This is a science podcast for May 1st, 2025.

I'm Sarah Crespi.

First up on the show, we have contributing correspondent Andrew Curry.

He talks with me about his visit to a 17th century crypt under an old hospital in Italy.

Researchers there are examining tooth plaque, bone lesions,

and mummified brains to learn more about the health, diet, and drug habits of Milan's working

poor. Next on the show, a mechanism for driving growth in fat stores with age, or the source of

the dad bodd trope. Producer Akia Watley talks with researcher Annabelle Wong about her work,

showing how middle-aged mice gain fat via dedicated progenitor cells

that actually become more active as the animal's age.

This weekend science contributing correspondent Andrew Curry wrote about a large series of Crips under an old hospital in Milan, just chock full of human remains that have been pretty much undisturbed since the 1600s. Now, researchers are looking

for clues about what people ate, the kind of drugs that they did, and how they died.

Hi, Andrew. Welcome back to the science podcast. Hi, thanks for having me on. This story is nuts.

Like, I, this is such a treasure trove of human bodies underground. How did you first come across this project?

So I was talking to somebody about detecting drugs in ancient bones. And he mentioned that somebody

had recently published a study looking at opiate and cocaine residues in bones in Italy and some sort of religious or monastery

contexts. And so I dove into this. Then last fall, I happened to be in Milan and I emailed the archaeologists,

sort of invited myself to go by and take a look. Yeah, I mean, it's an incredible site. The cool thing about the

team is the research is sort of a collaboration between historians

and archaeologists, but it's all centered through the forensic medicine department at the

University of Milan, where they do a lot of modern, like, prime scene detection.

So all these toxicology, like drug screening, et cetera, is modern methods then applied to this

...