BRCA1 turns 20; roundup of daily news with David Grimm.

Money battles; roundup of daily news with David Grimm.

Fruitflies take evasive action; roundup of daily news with David Grimm.

A distinctive binary star system; roundup of daily news with David Grimm.

Tsetse fly genetics; roundup of daily news with David Grimm.

Climate and crops; roundup of daily news with David Grimm.

Marine archaeology on the Silk Road; roundup of daily news with David Grimm.

Measuring minute motions; roundup of daily news with David Grimm.

Inequality and health; roundup of daily news with David Grimm.

The impact of Tiananmen Square on science in China; roundup of daily news with David Grimm.

Taming the unwieldy web of global supply chains; roundup of daily news with David Grimm.

Mapping Mexico's genetically diverse population; roundup of daily news with David Grimm.

Learning to read minds; roundup of daily news with David Grimm.

Moths chasing odors; roundup of daily news with David Grimm.

Psychedelic research resurgence; roundup of daily news with David Grimm.

The fate of plastic that ends up at sea; roundup of daily news with David Grimm.

Controlling populations in the wild through genetic manipulation; roundup of daily news with David Grimm.

NIH opts to back researchers rather than research; roundup of daily news with David Grimm.

A new class of gamma ray sources; roundup of daily news.

A new class of gamma ray sources; roundup of daily news.

Parenting from before conception; roundup of daily news.

Investigating web censorship practices in China; roundup of daily news.

Sharing microbes around the house; roundup of daily news.

Bringing cellulosic ethanol to market; roundup of daily news.

Frugal engineering for global health; roundup of daily news.

Hindcasting weather over the ocean near the California coast for 600 years.

New evidence reveals the complicated history of stone tool use 400,000 - 200,000 years ago.

Satellite data helps map the last unexplored terrain on planet Earth.

The rights and responsibilities of robots.

Adam Ford discusses linking plants, their herbivores, and their predators on the East African savannah. Science daily news editor David Grimm brings stories on storing CO2 underground for millions of years, why fruit flies like yeast and vice versa, and volcanoes on the moon. [Img: Filip Lachowski]

Kurt Rademaker discusses his work exploring the Andean plateau for artifacts of the earliest high-altitude humans, Paleoindians that lived at 4500 meters more than 11,000 years ago. Hosted by Sarah Crespi. [Img: David-Stanley/Flickr]

Ayelet Gneezy discusses trends in charitable giving and how to maximize donations. David Grimm brings stories on an algal virus found in humans, how to stop zooming human population growth, and an avalanche on an asteroid. Hosted by Sarah Crespi. [Img: ISAS/JAXA]

Stephanie Karst discusses her team's successful efforts to culture norovirus in the lab and what this new system means for treatment and prevention. David Grimm brings daily news stories on counting virtual friends, drama at the center of the galaxy, and the birth of the penis. Hosted by Sarah Crespi. 

David Grimm and Meghna Sachdev discuss robots that can induce ghostly feelings, the domestication of cats, and training humans to echolocate. Elizabeth Pennisi discusses overcoming hippos' dangerous reputation and oddly shaped bodies to study their important role in African ecosystems. Hosted by Sarah Crespi. [Img: Kabacchi/Wikipedia]

Cordelia Fine discusses the prevalence of "neurosexism" in the study of the human brain. Online news editor David Grimm brings stories on climbing walls like a gecko, human hand transplants, and measuring altruism in the lab. Hosted by Sarah Crespi. [Img: turkishdisco/Flickr/CC-BY-SA] 

Eric Hand discusses the winding history of the Black Beauty meteorite--a 4.4 billion-year-old piece of Mars. Online news editor David Grimm brings stories on bacteria's role in the blood-brain barrier, the "ice-pocalypse", and why only 10 percent of galaxies may host complex life. Hosted by Sarah Crespi. [Img: © Joe McNally]

Kenneth Catania takes a close look at how exactly electric eels stun their prey. Online news editor David Grimm brings stories on pushing back the earliest abstract art by a few millennia, how our primate ancestors handled their liquor, and murderous sea mammals. Hosted by Sarah Crespi. [Img: © Kenneth Catania]

Erich Jarvis sums up the findings from sequencing 40+ bird genomes. Online news editor David Grimm brings stories capturing comet dust, the origins of life, and losing the Y chromosome. Hosted by Sarah Crespi. [Img: Copyright © Flip de Nooyer/Foto Natura/Minden Pictures] 

Robert Coontz discusses Science's 2015 Breakthrough of the Year and runners-up, from visions of Pluto to the discovery of a previously unknown human species. Online news editor David Grimm reviews the top news stories of the past year with Sarah Crespi. Hosted by Susanne Bard.

News stories on using pets in clinical trials to test veterinarian drugs, debunking the Piltdown Man once and for all, and deciding just how smart crows can be, with David Grimm.   From the magazine It’s really difficult to figure out how old a free-living animal is. Maybe you can find growth rings in bone or other calcified body parts, but in sharks like the Greenland shark, no such hardened parts exist. Using two different radiocarbon dating approaches, Julius Neilsen and colleagues discovered that the giant Greenland shark may live as long as 400 years.   Read the research.   [Image: James Howard McGregor/Wikimedia Commons/Music: Jeffrey Cook]

This week, we chat about how the Earth is sending oxygen to the moon, using a GPS data set to hunt for dark matter, and retrieving 80-million year old proteins from dinosaur bones, with Online News Editor David Grimm. And Philip Tetlock joins Alexa Billow to discuss improving our ability to make judgments about the future through forecasting competitions as part of a special section on prediction in this week’s issue of Science. Listen to previous podcasts. [Image: NASA; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

David Grimm—online news editor for Science—talks with Sarah Crespi about the chance a naked mole rat could die at any one moment. Surprisingly, the probability a naked mole rat will die does not go up as it gets older. Researchers are looking at the biology of these fascinating animals for clues to their seeming lack of aging. Sarah also interviews freelancer Douglas Starr about his feature story on the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study—a comprehensive study of the lives of all the babies born in 1 year in a New Zealand hospital. Starr talks about the many insights that have come out of this work—including new understandings of criminality, drug addiction, and mental illness—and the research to be done in the future as the 1000-person cohort begins to enter its fifth decade. Listen to previous podcasts. [Image: Tim Evanson/Flickr/CC BY-SA 2.0; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

In 1968, Science published the now-famous paper “The Tragedy of the Commons” by ecologist Garrett Hardin. In it, Hardin questioned society’s ability to manage shared resources, concluding that individuals will act in their self-interest and ultimately spoil the resource. Host Meagan Cantwell revisits this classic paper with two experts: Tine De Moor, professor of economics and social history at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, and Brett Frischmann, a professor of law, business, and economics at Villanova University in Pennsylvania. They discuss how premodern societies dealt with common resources and how our current society might apply the concept to a more abstract resource—knowledge. Not all human skulls are the same shape—and if yours is a little less round, you may have your extinct cousins, the Neanderthals, to thank. Meagan speaks with Simon Fisher, neurogeneticist and director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, about why living humans with two Neanderthal gene variants have slightly less round heads—and how studying Neanderthal DNA can help us better understand our own biology. This week’s episode was edited by Podigy. Download a transcript of this episode (PDF) Listen to previous podcasts. About the Science Podcast [Image: Phillip Gunz; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

First, we hear Online News Editor David Grimm and host Sarah Crespi discuss audience favorites and staff picks from this year’s online stories, from mysterious pelvises to quantum engines. Megan Cantwell talks with News Editor Tim Appenzeller about the 2018 Breakthrough of the Year, a few of the runners-up, and some breakdowns. See the whole breakthrough package here, including all the runners-up and breakdowns. And in her final segment for the Science Podcast, host Jen Golbeck talks with Science books editor Valerie Thompson about the year in books. Both also suggest some last-minute additions to your holiday shopping list. This week’s episode was edited by Podigy. Download the transcript (PDF) Listen to previous podcasts. About the Science Podcast [Image: NASA Scientific Visualization Studio; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

New archaeological evidence suggests the same black plague that decimated Europe also took its toll on sub-Saharan Africa. Host Sarah Crespi talks with Contributing Correspondent Lizzie Wade about diverse medieval sub-Saharan cities that shrank or even disappeared around the same time the plague was stalking Europe. In a second archaeological story, Meagan Cantwell talks with Gustavo Politis, professor of archaeology at the National University of Central Buenos Aires and the National University of La Plata, about new radiocarbon dates for giant ground sloth remains found in the Argentine archaeological site Campo Laborde. The team’s new dates suggest humans hunted and butchered ground sloths in the late Pleistocene, about 12,500 years ago. This week’s episode was edited by Podigy. Download the transcript (PDF) Listen to previous podcasts. About the Science Podcast [Image: Ife-Sungbo Archaeological Project; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

Pirate’s gold may not be that far off, as there are valuable metals embedded in potato-size nodules thousands of meters down in the depths of the ocean. Host Meagan Cantwell talks with Staff Writer Paul Voosen about the first deep-sea test of a bus-size machine designed to scoop up these nodules, and its potential impact on the surrounding ecosystem. In an expedition well above sea level, the Hayabusa2 spacecraft touched down on the asteroid Ryugu last month. And although the craft won’t return to Earth until 2020, researchers have learned a lot about Ryugu in the meantime. Meagan speaks with Seiji Sugita, a professor at the University of Tokyo and principal investigator of the Optical Navigation Camera of Hayabusa 2, about Ryugu’s parent body, and how this study can better inform future asteroid missions. This week’s episode was edited by Podigy. Download transcript (PDF) Listen to previous podcasts. About the Science Podcast [Image: Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

In La Rinconada, Peru, a town 5100 meters up in the Peruvian Andes, residents get by breathing air with 50% less oxygen than at sea level. International News Editor Martin Enserink visited the site with researchers studying chronic mountain sickness—when the body makes excess red blood cells in an effort to cope with oxygen deprivation—in these extreme conditions. Martin talks with host Sarah Crespi about how understanding why this illness occurs in some people and not others could help the residents of La Rinconada and the 140 million people worldwide living above 2500 meters. Read the whole special issue on mountains.  Sarah also talks with Annika Stefanie Reinhold about her work at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin training rats to play hide and seek. Surprisingly, rats learned the game easily and were even able to switch roles—sometimes playing as the seeker, other times the hider. Annika talks with Sarah about why studying play behavior in animals is important for understanding the connections between play and learning in both rats and humans. This week’s episode was edited by Podigy. Ads on this week’s show: MOVA Globes; Kroger’s Zero Hunger, Zero Waste campaign Download a transcript (PDF)  Listen to previous podcasts. About the Science Podcast [Image: Tambako The Jaguar/Flickr; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

We start our first episode of the new year looking at future trends in policy and research with host Joel Goldberg and several Science News writers. Jeffrey Mervis discusses upcoming policy changes, Kelly Servick gives a rundown of areas to watch in the life sciences, and Ann Gibbons talks about potential advances in ancient proteins and DNA. In research news, host Meagan Cantwell talks with Beatriz Pinto-Goncalves, a postdoctoral researcher at the John Innes Centre, about carnivorous plant traps. Through understanding the mechanisms that create these traps, Pinto-Goncalves and colleagues elucidate what this could mean for how they emerged in the evolutionary history of plants. This week’s episode was edited by Podigy. Ads on this week’s show: KiwiCo Download a transcript (PDF) Listen to previous podcasts. About the Science Podcast  

Staff Writer Jocelyn Kaiser joins Sarah to talk about a recent Science paper describing the results of a large study on a blood test for multiple types of cancer. The trial’s results suggest such a blood test combined with follow-up scans may help detect cancers early, but there is a danger of too many false positives. And postdoctoral researcher Timo Reinhold of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research joins Sarah to talk about his paper on how the Sun is a lot less variable in its magnetic activity compared with similar stars—what does it mean that our Sun is a little bit boring? This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy. Listen to previous podcasts. About the Science Podcast Download a transcript (PDF).