Science Magazine Podcast

First up on the podcast, freelance science journalist Robin George Andrews describes Japan’s upcoming Martian Moons eXploration mission that will nab a sample from the surface of Mars’s moon Phobos. The material, due back to Earth in 2031, could reveal the origins of this mysterious moon, the past habitability of Mars, or even hints of life itself.

Next on the show, Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano started to periodically spew tall fountains of lava in December 2024. Researchers and the public tuned in to watch more than 50 fountaining events steaming live online. Ashton Flinders, a research geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about how observations from the cameras plus geochemical, geophysical, and geologic monitoring revealed a predictable pattern in these usually rare events.

Last up this week, Javier Birchenall, professor of economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, discusses predictions of world-ending crises—starting with a prediction published in a Science paper in 1960 that suggested Earth’s population would reach a singularity on 13 November 2026. We are still here and the global population is headed for a decline. What happened to the singularity and what else are we not predicting very well?

Heinz von Foerster et al., Science 1960

Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026

“At this date human population will approach infinity if it grows as it has grown in the last two millenia[sic].”

Image: ESA Mars Express/Andrea Luck

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

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First up on the podcast, Staff Writer Jennie Erin Smith joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about new research on how noninvasive technologies such as transcranial magnetic stimulation are being used in the context of women’s health to tackle everything from postpartum depression to menstrual pain and fertility issues.

Next on the show, we talk with Liisa Galea, Treliving family chair in women’s mental health and professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of Toronto. In a review in this week’s special issue on women’s health, Galea discusses the state of research on hormone therapy during perimenopause and the links between menopausal symptoms and long-term concerns such as dementia and cardiovascular disease.

See the whole women’s health special issue here.

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

Image credit: Chiara Vercesi
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First up on the podcast, Staff Reporter Tom Howarth joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about the language artificial intelligence agents evolve inside their swarms.

Next on the show, producer Elah Feder talks with Revathe Thillaikumar,  a behavioral ecologist and postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior. The two discuss the value of social learning as baby orangutans learn to find their own food over the longest dependency period of any animal, except humans.

Finally, from our series on scientific autobiographies, books host Angela Saini talks with astrophysicist Sara Seager about the moving account of life after losing her husband in her book, The Smallest Lights in the Universe.

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

About the Science Podcast

Image: inkoly/istock
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First up on the podcast, as the planet warms and forests burn, can we replant them with new trees that will thrive in the decades ahead? Associate Editor Katie Langin joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss research into “assisted migration” for replenishing forests after wildfires.

Next on the show, Susana Monsó, an associate professor in the Department of Logic, History and Philosophy of Science at the Spanish National University of Distance Education, shares her latest Expert Voices column. She discusses how philosophy can play a role in the scientific process—from defining terms to formulating questions.

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

Image: Dirk Hobman
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First up on the podcast, producer Meagan Cantwell and freelance journalist Andrew Lawler discuss how psychoactive drugs might have shaped culture in pre-Inca Andean societies. They chat about how technical advances and an increasingly open research environment have allowed scientists to detect traces of substances such as vilca, which contains dimethyl­tryptamine, the psychoactive compound also found in ayahuasca.

Next on the show, host Sarah Crespi is joined by Noam Angrist, academic director of the What Works Hub for Global Education at the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government. Angrist wrote a Policy Forum piece on the need to move on from small, controlled trials of education interventions to better address educational needs in lower and middle-income countries. To move forward, he explains, we need to learn how to make sure these interventions work at scale and that governments can readily implement them.

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

About the Science Podcast

Image credit: John Bigelow Taylor/Division of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History/Catalog number 41.2/7768
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