Robots that can smile in synchrony with people, and what ends up in the letters section
First on this week’s show, a robot that can predict your smile. Hod Lipson, a roboticist and professor at Columbia University, joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss how mirrors can help robots learn to make facial expressions and eventually improve robot nonverbal communication.
Next, we have Margaret Handley, a professor in the department of epidemiology and biostatistics and medicine at the University of California San Francisco. She shares a letter she wrote to Science about how her past, her family, and a rare instrument relate to her current career focus on public health and homelessness. Letters Editor Jennifer Sills also weighs in with the kinds of letters people write into the magazine.
Other Past as Prologue letters:
A new frontier for mi familia by Raven Delfina Otero-Symphony
A uranium miner’s daughter by Tanya J. Gallegos
Embracing questions after my father’s murder by Jacquelyn J. Cragg
A family’s pride in educated daughters by Qura Tul Ain
One person’s trash: Another’s treasured education by Xiangkun Elvis Cao
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
About the Science Podcast
Authors: Sarah Crespi; Jennifer Sills
Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.zy9w2u0
About the Science Podcast: https://www.science.org/content/page/about-science-podcast
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Compassion fatigue in those who care for lab animals, and straightening out ocean conveyor belts
Battling bias in medicine, and how dolphins use vocal fry
Shrinking MRI machines, and the smell of tsetse fly love
Earth’s hidden hydrogen, and a trip to Uranus
Using sharks to study ocean oxygen, and what ancient minerals teach us about early Earth
Visiting a mummy factory, and improving the IQ of … toilets
Wolves hunting otters, and chemical weathering in a warming world
Bad stats overturn ‘medical murders,’ and linking allergies with climate change
Peering beyond the haze of alien worlds, and how failures help us make new discoveries
A controversial dam in the Amazon unites Indigenous people and scientists, and transplanting mitochondria to treat rare diseases
Year in review 2022: Best of online news, and podcast highlights
Breakthrough of the Year, and the best in science books
The state of science in Ukraine, and a conversation with Anthony Fauci
A genetic history of Europe’s Jews, and measuring magma under a supervolcano
Artificial intelligence takes on Diplomacy, and how much water do we really need?
Mammoth ivory trade may be bad for elephants, and making green electronics with fungus
Kurt Vonnegut’s contribution to science, and tunas and sharks as ecosystem indicators
Cities as biodiversity havens, and gene therapy for epilepsy
Space-based solar power gets serious, AI helps optimize chemistry, and a book on food extinction
Snakes living the high-altitude life, and sending computing power to the edges of the internet
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