Radio Cabaret – Summer Edition

Sharon Mashihi, Kaitlin Prest and I produced our second quarterly Radio Cabaret on June 9th, to another sold-out crowd at Union Docs.

My co-producers and I in gleefully leopard prints

We were again fortunate to have Chris Berube as our charming host. The evening featured performances by Laura Hadden, Brendan McMullan and Michal Richardson, David Weinberg (coordinated by Sharon Mashihi), Alexis Powell (with Jessica Asch & Prentiss Benjamin), and The Amazing Amy (arranged by Kaitlin Prest).

We’re planning for the next Radio Cabaret in mid September. Check out  http://radiocabaret.org/ for more information.

Babies as Parasites, on Distillations

It’s happened. I’ve become a sucker for babies. But pregnancy? Yeech, I’m not there yet. Babies inside of you can have some pretty parasitic impacts. On last Friday’s episode of the Chemical Heritage Foundation’s podcast Distillations, I look into the chemistry behind pregnancy’s greatest drawbacks.

Listen here. My story starts 5:47 into the show.

The Mind Science Foundation Podcast now on iTunes

We’ve all been teens ourselves, so why do we have so much trouble relating to them now that we’re adults? And why do we even bother relating to each other in the first place?

Teen brain researcher Abigail Baird and neuroeconomist Paul Zak walk us through their answers to those questions in the first episode of the Mind Science Foundation’s podcast.

I’m thrilled about my new collaboration with the MSF, and plan to continue posting these podcasts with their scientists throughout the year. You can search for it on the iTunes store, or link to it from here.

March’s Radio Cabaret

On March 17th I was proud to be a part of the premiere night of Radio Cabaret. The show was organized by Sharon Mashihi, Kaitlin Prest, and myself. Along with Rachel James, Brendan Baker, Laura Mayer, and our host Chris Berube, we performed to a sold out crowd at Union Docs in Brooklyn.

Here’s my performance, where I probed the implications of recent memory research.

Listen Here Running time 5:45

I’m excited to say we’re already planning the next Radio Cabaret. It will be on Saturday June 9th, so stay tuned!


Me


Sharon Mashihi


Kaitlin Prest


Brendan Baker


Rachel James


Host Chris Berube

 

How do we choose which science stories get play?

Put this on the radio?

Last week I tried out something I haven’t done since I crossed the line from researcher to reporter. I crashed a conference. I went to the New York Structural Biology Discussion Group’s annual winter meeting. Way up on the 40th floor of 7 World Trade Center, the event included a full day of lectures and about 50 poster presentations.

Naively, I went hoping to scoop some research stories. Instead, the day lead me to some some questions about my own field. There stood hundreds of researchers, each eager to share their contributions to understanding the structure of ATP-dependent copper ion pumps, or the mechanisms of microtubule self-organization, or the pharmacology of the NMDA receptor. Each important findings in their realm, but I couldn’t imagine any as a radio story. “Oh, the glutamate-gated ion channel is in a different place on the protein than you expected?!” Nope, it just doesn’t translate.

Are some fields of science just not ripe for public consumption? I’d like to unpack those judgements of what topics make for media-worthy (pop?) science and what topics will never reach audiences outside of academic journals. In all seriousness, why doesn’t the glutamate-gated ion channel sound like something you’d hear about on the radio? Is the public just not interested in more minute science topics? Are we as reporters letting consumers down by writing off complicated topics as banal? I’m torn because I believe in being super-selective in choosing topics  to cover, I don’t want to waste my audience’s time blabbing about anything but compelling stories. But in doing so am I neglecting my journalistic duty to present truly balanced reports on science?

I’m reminded of a discussion I had a few weeks ago with a phonetics researcher. In the last month a study of hers had widely circulated in the pop press. Every article I’d read on the study completely mis-represented her findings. Was she furious? Quite the opposite. She told me she was just so glad to see phonetics research in the news, the bad journalism barely even bothered her. It seemed she’d internalized media bias against her diminutive field so much that she didn’t even think her work deserved fair coverage.

Hypnic Jerk

Image from radarofchance.wordpress.com

You know that feeling of falling some people get when they’re dozing off? It’s been happening to me a lot lately, so when I had some extra time yesterday afternoon I decided to do a little research. Here’s what I found.

Listen Here Running time 87 seconds

 

 

A new gene for depression?

David Glahn, image from brainmapping,org

Clinical depression conducts a full symphony of mischief on a person’s brain. A dampened mood, changes in blood chemistry, changes in cortical volume, impaired memory, and sleep disturbances make up some of the most commonly played behavioral and neurological symptoms. Actually, there’s over a thousand heritable trait markers of depression, says David Glahn at Yale University. He’s spent the last decade trying to track down their conductor.

His team has been the first to systematically rank all of these heritable trait markers for depression by their relevancy to the disease. By tracing the ranked trait markers back to their genes, he could decipher which genes have the most influence over the illness. To his surprise, RNF123, a gene not previously associated with depression, came out on top. On closer examination, RNF123 fits the bill as depression’s band leader. It manipulates the way neurons communicate in the hippocampus. That’s the area of the brain where anti-depressant drugs get down to work.

So what’s it matter? By pinpointing the gene behind depression, scientists have a new target for more effective anti-depressant drugs. Also, having an identifiable gene for depression could allow doctors to screen patients for susceptiblity to the illness. That way doctors could know to avoid depression-inducing medical procedures or to especially encourage counseling when the patient goes through a difficult life event.

Glahn admits his findings are still pretty preliminary. A team in Toronto has already replicated his conclusion that RNF123 plays a predominant role depression, but other groups will have to further replicate that. He’ll also have to show that RNF123 levels go up and down depending on the strength of a person’s depression symptoms. Regardless, I find this study exciting because it proposes a way of making empirical sense of the whole mess of traits that go along with a mental illness. While Glahn’s current paper may be a little too preliminary for a whole radio piece, I’d like to follow the progress of this line of research. I’d love to do a story on it when more results arrive.