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
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Fecal transplants in pill form, and gut bacteria that nourish hibernating squirrels
A window into live brains, and what saliva tells babies about human relationships
Cloning for conservation, and divining dynamos on super-Earths
Setting up a permafrost observatory, and regulating transmissible vaccines
Top online stories, the state of marijuana research, and Afrofuturism
The Breakthrough of the year show, and the best of science books
Tapping fiber optic cables for science, and what really happens when oil meets water
The ethics of small COVID-19 trials, and visiting an erupting volcano
Why trees are making extra nuts this year, human genetics and viral infections, and a seminal book on racism and identity
Wildfires could threaten ozone layer, and vaccinating against tick bites
The long road to launching the James Webb Space Telescope, and genes for a longer life span
The folate debate, and rewriting the radiocarbon curve
Sleeping without a brain, tracking alien invasions, and algorithms of oppression
Soil science goes deep, and making moldable wood
The ripple effects of mass incarceration, and how much is a dog’s nose really worth?
Swarms of satellites could crowd out the stars, and the evolution of hepatitis B over 10 millennia
Whole-genome screening for newborns, and the importance of active learning for STEM
Earliest human footprints in North America, dating violins with tree rings, and the social life of DNA
Potty training cows, and sardines swimming into an ecological trap
Legions of lunar landers, and why we make robots that look like people
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
DNA Today: A Genetics Podcast
Museum of the Missing
Strange by Nature Podcast
Sasquatch Chronicles
Hidden Brain