What we learned from a seismometer on Mars, why it’s so difficult to understand the relationship between our microbes and our brains, and the first in our series of books on the science of food and agriculture
First up this week, freelance space journalist Jonathan O’Callaghan joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss the retirement of NASA’s Mars InSight lander. After almost 4 years of measuring quakes on the surface of the Red Planet, the lander’s solar panels are getting too dusty to continue providing power. O'Callaghan and Crespi look back at the insights that InSight has given us about Mars’s interior, and they talk about where else in the Solar System it might make sense to place a seismometer.
Also this week, we have a special issue on the body’s microbiome beyond the gut. As part of the special issue, John Cryan, principal investigator at APC Microbiome Ireland, University College Cork, wrote a commentary piece on tightening the connections research has made between microbes and the brain—the steps needed to go from seeing connections to understanding how the microbiome might be tweaked to change what’s happening in the brain.
Finally this week, we have the first installment of our series of author interviews on the science of food and agriculture. In this inaugural segment, host and science journalist Angela Saini talks to Ousmane Badiane, an expert on agricultural policy and development in Africa, and a co-author of Food For All In Africa: Sustainable Intensification for African Farmers, a 2019 book looking at the possibilities and reality of sustainable intensive farming in Africa.
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
[Illustration: Hannah Agosta; Music: Jeffrey Cook]
[alt: overlapping drawings of microbial populations]
Authors: Sarah Crespi; Jonathan O’Callaghan; Angela Saini
Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.10.1126/science.add1406
About the Science Podcast: https://www.science.org/content/page/about-science-podcast
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Building a martian analog on Earth, and moral outrage on social media
A risky clinical trial design, and attacks on machine learning
A freeze on prion research, and watching cement dry
Debating healthy obesity, delaying type 1 diabetes, and visiting bone rooms
Blood tests for Alzheimer’s disease, and what earthquakes on Mars reveal about the Red Planet’s core
Science after COVID-19, and a landslide that became a flood
Scientists’ role in the opioid crisis, 3D-printed candy proteins, and summer books
Preserving plastic art, and a gold standard for measuring extreme pressure
Does Botox combat depression, the fruit fly sex drive, and a series on race and science
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Finding consciousness outside the brain, and using DNA to reunite families
Cicada citizen science, and expanding the genetic code
Cracking consciousness, and taking the temperature of urban heat islands
Ecstasy plus therapy for PTSD, and the effects of early childhood development programs on mothers
Cutting shipping air pollution may cause water pollution, and keeping air clean with lightning
Chernobyl’s ruins grow restless, and entangling macroscopic objects
Storing wind as gravity, and well-digging donkeys
Rebuilding Louisiana’s coast, and recycling plastic into fuel
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