First, we hear Online News Editor David Grimm and host Sarah Crespi discuss audience favorites and staff picks from this year’s online stories, from mysterious pelvises to quantum engines.

Megan Cantwell talks with News Editor Tim Appenzeller about the 2018 Breakthrough of the Year, a few of the runners-up, and some breakdowns. See the whole breakthrough package here, including all the runners-up and breakdowns. 

And in her final segment for the Science Podcast, host Jen Golbeck talks with Science books editor Valerie Thompson about the year in books. Both also suggest some last-minute additions to your holiday shopping list.

This week’s episode was edited by Podigy.

Listen to previous podcasts.

About the Science Podcast

[Image: NASA Scientific Visualization Studio; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

 ++

Authors: Sarah Crespi; Meagan Cantwell; Tim Appenzeller; David Grimm; Jen Golbeck; Valerie Thompson

In 1968, Science published the now-famous paper "The Tragedy of the Commons" by ecologist Garrett Hardin. In it, Hardin questioned society’s ability to manage shared resources, concluding that individuals will act in their self-interest and ultimately spoil the resource. Host Meagan Cantwell revisits this classic paper with two experts: Tine De Moor, professor of economics and social history at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, and Brett Frischmann, a professor of law, business, and economics at Villanova University in Pennsylvania. They discuss how premodern societies dealt with common resources and how our current society might apply the concept to a more abstract resource—knowledge.

Not all human skulls are the same shape—and if yours is a little less round, you may have your extinct cousins, the Neanderthals, to thank. Meagan speaks with Simon Fisher, neurogeneticist and director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, about why living humans with two Neanderthal gene variants have slightly less round heads—and how studying Neanderthal DNA can help us better understand our own biology.

This week’s episode was edited by Podigy.

Listen to previous podcasts.

About the Science Podcast

[Image: Phillip Gunz; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

 ++

Authors: Meagan Cantwell

A new Science investigation reveals that several major private research funders—including the Wellcome Trust and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation— are making secretive offshore investments at odds with their organizational missions. Host Meagan Cantwell talks with writer Charles Piller about his deep dive into why some private funders choose to invest in these accounts.

In the United States, gun injuries kill more kids annually than pediatric cancer, but funding for firearms research pales in comparison. On this week’s show, host Sarah Crespi talks with staff writer Meredith Wadman and emergency physician Rebecca Cunningham about how a new grant will jump-start research on gun deaths in kids.

This week’s episode was edited by Podigy.

Listen to previous podcasts

About the Science Podcast

[Image: Bernard Spragg; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

 ++

Authors: Sarah Crespi; Meagan Cantwell; Charles Piller; Meredith Wadman