Briefing Chat: The canny cow that can use tools, and how babies share their microbiomes
In this episode:00:24 How babies share their gut microbesNature: Sending babies to nursery completely reshapes their microbiome05:25 First evidence of tool use in cattleScience: No bull: This Austrian...
23 Jan 12min
The biggest 'Schrödinger's cat' yet — physicists put 7,000 atoms in superposition
00:46 Protein-sized superposition surpasses previous experimentsNature: Pedalino et al.News: Schrödinger's cat just got bigger: quantum physicists create largest ever 'superposition'11:46 Research Hig...
21 Jan 26min
Briefing Chat: Can NASA return rocks from Mars? And why dogs have long ears
In this episode:00:40 The rock samples destined to remain on MarsNature: NASA won’t bring Mars samples back to Earth: this is the science that will be lost05:24 The genetics of dogs’ droopy earsNature...
16 Jan 10min
AI can turbocharge scientists' careers — but limit their scope
In this episode:00:47 AI can boost research productivity — at what cost?Research article: Hao et al.10:10 Research HighlightsNature: Ancient ‘snowball’ Earth had frigidly briny seasNature: Putting imm...
14 Jan 21min
A mysterious ancient fingerprint and a lemon-shaped planet — the stories you’ve missed
00:54 Turning an undersea cable into a seismic detectorResearchers have shown that they can piggyback a signal on a 4,400-kilometer-long telecom cable that runs from California to Hawaii, allowing it ...
7 Jan 16min
Science in 2026: what to expect this year
In this episode, reporter Miryam Naddaf joins us to talk about the big science events to look out for in 2026. We’ll hear about: small-scale AI models that could outcompete Large Language Models in re...
1 Jan 11min
Audio long read: Will blockbuster obesity drugs revolutionize addiction treatment?
Anecdotal stories suggesting that weight-loss drugs can help people shake long-standing addictions have been spreading fast in the past few years, through online forums, weight-loss clinics and news h...
29 Dec 202517min
The Nature Podcast highlights of 2025
00:40 What a trove of potato genomes reveals about the humble spudResearchers have created a ‘pangenome’ containing the genomes of multiple potato types, something they believe can help make it easier...
24 Dec 202540min
