Wartime science in Ukraine, what Neanderthals really ate, and visiting the city of the dead
First up on the podcast, Contributing Correspondent Richard Stone joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about the toll of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine and how researchers have been mobilized to help the war effort. In June, Stone visited the basement labs where Ukrainian students modify off-the-shelf drones for war fighting and the facilities where biomedical researchers develop implants and bandages for wounded soldiers.
Next on the show, the isotopic ratios in our teeth and bones record the chemistry of what we eat. When anthropologists recently applied this technique to Neanderthals, they were surprised to find that when it comes to eating meat, our hominin cousins appeared to be on par with lions. Melanie Beasley, assistant professor of anthropology at Purdue University, has an explanation for why Neanderthals chemically look like hypercarnivores: They were just eating a lot of maggots. She talks about how she tested this idea by studying maggots that were fed putrefying human flesh.
Last up on this episode, a new installment of our series of books on death and science. This month’s books host Angela Saini talks with Ravi Nandan Singh, a sociologist at Shiv Nadar University, about his book Dead in Banaras: An Ethnography of Funeral Travelling.
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
About the Science Podcast
Authors: Sarah Crespi; Angela Saini; Rich Stone
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Robots that eat other robots, and an ancient hot spot of early human relatives
First up on the podcast, South Africa’s Cradle of Humankind is home to the world’s greatest concentration of ancestral human remains, including our own genus, Homo, Australopithecus, and a more robust hominin called Paranthropus. Proving they were there at the same time is challenging, but new fossil evidence seems to point to coexistence. Producer Kevin McLean discusses what a multihominin landscape might have looked like with Contributing Correspondent Ann Gibbons.
Next on the show, should robots grow and adapt like babies? Host Sarah Crespi talks with roboticist Philippe Wyder about a platform for
exploring this idea. In his Science Advances paper, Wyder and his team demonstrate how simple stick-shaped robots with magnets at either end can join up for more complicated tasks and shed parts to adapt to new ones.
Philippe Wyder was at Columbia University and the University of Washington when he completed this work, and he has now moved on to a company called Distyl AI.
This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.
About the Science Podcast
Authors: Sarah Crespi; Kevin McLean; Ann Gibbons
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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