TWiEVO 10: Spicing up peppered moths with a selfish gene

TWiEVO

Black and peppered mothsHosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

Nels and Vincent review experiments showing that the replacement of a pale moth with a black one during the industrial revolution was caused by a transposable element.

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Science Picks

Nels – Is Pokémon Go good for science? (one, two, three)
Vincent – Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli

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TWiEVO 9: How to crash your gene drive

TWiEVO

female mosquitoHosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

Guest: Jim Bull

Nels and Vincent speak with Jim Bull about the results of genetic models which suggest that the evolution of inbreeding in response to lethal gene drive might make population control difficult to achieve.

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Science Picks

Nels – Fertilization with parasitic sperm
Vincent – Undark

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TWiEVO 8: Everyone’s a little bit Neanderthal

TWiEVO

Nels and VincentHosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

Nels visits Vincent in the MicrobeTV studio in New York and talks about how key genes of the Homo sapiens innate immune response were acquired from Neanderthals.

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Science Picks

Nels – DNA Clues to our Inner Neanderthal
Vincent – Blockhead

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TWiEVO 7: Pigeon fashion week, feathery boots edition

TWiEVO

Muffed fairy swallowHosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

Guest: Mike Shapiro

Mike joins Nels and Vincent to talk about his work on what controls whether pigeons have scaly or feathered feet, and reveals that the hindlimbs of domestic birds with feathery feet are more like wings at the molecular level.

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Science Picks

Mike – Pigeon exhibit, Natural History Museum of Utah; Pigeonetics (App store); Darwin’s Pigeons
Nels – National Parasite Collection
Vincent – The Story Collider

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TWiEVO 6: Butterflies are free to shuffle

TWiEVO

Dennis-ray mimicry ringHosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

Nels and Vincent continue with an emerging sub-theme of TWiEVO – organisms with wings – as they reveal how enhancer shuffling produces diverse butterfly wing patterns.

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Science Picks

Nels – Hill Country Science Mill
Vincent – The Butterfly Conservatory

Listener Pick

Stephen – Darwin Legacy

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TWiEVO 5: Looking at straw colored fruit bats through a straw

TWiEVO

straw colored batHosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

Guests: Kartik Chandran and Sara Sawyer

Sara and Kartik join Nels and Vincent to talk about how the filovirus receptor NPC1 regulates Ebolavirus susceptibility in bats.

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Science Picks

Nels – Sundance Film Festival and Meru
Vincent – Quanta podcast (iTunes)
Sara – Isolation of Marburg viruses from fruit bats

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straw colored bat 2

Straw colored bat

 

Studio TwiEVO

Maryska Kaczmarek (a first author on the ELife paper), Nick Meyerson (rock god and science god), and Sara Sawyer

 

Esther, Kartik, and Melinda

Esther Ndungo and Melinda Ng (co-first authors on eLife paper) and Kartik Chandran.

TWiEVO 4: Taking the mystery out of the mystery of mysteries

TWiEVO

Nitin PhadnisHosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

Guest: Nitin Phadnis

Nitin joins Nels and Vincent to explain how he identified a gene that is responsible for male inviability in hybrids from a cross between two species of fruit flies.

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Science Picks

Nels – Watercolor of Darwin and crew
Vincent – SpaceX rocket landing (Verge and ArsTechnica)
Nitin – 120th anniversary of Roentgen’s first X-ray

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TWiEVO 3: Recombination is for the birds

TWiEVO

Taeniopygia guttataHosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

Nels and Vincent discuss the evolution of recombination in the genomes of birds and yeast.

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Science Picks

Nels – Tardigrade horizontal gene transfer (The Atlantic article)
Vincent – Einstein’s theory of relativity changed everything

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TWiEVO 2: Faster than a speeding virus

TWiEVO

HIV infected cellHosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

Nels and Vincent talk about how a cellular enzyme contributes to the very high mutation rate of human immunodeficiency virus type 1.

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Science Picks 57:22

Nels – Antelope Island State Park (Bison herders wanted)
Vincent – Processed meats cause cancer

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TWiEVO 1: When (scientific) worlds collide

TWiEVO

TWiEVO 001Hosts: Nels Elde and Vincent Racaniello

Nels and Vincent launch a new podcast on evolution, and start by discussing how the field has changed through recent mergers of evolutionary and experimental biology in the post-genome era.

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Science Picks 1:06:59

Nels – Your inner fish (video stream, Shubin website)
Vincent – Prelude to Foundation by Isaac Asimov

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