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Home > Science Magazine Podcast > A global treaty on plastic pollution, what mice pay attention to, and a dearth of Black physicists
Podcast: Science Magazine Podcast
Episode:

A global treaty on plastic pollution, what mice pay attention to, and a dearth of Black physicists
Category: Science & Medicine
Duration: 00:29:03
Publish Date: 2022-03-02 19:00:00
Description:

On this week’s show: The ins and outs of the first global treaty on plastic pollution, how the brain decides what to pay attention to (and what to ignore), and why the United States has so few Black physicists

First up, Staff Writer Erik Stokstad joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss the world’s first global treaty on plastics pollution–and the many questions that need answers to make it work. Read a related Policy Forum here.

Up next, we hear from one of more than 50 Black physicists interviewed for a special news package in Science about the barriers Black physicists face, and potential models for change drawing on a 2020 report that documents how the percentage of undergraduates physics degrees going to Black students has declined over the past 20 years. In this excerpt, Willie S. Rockward, chair and professor of physics at Morgan State University, describes how a study group dubbed the “Black Hole” provided much-needed support for him and four colleagues who were part of the first cohort of Black graduate physics students at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Finally, Nikola Grujic, a Ph.D. student at the Institute for Neuroscience at ETH Zurich, talks about rational inattention in mice and how measuring this phenomenon can help us understand why our brains attend to some things—and ignore others.

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

[Image: Carl Campbell/Flickr; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

[alt: sheaves of plastic wrap photographed against a black background]

Authors: Sarah Crespi; Erik Stokstad

Episode page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adb1765

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

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