Science Magazine Podcast

Timothy Snyder, historian and author focused on civic resistance and professional ethics. Carlos Camacho, nocturnal-bird researcher who studies moonlight effects on nightjars. Warren Cornwall, environmental reporter covering community arapaima conservation in the Amazon. They discuss community-led recovery of a giant fish, how moonlight shapes nightjar feeding and migration, and how scientists can navigate political threats to institutions and ethics.

Angela Saini, books host and science writer, and Valerie Thompson, Science books editor, discuss picking biographies and what they reveal about scientists. Jackie Leach Scully, bioethics professor, explores ethical pitfalls of epigenetics and potential social harms. Adrian Cho, physics writer, unpacks debates over black hole singularities. David Grimm, online news editor, shares quirky and important recent science stories like spiders’ heartbeats and housing trials.

Quentin Septer, freelance science and environmental journalist who investigated the Dewey Burdock uranium mine, explores geology, in-situ recovery mining, contamination risks, cleanup methods, and regulatory debates. Giulio Ciucci, postdoc studying heart mechanics and cancer resistance, discusses why the heart rarely gets cancer, experiments unloading hearts that allow tumor growth, mechanical forces altering chromatin, and potential therapeutic ideas.

Jill Fisher, professor of social medicine and author of Adverse Events, explores contemporary healthy-volunteer research and ethics. She discusses how trials shifted to for-profit clinics, clinic conditions and risks to repeat participants. Short conversations cover consent gaps, payment debates, calls for registries and inspections, and efforts to better protect financially vulnerable volunteers.

Zack Savitsky, freelance science journalist reporting on quantum cooling and helium‑3 supply; Nitsan Pakin, law professor studying legal and public‑health risks of commercial prediction markets; Filippo Dall’Armellina, neuroscience Ph.D. who found renewed purpose through podcasting. They discuss helium‑3 shortages and helium‑free cooling ideas, regulatory and addiction concerns around prediction markets, and how podcasting transformed a young researcher.

Ken Noss, a former NIH volunteer who interned at the Clinical Center, and Laura Stark, a history professor who studies human-subject experiments, discuss shifting sources of research volunteers in the 1960s. They cover expanding recruitment beyond peace churches, student interns and their motivations, changing ethics and record-keeping, and the move toward paid, short-term participants.

Aaron Sandell, a primatologist who co-directs the Ngogo Chimpanzee Project, describes a rare, violent split in a long-studied chimp community. Hannah Richter, a D.C.-based science reporter, explains NASA’s surprise plan for a 2028 fission-powered Mars mission. They discuss chimp social fragmentation and lethal raids, and the technical, bureaucratic, and programmatic hurdles of launching a space reactor.

Dale Horst, a Mennonite who served two years at the NIH in the 1950s, recalls daily life, LSD sessions, and living in the Clinical Center. Laura Stark, a history professor and author, traces how NIH recruited healthy volunteers, church ties that supplied conscientious objectors, and the wide range of human-subject studies that followed.

Mauro Costa-Mattioli, neuroscientist studying the integrated stress response and memory in mice. Daniel Clery, science writer covering methods to measure the universe’s expansion. They discuss using lensed repeating bursts to pin down the Hubble constant. They also explore how turning the ISR on or off affects memory in mice and the potential for ISR-targeted therapies.

Jacqueline Faherty, an astrophysicist and museum curator who reviews Project Hail Mary and planetary science. Myra Cheng, a Stanford CS Ph.D. candidate studying AI behavior and sycophancy. Jill Farrant, a molecular biologist researching resurrection plants and drought resilience. They discuss desiccation survival in plants, how chatbots overly agree and affect relationships, and scientific realism in Project Hail Mary.