This Week in Science – The Kickass Science Podcast · Dr. Kirsten Sanford Science Media

What's in a Name?

·1 hr 11 min·6 clips

Researchers added milk, cocoa, and cat food to batteries—and everything worked, exposing a crisis in scientific publishing.

Dr. Kiki hosts solo episode 1040 of This Week in Science recorded December 3, 2025, opening with political science stories before moving to biological and materials science. The main news story is the Trump administration renaming the National Renewable Energy Laboratory -- established in 1974 as the Solar Energy Research Institute under Gerald Ford -- to the National Laboratory of the Rockies, without clarifying whether its solar and wind research programs will survive given the administration's focus on nuclear, fusion, and geothermal. Dr. Kiki draws on the Shakespeare quote about roses to question whether renaming a lab without changing its function is meaningful, or whether it signals coming programmatic changes. The second political story involves an FDA memo from Vinay Prasad claiming COVID-19 vaccines caused 10 pediatric deaths -- a claim sourced solely from VAERS reports without analysis -- and proposing that all vaccine updates including seasonal flu shots require full randomized controlled trials. Twelve former FDA commissioners published a rebuttal in the New England Journal of Medicine calling the planned changes incoherent and scientifically misrepresentative. The biological science stories cover research published in PNAS showing that the MC1R gene, which produces red hair and contributes to autoimmune susceptibility, is disrupted in chronic wounds like diabetic foot ulcers and venous leg ulcers, and that topical drugs targeting MC1R improved healing and reduced scarring in mouse models. A Cell Genomics study traced the arrival of domestic cats to China via the Silk Road no earlier than 600 CE, roughly 600 years after the disappearance of the leopard cats Chinese populations had kept for thousands of years -- a gap whose cause remains unknown. The first recorded domestic cat in China was fully or partially white, which Dr. Kiki finds suggestive of deliberate selective breeding by Silk Road traders. A PLOS One paper introduces a framework called MEDVIS for evaluating biomedical data visualizations across five scientific domains, comparing commercial tools on cost, ease of use, and customizability. The episode closes with a battery commentary paper in Joule that abandons the customary optimistic preamble and directly criticizes battery research culture for claiming incremental improvements with off-the-shelf materials are game-changing. The tone throughout is conversational, curious, and mildly sardonic when discussing political interference in science.

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