How Earth’s rotation could predict giant quakes, gene therapy’s new hope, and how carbon monoxide helps deep-diving seals

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This week we hear stories on how the sloshing of Earth’s core may spike major earthquakes, carbon monoxide’s role in keeping deep diving elephant seals oxygenated, and a festival celebrating heavily researched yet completely nonsensical theories with Online News Editor David Grimm.

Sarah Crespi interviews staff writer Jocelyn Kaiser about the status of gene therapy, including a newly tested gene-delivering virus that may give scientists a new way to treat devastating spinal and brain diseases.

Listen to previous podcasts.

[Image: Robert Schwemmer, CINMS, NOAA; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

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Studying the changing of AI language inside swarms, how orangutans learn to forage, and an astrophysicist talks about loss

Can ‘assisted migration’ save forests? And the role of philosophy in science

Psychoactive substances helped spur Andean civilization, and breaking barriers to education

Sex-reversing frogs, and Europe’s rising rates of a deadly tick-borne disease

Making drugs in space, the man who fed India, and what narwhals can teach us about changing seas

Why tracing cyclosporiasis is so tough, and a digestible probe for the microbiome

A vest for blocking cosmic rays, and updates on NIH funding

Did meat or fruit give people big brains, and protecting bison diversity using ancient DNA

AI’s influence on society, measuring muscles, and a Crick biography

Death in a gene-editing trial, and insect larvae surviving in deep waters