#606 Carte Blanche: The Erosion of Medical Consent

August 3, 2022 Rachelle Saunders General Science, Multimedia

Even the luckiest and healthiest of us will interact with the medical systems we live in eventually, and navigating these systems can be frustrating, scary, and intimidating. In this labyrinth filled with jargon, bureaucracy, and opaque layers of expertise we often don't understand, we expect to have some control over what happens to our bodies...

#605 Designing wilderness

July 18, 2022 Rachelle Saunders General Science, Multimedia

There's no doubt that we humans have done some pretty awful things to our landscapes. Draining swamps, cutting down forests, shooting almost all the bison. Now, there are movements to preserve, conserve and bring those landscapes back. But for whom? Who benefits? This week we are talking to Laura Martin, author of the book Wild...

Episode 141: Bolca Fish

July 15, 2022 Liz Martin-Silverstone Multimedia

Bolca is a site of exceptional preservation of fossils (termed a konservat lagerstätte) located close to Verona, Italy. This 50 million year old limestone was deposited in the Eocene Epoch and contains over 500 species of plants, arthropods terrestrial vertebrates and most notably a lot of fish! The preservation at Bolca is so detailed that...

Article: Sharing Science Through Shared Values, Goals, and Stories: An Evidence-Based Approach to Making Science Matter

July 12, 2022 Bethann Garramon Merkle Communication, Education and Outreach, Multimedia

Last fall, I had the great pleasure to accept an invitation to write a paper for a special issue in the journal Human-Wildlife Interactions. The issue focuses on ravens, and the editors thought the topic needed a scicomm perspective. I like to share the love/fun/platform whenever possible, so I reached out to three scicomm colleagues...

#604 Sticky: The Secret Science of Surfaces

July 8, 2022 Rachelle Saunders General Science, Multimedia

This week we’re zooming in on surfaces, where lots of action happens as things slip, grip, slide, and more. Our guest Laurie Winkless, author of the book "Sticky: The Secret Science of Surfaces", takes us on a tour of these in-between spaces, delving into what’s going on with atoms and molecules and how that plays...

Episode 140: Aquatic Spinosaurids

June 20, 2022 Liz Martin-Silverstone Multimedia

In the last few years there has been lots of new work on the iconic Spinosaurus – was it aquatic? What about its relatives? What kind of evidence can we look at to tell us this answer? In this episode we speak with Dr. Matteo Fabbri, from the Field Museum of Chicago, who has been...

#603 Remaking the face

June 7, 2022 Rachelle Saunders General Science, Multimedia

In 2022 it seems surgery can perform miracles. Plastic surgery in particular can reshape noses, jaws, and even transplant entire faces. But not so long ago, plastic surgery as a field didn't even exist. This week, we're going back to the trenches of World War I to learn about the birth of plastic surgery in...

#602 Working while Marginalized

May 23, 2022 Rachelle Saunders General Science, Multimedia

The thing about humans is that, as a social species, we work with other people. And this means we often, consciously or unconsciously, end up being awful to each other. If you are someone who is marginalized in the workplace--something that often happens to people of color, LGBTQIA+ people, people with disabilities and white women--how...

Episode 139: Marrellomorphs

May 16, 2022 Liz Martin-Silverstone Multimedia

Marrellomorphs are the group of early Paleozoic arthropods that get their name from the well-known Burgess Shale fossil Marrella splendens. They have for a long time been considered to be closely related to the trilobites, based on similarities in their gills, whilst other studies have suggested they could be closer related to mandibulate arthropods (crustaceans,...

#601 This is not about dinosaurs

April 25, 2022 Rachelle Saunders General Science, Multimedia

Most people know how the age of dinosaurs ended. An asteroid hit and all the dinosaurs died out. But it's never quite that simple. In her newest book, The Last Days of the Dinosaurs: An Asteroid, Extinction, and the Beginning of Our World, Riley Black describes what the immediate post-impact world looked like, and what...

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