This is the science podcast for February 28, 2025.

I'm Sarah Crespi.

First up this week, freelancer Katakarot talks with me about a complicated effort to identify

traditionally prepared shrunken heads or sancesas in museums and collections around the world,

and potentially repatriate them to Ecuador.

Next, genetically modified BT corn has helped farmers avoid serious crop damage from insects,

but planting it everywhere all the time can drive insects to adapt to the bacterial toxin made by the plant.

Researcher Christian Kruppki talks about the economics of planting BT corn

and the ways farmers could save money and extend the lifetime of this form of pest control.

This week in science, freelance journalist Katakarat wrote about shrunken heads or sansas,

a project to study them and maybe one day repatriate them. Hi, Katta. Welcome to the science podcast.

Hi, Sarah. Nice to meet you. Thank you for having me here. So, Katta, you're from Hungary, but you've been working in Ecuador for almost seven years. And this is a topic very

close to you. This is the origin of the shrunken, most of the shrunken heads that are out there

in the world now. Exactly. That's why it was so cool for me to be able to research this story

because I could go anywhere that the story required me. When did you first encounter a shrunken head?

I think I ran into one in Peru, like staying at a hotel, which had displays up, and one of

them was there.

Where did you first see one?

That's a very good question, because by now I've seen so many.

But I think the very first ones're ironically in the Celestian Museum

called Abia. It's like a small ethnography museum founded by Catholic Celestian missionaries that

have been living and working in Ecuador since the previous century. But like by now, I feel like I'm not

...