Science Magazine Podcast

On this week’s show: The first images from the James Webb Space Telescope hint at the science to come, and disentangling the itch-scratch cycle After years of delays, the James Webb Space Telescope launched at the end of December 2021. Now, NASA has released a few of the first full-color images captured by the instrument’s enormous mirror. Staff Writer Daniel Clery joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss these first images and what they mean for the future of science from Webb. Next on the podcast, Jing Feng, principal investigator at the Center for Neurological and Psychiatric Research and Drug Discovery at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’s Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, discusses his Science Translational Medicine paper on why scratching sometimes triggers itching. It turns out, in cases of chronic itch there can be a miswiring in the skin. Cells that normally detect light touch instead connect with nerve fibers that convey a sensation of itchiness. This miswiring means light touches (such as scratching