With a growing number of people living with pain, we desperately need to understand it – but we are still unravelling the mysterious mechanisms behind the phenomenon
FEATURES – Roger Penrose: “Consciousness must be beyond computable physics”
FEATURES – Why emotions can feel so painful – and what it means for painkillers
FEATURES – We are only just beginning to understand what causes nociplastic pain
The James Webb Space Telescope’s first images of the distant universe shocked astronomers. Is the discovery of unimaginably distant galaxies a mirage or a revolution?
On this week’s show: How sci-fi writer Kurt Vonnegut foresaw many of today’s ethical dilemmas, and 70 years of tunas, billfishes, and sharks as sentinels of global ocean health
First up this week on the podcast, we revisit the works of science fiction author Kurt Vonneugt on what would have been his 100th birthday. News Intern Zack Savitsky and host Sarah Crespi discuss the work of ethicists, philosophers, and Vonnegut scholars on his influence on the ethics and practice of science. Researchers featured in this segment:
Peter-Paul Verbeek, a philosopher of science and technology at the University of Amsterdam and chair of the World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology David Koepsell, a philosopher of science and technology at Texas A&M University, College Station Christina Jarvis, a Vonnegut scholar at the State University of New York, Fredonia, and author of the new book Lucky Mud & Other Foma: A Field Guide to Kurt Vonnegut’s Environmentalism and Planetary Citizenship Sheila Jasanoff, a science studies scholar at Harvard University
Next, producer Kevin McLean discusses the connection between fishing pressure and extinction risk for large predatory fish such as tunas and sharks. He’s joined by Maria José Juan Jordá, a postdoc at the Spanish Institute for Oceanography, to learn what a new continuous Red List Index using the past 70 years of fisheries data can tell us about the effectiveness and limits of fishing regulations. Finally, in a sponsored segment from the Science/AAAS Custom Publishing Office, Sean Sanders, director and senior editor for custom publishing, interviews Joseph Hyser, assistant professor in the Department of Molecular Virology and Microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine about his use of wide-field fluorescence live cell microscopy to track intercellular calcium waves created following rotavirus infection.
The James Webb Space Telescope can peer into alien skies like never before. With six potentially habitable planets within its sights, astronomers are entering a new era in the search for biology beyond our solar system
The age at which you are considered an adult differs around the world, but emerging research into the developing brain suggests we may have got the concept of adulthood all wrong. When do we really become a grown-up?
The brain is so much more than its constituent cells. Each neuron in the brain connects with thousands of other neurons—but instead of a cacophony of connections, we have a synchronized symphony.
Detailed knowledge about the neural connections among regions of the brain is key for advancing our understanding of normal brain function and changes that occur with aging and disease.
Can we construct a model of brain function that enables an understanding of whole-brain circuit mechanisms underlying neurological disease and use it to predict the outcome of therapeutic interventions?
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