Soil science goes deep, and making moldable wood

Science Magazine Podcast

Science Podcast

Science, News, News Commentary

4.3 • 842 Ratings

🗓️ 20 October 2021

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

There are massive telescopes that look far out into the cosmos, giant particle accelerators looking for ever tinier signals, gargantuan gravitational wave detectors that span kilometers of Earth—what about soil science? Where’s the big science project on deep soil? It’s coming soon. Staff Writer Erik Stokstad talks with host Sarah Crespi about plans for a new subsoil observatory to take us beyond topsoil. Wood is in some ways an ideal building material. You can grow it out of the ground. It’s not very heavy. It’s strong. But materials like metal and plastic have one up on wood in terms of flexibility. Plastic and metal can be melted and molded into complicated shapes. Could wood ever do this? Liangbing Hu, a professor in the department of materials science and engineering and director of the Center for Materials Innovation at the University of Maryland, College Park, talked with Sarah about making moldable wood in a new way. In a sponsored segment from Science/AAAS Custom Publishing Office, Sean Sanders, director and senior editor for the Custom Publishing office, interviews Michael Brehm, associate professor at UMass Chan Medical School Diabetes Center of Excellence, about how he is using humanized mouse models to study ways to modulate the body’s immune system as a pathway to treating type 1 diabetes. This segment is sponsored by the Jackson Laboratory. This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy. [Image: Xiao et al., Science 2021; Music: Jeffrey Cook] [Alt text: honeycomb structure made from moldable wood] Authors: Sarah Crespi; Erik Stokstad Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:00.0	Morgan State University, a Baltimore, Maryland Carnegie R2 doctoral research institution,
0:05.0	offers more than 100 academic programs and awards degrees at the Baccliorate, Masters, and Doctoral Levels,
0:12.0	is furthering their mission of growing the future leading the world.
0:16.0	Morgan continues to address the needs and challenges of the modern urban environment.
0:20.0	With a four-year quadrupling of research, more than a dozen new doctoral programs,
0:25.7	and eight new National Centers of Excellence, Morgan is positioned to achieve Carnegie R1 designation in the next five years.
0:33.7	To learn more about Morgan and their ascension to R1, visit morgan.edu slash research.
0:40.5	This podcast is supported by the Icon School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, one of America's leading research medical schools.
0:48.1	Icon Mount Sinai is the academic arm of the eight hospital Mount Sinai health system in New York City.
0:55.7	It's consistently among the top recipients of NIH funding. Researchers at ICONMount Sinai have made breakthrough discoveries in
1:02.0	many fields vital to advancing the health of patients, including cancer, COVID and long COVID,
1:08.8	cardiology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence.
1:12.6	The icon school of medicine at Mount Sinai, we find a way.
1:22.3	This is a science podcast for October 22nd, 2021. I'm Sarah Presby. For this show, every week, we feature
1:30.9	the most interesting news and research, published in science and the sister journals. First up
1:37.0	this week, we're going to have staff writer Eric Stocksted. He's going to talk about plans for a new
1:42.8	deep soil observatory.
1:45.2	Deep soil is like the dark matter of soil science.
1:48.7	There's a lot of it, and we don't know exactly what's in it.
1:52.6	Then we're going to talk about why wood is a pretty good building material.
1:56.5	That could be made much better.
1:58.7	So much better that one day we might use it for making cars and planes.
	...

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