On this week’s show: Earth’s youngest impact craters could be vastly underestimated in size, and remaking a plant’s process for a creating a complex compound
First up this week, have we been measuring asteroid impact craters wrong? Staff Writer Paul Voosen talks with host Sarah Crespi about new approaches to measuring the diameter of impact craters. They discuss the new measurements which, if confirmed, might require us to rethink just how often Earth gets hit with large asteroids. Paul also shares more news from the recent Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Texas.
Next up, pulling together all the enzymes used by a plant to make a vaccine adjuvant—a compound used to boost the efficacy of vaccines—in the lab. Anne Osbourn, a group leader and professor of biology at the John Innes Centre in Norwich, England, talks about why plants are so much better at making complex molecules, and an approach that allows scientists to copy their methods.
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
About the Science Podcast
[Image: NASA/JPL; Music: Jeffrey Cook]
[alt: Itturalde crater in Bolivia with podcast overlay]
Authors: Sarah Crespi; Paul Voosen
Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adh9195
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Using waste to fuel airplanes, nature-based climate solutions, and a book on Indigenous conservation
A look at Long Covid, and why researchers and police shouldn’t use the same DNA kits
Saving the Spix’s macaw, and protecting the energy grid
The historic Maya’s sophisticated stargazing knowledge, and whether there is a cost to natural cloning
Saying farewell to Insight, connecting the microbiome and the brain, and a book on agriculture in Africa
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
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