Nature Podcast

In this episode:

00:24 How babies share their gut microbes
Nature: Sending babies to nursery completely reshapes their microbiome

05:25 First evidence of tool use in cattle
Science: No bull: This Austrian cow has learned to use tools

Subscribe to Nature Briefing, an unmissable daily round-up of science news, opinion and analysis free in your inbox every weekday.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

00:46 Protein-sized superposition surpasses previous experiments
Nature: Pedalino et al.
News: Schrödinger's cat just got bigger: quantum physicists create largest ever 'superposition'

11:46 Research Highlights
Nature: Ancient pottery reveals early evidence of mathematical thinking
Nature: Gifted dogs learn new words by overhearing humans

14:11 How Trump’s second term has impacted research
Nature: US science after a year of Trump
Nature: US science in 2026: five themes that will dominate Trump’s second year
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode:

00:40 The rock samples destined to remain on Mars
Nature: NASA won’t bring Mars samples back to Earth: this is the science that will be lost

05:24 The genetics of dogs’ droopy ears
Nature: Do their ears hang low? The genetics of dogs’ adorable floppy ears

Subscribe to Nature Briefing, an unmissable daily round-up of science news, opinion and analysis free in your inbox every weekday.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode:

00:47 AI can boost research productivity — at what cost?
Research article: Hao et al.

10:10 Research Highlights
Nature: Ancient ‘snowball’ Earth had frigidly briny seas
Nature: Putting immune cells into ‘night mode’ reduces heart-attack damage

12:41 JWST images are full of red dots, what are they?
Nature: Rusakov et al.

Subscribe to Nature Briefing, an unmissable daily round-up of science news, opinion and analysis free in your inbox every weekday.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

00:54 Turning an undersea cable into a seismic detector
Researchers have shown that they can piggyback a signal on a 4,400-kilometer-long telecom cable that runs from California to Hawaii, allowing it to act like 44,000 separate seismic-activity detectors. Their method takes advantage of impurities found in glass fibre-optic cables, which reflect light differently when they are stretched and distorted by the pressure of seismic waves.

Science: Seafloor telecom cable transformed into giant earthquake detector

04:17 The origin of an ancient boat
Chemical analysis of the caulking found on the wood an ancient boat has helped researchers identify the origins of the vessel, that sank off the coast of Denmark 2,400 years ago. The team’s analysis suggests it voyaged from much farther away that had been thought — perhaps coming from the Baltic Sea region. The team also found a fingerprint left in the caulk, although who it belonged to is unknown.

LiveScience: Fingerprint of ancient seaborne raider found on Scandinavia's oldest plank boat

08:29 How heating up helps some plants pollinate
Some plants called cycads (Zamia spp.) heat up to attract the beetles that pollinate them. These beetles have heat-seeking sensors in their antennae, which they use locate the plants. Male cycads warm up around 3 hours before females, meaning that beetles head to them before first carrying pollen over to the females.

Science: Heat-seeking beetles drawn to plants that glow in infrared

13:08 The exoplanet shaped like a lemon
The discovery of exoplanet PSR J2322-2650b reveals how unusual other worlds can be. This exoplanet takes just 7.8 hours to orbit an ultra-dense pulsar whose intense gravity pulls PSR J2322-2650b into a lemon shape.

New Scientist: Strange lemon-shaped exoplanet defies the rules of planet formation

Subscribe to Nature Briefing, an unmissable daily round-up of science news, opinion and analysis free in your inbox every weekday.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.