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
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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
The challenges of testing medicines during pregnancy, and when not paying attention makes sense
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
Securing nuclear waste for 100,000 years, and the link between math literacy and life satisfaction
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
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
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