Why anteaters keep evolving, and how giant whales get enough food to live
First up on the podcast, Online News Editor David Grimm brings stories on peacock feathers’ ability to emit laser light, how anteaters have evolved at least 12 times, and why we should be thanking ketchup for our French fries.
Next on the show, rorqual whales, such as the massive blue whale, use a lunging strategy to fill their monster maws with seawater and prey, then filter out the tasty parts with baleen sieves. Lunging for food when you weigh 100 tons seems like it would be an energetically expensive way to meet your dietary needs. But as Ashley Blawas, a postdoctoral researcher at the Hopkins Marine Station at Stanford University, describes in Science Advances this week, lunge-feeding whales have a few tricks up their sieves and use much less energy than predicted.
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
About the Science Podcast
Authors: Sarah Crespi; David Grimm
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28:08
Wartime science in Ukraine, what Neanderthals really ate, and visiting the city of the dead
First up on the podcast, Contributing Correspondent Richard Stone joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about the toll of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine and how researchers have been mobilized to help the war effort. In June, Stone visited the basement labs where Ukrainian students modify off-the-shelf drones for war fighting and the facilities where biomedical researchers develop implants and bandages for wounded soldiers.
Next on the show, the isotopic ratios in our teeth and bones record the chemistry of what we eat. When anthropologists recently applied this technique to Neanderthals, they were surprised to find that when it comes to eating meat, our hominin cousins appeared to be on par with lions. Melanie Beasley, assistant professor of anthropology at Purdue University, has an explanation for why Neanderthals chemically look like hypercarnivores: They were just eating a lot of maggots. She talks about how she tested this idea by studying maggots that were fed putrefying human flesh.
Last up on this episode, a new installment of our series of books on death and science. This month’s books host Angela Saini talks with Ravi Nandan Singh, a sociologist at Shiv Nadar University, about his book Dead in Banaras: An Ethnography of Funeral Travelling.
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
About the Science Podcast
Authors: Sarah Crespi; Angela Saini; Rich Stone
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51:33
Robots that eat other robots, and an ancient hot spot of early human relatives
First up on the podcast, South Africa’s Cradle of Humankind is home to the world’s greatest concentration of ancestral human remains, including our own genus, Homo, Australopithecus, and a more robust hominin called Paranthropus. Proving they were there at the same time is challenging, but new fossil evidence seems to point to coexistence. Producer Kevin McLean discusses what a multihominin landscape might have looked like with Contributing Correspondent Ann Gibbons.
Next on the show, should robots grow and adapt like babies? Host Sarah Crespi talks with roboticist Philippe Wyder about a platform for
exploring this idea. In his Science Advances paper, Wyder and his team demonstrate how simple stick-shaped robots with magnets at either end can join up for more complicated tasks and shed parts to adapt to new ones.
Philippe Wyder was at Columbia University and the University of Washington when he completed this work, and he has now moved on to a company called Distyl AI.
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
About the Science Podcast
Authors: Sarah Crespi; Kevin McLean; Ann Gibbons
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34:45
Studying a shark-haunted island, and upgrading our microbiomes with engineered bacteria
First up on the podcast, Réunion Island had a shark attack crisis in
2011 and closed its beaches for more than a decade. Former News Intern Alexa Robles-Gil joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about how researchers have used that time to study the island’s shark populations and test techniques for preventing attacks, in the hopes of protecting lives and reopening the island’s shores.
Next on the show, engineering gut microbes to break
down the precursors of kidney stones. Weston Whitaker, a research scientist at Stanford University, joins the podcast to discuss how he and his team created a stable niche for these useful microbes in the human gut and overcame some of the challenges of controlling them once inside.
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
About the Science Podcast
Authors: Sarah Crespi; Alexa Robles-Gil
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A tardi party for the ScienceAdviser newsletter, and sled dog genomes
First up on the podcast, Newsletter Editor Christie Wilcox joins host Sarah Crespi to celebrate the 2-year anniversary of ScienceAdviser with many stories about the amazing water bear. They also discuss links between climate change, melting glaciers, and earthquakes in the Alps, as well as what is probably the first edible laser.
Next on the show, freelance producer Elah Feder talks with Tatiana Feuerborn, a postdoctoral fellow in the cancer genetics and comparative genomics branch of the National Institutes of Health, about the evolutionary history of the Greenland sled dog. Her team’s work sequencing 98 genomes from modern and ancient sled dogs reveals the canine’s current diversity and suggests approaches for conservation.
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
About the Science Podcast
Authors: Sarah Crespi; Elah Feder; Christie
Wilcox
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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