In this episode: 00:46 Mysterious methane emission from a cool brown dwarf The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is revealing the makeup of brown dwarfs — strange space objects that blur the line between a planet and a star. And it appears that methane in the atmosphere of one of these objects, named W1935, is emitting infrared radiation. Where the energy comes from is a mystery however, researchers hypothesise that the glow could be caused by an aurora in the object’s atmosphere, perhaps driven...
Apr 17, 2024•34 min
In this episode: 00:46 Mapping ‘ghost roads’ in tropical forests Across the world, huge numbers of illegal roads have been cut into forests. However, due to their illicit nature, the exact numbers of these roads and their impacts on ecosystems is poorly understood. To address this, researchers have undertaken a huge mapping exercise across the tropical Asia-Pacific region. Their findings reveal over a million kilometers of roads that don’t appear on official maps, and that their construction is ...
Apr 10, 2024•23 min
Around the world, rates of cancers that typically affect older adults are increasing in those under 50 years old. Models based on global data predict that the number of early-onset cancer cases like these will increase by around 30% between 2019 and 2030. The most likely contributors — such as rising rates of obesity and early-cancer screening — do not fully account for the increase. To try and understand the reasons behind this trend, many researchers are searching for answers buried in studies...
Apr 05, 2024•16 min
In this episode: 00:35 Pregnancy advances your ‘biological’ age — but giving birth turns it back Growing a baby leads to changes in the distribution of certain chemical markers on a pregnant person’s DNA, but new research suggests that after giving birth, these changes can revert to an earlier state. Nature News: Pregnancy advances your ‘biological’ age — but giving birth turns it back 08:07 Bird gestures to say 'after you' A Japanese tit ( Parus minor ) will flutter its wings to invite their ma...
Apr 03, 2024•25 min
In this episode: 01:28 Inflammation’s role in memory How memories are stored is an ongoing question in neuroscience. Now researchers have found an inflammatory pathway that responds to DNA damage in neurons has a key role in the persistence of memories. How this pathway helps memories persist is unclear, but the researchers suggest that how the DNA damage is repaired may play a role. As inflammation in the brain is often associated with disease, the team were surprised by this finding, which the...
Mar 27, 2024•27 min
This podcast has been corrected: in a previous version at 5:55 we stated that that the team's 200mm devices currently contain only a couple of magnetic tunnelling junctions, in fact they studied 500-1000 devices in this work. 00:48 How mysterious skyrmions could power next-generation computers Skyrmions are tiny whirlpools of magnetic spin that some researchers believe have useful properties that could unlock new kinds of computing. However getting skyrmions to perform useful computational tasks...
Mar 20, 2024•30 min
In this episode: 00:45 Making a map of the human heart The human heart consists of multiple, specialised structures that all work together to enable the organ to beat for a lifetime. But exactly which cells are present in each part of the heart has been difficult to ascertain. Now, a team has combined molecular techniques to create an atlas of the developing human heart at an individual cell level. Their atlas provides insights into how cell communities communicate and form different structures....
Mar 13, 2024•27 min
In this episode: 00:48 Bumblebees can learn new tricks from each other One behaviour thought unique to humans is the ability to learn something from your predecessors that you couldn’t figure out on your own. However, researchers believe they have shown bumblebees are also capable of this ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’ approach to learning. Bees that were taught how to complete a puzzle too difficult to solve on their own, were able to share this knowledge with other bees, raising the pos...
Mar 06, 2024•37 min
In this episode: 00:49 What caused the Universe to become fully transparent? Around 13 billion years ago, the Universe was filled with a dense ‘fog’ of neutral hydrogen that blocked certain wavelengths of light. This fog was lifted when the hydrogen was hit by radiation in a process known as reionisation, but the source of this radiation has been debated. Now, researchers have used the JWST to peer deep into the Universe’s past and found that charged particles pouring out from dwarf galaxies app...
Feb 28, 2024•26 min
The phenomenon of animals catching diseases from humans, called reverse zoonoses, has had a severe impact on great ape populations, often representing a bigger threat than habitat loss or poaching. However, while many scientists and conservationists agree that human diseases pose one of the greatest risks to great apes today there are a few efforts under way to use a research-based approach to mitigate this problem. This is an audio version of our Feature Chimpanzees are dying from our colds — t...
Feb 26, 2024•25 min
The deep haunting tones of the world's largest animals, baleen whales, are iconic - but how the songs are produced has long been a mystery. Whales evolved from land dwelling mammals which vocalize by passing air through a structure called the larynx - a structure which also helps keep food from entering the respiratory system. However toothed whales like dolphins do not use their larynx to make sound, instead they have evolved a specialized organ in their nose. Now a team of researchers hav...
Feb 23, 2024•14 min
In this episode: 00:45 Why are humans so helpful? Humans are notable for their cooperation and display far more altruistic behaviour than other animals, but exactly why this behaviour evolved has been a puzzle. But in a new paper, the two leading theories have been put the test with a model and a real-life experiment. They find that actually neither theory on its own leads to cooperation but a combination is required for humans to help one another. Research article: Efferson et al. News and View...
Feb 21, 2024•31 min
00:45 Smoking's long-term effects on immunity It's well-known that smoking is bad for health and it has been linked to several autoimmune disorders, but the mechanisms are not fully understood. Now, researchers have investigated the immune responses of 1,000 people. Whilst some effects disappear after quitting, impacts on the T cell response lingers long after. The team hopes that this evidence could help better understand smoking's association with autoimmune diseases. Resea...
Feb 14, 2024•22 min
For over a century, cancer has been classified by areas of the body - lung cancer, breast cancer, skin cancer etc. And yet modern medical research is telling us that the molecular and genetic mechanisms behind cancers are not necessarily tied to parts of the body. Many drugs developed to treat metastatic cancers have the capacity to work across many different cancers, and that presents an opportunity for more tailored and efficient treatments. Oncologists are calling for a change ...
Feb 09, 2024•15 min
In this episode: 0:46 Borrowing tricks from cancer could help improve immunotherapy T cell based immunotherapies have revolutionised the treatment of certain types of cancer. However these therapies — which involved taking someone’s own T cells and reprogramming them to kill cancer cells — have struggled to treat solid tumours, which put up multiple defences. To overcome these, a team has taken mutations found in cancer cells that help them thrive and put them into therapeutic T cells. Their res...
Feb 07, 2024•35 min
Cervical cancer is both treatable and preventable, and the WHO has called for countries to come together to to eliminate the disease in the next century. However the disease still kills over 300,000 people each year, and levels of screening, treatment and vaccination need to be stepped up in order to achieve this goal. These challenges are particularly stark in low- and middle-income countries, where a lack of funding, staffing and infrastructure are obstacles. Vaccine hesitancy, especially in l...
Feb 04, 2024•17 min
In this episode: 0:48 How hominins spread through Europe Ancient stone tools are often uncovered in Europe, but it can be difficult to identify who crafted them, as Neanderthals and Homo sapiens coexisted in the region for several thousand years. The makers of one type of tool found in northern Europe has long puzzled researchers, but now through genetic analysis of nearby skeletal fragments, it has been revealed that they were made by Homo sapiens. The age of these tools suggests that modern hu...
Jan 31, 2024•29 min
Evidence so far suggests that the prevalence of long COVID in low- and middle-income countries could be similar to that of wealthier countries. For example, by some estimates, more than four million people in Brazil have long COVID. However, an absence of research on the condition in less-wealthy countries has left advocates hamstrung: few physicians acknowledge that long COVID exists. A lack of data is also hampering efforts to search for the mechanisms of the condition and tailor treatments. T...
Jan 26, 2024•12 min
In this episode: 0:46 Turning a toxic by-product into iron Red mud is a toxic by-product of aluminium manufacture, and millions of tonnes of it is produced each year. The majority ends up in landfills, pumped into vast lakes or stored in dried mounds, posing a serious environmental risk. This week, researchers demonstrate how red mud can be reused to make iron, a vital component in the production of steel. As their method uses hydrogen plasma rather than fossil fuels, they suggest it could be a ...
Jan 24, 2024•25 min
In this episode: 0:55 The AI that deduces solutions to complex maths problems Researchers at Google Deepmind have developed an AI that can solve International Mathematical Olympiad-level geometry problems, something previous AIs have struggled with. They provided the system with a huge number of random mathematical theorems and proofs, which it used to approximate general rules of geometry. The AI then applied these rules to solve the Olympiad problems and show its workings for humans to check. ...
Jan 17, 2024•32 min
In this episode of the Nature Podcast , we catch up on some science stories from the holiday period by diving into the Nature Briefing. We chat about: an extra-warm sweater inspired by polar bear fur; the fossil find revealing what a juvenile tyrannosaur liked to snack on; why scientists are struggling to open OSIRIS-REx’s sample container; how 2023 was a record for retractions; and how cats like to play fetch, sometimes. Nature News: Polar bear fur-inspired sweater is thinner than a down jacket...
Jan 10, 2024•30 min
In this episode, reporter Miryam Naddaf joins us to talk about the big science events to look out for in 2024. We'll hear about the mass of the neutrino, the neural basis of consciousness and the climate lawsuits at the Hague, to name but a few. News: the science events to look our for in 2024 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Jan 03, 2024•14 min
Perovskites are cheap, abundant photovoltaic materials that some have hailed as the future of green energy. Around the world, companies are layering perovskites on top of traditional silicon to develop so-called tandem solar cells that some think could deliver at least 20% more power than a silicon cell alone. However, there remain multiple issues to overcome before these products are ready for widespread uptake in the notoriously competitive solar-power market. This is an audio version of our F...
Dec 29, 2023•24 min
In this episode: 00:54 Franklin’s real role When it comes to the structure of DNA, everyone thinks they know Rosalind Franklin’s role in its discovery. The story goes that her crucial data was taken by James Watson without her knowledge, helping him and Francis Crick solve the structure. However, new evidence has revealed that this wasn’t really the case. Rosalind Franklin was not a ‘wronged heroine’, she was an equal contributor to the discovery. Nature Podcast : 25 April 2023 Comment : What Ro...
Dec 27, 2023•45 min
Many AIs are 'black box' in nature, meaning that part of all of the underlying structure is obfuscated, either intentionally to protect proprietary information, due to the sheer complexity of the model, or both. This can be problematic in situations where people are harmed by decisions made by AI but left without recourse to challenge them. Many researchers in search of solutions have coalesced around a concept called Explainable AI, but this too has its issues. Notably, that there is no real co...
Dec 22, 2023•38 min
In this episode: 01:55 “Oh GPT” In the first of our festive songs, we pay homage to LLMs, the generative AI chat bots which have taken 2023 by storm. 05:32 Twenty questions In this year’s festive game, our competitors try to guess some of the biggest science stories of the year, solely by asking yes/no questions. 24:40 “Warming night” In our final song this year, we take stock as 2023 is named the hottest year since records began. As worsening climate change continues to threaten...
Dec 20, 2023•45 min
In the latest episode of Nature hits the books , astronomer Aomawa Shields discusses her memoir Life on Other Planets: A Memoir of Finding My Place in the Universe . The book tracks her career path as a scientist and a classically-trained actor, explores her experiences as an African American woman in STEM, and interrogates science’s place in culture — some of the things we discussed in this podcast. Life on Other Planets: A Memoir of Finding My Place in the Universe Aomawa Shields Constable (20...
Dec 15, 2023•35 min
Current COVID-19 vaccines offer great protection from serious illness, but they don't prevent people from becoming infected in the first place. Because of this, researchers have been searching for ways to boost mucosal immunity — the immune response on mucosal surfaces — as this is where the virus is first encountered by the body. Now a team have shown that mucosal immunity can be improved enough to block infection in rhesus macaques by administering booster vaccine...
Dec 14, 2023•8 min
In this episode: 00:48 A new way to grow a tricky parasite in the lab Toxoplasma gondii , the parasite that causes the zoonotic disease toxoplasmosis, has a complex, multi-stage life cycle. Some of these stages will only grow in the intestines of cats, making it difficult to study. Now, a team has found a way to grow one of these stages in vitro for the first time, which they hope will help researchers learn more about this parasite, estimated to have infected around 30% of the world’s populatio...
Dec 13, 2023•26 min
In this episode: 00:48 A gap for trapping light Confining photons within materials opens up potential applications in quantum computing and telecommunications. But capturing light requires nanoscale cavities, which are difficult to make. This week, a team has created the smallest silicon gap yet for this purpose, just two nano-metres wide, by exploiting the intermolecular forces that are usually an obstacle when creating such small structures. They show this gap can trap light effectively, but t...
Dec 06, 2023•31 min
