Join us as Team Yack takes on Neanderthal nookie, the science of butt breathing, and all the things scientists lose down Antarctic boreholes (Bowties!?). NASA fails to launch Artemis II, but Ourobookos, our new YS book club, gets off the launchpad with John Green’s Everything is Tuberculosis. Matt spends a long minute talking chlorine chemistry, and the team says, “alright, alright, alright,” to Matthew McConaughey and the science of Interstellar.

Got a question, comment, or correction? Yack right back at us at YacketyScience@gmail.com.

Episode Art: Modified from Neanderthal_(28418907177) photo by Janine and Jim Eden (CC BY 2.0).

Theme music: “Funky Machine” (ID874) by Lobo Loco (Accessed through FreeMusicArchive.org.; CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Production help provided by Scott Gregory.

Yackety Science is recorded at the studios of Public Radio Tulsa, Kendall Hall, University of Tulsa, and at the Center for Creativity at Tulsa Community College.

Links:

The Thwaites Glacier:

Deep Inside an Antarctic Glacier, a Mission Collapses at Its Final Step by Raymond Zhong. (NYT; Feb. 2, 2026)

Artemis II:

Information about Artemis II from NASA.

Enteral Ventilation (aka, Butt Breathing):

Safety and tolerability of intrarectal perfluorodecalin for enteral ventilation in a first-in-human trial by Fujii, Tasuku et al. (Med, Volume 6, Issue 12, 100887)

Neanderthal Nookie:

Interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans was strongly sex biased by Alexander Platt et al. Science 391,922-925(2026)

Montreal Protocol:

Read more about CFCs and the Montreal Protocol here.

Ourobookos, A Yackety Science Book Club

Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green

“Tuberculosis has been entwined with hu­manity for millennia. Once romanticized as a malady of poets, today tuberculosis is seen as a disease of poverty that walks the trails of injustice and inequity we blazed for it. In 2019, author John Green met Henry Reider, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone. John be­came fast friends with Henry, a boy with spindly legs and a big, goofy smile. In the years since that first visit to Lakka, Green has become a vocal advocate for increased access to treatment and wider awareness of the healthcare inequi­ties that allow this curable, preventable infec­tious disease to also be the deadliest, killing over a million people every year. In Everything Is Tuberculosis, John tells Henry’s story, woven through with the scientific and social histories of how tuberculosis has shaped our world—and how our choices will shape the future of tuberculosis.”

Yackers Matt and Brian return triumphantly to the studio for what some are calling the Second Coming, others the Puntocalypse, and still others Yackety Science Season 2. The team takes a whirlwind tour of 2025 science breakthroughs—tricky tumors, new swine finds, and fresh eyes on the skies. A helium-filled man-o-war floats to the top of the listener mailbag. Brian weeps all over Galileo’s telescopes. And Matt susses out the secrets of sulfur, taking its malodorous measure.

Got a question, comment, or correction? Yack right back at us at YacketyScience@gmail.com.

Episode Art: Carl Yagan standing atop Santucci’s armillary sphere at the Galileo Museum in Florence, Italy.

Theme music: “Funky Machine” (ID874) by Lobo Loco (Accessed through FreeMusicArchive.org.; CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Production help provided by Scott Gregory.

Yackety Science is recorded at the studios of Public Radio Tulsa, Kendall Hall, University of Tulsa, and at the Center for Creativity at Tulsa Community College.

Links:

Green Energy:The Green Giant: Images of China’s clean energy infrastructure reveal a transformation of unmatched scale and speed. (Science, Vol 390, Issue 6779)

Gene Therapy and Rare Diseases:

Gene-editing therapy made in just 6 months helps baby with life-threatening disease by Jocelyn Kaiser (Science; May 15, 2025).

Patient-Specific In Vivo Gene Editing to Treat a Rare Genetic Disease by Musunuru et al. (NEJM N Engl J Med 2025;392:2235-2243)

New Gonorrhea Drugs :New antibiotics for gonorrhea could help beat back drug-resistant infections by Kai Kupperschimdt (Science, 11 Dec 2025)

Vera C. Rubin Observatory: All-Seeing Eye: The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is set to transform astronomy. Its wide and fast survey will discover billions of dynamic objects while building up a deep map of the universe (Science, Vol 388, Issue 6753)

Denisovans Among Us: ‘Dragon Man’ skull belongs to mysterious human relative by Andre Curry (Science, 18 Jun 2025)

Neurons, Mitochondria, and Tumors: Hoover, G., Gilbert, S., Curley, O. et al. Nerve-to-cancer transfer of mitochondria during cancer metastasis. Nature 644, 252–262 (2025).

Particle Physics Mystery Solved:Long-running physics experiment dashes hope of new particles and forces by Adrian Cho (Science, Vol 388, Issue 6751)

Xenotransplants:Man’s pig kidney fails just shy of setting record (Science, Vol 388, Issue 6750.)

Heat Tolerant Rice: A natural gene on-off system confers field thermotolerance for grain quality and yield in rice. Li, Wei et al. (Cell, Volume 188, Issue 14, 3661 - 3678.e21)