Top online stories of the year, and revisiting digging donkeys and baby minds
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This is a science podcast for December 20th, 2024. I'm Sarah Crespi. This is our last episode of the year, 2024. We will come back on January 3rd. So first up this week, we have online news editor David Grimm. He's bringing a sample of stories that hit big with our audience and our staff in 2024. From corpse-eating pets to the limits of fanning ourselves. Next, I'm going to tackle some unfinished business with producer Kevin McLean. We

We revisit three former guests that came on the show to talk about their research in past years. They're back to talk about where the research has taken them and answer some of my questions that I really should have asked back the first time they came.

Every year, online news editor David Grimm comes on this show to talk about the top online news stories. And this actually takes a bit more math, statistics, reading than you might think. Right, Dave? It's a lot more work than you would think, Sarah. You're in those web analytics trenches for days to bring us this list. Wow.

Let's not overdo it. It's not just hard numbers. We have the stuff that's basically people are voting with their views on some of it. But then there's also other kinds of stories in this list. Can you talk about those? Yeah. So, you know, some of it's purely objective. It's sort of some of our most popular stories of the year. But some of it's more subjective. It's stories that we really enjoy, stories that, you know, we wanted to get a little bit more love. Maybe we thought they were really, really cool. They didn't get as many eyeballs as we wanted. And

This is a chance to put what we think is a very cool story, or in this case, a bunch of very cool stories in front of readers for a second time. Give them a second shot at glory as it were, Sarah. We're only going to talk about five of these glorious stories. There's 10 on the site. We'll just do a few on here. And we're going to start with, you know, obviously a fun animal story. Is it a fun animal story, Sarah? Yeah.

No, it's not. But it is very interesting. So this is about, you know what? Let me just start with disturbing imagery warning here. This came up three times in the story when I read it. Three places it said, don't click on this link unless you want to see something gross. So don't keep listening to the segment unless you want to hear something gross. No, we don't want to turn off all the podcast listeners right now. Okay. Okay.

This is kind of common knowledge that unfortunately, you know, that if we die, and especially if we die alone, and if we're alone for a long time, and there happens to be a pet nearby, that they will probably eat us or eat part of us and nothing against our cats and dogs and other animals. But it's just kind of a fact of life and a fact of nature. That's not necessarily what this story is about, but it's sort of about

how that whole process can complicate forensic investigations. You can imagine, Sarah, you're a forensic investigator. Okay, I want to be on that side, yes. Yeah, that's right. Well, do you? I don't know. We'll see. You enter a crime scene. It's probably a little bit

a grizzly, and you've got to figure out what happened. And obviously there's a lot of damage to the body as is the case in a lot of these cases where pets have eaten owners or parts of owners that can actually obscure the evidence. We're not just talking about this because, you know, it kind of makes us question our love for living with animals. This is a scientific research result that actually came out this year, right? It's actually a flow chart. If you really want to see, if you

and very not gruesome. There's a very nifty flow chart in the story that really gives investigators a sense of, okay, you enter a crime scene, here's what you're seeing, here's how you might proceed to figure out, did a pet interfere with the evidence?

What kind of pet was it? You know, how much interference was it? And so it's a way of sort of getting a little bit more rigorous about sort of what's happening here, but also how investigators can correct for it. And then another study actually compared all the cases, right? And said, you know, what they see when it's dogs versus cats versus hamster. Yeah.

how different pets cause different types of damage, how they go after different parts of the body, and again, how they might compromise the evidence in different ways. I was surprised to see hamsters in here, Dave. I was thinking that this would be a dog and cat story, but it's, it expands past that. You will never think about hamster nesting the same way again, Sarah.

Okay, let's move on. Please. People can go read the grisly details if they like to on the website. This next story is about pesky kids. Not pesky pets. Those pesky kids. That's right. Those pesky kids. 14,000 years ago, they are in a cave with their

parents or their guardian. They're not in the cave because they're pesky, Sarah. That's right. They were not in prison. And they it looks like these children 14,000 years ago decided to draw on the walls. Yeah, I love this story. And actually, what's really fun and contrasting this story to the one we just mentioned, you know, that story that we just talked about came out very early in the year last year, like right at the beginning of the year. This story just came out. This cave story just came out last week.

Oh, okay. Wow. Yeah. Right. So we've got the whole gamut of the whole year represented already from the earliest part of the year to almost the end of the year. It's already become one of my favorites because it's just so fascinating. Cave art is already fascinating, but we tend to think of adults when we think cave art. We tend to think of these very sort of abstract, stylistic images of bison and reindeer and other animals. And this cave has that, but a little way down the cave, there's...

a wall that just has kind of like a bunch of scribbling in it. And it's been kind of a mystery since scientists first or since excavators first came across it in the 1950s. In fact, it was so odd that they dubbed it the panel of the enigmatic signs. And this is in a cave in Spain. That's right. This is northern Spain. So what made them decide it wasn't just people testing their charcoal or whatever? Why do they think that this is

kids at work in the enigmatic section of the cave. Well, that's another thing I love about the story, because often when we're talking about cave studies, we're talking about archaeologists, paleontologists. And this study has archaeologists, but it also has child development experts. And this actually sort of came about when one of these experts was in this cave, noticed this doodling and said, gosh, that

That sort of seems like what you might see in a modern day nursery school. And so the team really began investigating this and trying to figure out what's actually going on here. Yeah. So you said before it's down. It's like not high up. It's where like a little kid could reach it. The height and the patterns, it all seems to match up with this idea that we've got youngsters, maybe as young as three years old, maybe not any older than six years old,

basically scribbling on a cave wall in Sharpeville. Are the researchers going to now, you know, do a survey of other caves that maybe have scribbles on them and try to figure out if those are also children? Right. And not just caves, but other things that maybe we have mistakenly attributed to adults or have been kind of mysterious. This really gives us a way, as somebody says at the end of the story, you know, it's really makes it easier to identify children's art in the past. Hmm.

That's so cool. All right. So the next one we have is news you can use provided it's very, very hot. Right. This is about something that is, I guess, unsettled science, but it's also everyday science. We use fans to cool ourselves, but at a certain point that stops being effective.

Yeah, this one was actually a bit of a surprise to me. And that's something else we look for in these stories is, you know, stuff that not just surprised scientists, but actually surprised us and we're probably surprised readers as well. Yeah, there are temperatures where not only does it not make sense to use a fan, but actually using a fan would actually make things worse. But the question is, what?

temperature is that? How hot is too hot to use a fan? Yeah. And so the reason a fan won't work when it's very, very hot is because you're sweating and that air close to you is cooler.

where your sweat is evaporating. But a fan will just keep blowing that off of you. And so instead it's just serving up more and more hot air against your skin. And in fact, somebody compares it to almost like being in a convection oven where you're just basically blowing heat around, right? Yeah, exactly. And this is really important because you can imagine we have countries where you can get very hot, where you have an elderly population that's particularly susceptible to heat issues.

You really want to get this settled because you don't want to be giving people the wrong guidelines. You want to let them know, hey, at this temperature, a fan is going to do more harm than good. The stark difference I saw was CDC is recommending at 32, which is 32 C, which is 89 Fahrenheit. WHO says 40 degrees Celsius, which is... Right. That's a big difference. 104 Fahrenheit. These are huge differences. And so people are looking at this and trying to figure out

what the practical answer is, because a lot of this stuff has been done, you know, on modeling. So how are they trying to figure out where we should be with this? Well, this day, they put a few dozen people in a climate controlled chamber. They use different temperatures, different humidity levels to try to get a better answer about like what exactly is the right, the right recommendation. And I won't necessarily spoil the surprise other than to say that it's a little, it's not maybe as clear cut as we would like.

Yeah. And, you know, we will point out that humidity matters, that if you're if you're hot and dry versus wet and hot, you're going to have a different answer, perhaps. So, yeah, more data needed, I guess. Yes. To be continued. To be continued.

All right. So this is the last story that we're going to talk about on this. And it's kind of a cheat. It's kind of like wishing for more wishes. It's like a bunch of stories all backed into one. But this is actually my favorite on the list. This is actually by our news intern, Hannah Richter. And she wrote about

this year's Ig Nobel Awards. Yeah, I actually didn't realize that until you just said it, Sarah, that we, in our list, we have a list of top things. We have a list, another list of things. So it's a list of lists. It's nested. That's right. But yeah, so this was actually one of my favorites of the year as well. You know, the Ig Nobels, for the folks who don't know, this is sort of the goofy answer to the Nobel Prize. It occurs, I think, a couple of weeks before the Nobels happen every year. And it's sort of,

recognizes the wacky side of science, just really unusual, bizarre, sometimes really funny experiments. We cover it almost every year. And, you know, we, I like to think we do a very good job of that. This year, our coverage was different in that we decided to take a little bit of a different tack. I mean, we listed some of the winners, but we really wanted to give readers a sense of like,

You know, this ceremony has been going on for a while, at least a couple of decades, probably longer than that. And what are some of the behind the scenes things that folks may not know about? And again, speaking of surprises, there was a lot of stuff on this list that was a big surprise to me. This is the eight things you didn't know about science's wackiest night. You know, I followed this. I love this kind of science because it's always something that you're like, why would anyone do that? OK, so I'm going to mention two of the prizes just to give people a taste.

The Botany Prize this year was for finding evidence that some real plants imitate the shapes of neighboring artificial plastic plants. And then the Anatomy Prize was for a study of whether the hair on the heads of most people in the northern hemisphere swirls in the same direction, clockwise or counterclockwise, as the hair on the heads of most people in the southern hemisphere. It's just so fun. And, you know, I'm not going to tell you guys whether or not

The hair is determined by hemisphere. So I was really excited to see kind of this like

how this is put together and how the people who run it think about it. Yeah, it was really cool. A little bit of a behind the scenes look about what goes into it. And again, some big surprises. I didn't know there was a prize, but it's not exactly, I don't think anybody's going to go out of their way to do science to earn this prize. That was one of the things I did know. So the prize is actually a $10 trillion Simwabuian bill, which apparently is

basically worthless. So that sort of fits within the ceremony. But here's a couple of things I didn't know, and I won't spoil all of them. But one of them is that there are actually no, unlike the Nobels where you've got, you know, chemistry and medicine and all that stuff, there's actually no set category. So it really depends year by year. You can have completely different categories just sort of depending on who the winners are. Right. So like maybe this year they have statistics because the winner won in that field. Exactly. And

One other thing that I thought was really cool is that the Ig Nobel's actually get more nominations than the Nobel's. So that was that was really wild to me. Yeah. Yeah. That's like a thousand compared to ten thousand. I was really surprised. It's really crazy. That's great. Yeah. And Hannah did a really good job writing up that story. I was really, really enjoyed it. Very much so. So that's it for what we're going to kind of go into detail about. But we should mention that a couple of the top stories this year have videos in them. And so people should go check that out.

We've got Dancing Frogs, and I won't say anything more about that, other than it is a very cool video. And we've got some other really cool multimedia in these stories as well. So does the number one story have a video in it, Dave? Well, let's just say it could be a movie. A really, really bad movie.

So that's our number one story, which is also, to add a little more tease to it, was our most popular story of the year. Yeah, definitely check out our top online news of 2024. And yeah, thank you so much, Dave. Thanks, Sarah. David Grimm is the online news editor for Science. You can find a link to the compilation that we talked about today at science.org slash podcast. Stay tuned for our clip show with myself and producer Kevin McLean. We

We revisit research guests from the past and ask questions we should have asked back then about digging donkeys, rabies outbreaks, and baby mines. ♪

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Last week, we checked in with a bunch of science news staffers on stories they've been following closely throughout 2024. This week, we're checking in with researchers, scientists who have been on the show before. Kevin McLean, our multimedia manager and a producer for the podcast, is here to talk to me about some of these updates. Okay, we're recording. Do you know what we're doing?

Uh, kind of. We're talking about follow-up on research, right? Yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Okay, so I wanted to do this like check-in show. You know, I talk to sometimes like 40 researchers a year in some of those conversations or the topics, they stick with me. Or I was like, I wanted to ask them this question. I should have asked more, especially background stuff, like why are you doing this? What does this mean? How can you keep doing this for years and years?

So I went and dug out some of those people. Okay. So these are people that you talked to earlier this year? No. Oh, these are people that you talked to in the past at some point, and they were just still in your memory? Yeah. It turns out if I talk to you this year for the Science Podcast, you're not going to have something to talk to me about next year. Yeah, that makes sense. It's very unlikely that I would actually, there'd be enough for us. Because, you know, science takes time. ♪

All right, Kevin, let's talk about one of them and then we'll see how this goes. Okay, sounds good. All right. The first researcher I have here, Eric Lundgren is a researcher at the Center for Open Science and Research Synthesis at University of Alberta Edmonton. Eric first came on the show in April 2021 to talk about donkeys digging wells. So this is when you think of a donkey digging a well, it's actually going down deep under the ground until it finds water in the desert.

I've got to be honest, I don't think I ever think about donkeys digging...

No, apparently this is something that they do all over the western U.S. and in other places that they've invaded because they are an invasive species most places they've lived. They dig these big deep holes. They get water for themselves. And then it turns out that everybody else who lives in the desert also likes water. They also like these wells. And so Eric's paper was on making all these observations at the edges of wells and of the plants and all the different things that were kind of benefiting from these donkey wells.

But this larger picture he kind of brought into things was, what if there used to be things on this landscape that dug wells, but they're gone? Think mammoths?

mastodons. And now the donkeys are doing it and they're an invasive species. Is this happening more than we think that invasive species take on this important role in the ecosystem? So I wanted to see where he took this idea since we talked last in, what, 2021? He seems to think that we need to evaluate the ecosystems as they are and spend less time trying to catalog whether or not something is native or invasive when we're trying to protect things.

I think we have to try to bring a sort of agnostic and, you know, objective scientific curiosity towards these systems that are changing so rapidly. And a lot of those changes, we continue to drive them, like shifts in climate, altering stream flows and killing predators. And when species respond to that, we blame the species. And I think that that's not really ecological thinking. So trying to understand these systems in the ecological context in which they're

are embedded, I think is helpful. It's a sort of matter of perspective, right? The species itself wasn't on the landscape before it's something that was introduced. But the function that it provided to the ecosystem is something that had always existed. And that's something that that we remove. Is he still mostly studying donkeys? Is he studying this and like other species or ecosystems or anything?

This is what caught my eye, actually. He published a paper in Science in 2024, and it caught my eye very late. Obviously, it was in the early beginning part of the year, and then I noticed it more recently. And it's much more broad. It was a meta-analysis looking at evaluations of invasive species. Here, I can play a little bit here. There's a longstanding critique with invasion biology, which is, can you actually go into a system and tell which species are native or not based on their measurable impacts?

Because if you can't, then nativeness is no longer really a biological category. It is a description of history and a way to value organisms based on their history. But the claim that organisms have different impacts because they co-evolved, and that's why we value native species, would not be supported.

So we've looked at all the evidence that's been published about the effects of native and introduced large herbivores. And there is no way to tell which ones are native and which ones are introduced from their impacts on plants. I think that it really comes down to like, do we know all of the functions of species that are in an ecosystem, right? Yeah, and that is all going to change with climate. As Eric points out, you know, everything is going to start shifting and changing.

Whether or not something is invasive is going to be a lot less important than is the ecosystem functioning. Climate change projections describe a world by 2100 that's going to be radically novel. And that's going to include migrating native species and migrating introduced species. And if we just continue to persecute these organisms with binary notions of who's good and bad because their histories are entangled in our own,

I don't think we're going to really understand how those systems work, and I don't think we'll respond to them effectively or appropriately. All right. That was Eric Lundgren. He's a researcher at the Center for Open Science and Research Synthesis at University of Alberta, Edmonton. What do you think, Kevin? This is a weird thing that we're doing that we've never done before.

Yeah, it is sort of nice to kind of look back on stuff and follow up with folks that, you know, you hear from once, but you don't necessarily know whether you're going to hear from them again. Definitely. And especially if they're in the middle of something that feels big when you talk to them, you kind of want to find out what happens. This next person that's a good example of that. This is Katie Hampson. I talked to her, I guess, in 2022 about rabies.

I've definitely talked about this a lot because our team did a contact tracing with dogs in Tanzania, 50,000 dogs. Oh my gosh. And they followed all these cases of rabies and how the dogs spread the rabies. There's this kind of mystery in rabies. Like if it's,

100% deadly, how does it keep coming back? Like if it just kills everybody that it infects. Yeah, that seems like a bad pathogen. Yeah, exactly. Curb your virulence or you're going to be in trouble. But yeah, so it turns out that what it does is it has all these traits that it evokes in the dogs to cause it to kind of create small outbreaks at a distance.

an outlier dog, so not every dog, will go kilometers away to another village and bite some dogs and kids. Or a single dog will bite like 20 dogs. And so these kind of extremes in their behavior allow it to kind of escape wherever it's starting to burn itself out. Interesting. So she figured out this very important spatial scale that they need to take into consideration when doing vaccination campaigns, what size you need to be at in order to be the most effective. So what I wanted to know is where did this go? Like,

Has it taken root in that part of Tanzania or anywhere else? Here's Katie. We've been doing lots of work on the implementation of dog vaccination programs. We've continued to do contact tracing. We're also doing a lot of work on trying to scale up One Health approaches to rabies surveillance. One Health is an approach that

captures the interactions between human health, animal health and the health of the environment. Surveillance systems are typically set up in quite a siloed way. So they will operate for detecting cases of some disease in human populations, but often not in animal populations. And obviously for rabies, you need the two different sectors to really be well linked together to be able to understand what's going on. So that's actually something that

Katie spent quite a bit of time talking about was that the way that the access to that vaccine is,

has been done in the past is changing now. So I want to play that part. There is some pretty exciting news happening around rabies at the moment. Gavi, the vaccine alliance who really support large scale childhood immunization programs for decades now. And after many years of advocacy and trying to build evidence as to why Gavi really should be investing in human rabies vaccines, they made the decision to invest.

That was all sort of planned for 2021, but then another pathogen got in the way and set things back. But fortunately, Gavi have sort of reconvened and now they're starting to begin the rollout. Countries were able to apply for Gavi investment in human rabies vaccines as of last September, which

And the next round is coming up in January and the government of Tanzania is applying. And so I'm super excited because the ability for people to access these life-saving vaccines for free is a massive game changer. We had an incident at my daughter's school in the fall where a sick bat was found on the playground and wildlife services came and took care of it. But they did test it and it had rabies.

And we got all these letters from the county health department saying, if your child was in contact with the rabid animal, they're going to have to come in and get these shots. Luckily, no kids get anywhere near it. But it's somewhat available here, but when you're talking about Tanzania, for example,

You need to get a series of shots. You need to get it very quickly. And it's very expensive. And you have to repeatedly visit. And sometimes it's a really long distance to travel to get those shots. And then after talking about, you know, these kind of changes in vaccine finance, she said that there actually had been a shift in the global disease burden of rabies after COVID. Oh, really? Basically, a lot of people were not vaccinating their animals during COVID.

Oh, wow. And so there's more out? Yeah, because it's endemic to a lot of places. And so if enough dogs are vaccinated, though, it kind of cuts off the chain of transmission. But now they're starting to see rabies spreading across Indonesia. And there was an outbreak in the Philippines.

And it's just the dog vaccination programs have been disrupted. And so now they need to figure out how to keep those down while also treating people. So although rabies is an endemic disease and it's considered neglected, in some parts of the world, it really is emerging. And it's just the kind of sort of one health outbreak response that we need to build our capacities in. That was Katie Hampson. She's professor of infectious disease ecology at the University of Glasgow.

I guess I could think of a transition between that story and the one that we're going to do next, which is saliva. Oh, all right. We're going to go to Ashley Thomas. She was on in January 2022, so I'm pretty sure that you did not overlap. Okay.

Do you remember me talking about saliva and babies at any point? I don't know if I remember this. Tell me more. Okay. So Ashley was really interested in understanding what babies know about social relationships. Okay. We talked a lot about saliva sharing. And to keep it less gross...

You know, but like it's a proxy for closeness. I think I used a photo of a kid putting an iPhone in its mouth and how maybe you would be disgusted. I would be disgusted, but its mom probably wouldn't care. Yeah. And what they showed to the little kids, they do these little puppet shows for toddlers and babies, and they'll show them sharing food with someone else or, you know, putting their finger in each other's mouths. Then if the child puppet in the show shows distress, they'll show them

Who does the baby observer look to? Who do they think the close person is that's going to help this baby? And they look to the one they shared saliva with. They look to the other baby they shared saliva with? Or they look to the person or like the parent? No, they look to the other puppet. So they shared saliva with the puppet. Then they're like, oh, well, that's the one that's going to be helping. This other puppet is in distress, the one it's close to.

Oh, interesting. But then I talked to her for this episode and I was like, are you still doing puppets? Are you still doing saliva? And she said, well, we were looking a little bit deeper into this and we were looking at whether or not, not just saliva, because we also talked about how you would share a straw with someone that you know, but you wouldn't drink out of a soda on the subway. It's just so many things.

It's funny because I totally understand. It's weird because it makes sense. It is weird. It's like a very, very clever proxy for closeness because it really does express a lot of our closeness with saliva. Who knew? We did move a little bit away from that in her latest work. Let me play some of that. What my

Myself and some collaborators, including Allison Gopnik, Rebecca Sachs, and my graduate student, Christina Steele, wrote a paper about what we think caregiving relationships are, which we hypothesize are intimate and asymmetrical. And so what Christina has done in this study is there's a small character in the middle, a small character on one side of it, and then a large character on the other side.

The small character touches and dances with both of the side characters. And then the question is, given the same interaction, do they use physical size to make predictions about who will respond to distress? So the answer you can get from this is, you know, the baby that's watching this happen, if it looks at the largest puppet, then the baby thinks there is a connection.

between physical size and caretaking. It's so fascinating. It really just isolates this one variable, and they get these babies and toddlers to make these distinctions using these puppet shows, or sometimes it'll be, you know, kind of like a cartoon. Testing all these sort of, like, social cues with the babies, like, what is she ultimately trying to get at? Yeah, I asked Ashley about this. Why do we need to know what a baby thinks about another relationship?

Part of the point of studying infants and children is that they just don't have that much experience with a lot of this stuff.

It can give us clues about what might be shared across many humans in terms of how we go about making sense of our social world. When kids have a certain way of thinking about things, it's harder to say, like, it's innate, for example. I mean, it's basically impossible to say that it's innate. But we can at least say, like, look, at this point in development,

They've had this kind of experience. We can infer what kind of experience they've had, and they've already learned this specific thing. An example that I like to give is like a fear of guns, for example. And this is not something I study, but it's a good way to sort of think through what might happen. So you might find that five-year-olds think guns are dangerous. And of course, we would think that's innate, right? Because...

There's no way that guns were part of our environment when our brains were evolving. Our evolutionary upbringing, if you will. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

But they were, you know, able to learn that quickly. And I actually don't know the answer about whether five-year-olds think that guns are scary. I think they have different opinions is pretty much the answer. Yeah, I mean, my five-year-old. Yeah. And then what pieces come when is really interesting because I think at some point we'll be able to use this to kind of help understand social development in children and help them if there's a problem. I mean, this sounds crazy, but part of my project is just understanding how the mind works.

That's me amongst thousands of other psychologists, right? And so the story that I'm interested in is what's the stuff that we're all born with and then –

How do we build on that stuff from environmental input, the things that people say, the things that we observe in the world, to come up with these really complex theories that we get as adults? And there's many steps along the way that can shed light both on how that stuff is formed and then also why it can be hard, for example, to change some beliefs about adults but easier to change other beliefs, right? ♪

Ashley Thomas is an assistant professor of psychology in the Laboratory for Development Studies at Harvard University. I have a question. You sort of answered it to some extent, but when you tasked yourself with the idea that, like, I'm going to go back and re-interview people, what was the first thing that came to your mind?

What was it about these people or their work that stood out to you as like, I want to hear what's going on with that? There's something about it that I felt like was either unfinished or I felt like I hadn't asked the big questions. So for example, with the donkeys, I wanted to know if anybody else was doing these ecosystem services in other environments. And the answer is yes. And I really felt like I got the complete picture after talking to Eric a second time. And then when I talked to Candice,

Katie about rabies, you know, I had kind of gotten all of the, ooh, rabies is creepy part out of my system, which kind of happened in the first interview. And I didn't, I wanted to see how something that seemed to have real world implications, you know, how it played out a couple of years later. And then also when I talked to Katie, it turns out that there were big changes in the world of rabies and the global approach to funding rabies vaccinations.

and in how it's spreading around the world. And so that was news to me. I hadn't seen it on our news site. It hasn't really been covered. So I was really happy to catch that. And then finally, with Ashley, I think for me, two things. The way she designs studies, it's like these little jewel box, these little traps to get information out of completely unwilling subjects. Babies are not trying to tell you anything about what they think about other people's relationships.

That is such a hard thing to tackle. I wanted to kind of move past that again and figure out

Why is she asking these questions? Why is it important? And how is this part of a larger project for her? Because I feel like that's not the part I remember from our first interview. I mostly just remember saliva jokes. But we didn't go down the big picture knowing other people's minds, at least the way I remember it. You had unfinished business. Exactly, exactly. Is there anything that you are sort of thinking about on the horizon for the upcoming year? We do have a big three-part series coming out that we can't talk about, but that's

targeted for the spring. Our book series, we've decided to talk about death, dying, and science, which sounds grim, but we get into the details, which are always interesting and fun. Yeah, I think there will be some interesting stuff in that one. Yeah, and I'm really excited to kick that off in the late spring. Mm-hmm.

And then let's just say some of the news reporters have been getting me very psyched about the Vera Rubin project. So this is like capturing the entire night sky every three days. I'm really excited about that turning on next year. There's always fun stuff coming through science. The sister journals like

I got to keep my eye on papers about itching, papers about the sense of smell. You know, I haven't seen anything yet, but I will. I'll be looking out for it. Yeah. Great. Well, yeah, definitely. Definitely lots of stuff to look forward to. All right. Thanks, Kevin. Yeah. Thank you. Kevin McLean is a podcast producer and the multimedia manager at Science.

And that concludes this edition of the Science Podcast. Remember, this is the last show for this year. We'll be back January 3rd. If you have any comments or suggestions, write to us at sciencepodcast at aaaas.org. To find us on podcasting apps, you need to search for Science Magazine, or you can listen on our website, science.org slash podcast. This show was edited by me, Sarah Crespi, and Kevin McLean. We had production help from Megan Tuck at Podigy.

Our show music is by Jeffrey Cook and Wen Kui Wen. This year's wrap-up music is Faster Does It by Kevin MacLeod. On behalf of Science and its publisher, AAAS, thanks for joining us.