In this episode of Yackety Science, mangrove rivulus fish take a long strange trip and find their inner chill. Ribozymes lead the way back to life’s very beginning. And in the U.S., bad public policy chases away more good science. In the chemical minute, Matt mixes up a chalky mojito and talks calcium. And in Ourobookos, the team wraps up their own very strange trip through the past, present and future of TB.

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Episode Art: Modified from “Mangrove Killifish (Kryptolebias marmoratus)” by Jean-Paul Cicéron (PD)

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:

Fish Tripping on Shrooms:

Forsyth D, Faraone N, Lamarre SG and Currie S (2026) The magic of mushrooms: psilocybin influences behavior in the mangrove rivulus fish, Kryptolebias marmoratus. Front. Behav. Neurosci. 20:1767175.

Ribozymes:

Edoardo Gianni et al. A small polymerase ribozyme that can synthesize itself and its complementary strand. Science 391,1022-1028(2026). DOI:10.1126/science.adt2760

1. Shirley Meng and Sodium Batteries:
3. Pushed by Trump policies, top U.S. battery scientist is moving to Singapore by Jeffrey Mervis (Science; May 1, 2026)

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.”

Next Book Selection:

The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) by Katie Mack

“. . . a mind-bending tour through five of the cosmos’s possible finales: the Big Crunch, Heat Death, the Big Rip, Vacuum Decay (the one that could happen at any moment!), and the Bounce. Guiding us through cutting-edge science and major concepts in quantum mechanics, cosmology, string theory, and much more, The End of Everything is a wildly fun, surprisingly upbeat ride to the farthest reaches of all that we know.”