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy [https://podigy.co/].  About the [/content/page/about-science-podcast]Science [/content/page/about-science-podcast] Podcast [/content/page/about-science-podcast] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices [https://megaphone.fm/adchoices]