Science At The Oscars, Finding Shackleton’s “Endurance” Ship. March 3, 2023, Part 1

In 1923, drug manufacturer Eli Lilly became the first company to commercialize insulin. Since then, its cost has skyrocketed. But this week, the company announced that it is capping the cost of insulin at $35. This comes as a huge relief to many Americans, since insulin has become the face of pharmaceutical price gouging. Over the last 20 years, the price of insulin has grown by six times, making this essential, life-saving drug unaffordable to many who need it.

Purbita Saha, deputy editor at Popular Science, joins Ira to talk about this announcement and other science news of the week. They chat about a new at-home test for COVID-19 and the flu, how the bird flu outbreak is faring, what we learned from NASA’s DART mission, and why scientists are growing a mushroom computer.

It’s Spacetime And Science Season At The Oscars

The Academy Awards are almost upon us, airing March 12. Movie buffs may have already seen many of the nominated films. But for science geeks, there’s another form of criteria for what films go on the top of their watchlist: Do these movies include science? This year, a whole bunch of Oscar nominees are driven by science as part of the plot. The Best Picture category has three: the multiverses in “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” the water-based society in “Avatar: The Way of Water,” and the gravity-defying aerial stunts in “Top Gun: Maverick.”

The Documentary Feature Film category is also ripe for science analysis: “Fire of Love” follows the love story between two French volcanologists, “All That Breathes” follows brothers who run a bird hospital in Delhi, and “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” spotlights Nan Goldin’s advocacy against the opioid-creating Sackler family. Ira is joined by Sonia Epstein, curator of science and technology at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, New York, to discuss these films and more—including science-oriented films that were snubbed from this years’ awards.

The Lasting Allure Of Shackleton’s ‘Endurance’

There are few stories about heroic survival equal to Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic rescue of his crew, which turned disaster into triumph. In August of 1914, 28 men set sail from England to the South Pole. Led by Shackleton himself, the group hoped to be the first to cross Antarctica by foot. However, their ship, the Endurance, became stuck in ice. It sank to the bottom of the frigid Antarctic waters, leaving most of the men stranded on a cold, desolate ice floe. Shackleton, with five of his crew, set out in a small boat to bring help from hundreds of miles away. Finally, after many months of fighting the cold, frostbite and angry seas, Shackleton was able to rescue all his men with no loss of life.

Over the years, there have been many attempts to find the Endurance shipwreck. None were successful until a year ago, when the wreck was located for the first time since it sank back in 1915. Ira is joined by Mensun Bound, maritime archeologist and the director of exploration on the mission that found the Endurance. His new book, The Ship Beneath the Ice, is out now.

Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

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