Science Magazine Podcast27 Syys 2018

The future of PCB-laden orca whales, and doing genomics work with Indigenous people

Science has often treated Indigenous people as resources for research—especially when it comes to genomics. Now, Indigenous people are exploring how this type of study can be conducted in a way that respects their people and traditions. Meagan Cantwell talks with contributing correspondent Lizzie Wade about a summer workshop for Indigenous scientists that aims to start a new chapter in genomics. We’ve known for decades that PCBs—polychlorinated biphenyls—are toxic and carcinogenic. In the 1970s and 1980s, these compounds were phased out of use in industrial and electronic applications, worldwide. But they are still in the environment—in soil and air—and in animal tissues, particularly those of killer whales. These toxic compounds start out at minute levels in tiny organisms, but as the small are eaten by the slightly larger, the PCB concentration increases—from plankton, to fish, to seals—until you are at killer whales with PCB-packed blubber. Ailsa Hall, director of the Sea Mammal Research Unit at St. Andrews University in the United Kingdom, talks with host Sarah Crespi about her group’s work measuring PCB levels in different killer whale populations and calculating the effect of PCBs on those populations 100 years from now. In this month’s book segment, Jen Golbeck interviews Damon Centola about his book How Behavior Spreads: The Science of Complex Contagions. You can listen to more books segment and read more reviews on our books blog, Books et al. This week’s episode was edited by Podigy. Download a transcript of this episode (PDF) Listen to previous podcasts About the Science Podcast [Image: Public domain; Music: Jeffrey Cook] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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The Normals | Episode 1

How do we know what's normal in a person? In the early 1950s, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) set out to do something unprecedented. It wanted to start studying normal humans on a grand scale....

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Resolving the dispute over the speed of the expanding universe, and seeking new drug targets for cognitive dysfunction

First up on the podcast, a new path to calculating the Hubble constant. This value for the universe’s speed of expansion is typically determined in one of two ways, one favored by cosmologists, the ot...

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Resurrection plants, Project Hail Mary, and the trouble with sycophantic AI

First up on the podcast, Deputy News Editor Martin Enserink talks about so-called resurrection plants. These specialized plants can survive up to 95% water loss, whereas most plants struggle when thei...

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Rethinking the peopling of the Americas, and the best ways to get groundwater back

First up on the podcast, we discuss a finding that’s likely to reignite debate over how humans first spread through the Americas. In the late 1990s, a site in southern Chile called Monte Verde forced ...

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What Alaska’s eroding coastline says about Earth’s future, and how Yellowstone ravens use their smarts to find wolf kills

First up on the podcast, freelance journalist Evan Howell traveled to Cape Blossom, Alaska, where the receding coastline has revealed an ancient trove of glacial ice that may have survived for 350,000...

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An alleged nuclear blast may reignite weapons testing, and who owns the Moon

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Tropical birds’ ‘silent spring,’ and mapping people’s brains during surgery

First up on the podcast, producer Meagan Cantwell talks to Contributing Correspondent Warren Cornwall about his visit to Brazil, where he observed firsthand what it takes for researchers to understand...

26 Helmi 32min

Matching sounds to shapes, and stories from the AAAS annual meeting

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