This podcast is supported by the Icon School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, the academic arm of the Mount Sinai Health System in New York City, and one of America's leading research medical schools.

What are researchers on heart health working on to transform patient care and prolong lives?

Find out in a special supplement to Science magazine prepared by the Icon School of Medicine

at Mount Sinai in partnership with science. Visit our website at www.combe.combe.com

to science.org and search for Frontiers of Medical Research, dash heart. The Icon

School of Medicine in Mount Sinai, we find a way. This is a science podcast for July 17th, 2025. I'm Sarah Presby.

First up on the show, Reunion Island had a shark attack crisis in 2011, and as a result,

closed down its beaches for more than a decade. Former news intern Alexa Robles Gill joins us to talk about how researchers have used that time

to study the island's shark populations and test techniques for preventing attacks.

Next on the show, engineering gut microbes to break down the precursors of kidney stones.

West and Whitaker discusses how he and his team created a stable niche for these

useful microbes in the human gut and overcame some of the challenges of controlling them

once inside.

We don't usually celebrate Shark Week on the podcast. The timing just doesn't work out. We don't

have many shark stories or shark papers in the journals. But this year, it came together for us

with some extra special help from editors. And news intern Alexa Robless Gill wrote the shark

science story for us just in time. Hi, Alexa. Welcome to the science podcast.

Hi, Sarah. It's great to be here. For this story, we're going to reunion. This is an island in the

Indian Ocean. And if you're, say, flying from Africa to Australia, you fly over Madagascar

and then a little bit further east, you fly over reunion. Almost a million people live on this island, which is considered part of France and then a little bit further east, you fly over reunion. Almost a million people live on this

island, which is considered part of France and therefore the EU. So that's where we are on the map.

So Alexa, can you take us to 2011 and describe the shark crisis that happened there? Yeah, so

...