Iron-toothed dragons, and improving electron microscopy

This episode dives into the fascinating world of Komodo dragons, known for their iron-lined teeth, and discusses advancements in electron microscopy that minimize sample damage during observation.

1. Komodo dragons' teeth are uniquely reinforced with iron, enhancing their predatory efficiency.
2. New methodologies in electron microscopy can reduce sample damage, allowing for prolonged and detailed observation.
3. The adaptation of these microscopy techniques could enable the study of more sensitive materials and biological samples.
4. Innovations discussed could have broader applications in various fields of science, potentially improving imaging techniques across disciplines.
5. The episode underscores the intersection of biological wonder and technological advancement in modern science.

1: Komodo Dragons and their Iron Teeth

Exploring the unique biological adaptation of Komodo dragons, which have iron-reinforced teeth for effective predation. The discussion includes insights into the evolutionary significance of this trait. Sarah Crespi: "Komodo dragons' teeth, lined with iron, are nature's version of a steak knife—perfectly designed for tearing through tough prey."

2: Advancing Electron Microscopy

Jonathan Peters describes a new technique in electron microscopy that minimizes damage to samples by reducing electron exposure, preserving the quality and integrity of the images obtained. Jonathan Peters: "By controlling electron exposure, we can extend the life of the samples we study, allowing for more detailed and extended observations."

1. Educate about wildlife conservation: Understanding unique animal traits like those of Komodo dragons can foster interest and efforts in wildlife conservation.
2. Promote cross-disciplinary research: Combining biological insights with technological innovations can lead to breakthroughs in multiple fields.
3. Encourage participation in science: Highlighting intriguing research can inspire the public and especially younger generations to engage in scientific studies and careers.
4. Support scientific literacy: Share knowledge from such episodes to enhance public understanding of complex scientific concepts.
5. Advocate for technological advancements: Support research and development in technologies that reduce environmental or procedural impacts, such as the new electron microscopy techniques.

First up this week, we hear about caves on the Moon, a shake-up at Pompeii, and the iron-lined teeth of the Komodo dragon. Reporter Phie Jacobs joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss these news stories and more from our daily newsletter, ScienceAdviser.

Next on the show, electron microscopes allow us to view a world inaccessible to light—at incredible resolution and tiny scales. But bombarding samples with a beam of electrons has downsides. The high-energy electrons used for visualizing minute structures can cause damage to certain materials. Jonathan Peters, a research fellow in the School of Physics at Trinity College Dublin, joins the podcast to talk about a new approach that protects samples while keeping resolution sharp.

People

Sarah Crespi, Jonathan Peters, Phie Jacobs

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None

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Jonathan Peters

Content Warnings:

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Sarah Crespi
This podcast is supported by the Icon School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, one of America's leading research medical schools. Icon Mount Sinai is the academic arm of the eight hospital Mount Sinai health System in New York City. It's consistently among the top recipients of NIH funding. Researchers at Icon Mount Sinai have made breakthrough discoveries in many fields vital to advancing the health of patients, including cancer, Covid and long Covid, cardiology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence. The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai we find a way before the show starts, I'd like to ask you to consider subscribing to news from science. You've heard from some of our editors on here, David Grimm, Mike Price. They handle the latest scientific news with accuracy and good cheer, which, which is pretty amazing, considering it can sometimes be over 20 articles a week. And you hear from our journalists. They're all over the world writing on every topic under the sun, and they come on here to share their stories. The money from subscriptions, which is about fifty cents a week, goes directly to supporting nonprofit science journalism, tracking science policy, our investigations, international news. And yes, when we find out new mummy secrets, we report on that, too. Support nonprofit science journalism with your subscription@science.org. news scroll down and click subscribe. On the right side, that's science.org news. Click subscribe.

This is the science podcast for August 2, 2024. I'm Sarah Crespi. First up this week, we hear about caves on the moon, a shakeup at Pompeii, and the iron lined teeth of the Komodo dragon. Reporter fee Jacobs joins us to discuss these news stories and more from our daily newsletter. Science Advisor. Up next, researcher Jonathan Peters is here to describe improvements to electron microscopy. The aim is to protect samples from breaking down when hit with high speed electrons by reducing the number of electrons delivered per pixel.

Now we have fee Jacobs. They're a general assignment reporter for the news team. Hi fi. Welcome to the Science Podcast.

Phie Jacobs
Hi.

Sarah Crespi
So you've been on newsletter duty on and off all summer, because obviously there's a lot of news, but then there's a lot of vacations that are happening at the same time. How's that going for you? Have you had a good summer so far?

Phie Jacobs
Yeah, I've had a great summer. A little bit of chaos juggling, lots of different vacations, but overall, lots of fun. I always enjoy working on science advisor, getting to put together a banquet of hors d'oeuvre sized science stories.

Sarah Crespi
Exactly. So was there anything particularly tasty that you covered? Anything that sticks in your mind after all this running around covering newsletter.

Phie Jacobs
I was a fan. This was from, originally an online news story, but I enjoyed just getting to dive into it for the newsletter. Learning that lanternflies, invasive lanternflies, can hitchhike between states by riding on cars. It was a great subject line for the newsletter email, where one of the scientists that got interviewed described the invasive lanternflies as insidious little creeps.

This is.

Sarah Crespi
I remember reading this one because they test drove the flies by, like, applying extremely high winds to them to see if they would heal off or if they would stick around on a car. That is a great one.

Phie Jacobs
Yeah. I was very impressed by the grip strength of lanternfly, a thing I had never considered.

Sarah Crespi
Yeah, if you want to travel the world, I guess you gotta hold on tighten. Okay. So I also selected some of the things. Most of them caught my eye because of the subject line of the email. They really are killer. They get me every time it comes into my inbox. And this, this first one is about, I think it's something along the lines of, yes, there are caves on the moon, which I was not asking that question, but now I'm very curious about it. So basically, there's some indications, some hints that there might be at least the first sighting of a cave on the.

Phie Jacobs
Moon for about, I guess, 50 years now. People have noticed that there are all of these sort of divots and pits and holes on the moon that could potentially lead to underground caverns. But we didn't really have any definitive evidence for it until recently. This team of scientists in Italy, they used kind of old data from NASA's lunar Reconnaissance orbiter, which collected all this radar data about, I think it was 2010. But they use sort of new analysis methods and computer simulations to analyze that data and compared it to what we know about lava tubes on Earth. They're common in like, Hawaii and Iceland, South Korea, sort of. After volcanic eruptions, the lava will create these underground tunnels, and they found a lot of similarities. Their analysis showed that this pit in the Sea of tranquility, which is actually not very far from where Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first walked on the moon. This deep pit in the sea of tranquility is actually the entrance to a pretty large underground cavern.

Sarah Crespi
Wow. So are we lucky they didn't fall in? Is that what you're implying?

Phie Jacobs
When I say not very far, I mean about 250 km.

Sarah Crespi
Okay, okay, so they're not going to scroll.

Phie Jacobs
Capability is quite large.

Sarah Crespi
Well, that's really cool. So how large do we think that the cavern, or at least the lava tube like thing might be, it's a.

Phie Jacobs
Tube, so it's about 130ft or 40 meters wide and tens of yards or meters long, but probably more. And there might be a sort of a network, but we know sort of for sure that there is this one large cavern at least.

Sarah Crespi
So this could be good news because it could mean that people could, if they needed to spend a lot of time on the moon, they would find a protected place. But it's bad news because there might be this giant worm in there that when you go inside, you're actually inside the wormhood.

Phie Jacobs
Probably the biggest hurdle will not be existence of giant like dune moonworms, but actually that could be. That could be a problem. I think the main problem is going to be actually getting into the cavern because apparently in order to access it, you have to cave dive a really long way and it's super treacherous. Also, they would need to reinforce it to make it actually safe for astronauts to live in. But if we were able to accomplish all that, it could be a great shelter for a future lunar base because apparently the temperature is more stable inside there, whereas the surface can get super hot, super cold is also being blasted by radiation all of the time.

Sarah Crespi
I would go in a cave. Yeah. Even if it had some of those risks we talked about. All right, thanks, be. I think next we're going to go to volcanoes. It's almost like a theme. So this is something. Lava tube adjacent. This is about Mount Vesuvius, a volcano that erupted famously back in 79 CE. And again, the headline for this one, I think the Pompeii was a fiery, shaky hell. That's the subject line of the email, which, you know. Okay, so fiery for sure, but shaky is kind of the new addition here.

Phie Jacobs
Yeah, we knew it was fiery, though. The big news is that it was also shaky.

Sarah Crespi
This is big news. Okay, so what does that exactly mean? What does that imply about what was going on during this time? That is kind of well recorded for how much the destruction that's going on and, you know, for how long ago it was.

Phie Jacobs
Yeah, no, it's kind of crazy. People describe Pompeii as the most well preserved catastrophe in human history because we have these eerie casts of the people who died and preserved under this layer of ash, but that we're still discovering new things about it all the time. So the shaky refers to that. There are contemporary reports, I think, from Pliny the younger, who was watching the eruption sort of from across the water, described the ground violently shaking after the initial eruption. For a long time, people have suspected that there was some sort of seismic activity going on in addition to the eruption, but they hadn't found any direct evidence for it until now.

Sarah Crespi
How do they find evidence for shaking during this? Again, very tumultuous, crazy time.

Phie Jacobs
This team of scientists was excavating rooms in kind of a famous part of Pompeii, this very well preserved area, this central city block that's actually a little ironic. It's called the insula of the chaste lovers, named for this fresco that depicts two figures kissing, which is very sweet. But then, of course, is the site of all of this destruction. They were excavating the rooms, and they found the skeletons of these two men. They found them in a crouching position in a corner, under a collapsed wall, and they sort of painstakingly reconstructed crime scene to see what had happened to these Mendez. The interesting thing about Pompeii is because the eruption of Vesuvius, most scientists think, happened in these two major phases. There was the initial phase where all of this pumice and ash from the volcano rained down on the city and caved in roofs. A lot of people suffocated. And then a couple hours later, the second phase was this pyroclastic flow of ash and hot gases. And the result of that is you end up with this kind of grotesque layer cake. Where are these multiple layers of different death styles? Yeah, basically, where you can sort of figure out when people died based on where they are. And they found that these men were on top of a layer of pumice, which suggests that they'd survived the first phase and had potentially gone into this building to take shelter. But they didn't look like some of the people who died during the pyroclastic flow. So a lot of those people asphyxiated, and so were found in these sort of lying down, relaxed poses, or some of them had evidence of burn marks, and they didn't see this in these two men.

What they did see from their skeletons was evidence of compression trauma, which is something that you see in modern victims of earthquakes.

Sarah Crespi
Wow.

Phie Jacobs
Yeah.

Sort of putting all of that information together, they suspect that what probably happened is these men survived the first eruption, went to take shelter, and then were killed when an earthquake struck and caused the wall to collapse on them.

Sarah Crespi
So that means that this shaking happened between these two different types of destruction.

Phie Jacobs
Feels like a little bit of an understatement to say it was just a series of extreme bad luck that if you managed to survive the first phase, you probably survived that phase by taking shelter somewhere not being out in the open. But then when earthquakes hit, you would want to get out of your shelter to prevent them from collapsing on you, then leaving yourself open to being hit by this pyroclastic flow. There really just was no good option for people trying to escape.

Sarah Crespi
All right, last story that I've selected, this one, you'd have to come up with a connection. For me, this is about, the last one on my list is about Komodo dragon teeth. You know, actually, I just have to have an animal story every time I have someone up for a roundup. So what's. What's new in dragon teeth?

Phie Jacobs
Fee, you always need an animal story. We love to write about them. People love to read about them.

Sarah Crespi
So this one is actually an animal that I am a big fan of. Photo dragons are giant monitor lizards. And, you know, monitors are kind of the smart guys of the reptile world.

Phie Jacobs
They're also the big guys. I believe Komodo dragons are the largest predatory lizards. As a kid, like, watching animal planet, I was a big animal planet kid. Watching Komodo dragon eat is kind of like watching a car crash. It's super gross. It's also, you can't look away because it's impressive. They're really big lizards, but they take down prey that's bigger than they are.

Sarah Crespi
Wow.

Phie Jacobs
Like, you might see, like, I feel like most of the pictures are them eating goats, but they'll take down. They'll eat buffalo, they'll take down horses. And their teeth are interesting. Cause they're sort of steak knife shaped and really sharp and serrated. And they use them to shake apart and shred their meals.

Sarah Crespi
It's not like a crocodilian. That's not what they're doing.

Phie Jacobs
Yeah, no, they're not like snakes swallowing things whole or, like, rolling over.

Their teeth are very strong, and it turns out they're actually reinforced with iron, which I believe in the newsletter, we referred to them as iron chefs.

Between them having steak knife shaped teeth and slicing and dicing, they're like celebrity chefs.

Sarah Crespi
How much of their tooth is iron, though?

Phie Jacobs
I mean, they have a coating of iron specifically on the sort of serrated edge or point of their teeth, which is the part of the tooth that's taking the brunt of the stress of biting and ripping and shredding. Looking at museum specimens, they saw a clear line of orange, which you see sort of on other teeth, like beavers.

Sarah Crespi
Yeah, they have really orange teeth, but.

Phie Jacobs
Yeah, they saw this. And the scientists said that he's a tooth guy. He's been looking at animal teeth for his whole career, and he'd never seen.

Sarah Crespi
Something like this at the edge, defined like that. It's. The pictures in the paper are pretty amazing, actually. People should check that out. Okay. But besides seeing it with your eyes, what do they do to tell you whether or not there was iron there?

Phie Jacobs
At first, they wanted to rule out the idea that it came from their diet. So then they looked at infants.

Sarah Crespi
Infant komodo dragons.

Phie Jacobs
Pretty great. Yes. And they still saw the orange there.

They used chemical analyses, but mainly the evidence is you just. It seems like you just don't see this.

If you see orange pigment on teeth, there's very few options of what that could mean. The main one being that's probably an iron coating.

Sarah Crespi
Yeah, that is very cool. So is there evidence in other reptiles or further afield that this is going on to reinforced teeth? You mentioned beavers.

Phie Jacobs
Yeah. You see it in beavers, some fish, even. This team also looked more widely, and they saw some orange teeth in alligators and crocodiles as well.

Sarah Crespi
Okay, what about our friends the dinosaurs?

Phie Jacobs
Yeah, I think actually the original reason why this team was looking at Komodo dragon teeth is they were trying to see if they could get any insight into dinosaurs, because they aren't distantly related. But considering we think of komodo dragons as being sort of the dinosaurs of the modern age because they're big predatory lizards, unfortunately, most of the specimens of dinosaur teeth, because they're fossilized, they've mineralized over time, which would destroy the evidence that we see in modern teeth.

Sarah Crespi
All right. That is super cool. Okay, fi, is there anything else we should mention from recent newsletters? Anything you want to touch on? Give me your favorite headline.

Phie Jacobs
Once a week, I put together the whole newsletter. Like, I write all of the preamble, and I come up with the subject line. I think my favorite subject line that I wrote that I was responsible for was she has her mother's laugh and part of her father's microbiome, which was from back in June.

It was basically looking at the paternal contribution to the infant microbiome, which is surprising, right?

Sarah Crespi
Yes. We have some guesses about how being in the uterus, you can somehow get microbes into a baby, ker duckin style. Yeah, but how do the dad's microbes get in? We don't know, but it happens.

Phie Jacobs
So a baby is a blank slate before it's born for the most part. But passing through the birth canal, being breastfed, basically, it colonizes its body with microbes from the parent that gave birth to it. But there's evidence that the first months of life, maybe not just fathers, but sort of other close family members and people that spend a lot of time around the baby, who are holding it, taking care of it, are transferring some of their microbiome. And it turns out that the paternal contribution is not larger than we expected it to be.

Sarah Crespi
Okay, that is very cool. All right, be. Thank you so much for coming on the show this week.

Phie Jacobs
Thank you. I had a great time.

Sarah Crespi
Bea Jacobs is a general assignment reporter for Science. You can find a link to the newsletter items we discussed@science.org. podcast up next, stay tuned for my chat with researcher Jonathan Peters about treating electron microscopes less like cameras and more like little particle accelerators.

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Sciencecareers.org today to get started, electron microscopes allow us to view a world inaccessible to light, at incredible resolution and tiny scales. But bombarding samples with a beam of electrons has downsides. The electrons used for visualizing minute structures can cause damage to certain materials. This week in science, Jonathan Peters and colleagues write about a new approach to protecting samples while keeping resolution high. Hi Jonathan. Welcome to the science podcast.

Jonathan Peters
Hi. Thanks for having me.

Sarah Crespi
Sure. We've probably all seen the amazing results from using these types of microscopes, these black and white, typically grayscale images of butterfly wings or the patterns of graphene. You know, I had assumed that sample prep could sometimes be harmful, but I didn't realize that actually being exposed to this bombardment could cause damage. What are some of the consequences of being hit with a beam of electrons?

Jonathan Peters
Say these electrons are accelerating, usually 200 kilovolts. They travel something like 60 70% the speed of light.

And that's a lot of energy going into the sample. So you can just get effects like thermal heating and basically disintegrating falsely. Electrons are charged as well, so you can get charge buildup, and then basically the charges repel and they break apart. But a charge could also break bonds. And then there's sort of what we call knock on, which is like a billiard ball style model. One electron comes in, hits something and just pings out.

And what this does to the sample, basically, is just destroy it in various ways.

So if you make a sample, you want to work out what you've made or what this sort of biological tissue is. And you can't do that if, as you're imaging it, it's changing and you're destroying it.

Sarah Crespi
Yeah, that does sound problematic. And electron microscopes are actually kind of like a camera. There's a certain exposure time, then the shutter closes or the beam goes off, in this case, and then it's on to post production, kind of figuring out what you got from that exposure. In this paper, you took that process and you changed it up a little bit. Can you describe what you altered about that sequence of events?

Jonathan Peters
It's funny you mentioned it's a camera, because one of the things electromicroscopists are trying to get away from, I think, is this idea that being a sort of photography concept, and we're trying to move towards this small particle accelerator kind of idea.

Sarah Crespi
I saw that in the paper and I had no idea what that meant. So please expand.

Jonathan Peters
I mean, I say photography because it does extend from back in the early days, you would put a photographic film in, you'd expose it, and, you know, go through a dark room and develop it. But when you start doing really low doses, you start getting down more to the particle nature of the electrons. So in each pixel in an image, you might only have one, maybe two electrons. A lot of the time, if you have one electron in a pixel, for example, that, I mean, it tells you there's one electron. But if it was a, say, exposure time of ten microseconds, might be typical. In the kind of work we do, you don't know whether that first electron arrived very quickly or very late. You just know one.

So our work is now about timing when these events detecting electron, we call an event. So we're now timing when these events happen. So that allows us to work out more information about scattering rates and things like that.

Sarah Crespi
So that's more like a particle accelerator, because in those systems, what you're doing is you're trying to follow these cascades of actions after releasing the particles. Is that why it's like it?

Jonathan Peters
Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, our systems are less complicated than that, but a similar kind of idea.

Sarah Crespi
What did you have to change? Is this a new technology? Is this a new algorithm? How were you able to make this adjustment?

Jonathan Peters
We've developed in our lab a pulse counter. So that will tell you when you've detected an electron.

And then we combine that with a fast beam blanker. So this turns the beam on to off in about ten nanoseconds. And really it's quite simple, but our pulse counter just works out. It's got two electrons, and it just sends a signal to the blanket, and away it goes, really. It's quite simple when you actually get down to the implementation of it.

Sarah Crespi
Why don't you give us some specific examples of what you, in the paper you imaged? I think that might be helpful to kind of ground this in other people's research. So what were you able to image? You know, what did you test this on?

Jonathan Peters
So we use this to image, a human derived monocyte is a biological tissue. So I am not an expert.

Sarah Crespi
And for those of us who are not biology people, monocytes are white blood cells.

Jonathan Peters
Traditionally, biological tissues are relatively hard to image in the microscope. But I was able to do it using this method. So I consider that that's impressive. Yeah, consider that a success. And we also, we looked at a zeolite sample.

Sarah Crespi
Zeolites are used for chemistry. They have pores in them. I think it's the most important part. And, you know, they're used for, like, filtration or as catalysts. The structure is really important. It helps you understand its function. And if you can see the pores well, you know more, you understand your material better. Okay, so here you are applying your new technique to zeolites, or monocytes. Were you able to show that this technique caused less damage? Did you get higher resolution? What changed about the outcomes here?

Jonathan Peters
Comparing the damage is kind of hard because of the way our method works of measuring the scattering rate and blanking the beam. It's sort of arbitrary how you compare it. So I could do an image of a really long exposure time, like a conventional image, and then I could do our methods and only count to one electron, and the dose savings would be huge. So doing a direct comparison is actually quite complicated. So we have some theories to back this idea up. But one of the things I think is really powerful is that the operator of the microscope whoever's using it doesn't have to think quite so hard about how much dose they can put into their sample. They can almost just type a number in. What you would do is you'd say, I want two electrons per pixel measured, and that would give you some uncertainty in there's still noise. And then basically the machine would do the rest of it, counter two, and then just stop it with blank beam, reduce the exposure. Maybe doing it the conventional way, you can optimize it that way, but you can get a similar optimization.

But you have to do much more work to get to that point, understanding how your machine is working and finding the exact exposure time you can use for your sample to get that kind of equivalent dose.

Sarah Crespi
So what it does, though, is it extends the life of your sample so your sample lasts longer. You can image it in more detail over. We're still talking in these tiny increments of time, but so the point is that you're very specific with the number of electrons you're exposing each pixel to in your sample, and so you can get more coverage. It's not destroyed by the time you're done.

What do you get out of it?

Jonathan Peters
Yeah, basically. So, doing this way to reduce the dose is sample just survive longer. You can take more pictures. You can maybe zoom in more to get a high resolution image. It just allows you to get more information out of your sample. Really.

Sarah Crespi
Does it mean that you can image new things, like things that haven't really had a good image capture in the past?

Jonathan Peters
It would definitely make it easier to image new things, I think. Yeah, you know, we're still putting these electrons in the sample, so it's not removing that problem. But I think at the moment, it's probably about as good as we can do.

Sarah Crespi
Is Microsoft store expensive, in my experience? Is this something that could be like an add on, or do you have to get a new microscope in order to take advantage of this innovation?

Jonathan Peters
So, the pulse counting stuff that we developed, you can add onto any microscope. The boom blank part we use. This is more integrated. So it would probably be a new investment in a microscope.

Sarah Crespi
Okay, now, here's my question, because this relates to me as a person, but because I just got dental x rays, like, yesterday, could this be applied to other kinds of beams where you do want to reduce exposure?

Jonathan Peters
I think it has potential. Admittedly, I don't know enough about.

You know, I'm very focused on electron microscopy. So outside of that, I wouldn't want to say with any certainty, but, yeah, it's the sort of thing which could be applied to ideas like that.

Sarah Crespi
You are so electron focused. What attracted you to this area of research?

Jonathan Peters
I mean, I think I was recently attracted to nanomaterials and that kind of space just by the idea of sort of understanding the things that you touch and use every day.

And then that, for me, naturally led to electromicroscopy, because that is one of the tools that really allows you to see atoms in materials.

Sarah Crespi
Yeah, I really. That's why I didn't like a lot of chemistry, because I couldn't see anything.

Jonathan Peters
And I don't like, I know Astro is popular, but I don't really care about what's happening hundreds of millions of miles away.

Sarah Crespi
You want to touch it and then also see its atoms. That's important to you.

Jonathan Peters
Yeah, but it's like the electromicroscopy field is like, had loads of input to, like, semiconductors, the whole Moore's law concept. And really, without electron microscopy, none of that would have happened.

Sarah Crespi
I was really surprised at how old this technology is.

Jonathan Peters
Yeah. 1930s, I think, was the first, but they were the one in the 1930s. Washington, I think, was worse than optical microscope.

Sarah Crespi
If you want to see less, use this.

Jonathan Peters
Yeah. And if you want a bit of history. But the lenses are awful, so they're spherical rather than parabolic. And it wasn't until actually, I think the concept of correcting aberrations was quite quick, but the technology wasn't ready towards around the two thousands to actually do this aberration correction. And that's why we've seen all this atomic resolution stuff since then.

Sarah Crespi
Thanks so much for coming on the show, John.

Jonathan Peters
Thank you for having me.

Sarah Crespi
Jonathan Peters is a research fellow in the school of physics at Trinity College, Dublin. You can find a link to the paper we discussed@science.org. podcast and that concludes this edition of the Science Podcast. If you have any comments or suggestions, write to us@sciencepodcast.org dot. We're also noticing some comments on Spotify. So, yeah, do check those out to find us on podcasting apps like Spotify, Overcast, Apple Podcasts, search for Science magazine, or you can listen on our website, science.org podcast. This show was edited by me, Sarah Crespi, Megan Cantwell, and Kevin McLean. We also had production help from Megan Tuck at Prodigy. Our music is by Jeffrey Cook and Wen Koi Wen on behalf of Science and its publisher, AAA's. Thanks for joining us. You listen to us to hear about new discoveries in science. But did you know we're a part of the American association for the Advancement of Science.

AAA's is a nonprofit publisher and a science society. When you join AAA's, you help support our mission to advance science for the benefit of all.

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