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This is the science podcast for June 19th, 2025. I'm Sarah Crespi. First this week, the Vera Rubin Observatory is just coming online. Once fully operational, it will take a snapshot of the entire southern sky every three days. Producer Megan Cantwell talks with staff writer Daniel Clary about his trip to the site of the largest camera ever made for astronomy.

Next on the show, probing the impact of plastic bag regulations.

Environmental Economist Ana Pop joins me to discuss her work, quantifying litter collected by shore cleanup efforts before and after the

onset of plastic bag rules. And in a sponsored segment from our custom publishing office,

Director of Custom Publishing, Erica Berg, talks with Deepak Bot and Phillips Swirsky about advances

in the science of heart health.

This year, the Veraruban Observatory will start its 10-year probe into the universe.

I'm Megan Cantwell, a producer at Science, and I learned from our staff writer Daniel Clary all about how this telescope could transform the field of astronomy.

In the past, almost all telescopes would be made with aiming to zero in on something really little and look at it in great detail.

In recent years, people have got more interested in surveys, collecting big populations of similar sort of objects.

The idea behind the Rubin Observatory is to take

in a huge amount of sky with a very large telescope so it collects a lot of light so it can

see things that are very distant and very dim. It'll take a 30-second exposure, close the

shutter, move to another part of the sky, take another one,

and it'll do that all night long. It's going to discover something like 10 times more objects

in our own solar system than we know about already. New asteroids and moons, planets,

...