Episoder
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Whatâs the worldâs oldest surviving building? Language? Useful technology? The oldest living organism? The oldest species of living organism? The oldest rock on the planet and the oldest star in the cosmos? How do scientists measure the ages of ancient things?
In this podcast series, âThe Oldest Everythingâ, Iâll go in search of the oldest things in the world, and along the way Iâll explore the physics of timeâs passage, which is tied up with the concept of entropy, itself intertwined with the process of aging. Iâll explore the notion of endurance and what parts of our present world will be left standing in the far future.
In this pilot episode, Iâll be turning my attention to the universe â which is getting a lot of attention lately for amazing new discoveries, most recently that the whole cosmos is rippling with gravitational waves.
Those waves may be the weirdest thing in the universe, but whatâs the very oldest thing in the universe? Is it something all around us, or something many light years away?
Iâll be hearing from four science superstars â Richard Gott, Sabine Hossenfelder, Hakeem Oluseye, and Nobel Laureate James Peebles.
Writer, Host, Producer: Faye Flam
Editor: Seth Gliksman
Music:
"Through The Wormhole" by Dilating Times is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY).
"Jam No. 1" by Dilating Times is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY).
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Some scientists think long Covid is caused by lingering inflammation. Others think the virus might hide out in the body. Two years into the pandemic, scientists are scrambling to understand long Covid and find treatments.
Bruce Levy is chief of the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at Brigham and Womenâs Hospital. He now heads the Recovery Center, which was set up to treat and study long Covid.
We talk about risk factors for long Covid, the most common lingering symptoms, the different theories for its cause, the hunt for treatments and how the threat of long covid should shape peopleâs risk calculations.
âFollow the Science" is produced, written, and hosted by Faye Flam. Todayâs episode was edited by Seth Gliksman with music by Kyle Imperatore. If youâd like to hear more "Follow the Science," please like, follow, and subscribe!
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I think this February 2021 episode is more relevant than ever today. It explores the subjective, politicized way that some ideas get labelled as misinformation and why itâs so important for experts to explain why something is likely to be wrong rather than dismissing it out of hand - and why censorship can cause more harm than good.
Original Description:
Misinformation about the pandemic is flooding over social media and traditional news media as well. But itâs not obvious what constitutes misinformation when the weâre grappling with a new virus and the state of science changes weekly. Iâll be talking to physician and medical educator Roger Seheult about getting censored by YouTube, and about the way politics has shaped peopleâs perception of such seemingly neutral topics as drugs, vitamin D and vaccines.
Immunologist Florian Krammer will talk about how the pandemic has changed the way people consumer and create science news, so that legitimate scientific papers can be misinterpreted to create misinformation.
âFollow the Science" is produced, written, and hosted by Faye Flam. Todayâs episode was edited by Seth Gliksman with music by Kyle Imperatore. If youâd like to hear more "Follow the Science," please like, follow, and subscribe!
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Some people still have symptoms from a Covid-19 infection picked up in 2020 and are wondering if thereâs any relief in sight. Many suffer months of debilitating fatigue and neurological problems, and Covid-19 can increase risk for heart disease. Scientists are scrambling to understand why, and how to prevent or treat whatâs come to be called "long Covid".
Ziyad Al-Aly has been a leader in research on long Covid. We talk about the symptoms heâs seeing in his patients, leading ideas for whatâs causing long Covid, how infection affects the brain, the challenge of estimating the frequency of long Covid, and why he thinks a âLong Covid moonshotâ is warranted.
Dr. Al-Aly is Chief of Research and Development at the VA Saint Louis Health Care System.
âFollow the Science" is produced, written, and hosted by Faye Flam. Todayâs episode was edited by Seth Gliksman with music by Kyle Imperatore. If youâd like to hear more "Follow the Science," please like, follow, and subscribe!
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Covid-19 has some weird long-term effects, including prolonged inability to taste or smell, and various neurological symptoms â difficulty concentrating, memory loss and crushing fatigue. Alzheimerâs Disease is also connected to changes in smell and ability to remember smells. My guest, neurologist Mark Albers of Massachusetts General Hospital will help explain what all this means.
We talk about how to interpret a brain scanning study showing brain âshrinkageâ in people whoâd had Covid; How inflammation in the brain might have something to do with changes in smell and long Covid; How heâs devised a smell test that picks up risk of early Alzheimerâs Disease, and whether thereâs any reason to be concerned that Covid-19 will increase the risk for dementia.
âFollow the Science" is produced, written, and hosted by Faye Flam. Todayâs episode was edited by Seth Gliksman with music by Kyle Imperatore. If youâd like to hear more "Follow the Science," please like, follow, and subscribe!
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In the 1950s, 100 million rabbits were overrunning Australia â an invasive species crisis that led people to unleash germ warfare â infecting them with a deadly virus called myxomatosis. It was devastating â 99.9% of the rabbits across the continent died, according to Penn State University biologist Andrew Read. But the survivors rebounded, and over the subsequent decades the virus became less virulent, and then deadlier, and the rabbits evolved resistance. I talk to Dr. Read about that episode, what scientists learned from it, and how those lessons might apply to understanding the evolution of SARS-CoV-2.
âFollow the Science" is produced, written, and hosted by Faye Flam. Todayâs episode was edited by Seth Gliksman with music by Kyle Imperatore. If youâd like to hear more "Follow the Science," please like, follow, and subscribe!
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We seem to be in Covid intermission now, with low cases but lots of warnings that the disease will stage a comeback, probably in some new mutated form. Itâs a time to reflect back on the last two years, and consider the many misleading predictions and projections, including the notion that the pandemic would go away if enough people wore a mask.
In this episode Iâll talk with epidemiologist Michael Osterholm, who heads the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. Heâs worried about a next wave, and even more worried that public health squandered our trust with overconfident predictions about untested non-pharmaceutical interventions. We talk about mask policies, evolution of the virus, and why heâs still mystified by the steep rise and fall of pandemic waves.
âFollow the Science" is produced, written, and hosted by Faye Flam. Todayâs episode was edited by Seth Gliksman with music by Kyle Imperatore. If youâd like to hear more "Follow the Science," please like, follow, and subscribe!
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Science can tell us something about the risks of Covid-19 but it canât tell us how much risk to accept, or how much to sacrifice in the name of mitigation. Too often politicians used the phrase âFollow the Scienceâ to silence much-needed public debate and create the illusion that science allowed no other alternatives to the policies they wanted to impose.
Rutgers University law professor Jacob Hale Russell has studied populism and the publicâs attitude toward expertise. He questions the stereotype of populists as those who dislike knowledge and hate science. Instead, their grievances are against use of science to deflect legitimate concerns and questions. We talk about how our policies â especially universal making - came about and why follow the science may be a problematic policy slogan but itâs still a pretty good name for a podcast.
âFollow the Science" is produced, written, and hosted by Faye Flam. Todayâs episode was edited by Seth Gliksman with music by Kyle Imperatore. If youâd like to hear more "Follow the Science," please like, follow, and subscribe!
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Thereâs a lot of anxiety this week as the public, politicians and even some scientists are moving on from restrictions and mask-wearing that defined the last two years. And yet, SARS-CoV-2 is very much still with us, a sub-variant called BA.2 is still posing a threat, and new variants are likely to emerge. And thereâs evidence that protection from our booster shots could wane. Immunologist Dan Barouch of Harvard and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center will talk about all these threats, address scientistsâ new appreciation for ânatural immunityâ and explain how he and other scientists will continue to fight the pandemic in months to come.
âFollow the Science" is produced, written, and hosted by Faye Flam. Todayâs episode was edited by Seth Gliksman with music by Kyle Imperatore. If youâd like to hear more "Follow the Science," please like, follow, and subscribe!
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In this episode I set off on a quest to find the oldest endemic human virusâthe one thatâs been riding along with our species the longest. The answer is harder to get than Iâd anticipated, but along the way I learn about some ancient viruses, and how viruses shape our evolution as they evolve themselves.
Iâll also discuss where the omicron variant came from â including the possibility it jumped to another animal and back to humans. And Iâll get up to date on the latest worrisome variant â a sister of omicron called BA.2
Erin Bromage is a biologist and infectious disease expert at the UMass, Dartmouth
Bill Hanage is an epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health
David Sanders is a virologist at Purdue University
Sarah Otto is an evolutionary biologist at the University of British Columbia
âFollow the Science" is produced, written, and hosted by Faye Flam. Todayâs episode was edited by Seth Gliksman with music by Kyle Imperatore. If youâd like to hear more "Follow the Science," please like, follow, and subscribe!
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Spreading rumors and misinformation about enemies for political gain has deep roots in humanityâs affinity for tribal behavior, says political scientist and evolutionary psychologist Michael Bang Petersen of Aarhus University in Denmark. His latest work shows that the biggest super-spreaders of misinformation and hatred on social media are actually the most politically savvy and well-connected.
In this interview we talk about his latest work and about how both the US and Denmark recently ended many pandemic restrictions. But in his country it went smoothly and here people are either outraged that restrictions are ending or outraged they were ever imposed. We talk about Dr. Bang Petersenâs New York Times piece, âThe End of the Pandemic May Tear Us Apart.â Why isnât it tearing Denmark apart? They have trust and shared, realistic goals.
âFollow the Science" is produced, written, and hosted by Faye Flam. Todayâs episode was edited by Seth Gliksman with music by Kyle Imperatore. If youâd like to hear more "Follow the Science," please like, follow, and subscribe!
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Social media companies may claim censorship is for our own good â to shield us from misinformation â but the process has no transparency. And Facebook and Twitter algorithms are set up to amplify sensational claims, to push people into polarized camps, and delude users about the popularity and value of what are often fringe ideas.
Social scientists David Rand and Gordon Pennycook have studied social media behavior and found that people care about sharing accurate news, but often give in to temptation to share with whatâs likely to be popular, rather than accurate. But there are solutions. The researchers found a way to leverage crowdsourcing to improve the quality of shared information. And algorithms could, in principle, be reset to amplify high quality information.
âFollow the Science" is produced, written, and hosted by Faye Flam. Todayâs episode was edited by Seth Gliksman with music by Kyle Imperatore. If youâd like to hear more "Follow the Science," please like, follow, and subscribe!
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Suddenly the word endemic is all over the media â perhaps itâs replacing âherd immunityâ and ânew normalâ to put words to peopleâs hopes that the pandemic will end soon.
But what does endemic mean and when will Covid-19 get there? I pose these questions to Aris Katzourakis, an expert in viral genomics and evolution at Oxford University, and author of a recent opinion piece in the journal Nature titled "Endemic Doesnât Mean Harmless". We also talk about how new variants come along, and what can be predicted about the evolution of the virus in the future.
That said, there are signs everywhere that people in many parts of the world will soon stop reacting to Covid-19 as an emergency and settle into more normal activities as we recognize that weâre in this for the long haul.
âFollow the Science" is produced, written, and hosted by Faye Flam. Todayâs episode was edited by Seth Gliksman with music by Kyle Imperatore. If youâd like to hear more "Follow the Science," please like, follow, and subscribe!
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Almost everyone has a story of someone who was healthy and received all the shots and still got wiped out by Covid-19 this winter. While thereâs no doubt getting vaccinated and boosted vastly lowers your odds being hospitalized, thereâs a random element in this omicron phase of the pandemic that comes down to our genes.
Immunologist Gaurav Das Gaiha explains how he and his colleagues discovered that about 20% of people donât get nearly as much protection against omicron from their vaccines. Instead of everyone getting 75% protection, weâre seeing a lot of variability. In this discussion, we consider why the human immune system is so diverse and what it means for our species.
Here is the study we discuss showing some peopleâs vaccines donât give them strong protection against omicron: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.04.21268586v1
And hereâs the study connecting pheromones, attraction and the genes regulating our immune systems: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17888797/
âFollow the Science" is produced, written, and hosted by Faye Flam. Todayâs episode was edited by Seth Gliksman with music by Kyle Imperatore. If youâd like to hear more "Follow the Science," please like, follow, and subscribe!
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Itâs a confusing time right now - in January of 2022, since so many vaccinated people are coming down with omicron. The virus has changed a lot since the vaccines were formulated, but the data show they are still offering partial protection. To understand whatâs going on, I asked immunologist(and poet) Shiv Pillai to explain how our bodies ârememberâ those vaccines. I wanted to know how vaccines work in the first place, and how they can protect us after the virus mutates into a new variant. What I learned was that the vaccines kick off a process of Darwinian evolution in your antibody-producing cells.
âFollow the Science" is produced, written, and hosted by Faye Flam, with funding by the Society for Professional Journalists. Todayâs episode was edited by Seth Gliksman with music by Kyle Imperatore. If youâd like to hear more "Follow the Science," please like, follow, and subscribe!
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Big pharma is out for big pharma, but that doesnât mean we donât benefit from drugs, vaccines and treatments â AIDS was a death sentence until pharma came up with drugs called protease inhibitors that allowed people with HIV to live out their lives.
Now thereâs Paxlovid - a protease inhibitor to fight Covid-19. The biggest downside of this drug is there isnât enough of it to go around.
Iâll be talking about that drug and more with medicinal chemist Derek Lowe, who is the author of Science Magazineâs In the Pipeline blog. Itâs a wonderful, critical, objective look at the science of pharmaceuticals. The bottom line is you donât ever have to blindly trust anyone to tell you a drug works. What matters is that they can show how drugs work â and provide reproducible data.
âFollow the Science" is produced, written, and hosted by Faye Flam, with funding by the Society for Professional Journalists. Todayâs episode was edited by Seth Gliksman with music by Kyle Imperatore. If youâd like to hear more "Follow the Science," please like, follow, and subscribe!
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Few subjects are more contaminated with misinformation than treatments for Covid-19, with many patients still demanding Ivermectin in hospitals despite the drugâs failure in clinical trials. But now, finally, weâre hearing claims that new drugs really do save lives. Pfizer just got approval for a pill called Paxlovid, and now thereâs evidence a cheap anti-depressant called Fluvoxamine can save lives as well. But how do we sort out the science from the big pharma hype?
Iâll be talking to Roger Seheult (MedCram), a pulmonologist and critical care doctor, who goes deeper than the clinical data. Our discussion delves into the inner workings of your cells to show what these drugs do, why theyâre likely to help some people, and how they might cause some side effects.
Dr. Seheult is also a sleep researcher, and had some fascinating ideas on how to stay healthy this winter â because itâs much better not to need drugs in the first place.
âFollow the Science" is produced, written, and hosted by Faye Flam, with funding by the Society for Professional Journalists. Todayâs episode was edited by Seth Gliksman with music by Kyle Imperatore. If youâd like to hear more "Follow the Science," please like, follow, and subscribe!
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Omicron is less deadly but spreading at blinding speed. Is it the end of the world or no big deal? The UK is several weeks ahead of us in their omicron wave and can give us a sense of what might happen here.
Physician MĂŒge Ăevik will join us from the Scotland, where sheâs an infectious disease specialist and a lecturer at the University of St. Andrews. Sheâs become famous as a source of practical advice throughout the pandemic. We talk about whatâs happening in the hospitals there, whoâs at risk for hospitalization, what prevention measures are likely to help, and what societyâs goals should be in dealing with the virus.
âFollow the Science" is produced, written, and hosted by Faye Flam, with funding by the Society for Professional Journalists. Todayâs episode was edited by Seth Gliksman with music by Kyle Imperatore. If youâd like to hear more "Follow the Science," please like, follow, and subscribe!
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With omicron exploding, weâre seeing vaccine mandates expand and booster mandates on the table. Whatâs the scientific rationale? Mandates are predicated on the idea that vaccines stop or at least reduce transmission, and booster mandates on the notion that unboosted people pose a danger to society. Do they? Iâll be talking about vaccines and transmission with Stephen Kissler. Heâs a research fellow in immunology and infectious diseases at the Harvard School of Public health. Heâs the lead author on a recent study that tracked cases in the NBA to understand viral loads, variants and the effects of vaccines.
âFollow the Science" is produced, written, and hosted by Faye Flam, with funding by the Society for Professional Journalists. Todayâs episode was edited by Seth Gliksman with music by Kyle Imperatore. If youâd like to hear more "Follow the Science," please like, follow, and subscribe!
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Some experts tell us to be very afraid, others are not so sure. But what matters about the omicron problem is how we solve it â and that means understanding what it is, how well vaccines protect against it, and whether to focus efforts on boosters, getting doses to other countries, or creating a new vaccine tailored for this emerging variant.
My guest, Emma Hodcroft, is a molecular epidemiologist at the University of Bern, and has been closely tracking all the scientific work thatâs been done to quickly assess omicron. We talk about best and worst case scenarios, laboratory experiments that attempt to measure how well vaccines work against omicron, and how the new data should translate into action.
âFollow the Science" is produced, written, and hosted by Faye Flam, with funding by the Society for Professional Journalists. Todayâs episode was edited by Seth Gliksman with music by Kyle Imperatore. If youâd like to hear more "Follow the Science," please like, follow, and subscribe!
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