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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The historic Maya’s sophisticated stargazing knowledge, and whether there is a cost to natural cloning
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Seeing the Milky Way’s central black hole, and calling dolphins by their names
Fixing fat bubbles for vaccines, and preventing pain from turning chronic
Staking out the start of the Anthropocene, and why sunscreen is bad for coral
Using quantum tools to track dark matter, why rabies remains, and a book series on science and food
Protecting birds from brightly lit buildings, and controlling robots from orbit
Desert ‘skins’ drying up, and one of the oldest Maya calendars
A surprisingly weighty fundamental particle, and surveying the seas for RNA viruses
Probing Earth’s mysterious inner core, and the most complete human genome to date
Scientists become targets on social media, and battling space weather
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Monitoring wastewater for SARS-CoV-2, and looking back at the biggest questions about the pandemic
A global treaty on plastic pollution, and a dearth of Black physicists
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COVID-19’s long-term impact on the heart, and calculating the survival rate of human artifacts
Merging supermassive black holes, and communicating science in the age of social media
Building a green city in a biodiversity hot spot, and live monitoring vehicle emissions
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