Carry The One Radio: The Science Podcast

Fossils of ancient viruses are living inside us, and they may reveal important clues about how we became who we are today. In this Young Scientist Spotlight, PhD candidate Emma Harding tells us about her research studying viral fossils in marsupials, and why she suspects these chunks of ancient DNA are sticking around for a reason. She also talks about what it’s like working in a brand-new field, and why Australia is an awesome place to study weird genomes. We can’t wait for you to meet this rising microbiology star!  This episode was produced by Celia Ford. Music used in this episode is by Blue Dot Sessions on Free Music Archive. To learn more about Emma’s work, follow her on Twitter @emma__harding and check out her website, https://emmavirologist.wixsite.com/my-site. 

We, like many animals, live in groups. We need these groups to survive -- but why? What are the benefits of group living? What do we gain from each other? What quirks of evolution drove us to band together, form collectives, and solve problems together? In this episode, we’re joined by collective behavior researchers Iain Couzin and Naomi Leonard, who study networks, teamwork, and interactions between groups of everything from fish to robots to humans on social media. They discuss how we can get the most out of each other, what we can learn from creatures across all scales of life, and the beauty of our interconnected world. You can read more about our guests’ research on their lab websites. Iain Couzin work is on https://collectivebehaviour.com/research/ (and on Twitter @icouzin) and Naomi Leonard is https://naomi.princeton.edu/. This episode was written and produced by Celia Ford and Deanna Necula. Music from this episode was produced by Blue Dot Sessions. Episode art by Celia Ford, with vector art from The

When you think about the future of medicine, do you picture cure-all pills? Instant diagnostics from a drop of blood? What about going back to the basics with plant-based treatments with a side of spiritual healing?In this episode, we sat down with scientist and social entrepreneur Dr. Victoria Hale, co-founder of an ayahuasca tea company called Sacred Medicines. Listen to our conversation about how psychedelics are making a comeback (especially in the mental health space), what it takes to get FDA approval for new treatments, and the ethical and cultural debate surrounding the increased Western attention on traditional ayahuasca tea ceremonies.Check out the episode page at carrytheoneradio.com for links to Sacred Medicines and more reading!This episode was produced by Stella Belonwu, Cindy Liu, and Seesha Takagishi. Episode art by Stella Belonwu and Seesha Takagishi. All music by Blue Dot Sessions.

What do cancer cells and t-shirts have in common? You might be surprised! In this Young Scientist Spotlight, Dr Danielle Twum explains how she uses her communication skills and expertise to help doctors and researchers improve the way they treat cancer. In addition to working in industry, Dr Twum also works with AAAS IF/THEN to teach young students about being a scientist. We talk about her transition from studying corals to cancer, how the hungriest cells in our body can be a tumor’s best friend and the importance of telling a story with your science. By the end, you may never look at a shirt tag the same way again!This episode was produced by Maggie Colton with help from the team at CTOR. Music by Valentin Sosnitskiy. You can follow Dr Twum @forgedonyx on Twitter and Instagram.

The earth can’t wait, and it’s imperative that we are climate aware and are moved to action to maintain it. In this episode covering sustainability and climate change, we talk to Dr. Sheri Weiser, a physician-scientist at UCSF with a long history of researching food insecurity and climate justice. Dr. Weiser has been a Principal Investigator on over 25 research grants and has published over 165 manuscripts in this area. In our conversation with Dr. Weiser, we learn about how her work exposed her to the harsh climate realities faced by the food insecure on a daily basis. Additionally, Dr. Weiser shares her path to sustainability activism and some initiatives she has led in the UC system to tackle climate change with a key focus on environmental justice and equity. These include, but are not limited to, integrating sustainability across the UC curriculum, directing the Global Food Initiative at UCSF, co-leading the launch of UCSF’s EaRTH Center this Earth Day (April 22nd), and creating a myriad of opportunities

Before this episode, if someone asked me what could be done to improve maternal and newborn health outcomes, one of the last things on my mind would have been “kindness” because that part should be obvious, right? Wrong. In this episode, we speak with Dr. Afulani and Dr.Walker, two faculty members in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and affiliates with the Institute of Global Health Sciences at UCSF. They share information about the disparities in women’s health and the importance of patient-centered care across the globe, particularly in these pandemic times, where navigating patient interactions with physicians can be varied and complex.

Contact tracing is a term that almost all of us are familiar with, but what exactly does it entail? As part of a collaboration with the Institute of Global Health Sciences (IGHS) at UCSF, we spoke to three contact tracing experts in San Francisco. From our conversations with librarian and manager at the Excelsior Branch Public Library Ramses Escobado, deputy director of the Center for Global Health Delivery, Diplomacy and Economics Jess Celentano, and Infectious disease doctor Mike Reid, we discuss contact tracing from epidemiological and health equity lens. We discuss their newly found roles in the sector of contact tracing, how contact tracing goes beyond facilitating infected parties to quarantine, the barriers to contact tracing, how to measure the success of contact tracing efforts, what characteristics make a good contact tracer, and how we envision a future post COVID-19.This interview was conducted via zoom in September 2020. If you’d like to learn more about current contact tracing efforts and the re

Let’s be real -- life can be stressful. For those facing early life stress, the consequences can even affect their very biology. Fortunately, Rebekah Rashford is a young Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University who is uncovering just how these stressors affect people. In this Young Scientist Spotlight (our 16th!), Rebekah Rashford shares how she began her journey in science, her sources of inspiration, and how she balances her hobbies with her academic pursuits. You’ll discover that her joy for scientific discoveries is exceptionally infectious! This episode was produced by Kanchi Mehta. Music used in this episode is Town Market by the Blue Dot Sessions. This interview was completed via Zoom in October 2020.

Roughly 4% of the world’s population is affected by a rare disease, and while we are learning every day how to better diagnose and treat these conditions, there is still much to uncover. Rare Disease Day, which lands on the last day of February every year, seeks to raise awareness and improve access to care for patients and families living with rare diseases. For both scientific and clinical perspectives, we speak with Dr. William Gahl from the NIH, as well as Linda Manwaring, a genetic counselor from Washington University in St. Louis. In addition, we hear directly from a young patient named Aiden and his caregiver, Shaun, about their experiences living with a rare disease. This episode was written and produced by Iris Chin, Marilyn Steyert, and Devika Nair with editing help from the rest of the CTOR team. Music used in this episode is by Blue Dot Sessions. For more information on Rare Disease Day, visit https://www.rarediseaseday.org/, and to learn more about the Undiagnosed Disease Network, visit https://u

We don’t usually hear the words science and art together, but we’ve been misled -- science and art exist together on multiple planes, constantly informing each other in beautiful and unexpected ways. This is the second episode in our two-part mini-series on science and art. Here, we’re joined by visual artists and science communicators Kelly Montgomery and Sophie Wang. They both discuss how they’ve used art to communicate big ideas, and how scientists can approach making knowledge more accessible. We’d like to share some comic excerpts from JKX’s latest project "Gaining STEAM!". They are done by each of the co-founders. The excerpt titled "Squirrel Comic..." is by Jaye Gardiner. The design titled "Khoa" is by Khoa Tran. Lastly, the work titled "Kelly" is by Kelly. To see more of their work, check out jkxcomics.com, or @JKXcomics on Instagram or Twitter. Sophie’s activist collective, Free Radicals, posts on freerads.org, and are on Instagram and Twitter @freeradsorg. This episode was written and produced by S

Did you know you could scuba dive for science? Well, that’s exactly what Gaby Keeler-May does in the waters of New Zealand! In our latest Young Scientist Spotlight episode (#15!), learn about how Gaby’s scuba diving class in Santa Cruz, California, led her to investigating invasive seaweeds in New Zealand!We discuss how she conducts each dive (safety first!) and what they do with the tons of seaweed they pull from the waters (spoiler alert: it may become your next meal!). Gaby also shares her experience applying to graduate school internationally and being a PhD student who has had over 5 years of work experience. By the end of this episode, you’ll want to be swimming with the seaweeds of New Zealand, too!

You feeling stressed? Well, take a break from work and listen to our latest Young Scientist Spotlight with Sero Parel. Sero is a Neuroscience graduate student at Princeton University, who is interested in studying stress and how stressful moments can change the course of our developing brain. For Sero, their research goes way beyond any old science experiment. Their work asks fundamental questions about what is actually happening to the brains of those whose lives are impacted by certain levels of stress. In this conversation you will get a glimpse into how an activist and a graduate student in neuroscience can be one and the same person. This episode was produced by Hasan Alkhairo. To learn more about Sero, you can follow them on Twitter at @mx_sero.

We don’t usually hear the words science and art together, but we’ve been misled -- science and art exist together on multiple planes, constantly informing each other in beautiful and unexpected ways.This is the first episode in our two-part mini-series on science and art. Here, we’re joined by choreographer-slash-educator Suba Subramaniam and computational-biologist-slash-generative-artist Dr. Alex Naka. They describe how they each blended science and art through their own career journeys, how the methodology of science can be used as an artistic tool, and how the creative process drives scientific curiosity.To see more of Suba’s work, you can follow her South Asian dance organization on Instagram @akademidance and on Twitter @akademi. You can find photos and videos of Alex’s artwork (along with his thoughts on science) on Instagram @bb_bygones and on Twitter @gottapatchemallThis episode was written and produced by Stella Belonwu, Celia Ford, and Devika Nair. Music from this episode was produced by EminYILDIR

New Year, new you, new …. ant? Dr. Balint Kacsoh, a postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania, discusses his work on the genetics of social interactions in ants in our latest Young Scientist Spotlight. Listening to this conversation, you’ll learn a ton of interesting ant facts, like how ants bites are used to staple together wounds in the jungle. You'll also learn some amazing ways that ant research can help us understand how loneliness affects disease progression. From 3D printed ant models to the intricacies of garbage disposal, Balint’s research and scientific outreach has something for everyone.

Stephanie Renee is a non-traditional undergraduate student. After working in non-scientific fields, she decided to go back to school a few years ago to pursue a bachelor's in neuroscience with the goal of becoming a clinical neuropsychologist. In this spotlight interview, she shares her experiences working in a metastatic breast cancer lab, her thoughts on science education and research training as an undergrad, as well as her love for weird medical history facts, which she talks about in her own podcast, "Charlatan"!This episode was produced by Devika Nair with editing help from the rest of the CTOR team. Music used in this episode is by Blue Dot Sessions.Follow Stephanie on Twitter @OsmosisReads and subscribe to her podcast "Charlatan" on Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/58Lc3MyOFSEgdxxx1olOU4

“All day strong, all day long”, “the painkiller hospitals use most”, “the extra strength pain reliever”. We see pain reducing drugs like Advil and Aleve advertised all the time. But how do these drugs actually work? Can they relieve all types of pain? What about prescription drugs? Why are opioids the best we have, and awful at the same time? How are new medicines evaluated? And is anyone trying to find a way to make all the pain go away? This is the second episode in our two-part mini-series on pain. We’ll be joined again by the two esteemed experts that helped us learn about this invisible disease in the first episode: Dr. Allan Basbaum, Professor and Chair of the Department of Anatomy at UCSF, and Dr. Ishmail Abdus-Saboor, Assistant Professor of Biology at the University of Pennsylvania. In this episode, they will describe the current types of treatments available for various pain conditions, and also highlight exciting new treatments for painful maladies that may be available soon. They explain how optim

For this eleventh installment of “The Spotlight” we interviewed Oluwasegun Akiniyi, a bioengineering masters student at Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile Ife, Osun State, Nigeria. We talked about his education journey and current research endeavors using a robotic device to rehabilitate the hand of stroke patients. We discussed how his identity influences his research, and the intricacies of pursuing a research career in Nigeria. Additionally, we discussed his newfound love for traveling and gardening, and his future academic pursuits.This episode was written and produced by Stella Belonwu. Music from this episode was produced by Tictac9, Joe_anderson22, Josefpres, Uzerx, and Monkeyman535, and acquired from www.freesound.org.

A brain is very computationally efficient – you can look at a group of objects and your brain will instantly calculate the average features (size, orientation, etc). But how fast is this process – can it even be done with images that flash by so quickly you aren’t sure if you even saw them? To learn more, we interviewed Maria Servetnik, a Master’s student at the University of Leuven in Belgium who is currently testing this hypothesis. In our conversation, we also discussed the importance of mentorship, her journey from journalism to science, the challenges of communicating science to people who don’t trust the scientific process, and how to stay sane amidst the combined struggles of grad school and 2020. This episode was produced by Katie Cabral.Music featured in this episode: Perspiration, Color Country, and Yarrow and Root, all by Blue Dot Sessions.

What do bumblebees and octopuses have in common? They’re both invertebrates - or as Dr. Yan Wang says, “the shiny and squishy things.” And what makes them different? Well, beyond the obvious, octopuses are extremely anti-social, while bumblebees depend on their societies to survive. In this episode, you’ll hear about Dr. Wang’s research on bees and how they get their roles in bee society plus a little about octopus cannibals. In the second half of the episode, Dr. Wang shares her perspective on the complex ways race and white supremacy interact in the university setting and beyond.This episode was produced by Ben Mansky, with help from the rest of the CTOR team.

Ever stepped on a Lego? Taken a fall during a sports match? Had an awful headache? Yeah, we have, too. Why are they all such awful experiences? Well, simply put, they all cause pain. But… what exactly is pain?In the first episode of our two-part mini-series on pain, we will hear from experts in the field of pain research: Dr. Allan Basbaum, Professor and Chair of the Department of Anatomy at UCSF, as well as Dr. Ishmail Abdus-Saboor, Assistant Professor of Biology at the University of Pennsylvania.They will help us to define pain, figure out what factors contribute to how we feel pain, and classify it in various ways. We will also hear personal stories from a friend who has been dealing with chronic pain for many years now. As we’ll learn, pain can really affect the way a person lives their life, and can be a disease in and of itself. Once we understand pain a little better, we can start to treat it! So, stay tuned for the second episode in the mini-series where we’ll learn what our experts are doing to furth