Science Talk

It is the wood that the rock greats have sworn by—swamp ash, in the form of their Fender Telecaster and Stratocaster guitars—for more than 70 years. If you have ever listened to rock, you have probably heard a solid-body swamp ash guitar. But now climate change is threatening the wood that helped build rock and roll. In today’s podcast, veteran guitarist Jim Campilongo takes us through the finer points of swamp ash and what it would mean to lose it.  Bonus material: Here’s Campilongo showing the difference between the sound of a solid-body swamp ash guitar and a hollow-body one.  And here’s a little information about Campilongo’s latest project: He teams up with his longtime collaborator Luca Benedetti on the album Two Guitars. Check it out. Editor’s Not (2/16/21): This podcast incorrectly stated that the article on climate change and swamp ash in the February 2021 edition of Scientific American was authored by Priyanka Runwal and Andrea Thompson. The author was Runwal alone. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on the Science Talk podcast, Alexis Gambis, a New York University biologist and independent filmmaker, speaks about making Son of Monarchs, which won the 2021 Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. The film is about a Mexican scientist who studies the evolution of monarch butterfly wings. It is a cultural piece about the politics of immigration, spirituality and shifting identities. Gambis talks about science beyond the lab bench, bringing CRISPR technology to the big screen and how he is usually given to bold, innovative features that focus on science or technology and that depict a scientist as a central character.  In one scene in Son of Monarchs, the main character stands in a rowdy bar and raises his glass to “CRISPR and the genetic revolution.” There are several allusions throughout the film to how gene editing fascinates and terrifies us. Evolutionary science is the thread that ties the human story together.  From script to screen, the scientist-director meditates on the long journey to the finish line, securing funding and how science’s big stories can be weaved into art.  Gambis has been running a science film festival for 13 years and making science films for longer. His next project, El Beso, is a plunge into the life and science-fiction writings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal, an early 20th-century Spanish neuroscientist who won the 1906 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb talks about his book Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kidney disease affects millions of Americans, but corporate capture of dialysis, along with disparities in treatment and transplant access, mean that not everyone's journey is the same. On this Science Talk podcast, we speak with Carrie Arnold, lead reporter in an ambitious, year-long reporting project into the current state of chronic kidney disease treatment in the U.S., from diagnosis to dialysis, and from maintenance treatment to transplant (for those who are lucky). You can read the first part in the series here. It's a story of technological and procedural advance, but also one that has seen just two large, for-profit enterprises come to dominate the market for dialysis delivery. It's a story of expanding access, but also one still marked by racial and ethnic disparities. And it's a tale of medical innovation and adaptation, but also one beset by conflicts of interest and an inability to adapt to holistic modes of care that other disease specialities, from cardiology to oncology, have long ago embraced.  For the 37 million Americans navigating the corridors of kidney disease, these are likely familiar issues. But for the third of Americans at risk for renal disease — and for anyone who cares about how the nation's health care dollars are spent — this five-part collaboration between Undark Magazine and Scientific American pulls back the curtain and provides an unflinching look at what's working, and what's not.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

About a year ago, SARS-CoV-2 (which wasn’t called that yet) was just beginning to emerge in a cluster of cases inside China. We know what has happened since then, but it bears repeating: there have been 69 million cases and more than 1.5 million deaths globally as of December 10, 2020, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. And as the virus raced around the world, science has also raced to understand how it actually works, biologically. Today on the Science Talk podcast, a virologist who has been part of that massive effort joins us. Britt Glaunsinger is a professor in the department of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She has been studying viruses for 25 years, with a particular focus, before December 2019, on the herpesvirus. Over the past 12 months, her lab has been focusing on strategies the virus uses to suppress the body's innate immune system. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Scientific American and the World Economic Forum sifted through more than 75 nominations for the most innovative and potentially game-changing technologies in 2020. The final top 10 span the fields of medicine, engineering, environmental sciences and chemistry. And to win the nod, the technologies must have the potential to spur progress in societies and economies by outperforming established ways of doing things. They also need to be novel (that is, not currently in wide use) yet likely to have a major impact within the next three to five years. Here’s your guide for the (hopefully) near future.  Read the full report here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Materials scientist and science writer Ainissa Ramirez talks about her latest book The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We look back at some highlights, midlights and lowlights of the history of Scientific American, featuring former editor in chief John Rennie. Astrophysicist Alan Guth also appears in a sponsored segment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Baking is applied microbiology,” according to the book Modernist Bread. During pandemic lockdowns, many people started baking their own bread. Scientific American contributing editor W. Wayt Gibbs talks about Modernist Bread, for which he was a writer and editor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Former Scientific American editor Mark Alpert talks about his latest sci-fi thriller The Coming Storm, which warns about the consequences of unethical scientific research and of ignoring the scientific findings you don’t like.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices