Sonic geologists: Cristina Quinn and Alison BruzekIn the first episode of their podcast, Boston journalists Cristina Quinn and Alison Bruzek’s anticipatory chatter morphs into frightened shrieks as they nearly get hit by a car. On purpose.

Thus opens Trace Elements – “Two hosts, one adventure. An off-road trip into the science that connects us.” – a five-part series on PRX’s Transistor podcast that drops every other Thursday. The science and tech-rich episodes are short, consumable, engaging, and, Bruzek said, “wildly different.”

For podcast aficionados, Trace Elements evokes the storytelling of Radiolab, the science of Stuff You Should Know, and the banter of NPR’s Planet Money. Its charm rests with Quinn and Bruzek’s enthusiasm and familiarity, educated by years of journalistic curiosity.

Quinn is a Dorchester native, and can't think of much in her vocal style that she got from her father Joe, the late Savin Hill native and World War II veteran whose deep baritone led the St. Gregory’s congregation in song for many years, although she suspects her performative instincts may be informed by him. Quinn’s Boston Latin Academy schoolmate and fellow Dorchester resident Rory Jackson is responsible for the show’s score and its trippy futuristic theme music.

Quinn and Bruzek said they will follow a similar format episode-by-episode, each rooted in a search for adventure. That car aiming for them at the start of the pilot was an experiment accompanying a story about a man who became unable to feel fear after a medical procedure.

Pursuing that audible adventure means staying portable. Quinn pulled a small pouch out of her backpack in the studio, drawing from it a handheld recorder and a portable microphone. That is the go-bag that accompanies them into labs, onto streets, and around careening cars.

The narratives are shaped with an eye toward expanding the conversation, even if tackling ripe and topical subjects. Their second episode, about artificial intelligence and robots, drops tomorrow.

“We kind of want to have discussions that… tap into areas of discussion that haven’t really been delved into,” Quinn said. Bruzek elaborated: “Like, a lot of people now are talking about Alpha Go [the robot that crushed one of the world’s best Go players], and saying “Oh my God, this just happened!” We’re talking about the opposite of that. People are talking about how hard it is to create artificial intelligence, and our episode is about how easy it is to fool people into thinking something’s smart.”

The day after the podcast’s launch, the two women sat on low orange felt chairs in Andrew Kramer’s cozy Quincy studio that was bathed in purple light. They banter easily, dropping and picking up each other's sentences with nary a beat between them.

Both have public radio in their veins; they worked near each other in the WGBH newsroom about two years ago. Quinn was the station’s science and innovation reporter and Minnesota-native Bruzek was working “kitty-corner” to her as a project manager for the Forum Network.

“We were in perfect diagonal distance from each other in the newsroom,” Quinn said.

Bruzek picks up the thought: “So Cristina could just shout across, ‘I read this Popular Science article!’ ”

“And there’d be like a ‘What? Oh, hahahaha,’ ” Quinn added, laughing herself.

Months of cracking jokes and sharing stories later, the colleagues and friends left their full-time WGBH jobs in the fall of 2104, only a week apart. While Bruzek worked as an intern at the NPR science desk in Washington, Quinn freelanced around Boston.

When Bruzek returned to the Bay State in December, she got a call from Quinn, apropos of nothing, asking “Do you want to do a podcast?” Bruzek’s easy and immediate answer: “Yeah, of course.”

Trace Elements was conceived and slowly formed over the course of 2015 and early 2016. They started interviewing experts for their pilot episode in January 2015, finally wrapping up in early March.

The Trace Elements name probably will not follow them off PRX, Quinn and Bruzek said. They are close to completing the allotted five episodes, and are already looking to expand with different partners and sponsorships.

Perhaps the best way to grasp the purpose of the series is to go back to their initial, and rejected, proposal for a name: Polariscope. “It’s what geologists use to examine a jewel from many different angles,” Bruzek said, with Quinn clarifying: “It’s a tool they use to discover what’s a true gem.”

“We’re geologists,” Bruzek said, chuckling. “Sonic geologists,” Quinn said.

Subscribe to/download the Tranistor podcast to listen to Trace Elements. Follow Trace Elements on Twitter at @tracesfm, Quinn at @cristinatquinn, and Bruzek at @voteforali.