{"version":1,"type":"rich","provider_name":"Libsyn","provider_url":"https:\/\/www.libsyn.com","height":90,"width":600,"title":"Fossilized dinosaur proteins, and making a fridge from rubber bands","description":"Have you ever tried to scrub off the dark, tarlike residue on a grill? That tough stuff is made up of polymers\u2014basically just byproducts of cooking\u2014and it is so persistent that researchers have found similar molecules that have survived hundreds of millions of years. And these aren't from cook fires. They are actually the byproducts of death and fossilization. Host Sarah Crespi talks with Contributing Correspondent Gretchen Vogel about how these molecules can be found on the surface of certain fossils and used as fingerprints for the proteins that once dwelled in dinos. And Sarah talks with Zunfeng Liu, a professor at Nankai University in Tianjin, China, about a new cooling technology based on a 100- -year-old observation that a stretched rubber band is warm and a relaxed one is cool. It\u2019s going to be hard to beat the 60% efficiency of compression-based refrigerators and air conditioning units, but Zunfeng and colleagues aim to try, with twists and coils that can cool water by 7\u00b0C when relaxed. This week\u2019s episode was edited by Podigy.   Ads on this week\u2019s show: The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life by David Quammen   Listen to previous podcasts   About the Science Podcast   [Image: Twila Cheeseborough\/Flickr; Music: Jeffrey Cook]    ++ Authors: Sarah Crespi; Gretchen Vogel ","author_name":"Science Magazine Podcast","author_url":"http:\/\/www.sciencemag.org","html":"