Science Friday Folgen

Overuse of antibiotics has lead to bacteria becoming resistant to the drugs. In the United States, at least two million people become infected with antibiotic resistant bacteria each year, according to the Center for Disease Control. While some researchers are looking for new sources of antibiotics, other scientists are looking for new strategies to treat bacterial infections. One strategy is the use of bacteriophages—viruses that infect and kill bacteria.  In 2013, the Food and Drug Administration prohibited the consumer genetic testing company 23andMe from marketing a test for breast cancer mutations and drug sensitivity. Now, the FDA has changed its mind, granting 23andMe permission to screen for three mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, which increase breast cancer risk. Around four percent of the world’s population has some form of synesthesia, a neurological phenomenon that blurs some of the lines around the senses. In two of the more common variants, synesthetes may involuntarily associate letters with colors, or see colors for musical notes—but there are many other forms of synesthesia, all involving the crossover of one form of perception to another. This week, researchers report that they’ve identified several regions of the genome that may be involved in synesthesia. Plus, Maggie Koerth-Baker, senior science reporter for Fivethirtyeight.com, tells Ira about a falling space station, exoplanets, and more top science stories of the week in the News Round-up. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Currently, the International Space Station is the only destination for astronauts traveling into lower-earth orbit. It’s also the only way for scientists to conduct experiments in microgravity. After two decades, it’s still proving to be incredibly useful to researchers. But time is running out. President Trump has indicated he wants to defund the station as scheduled by 2025, it’s nearing the end of its expected lifetime, and private companies have indicated that they, too, want to invest in the space station market. What does the future hold for science’s single biggest asset in lower earth orbit? Plus, researchers investigating mysterious X-ray sources in other galaxies are finding something strange: neutron stars that burn hundreds of times brighter than they should be able to. And new research published in Nature Astronomy suggests that the answer has to do with a magnetic field 10 billion times stronger than the strongest one ever generated on Earth by human physics experiments. It’s been about two years since U.S. retailers and lenders began converting to chip-based credit card technology—all in an effort to fend off the kind of fraud and hacks that stole millions of credit card numbers from big retailers like Target, Home Depot, and Michael’s a few years ago. Has it made a difference? And Gizmodo's Ryan Mandelbaum tells Ira about the biggest science stories this week in the News Round-up.   Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

If you like to read about the psychology around food and eating, you’ve probably come across stories based on research from Cornell’s Food and Brand Lab, directed by Brian Wansink. In an article published this week by Buzzfeed News, science reporter Stephanie Lee reports on a history of shoddy research practices in the lab, and a chain of emails that indicates a practice of “p-hacking”—a statistical wrangling of data aimed at making a borderline result appear to be statistically significant. Lee discusses her reporting with Ira, and talks about the challenge of reproducibility in scientific research. Having trouble warding off that weight gain? Have you tried taking some tapeworm eggs? Got a troublesome toothache? Consider cocaine. Swollen joints? Slather on some snake oil. In the new book Quackery:A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything, authors Lydia Kang and Nate Pederson survey a medicine chest’s worth of quacks through the ages, and employ modern-day scientific evidence to evaluate their efficacy. The grain sorghum might not seem familiar to many in the U.S.—but it’s the fifth most important cereal grown in the world. It’s a common human food ingredient in Africa and parts of Asia, and is often used in the U.S. for animal feed or for ethanol production. Now, researchers report that they’ve identified the pathway in one mutant strain of the grain that allows that variety to produce three times as many seeds per plant as regular sorghum. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.