Podcast: Cooling Earth with asteroid dust, and 3 billion missing birds
On this week’s show: How dust from an asteroid breakup might have triggered an ice age, and billions of North American birds have vanished
Science Podcasts
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Podcast: Studying human health at 5100 meters, and playing hide and seek with rats
On this week’s show: We hear about a gold mining town more than 5 kilometers above sea level, and learn why studying play behavior is important -
Podcast: Searching for a lost Maya city, and measuring the information density of language
On this week’s show: Archaeologists search for a mysterious city that evaded Spanish conquistadors for a century, and linguists find that—no matter how complex their structure—many languages convey information at the same rate -
Podcast: Where our microbiome came from, and how our farming and hunting ancestors transformed the world
On this week’s show: A survey of microbes in Hawaii reveals how plants and animals get their microbiomes, and a crowdsourced map of how our early ancestors altered the world -
Podcast: Promising approaches in suicide prevention, and how to retreat from climate change
On this week’s show: Three promising prevention strategies to save lives, and how one researcher recommends integrating relocation into our long-term climate change goals -
Podcast: One million ways to sex a chicken egg, and how plastic finds its way to Arctic ice
On this week’s show: Researchers bring in MRI, artificial intelligence, and CRISPR to figure out the sex of unhatched chickens, and microplastic finds a route to the far north -
Podcast: Next-generation cellphone signals could interfere with weather forecasts, and using smoke from wildfires to model nuclear winter
On this week’s show: Weather forecasters express concerns about new cellphone technology, and what smoke plumes can reveal about the aftermath of nuclear bombs -
Podcast: Earthquakes caused by too much water extraction, and a dog cancer that has lived for millennia
On this week’s show: Researchers suspect pulling water out of the ground may cause earthquakes, and what we can learn about human cancer from a dog cancer that has been around for about 8000 years -
Podcast: Breeding better bees, and training artificial intelligence on emotional imagery
On this week’s show: Using new technology and bee behavior, researchers and beekeepers are working to defeat a mite that has decimated bee colonies worldwide. Meanwhile, other researchers are training an artificial intelligence to recognize the emotional content of images. Plus, our monthly books segment -
Podcast: Can we inherit trauma from our ancestors, and the secret to dark liquid dances
On this week’s show: Making a permanent liquid magnet, and how nongenetic factors could help parents pass trauma to their children
