NASA’s nuclear spacecraft, Iran war climate fallout and a promising new Lyme shot

Science Quickly

Scientific American

Science

4.4 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 30 March 2026

⏱️ 10 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode of Science Quickly, we dig into NASA’s bold push toward a nuclear‑powered mission to Mars and plans for a long‑term lunar base, examine how the Iran war has triggered massive carbon emissions and a looming climate cost from the needed reconstruction and break down the promising latest results from Pfizer and Valneva’s new Lyme disease vaccine—all packed into your weekly science news roundup. Recommended Reading: NASA announces nuclear-powered Mars mission by 2028 NASA unveils ambitious new moon base plans Why Iran is targeting Qatar’s liquid natural gas trains E-mail us at sciencequickly@sciam.com if you have any questions, comments or ideas for stories we should cover! Discover something new everyday: subscribe to Scientific American and sign up for Today in Science, our daily newsletter. Science Quickly is produced by Kendra Pierre-Louis, Fonda Mwangi, Sushmita Pathak and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was edited by Alex Sugiura, with fact-checking by Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Now, are all the traitors present?
0:02.0	Let's get started, shall we?
0:04.0	From rags to riches.
0:06.0	I'm so sick of this.
0:07.0	Working like a dog and being treated worse.
0:09.0	Yorkshire to New York.
0:10.0	Poor climbers, you and me.
0:12.0	A life dedicated to revenge.
0:14.0	Let's make this an occasion to remember.
0:17.0	A Woman of Substance on Channel 4.
0:19.0	Stream now.
0:20.0	... A Woman of Substance on Channel 4, stream now.
0:34.8	For Scientific Americans, Science Quickly, I'm Kendra P.R. Lewis, in for Rachel Feltman.
0:37.5	You're listening to our weekly science news roundup.
0:43.2	Let's start off in space.
0:49.7	Last Tuesday, NASA announced it will launch a nuclear-powered spacecraft to Mars before the end of 2008, and the agency also said it's planning to build a base on the moon.
0:55.6	Siam Senior Space and Physics Editor Lee Billings is here to give us the latest updates on space exploration.
1:01.9	Can I tell you more about NASA's nuclear-powered Mars mission?
1:05.2	As a matter of fact, I can.
1:06.7	And it's really cool.
1:08.1	There's still a lot of stuff that is remaining to be disclosed or to be finalized.
1:12.6	But in short, it's something called Space Reactor One Freedom.
	...

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