Using free-floating DNA to find soldiers’ remains, and how people contribute to indoor air chemistry

On this week’s show: The U.S. government is partnering with academics to speed up the search for more than 80,000 soldiers who went missing in action, and how humans create their own “oxidation zone” in the air around them

First up on the podcast this week, Tess Joosse is a former news intern here at Science and is now a freelance science journalist based in Madison, Wisconsin. Tess talks with host Sarah Crespi about attempts to use environmental DNA—free-floating DNA in soil or water—to help locate the remains of soldiers lost at sea.

Also featured in this segment:

• University of Wisconsin, Madison, molecular biologist Bridget Ladell
• Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution marine biologist Kirstin Meyer-Kaiser

Also this week, Nora Zannoni, a postdoctoral researcher in the atmospheric chemistry department at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, talks about people’s contributions to indoor chemistry. She chats with Sarah about why it’s important to go beyond studying the health effects of cleaning chemicals and gas stoves to explore how humans add their own bodies’ chemicals and reactions to the air we breathe.

In a sponsored segment from Science/AAAS Custom Publishing Office, Sean Sanders, director and senior editor for Custom Publishing, interviews Benedetto Marelli, associate professor at MIT, about winning the BioInnovation Institute & Science Prize for Innovation and how he became an entrepreneur.

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

[Image: Jeremy Borrelli/East Carolina University; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

[alt: a scuba diver underwater near a World War II wreck off Saipan with podcast overlay symbol]

Authors: Sarah Crespi; Tess Joosse

Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ade6771

About the Science Podcast: https://www.science.org/content/page/about-science-podcast

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