Smoke taint in wine from wildfires, ancient Neanderthal horses, racehorse injury risk, eclipse bird behavior, and climate-education data archiving | Science Magazine Podcast Oct 9, 2025

Short Summary

In this Science Magazine podcast episode from October 9, 2025, host Michael Greshko explores how wildfire smoke can affect wine flavor through phenols like guaiacol and a rare bacterium, Gordonia alcanivorans, that could help break down these compounds. The show then shifts to archaeology with the discovery of the oldest open-air DNA from 300,000-year-old horses at Schnien, followed by modern veterinary science on racehorse injuries and the use of saddle-mounted trackers to forecast fractures, plus biomechanical simulations of bone stress. The episode also covers climate-education data archiving after Climate.gov changes and a citizen science eclipse study at Indiana University Bloomington that investigated how birds respond to totality.

Smoke taint, ancient horses, and equine biomechanics

The episode opens with a discussion of wildfire smoke affecting wine flavor, not just through burnt vines but via smoke compounds that lodge in grape skins. A recent study identifies Gordonia alcanivorans, a bacterium living on grape leaves, capable of breaking down guaiacol, a key phenol responsible for smoke taint. This finding highlights a potential bioremediation route during fermentation, aiming to reduce taint without stripping desirable wine aromas. The researchers tested multiple bacteria for survival on guaiacol-rich carbon sources, isolating two Gordonia strains that could persist, though they act specifically on guaiacol and not on all phenols, preserving desirable flavor compounds. This work underscores the careful balance required when mitigating smoke taint, as phenols also contribute positive aroma notes in wine.

"Gordonia alcanivorans can break down guaiacol, a primary smoke-taint phenol" - Michael Greshko

Ancient and modern horses — The program then traverses time with Andrew Curry’s report on Neanderthal–horse interactions from roughly 300,000 years ago at the Schnien open-air site in northern Germany. The assemblage reveals sophisticated Neanderthal hunting and butchery strategies, and critically, DNA preserved in horse bones marks the oldest open-air animal DNA sequenced to date, pushing ancient DNA techniques beyond permafrost and cave contexts. This landmark demonstrates how far ancient-DNA work has progressed, even in temperate, seasonally variable settings, and how researchers correct for DNA fragmentation and chemical damage to extract meaningful data. The conversation then moves to modern equine health, where researchers at Washington State University are using saddle-based biometric trackers to study movement patterns in thousands of racehorses. Their machine-learning model flags potential catastrophic fractures before they occur, offering a practical analog to human athlete monitoring. They also simulate bone sensors under high-intensity training to identify when rest and moderated workloads become essential to bone remodeling and injury prevention.

"This is the oldest DNA of its kind from an open-air site" - Andrew Curry

Public health, climate education, and eclipse science — The episode then shifts to education and policy, discussing how the Trump administration shuttered Climate.gov, redirecting resources to NOAA pages with far less data, complicating teachers’ ability to teach climate change per Next Generation Science Standards. Educators have formed nonprofit archives to preserve Climate.gov content and create Climate.us as a public resource, underscoring the need for accessible, accurate teaching materials in a changing policy landscape. The showcase closes with an Indiana University Bloomington eclipse study led by Kim Rosewall and Liz Aguilar, a citizen science project that combined a community app for focal observations with passive audio recorders to document bird responses before, during, and after totality in April 2024. The researchers emphasize outreach as data collection, inviting broad public participation while producing scientifically robust observations of 52 species, including robins whose dawn chorus spiked during totality.

"Not just data collection, we wanted the public to feel like scientists and contribute to discovery" - Liz Aguilar