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the academic arm of the Mount Sinai health system in New York City,

and one of America's leading research medical schools.

What are scientists and clinicians working on to improve medical care and health for women?

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

and Mount Sinai in partnership

with science. Visit our website at www.science.org and search for Frontiers of Medical

Research-Wedmen's Health. The Icon School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, we find a way.

Welcome to the science podcast for June 23rd, 2017.

I'm Sarah Crespi.

In this week's show, Mary Caswell-Soddard, talks about why bird eggs come in so many different shapes.

They all do the same thing, right?

And David Grimm is here with a roundup of stories from our daily news site. Now we have David Grimm, editor for our daily news site. He's here to

talk about some recent online stories. First up, we have a story on scientific ballooning. I've heard of weather

balloons, mostly in the context of being mistaken for alien spacecraft, but balloons actually

used to do the job of modern satellites. One of the first big balloon projects involved

bouncing radio waves off a giant silvery balloon to connect distance points on the earth. But in this day

and age, why would anyone want a balloon when they could have a satellite, Dave?

Well, money, that's a big thing. These balloons are a lot cheaper. These satellite operations,

just to not only build them, to launch them, to maintain them can cost billions of dollars.

And some of these balloons can actually be, especially these modern balloons we're talking about

here, these commercial balloons, the project can be a few hundred thousand dollars.

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