Episodes

4 days ago
4 days ago
Seeing how something happens makes it much easier to understand. Biological process can be very hard to capture with images or video. Understanding how a protein requires thinking in 3D but to take images of them we often have to 'snap freeze' them in place. How can lasers, ions and quantum mechanics be used to help capture a protein in motion. PCR based diagnostics tests are accurate but require a lot of setup and expertise. Can you make a PCR test more like a point of care test using bio-luminescence.
- Shiny Maity, Brad D. Price, C. Blake Wilson, Arnab Mukherjee, Matthieu Starck, David Parker, Maxwell Z. Wilson, Janet E. Lovett, Songi Han, Mark S. Sherwin. Triggered Functional Dynamics of AsLOV2 by Time‐Resolved Electron Paramagnetic Resonance at High Magnetic Fields. Angewandte Chemie International Edition, 2023; 62 (13) DOI: 10.1002/anie.202212832
- Harmen J. van der Veer, Eva A. van Aalen, Claire M. S. Michielsen, Eva T. L. Hanckmann, Jeroen Deckers, Marcel M. G. J. van Borren, Jacky Flipse, Anne J. M. Loonen, Joost P. H. Schoeber, Maarten Merkx. Glow-in-the-Dark Infectious Disease Diagnostics Using CRISPR-Cas9-Based Split Luciferase Complementation. ACS Central Science, 2023; DOI: 10.1021/acscentsci.2c01467

Monday Mar 13, 2023
Episode 525 - Life in a radiation exclusion zone and #2023MMM
Monday Mar 13, 2023
Monday Mar 13, 2023
Life in a radiation exclusion zone is challenging but not impossible. We find out about tales of survival, endurance and adaption in radiation zones and in March Mammal Madness. How does life adapt to high exposure of toxic chemicals, radiation and heavy metals? Studying the DNA of differing animal populations in Chernobyl helps researchers understand how life responds to environmental disasters. What's more stressful for wild boar - humans or a radiation disaster zone? Around Fukashima wild boar and snakes are thriving in what is classified as a radiation disaster zone. We also preview March Mammal Madness and find out about the different divisions in this year's edition.
- March Mammal Madness resources compiled by Arizona State University https://libguides.asu.edu/marchmammalmadness
- Megan N. Dillon, Rachael Thomas, Timothy A. Mousseau, Jennifer A. Betz, Norman J. Kleiman, Martha O. Burford Reiskind, Matthew Breen. Population dynamics and genome-wide selection scan for dogs in Chernobyl. Canine Medicine and Genetics, 2023; 10 (1) DOI: 10.1186/s40575-023-00124-1
- Kelly Cunningham, Thomas G. Hinton, Jared J. Luxton, Aryn Bordman, Kei Okuda, Lynn E. Taylor, Josh Hayes, Hannah C. Gerke, Sarah M. Chinn, Donovan Anderson, Mark L. Laudenslager, Tsugiko Takase, Yui Nemoto, Hiroko Ishiniwa, James C. Beasley, Susan M. Bailey. Evaluation of DNA damage and stress in wildlife chronically exposed to low-dose, low-dose rate radiation from the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant accident. Environment International, 2021; 155: 106675 DOI: 10.1016/j.envint.2021.106675

Monday Mar 06, 2023
Episode 524 - Bacteria’s sneaky 1-2 punch to get into your brain
Monday Mar 06, 2023
Monday Mar 06, 2023
Bacteria uses a clever 1-2 punch to make it through our central nervous systems defenses. The way bacteria can get through the outer layers of the meninges relies on knowing exactly what how the brain will respond to infection. Painful headaches are a key part of meningitis, but that pain response is actually opening the door for a sneak attack. Understanding how bacterial infections get into the brain will help develop new treatment pathways for meningitis. When bacteria come under attack themselves, they use signalling pathways that we can learn from. By studying the way bacteria defend themselves we could find common tools to use to precisely regulate human cells.
- Felipe A. Pinho-Ribeiro, Liwen Deng, Dylan V. Neel, Ozge Erdogan, Himanish Basu, Daping Yang, Samantha Choi, Alec J. Walker, Simone Carneiro-Nascimento, Kathleen He, Glendon Wu, Beth Stevens, Kelly S. Doran, Dan Levy, Isaac M. Chiu. Bacteria hijack a meningeal neuroimmune axis to facilitate brain invasion. Nature, 2023; DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-05753-x
- Hannah E. Ledvina, Qiaozhen Ye, Yajie Gu, Ashley E. Sullivan, Yun Quan, Rebecca K. Lau, Huilin Zhou, Kevin D. Corbett, Aaron T. Whiteley. An E1–E2 fusion protein primes antiviral immune signalling in bacteria. Nature, 2023; DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-05647-4

Monday Feb 27, 2023
Episode 523 - Sinking carbon out of seawater and carbon storage in wood
Monday Feb 27, 2023
Monday Feb 27, 2023
Our oceans and waterways are our largest carbon sinks and they're overflowing with CO2. Too much CO2 in our waterways can cause tremendous local damage, but there may be ways to clean that up. Using a cyclic process without messy membranes you can get water to release the CO2 captured inside. Extracting excess CO2 from oceans could be possible with only some clever chemistry cells with no waste byproducts. Now that you've got CO2 out of the ocean, what are you going to do with it? Make it work for you. Carbon sequestration can be more useful than just pumping it into the ground. With the right techniques you can use excess CO2 to improve construction materials.
- Seoni Kim, Michael Nitzsche, Simon B Rufer, Jack R. Lake, Kripa Kiran Varanasi, T. Alan Hatton. Asymmetric chloride-mediated electrochemical process for CO2 removal from oceanwater. Energy & Environmental Science, 2023; DOI: 10.1039/D2EE03804H
- Soumyabrata Roy, Firuz Alam Philip, Eliezer Fernando Oliveira, Gurwinder Singh, Stalin Joseph, Ram Manohar Yadav, Aparna Adumbumkulath, Sakib Hassan, Ali Khater, Xiaowei Wu, Praveen Bollini, Ajayan Vinu, George Shimizu, Pulickel M. Ajayan, Md Golam Kibria, Muhammad M. Rahman. Functional wood for carbon dioxide capture. Cell Reports Physical Science, 2023; 4 (2): 101269 DOI: 10.1016/j.xcrp.2023.101269

Monday Feb 20, 2023
Episode 522 - Making hydrogen greenly from Seawater
Monday Feb 20, 2023
Monday Feb 20, 2023
Hydrogen comes in all kinds of colours but what does that mean? Hydrogen has a role to play in a decarbonised world as long as we can produce it greenly. It's no good producing green hydrogen if you use up another valuable resource or create another kind of waste. Water water everywhere, but not a drop to electrolyse. Using seawater to make hydrogen has challenges. How can we use the abundant seawater resource to make green energy sources without producing nasty by products?
- Suraj Loomba, Muhammad Waqas Khan, Muhammad Haris, Seyed Mahdi Mousavi, Ali Zavabeti, Kai Xu, Anton Tadich, Lars Thomsen, Christopher F. McConville, Yongxiang Li, Sumeet Walia, Nasir Mahmood. Nitrogen‐Doped Porous Nickel Molybdenum Phosphide Sheets for Efficient Seawater Splitting. Small, 2023; 2207310 DOI: 10.1002/smll.202207310

Tuesday Feb 14, 2023
Episode 521 - Galaxies at the Cosmic Dawn
Tuesday Feb 14, 2023
Tuesday Feb 14, 2023
Using the JWST to peer into the Cosmic dawn of the universe. The JWST enables researchers to peer into the earliest galaxies in our universe. 250 Million years is not a long time when it comes to a star or galaxy. With JWST researchers can see galaxies formed 250 million years after the Big Bang. To peer into the earliest universe you must use infrared to capture the faintest light. Using new instruments on the JWST researchers are able to see galaxies from 13.25 billion years ago. JWST also lets researchers investigate strange new types of spiral galaxies from the Cosmic Noon.
- Yoshinobu Fudamoto, Akio K. Inoue, Yuma Sugahara. Red Spiral Galaxies at Cosmic Noon Unveiled in the First JWST Image. The Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2022; 938 (2): L24 DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/ac982b
- University of California - Santa Cruz. (2022, December 9). Astronomers report most distant known galaxies, detected and confirmed. ScienceDaily. Retrieved January 2, 2023 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/12/221209135542.htm

Monday Feb 06, 2023
Episode 520 - There and back again - tales from a wandering space probe
Monday Feb 06, 2023
Monday Feb 06, 2023
Hayabusa2 had an exciting voyage across our solar system, getting into dust ups and even coming back home again with data to share. We've been tracking the long journey of Hayabusa2 over the 10 years of this podcast, and we're now getting interesting data from the returned samples. The Hayabusa2 probe shot at the asteroid Ryugu and brought back proof for JAXA to study and it tells tales of a very early time in our solar system. Ryugu is much much older than we thought, born only 1.8 million years after the formation of our solar system. How does a planetary system form and why are some planets in a flat line and others really odd. Our Nepture is an anomaly not just in our solar system but also compared to others. What happened to all the other 'Hot Neptune' exoplanets? Did they get burnt off or flung away?
- Kaitlyn A. McCain, Nozomi Matsuda, Ming-Chang Liu, Kevin D. McKeegan, Akira Yamaguchi, Makoto Kimura, Naotaka Tomioka, Motoo Ito, Naoya Imae, Masayuki Uesugi, Naoki Shirai, Takuji Ohigashi, Richard C. Greenwood, Kentaro Uesugi, Aiko Nakato, Kasumi Yogata, Hayato Yuzawa, Yu Kodama, Kaori Hirahara, Ikuya Sakurai, Ikuo Okada, Yuzuru Karouji, Satoru Nakazawa, Tatsuaki Okada, Takanao Saiki, Satoshi Tanaka, Fuyuto Terui, Makoto Yoshikawa, Akiko Miyazaki, Masahiro Nishimura, Toru Yada, Masanao Abe, Tomohiro Usui, Sei-ichiro Watanabe, Yuichi Tsuda. Early fluid activity on Ryugu inferred by isotopic analyses of carbonates and magnetite. Nature Astronomy, 2023; DOI: 10.1038/s41550-022-01863-0.
- V. Bourrier, O. Attia, M. Mallonn, A. Marret, M. Lendl, P.-C. Konig, A. Krenn, M. Cretignier, R. Allart, G. Henry, E. Bryant, A. Leleu, L. Nielsen, G. Hebrard, N. Hara, D. Ehrenreich, J. Seidel, L. dos Santos, C. Lovis, D. Bayliss, H. M. Cegla, X. Dumusque, I. Boisse, A. Boucher, F. Bouchy, F. Pepe, B. Lavie, J. Rey Cerda, D. Ségransan, S. Udry, T. Vrignaud. DREAM. Astronomy & Astrophysics, 2023; 669: A63 DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/202245004

Monday Jan 30, 2023
Episode 519 - Evolving beaks and wild chickens
Monday Jan 30, 2023
Monday Jan 30, 2023
How did birds end up with their trademark beaks? You can broadly group birds into two categories, ancient and modern jaws or beaks. We thought mobile beaks were a modern invention but new fossils overturn this idea. Just when did birds first develop their modern mobile beaks? Wild jungle fowl were domesticated to become the chickens we love today. But wild chickens are not isolated completely from modern ones. Gene transfers between wild and domesticated chickens are eroding the genetic diversity of the species.
- Benjamin A. Tonelli, Casey Youngflesh, Morgan W. Tingley. Geomagnetic disturbance associated with increased vagrancy in migratory landbirds. Scientific Reports, 2023; 13 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-26586-0
- Meng Yue Wu, Giovanni Forcina, Gabriel Weijie Low, Keren R. Sadanandan, Chyi Yin Gwee, Hein van Grouw, Shaoyuan Wu, Scott V. Edwards, Maude W. Baldwin, Frank E. Rheindt. Historic samples reveal loss of wild genotype through domestic chicken introgression during the Anthropocene. PLOS Genetics, 2023; 19 (1): e1010551 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1010551

Monday Jan 23, 2023
Episode 518 - Aurora on Jupiter and on Earth
Monday Jan 23, 2023
Monday Jan 23, 2023
Aurora are stellar examples of high energy physics. You need to be at the right spot to find Aurora on earth, but its not quite the same on Jupiter. What governs where and how an aurora will form? Earth and Jupiter are very different in size and speed, but why are our Auroras so different? How does Jupiter's magnetosphere bring all it's moons into line? What happens when an small independent moon brushes up against a super sized neighbour? Ganymede has it's own indepedent magnetic field. So what would happen if it got gobbled up by Jupiter?
- Binzheng Zhang, Peter A. Delamere, Zhonghua Yao, Bertrand Bonfond, D. Lin, Kareem A. Sorathia, Oliver J. Brambles, William Lotko, Jeff S. Garretson, Viacheslav G. Merkin, Denis Grodent, William R. Dunn, John G. Lyon. How Jupiter’s unusual magnetospheric topology structures its aurora. Science Advances, 2021; 7 (15): eabd1204 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abd1204
- R. W. Ebert, S. A. Fuselier, F. Allegrini, F. Bagenal, S. J. Bolton, G. Clark, J. E. P. Connerney, G. A. DiBraccio, W. S. Kurth, S. Levin, D. J. McComas, J. Montgomery, N. Romanelli, A. H. Sulaiman, J. R. Szalay, P. Valek, R. J. Wilson. Evidence for Magnetic Reconnection at Ganymede's Upstream Magnetopause During the PJ34 Juno Flyby. Geophysical Research Letters, 2022; 49 (23) DOI: 10.1029/2022GL099775

Monday Jan 16, 2023
Episode 517 - Cute green balls of algae and a changing climate
Monday Jan 16, 2023
Monday Jan 16, 2023
In the northern reaches of Japan in a idyllic lake, cute green balls of algae are battling for survival. It sounds like an anime, but cute green algae balls, Marimo, are battling stellar forces. Too much sunlight can endanger the cute green algae balls, the Marimo. Having too much sunlight can be just as bad for algae as too little. How can brown algae help fight back against climate change? Algae have changed the climate once before, so can they do it again? If you were to quantify the carbon sequestration of algae, would it really make an impact globally?
- Akina Obara, Mari Ogawa, Yoichi Oyama, Yoshihiro Suzuki, Masaru Kono. Effects of High Irradiance and Low Water Temperature on Photoinhibition and Repair of Photosystems in Marimo (Aegagropila linnaei) in Lake Akan, Japan. International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 2022; 24 (1): 60 DOI: 10.3390/ijms24010060
- Hagen Buck-Wiese, Mona A. Andskog, Nguyen P. Nguyen, Margot Bligh, Eero Asmala, Silvia Vidal-Melgosa, Manuel Liebeke, Camilla Gustafsson, Jan-Hendrik Hehemann. Fucoid brown algae inject fucoidan carbon into the ocean. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2022; 120 (1) DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2210561119

Monday Jan 09, 2023
Episode 517 - How our body senses and interacts with the world
Monday Jan 09, 2023
Monday Jan 09, 2023
Understanding how our body senses and interacts with the world. Scientists are only now beginning to understand how our body senses the world, hence the '21 Nobel Prizes. This Nobel prize wining research helped others find a connection between the gut and our sense of touch. Internal organ pain can be crippling and require side effect laden treatments. How do organs like the gut detect and transmit pain signals? The same mechanism to detect soft touch is used by your organs to send pain signals. How does our body precisely control temperature? What region of the brain measures and control what temperature to set itself to?
- Zili Xie, Jing Feng, Timothy J. Hibberd, Bao Nan Chen, Yonghui Zhao, Kaikai Zang, Xueming Hu, Xingliang Yang, Lvyi Chen, Simon J. Brookes, Nick J. Spencer, Hongzhen Hu. Piezo2 channels expressed by colon-innervating TRPV1-lineage neurons mediate visceral mechanical hypersensitivity. Neuron, 2022; DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2022.11.015
- Yoshiko Nakamura, Takaki Yahiro, Akihiro Fukushima, Naoya Kataoka, Hiroyuki Hioki, Kazuhiro Nakamura. Prostaglandin EP3 receptor–expressing preoptic neurons bidirectionally control body temperature via tonic GABAergic signaling. Science Advances, 2022; 8 (51) DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.add5463

Monday Jan 02, 2023
Episode 516 - How plants handle too much or too little light
Monday Jan 02, 2023
Monday Jan 02, 2023
Too much or too little light can cause serious problems for plants. Light levels are not simply a feast or famine equation when it comes to photosynthesis. Plants must carefully manage the amount of light coming in to ensure smooth photosynthesis. The way genes in leaves responding to rapidly changing light conditions help them make the most of photosynthesis. Your eyes have to rapidly respond to opening curtains in a dark room, just like leaves of a plant. What about plants that have abandoned the need for light at all? Can a plant survive or thrive without light or photosynthesis?
- Thekla von Bismarck, Kübra Korkmaz, Jeremy Ruß, Kira Skurk, Elias Kaiser, Viviana Correa Galvis, Jeffrey A. Cruz, Deserah D. Strand, Karin Köhl, Jürgen Eirich, Iris Finkemeier, Peter Jahns, David M. Kramer, Ute Armbruster. Light acclimation interacts with thylakoid ion transport to govern the dynamics of photosynthesis in Arabidopsis. New Phytologist, 2022; 237 (1): 160 DOI: 10.1111/nph.18534
- Kenji Suetsugu, Shun K. Hirota, Tian-Chuan Hsu, Shuichi Kurogi, Akio Imamura, Yoshihisa Suyama. Monotropastrum kirishimense (Ericaceae), a new mycoheterotrophic plant from Japan based on multifaceted evidence. Journal of Plant Research, 2022; DOI: 10.1007/s10265-022-01422-8

Monday Dec 26, 2022
Episode 515 - Do you really need oxygen for oxidation
Monday Dec 26, 2022
Monday Dec 26, 2022
How does chemistry change when you travel to another planet? When it comes to scientific experiments often we can be hampered by our own experience. Just because something is abundant on earth does not meant that it's a universal constant. Out of this world chemistry is hard to get your head around and it requires thinking outside the box. Is it possible to have oxidize minerals without oxygen?
- Kaushik Mitra, Eleanor L. Moreland, Greg J. Ledingham, Jeffrey G. Catalano. Formation of manganese oxides on early Mars due to active halogen cycling. Nature Geoscience, 2022; DOI: 10.1038/s41561-022-01094-y

Monday Dec 19, 2022
Episode 514 - Pushing water to the limits on earth and in space
Monday Dec 19, 2022
Monday Dec 19, 2022
What happens when you push water to the limits on earth and in Space? Water has really weird properties especially when it gets really cold. How can we understand and model the behaviour when it moves to fast for us to capture? How do droplets form and why do you need the ISS to study it? What can microgravity tell us about the way droplets form?
- Thomas E. Gartner, Pablo M. Piaggi, Roberto Car, Athanassios Z. Panagiotopoulos, Pablo G. Debenedetti. Liquid-Liquid Transition in Water from First Principles. Physical Review Letters, 2022; 129 (25) DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.129.255702
- J. McCraney, J. Ludwicki, J. Bostwick, S. Daniel, P. Steen. Coalescence-induced droplet spreading: Experiments aboard the International Space Station. Physics of Fluids, 2022; 34 (12): 122110 DOI: 10.1063/5.0125279

Monday Dec 12, 2022
Episode 513 - An eerie glow in the Solar System
Monday Dec 12, 2022
Monday Dec 12, 2022
How do you measure the solar system and the universe whilst being inside of it? Too much light is a problem for astronomers and our solar system has it's own glow. If you take away all known light sources form the solar system, there is still a faint glow. We know about background radiation, but what about the solar systems background lighting? How can you test the curvature of the universe? To answer universal scale questions you need to start small. Really small. Using Bose Einstein condensates and getting really cold we can simulate curved universes in a molecule scale.
- Timothy Carleton, Rogier A. Windhorst, Rosalia O’Brien, Seth H. Cohen, Delondrae Carter, Rolf Jansen, Scott Tompkins, Richard G. Arendt, Sarah Caddy, Norman Grogin, Scott J. Kenyon, Anton Koekemoer, John MacKenty, Stefano Casertano, Luke J. M. Davies, Simon P. Driver, Eli Dwek, Alexander Kashlinsky, Nathan Miles, Nor Pirzkal, Aaron Robotham, Russell Ryan, Haley Abate, Hanga Andras-Letanovszky, Jessica Berkheimer, Zak Goisman, Daniel Henningsen, Darby Kramer, Ci’mone Rogers, Andi Swirbul. SKYSURF: Constraints on Zodiacal Light and Extragalactic Background Light through Panchromatic HST All-sky Surface-brightness Measurements: II. First Limits on Diffuse Light at 1.25, 1.4, and 1.6 μm. The Astronomical Journal, 2022; 164 (5): 170 DOI: 10.3847/1538-3881/ac8d02
- Celia Viermann, Marius Sparn, Nikolas Liebster, Maurus Hans, Elinor Kath, Álvaro Parra-López, Mireia Tolosa-Simeón, Natalia Sánchez-Kuntz, Tobias Haas, Helmut Strobel, Stefan Floerchinger, Markus K. Oberthaler. Quantum field simulator for dynamics in curved spacetime. Nature, 2022; 611 (7935): 260 DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-05313-9

Monday Dec 05, 2022
Episode 512 - Analyzing aftershocks and predicting earthquakes
Monday Dec 05, 2022
Monday Dec 05, 2022
Forecasting an earthquake is serious business, but it's not like the weather. Why are earthquakes so hard to predict? Knowing when an earthquake will occur is hard enough, but what about predicting aftershocks? Aftershocks can create huge stress and compound damage after a quake so what can be done to predict them? Building huge scale models out of granite can help researchers better understand aftershocks. Sliding slabs of granite, plastic blocks and quartz dust help researchers understand aftershocks. When an earthquake combines with another disaster, the compound effect is devastating. How good are modern risk assessment tools at managing compound disasters?
- Sara Beth L. Cebry, Chun-Yu Ke, Srisharan Shreedharan, Chris Marone, David S. Kammer, Gregory C. McLaskey. Creep fronts and complexity in laboratory earthquake sequences illuminate delayed earthquake triggering. Nature Communications, 2022; 13 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-34397-0
- Misato Uehara, Kuei-Hsien Liao, Yuki Arai, Yuta Masakane. Could the magnitude of the 3/11 disaster have been reduced by ecological planning? A retrospective multi-hazard risk assessment through map overlay. Landscape and Urban Planning, 2022; 227: 104541 DOI: 10.1016/j.landurbplan.2022.104541

Monday Nov 28, 2022
Episode 511 - How the earliest brains developed and handle touch
Monday Nov 28, 2022
Monday Nov 28, 2022
Peering into the history of brains with some amazing tiny fossils. How did the earliest brains develop? Is a head just an extension of a segmented body or something else entirely? How did the first brains and nervous systems evolve in arthropods. How does your body process the sense of touch? The faintest sensations of touch are handled by specialist cells in your spinal cord. How do your brain stem and spinal cord help your body process the senses?
- Nicholas J. Strausfeld, Xianguang Hou, Marcel E. Sayre, Frank Hirth. The lower Cambrian lobopodian Cardiodictyon resolves the origin of euarthropod brains. Science, 2022; 378 (6622): 905 DOI: 10.1126/science.abn6264
- Turecek, J., Lehnert, B.P. & Ginty, D.D. The encoding of touch by somatotopically aligned dorsal column subdivisions. Nature, 2022 DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-05470-x
- Anda M. Chirila, Genelle Rankin, Shih-Yi Tseng, Alan J. Emanuel, Carmine L. Chavez-Martinez, Dawei Zhang, Christopher D. Harvey, David D. Ginty. Mechanoreceptor signal convergence and transformation in the dorsal horn flexibly shape a diversity of outputs to the brain. Cell, 2022; 185 (24): 4541 DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2022.10.012

Monday Nov 21, 2022
Episode 510 - Fungi spreading across the planet and wiping out toxic soils
Monday Nov 21, 2022
Monday Nov 21, 2022
Fungi have an amazing ability to spread across continents but stay linked as a family lineage. Fungi can adapt to specific geographic niches in the same way as grapes. Different families of highly specialized mushrooms grow side by side across continents. How can fungi protect the plants it's attached to? Fungi often get a bad rap in farming, but they can be used to detoxify soils. Removing mercury and boosting crops; is there anything fungi can't do?
- Keaton Tremble, J. I. Hoffman, Bryn T. M. Dentinger. Contrasting continental patterns of adaptive population divergence in the holarctic ectomycorrhizal fungus Boletus edulis. New Phytologist, 2022; DOI: 10.1111/nph.18521
- Congcong Wu, Dan Tang, Jin Dai, Xingyuan Tang, Yuting Bao, Jiali Ning, Qing Zhen, Hui Song, Raymond J. St. Leger, Weiguo Fang. Bioremediation of mercury-polluted soil and water by the plant symbiotic fungus Metarhizium robertsii. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2022; 119 (47) DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2214513119

Monday Nov 14, 2022
Episode 509 - What connects spicy food, proteins and your gut
Monday Nov 14, 2022
Monday Nov 14, 2022
How is your gut connected to the rest of your body? How does your nervous system connect to your gut? How can you sense pain inside of your gut? The bacteria that live inside your gut can call for help when under pressure. With the wrong balance of bacteria or signalling proteins our guts can be more prone for inflammation and damage. How can bad bacteria escape from the gut and evade detection? What enables some bacteria to sneak out of the intestine and wreck havoc.
- Wen Zhang, Mengze Lyu, Nicholas J. Bessman, Zili Xie, Mohammad Arifuzzaman, Hiroshi Yano, Christopher N. Parkhurst, Coco Chu, Lei Zhou, Gregory G. Putzel, Ting-Ting Li, Wen-Bing Jin, Jordan Zhou, Hongzhen Hu, Amy M. Tsou, Chun-Jun Guo, David Artis. Gut-innervating nociceptors regulate the intestinal microbiota to promote tissue protection. Cell, 2022; DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2022.09.008
- Yusibeska Ramos, Stephanie Sansone, Sung-Min Hwang, Tito A. Sandoval, Mengmeng Zhu, Guoan Zhang, Juan R. Cubillos-Ruiz, Diana K. Morales. Remodeling of the Enterococcal Cell Envelope during Surface Penetration Promotes Intrinsic Resistance to Stress. mBio, 2022; DOI: 10.1128/mbio.02294-22

Monday Nov 07, 2022
Episode 508 - Finding your way as a fish along rivers and into the deep
Monday Nov 07, 2022
Monday Nov 07, 2022
How can fish keep themselves stable in a fast flowing river? What's the best way to stay on track as a fish? To swim straight ahead fish often end up staring downwards. The riverbed is way easier to track than a fast flowing current. How did fish manage to make their way into the deepest parts of the ocean? What climatic factors drove fish to explore deeper and deeper? What changed in Earth's history to encourage fish to thrive in the deepest parts of oceans?
- Emma Alexander, Lanya T. Cai, Sabrina Fuchs, Tim C. Hladnik, Yue Zhang, Venkatesh Subramanian, Nicholas C. Guilbeault, Chinnian Vijayakumar, Muthukumarasamy Arunachalam, Scott A. Juntti, Tod R. Thiele, Aristides B. Arrenberg, Emily A. Cooper. Optic flow in the natural habitats of zebrafish supports spatial biases in visual self-motion estimation. Current Biology, 2022; DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.10.009
- Elizabeth Christina Miller, Christopher M. Martinez, Sarah T. Friedman, Peter C. Wainwright, Samantha A. Price, Luke Tornabene. Alternating regimes of shallow and deep-sea diversification explain a species-richness paradox in marine fishes. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2022; 119 (43) DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2123544119