Science Friday (Science Friday and WNYC Studios)

When it comes to the eventual end of our universe, cosmologists have a few classic theories: the Big Crunch, where the universe reverses its expansion and contracts again, setting the stars themselves on fire in the process. Or the Big Rip, where the universe expands forever—but in a fundamentally unstable way that tears matter itself apart. Or it might be heat death, in which matter and energy become equally distributed in a cold, eventless soup.

These theories have continued to evolve as we gain new understandings from particle accelerators and astronomical observations. As our understanding of fundamental physics advances, new ideas about the ending are joining the list. Take vacuum decay, a theory that’s been around since the 1970s, but which gained new support when CERN confirmed detection of the Higgs Boson particle. The nice thing about vacuum decay, writes cosmologist Dr. Katie Mack in her book The End of Everything: (Astrophysically Speaking), is that it could happen at any time, and would be almost instantaneous—painless, efficient.

The End Of Everything is our SciFri Book Club pick for April—you can join in on the community conversation and maybe even win a free book on our book club page. In this interview from 2020, Mack joins Ira to talk about the diversity of universe-ending theories, and how cosmologists like her think about the big questions, like where the universe started, how it might end, and what happens after it does.

Also, Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Dr. Daniel Kahneman died this week at the age of 90. His work turned many traditional ideas about economics upside-down, arguing that people often make bad decisions that go against their own self-interest. It’s something he continued to study throughout his career, and that he wrote about in the 2022 book Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment. At the end of this segment, we revisit an interview from 2022 with Kahneman in remembrance of his long career studying cognitive biases.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Some birds are famous for being extinct, like the Dodo and the passenger pigeon.

But how do we prevent species from reaching that point? One of the starting points is to try and track down the birds that are “lost to science.” These are birds that have not been documented in over a decade, but just might still be out there, if we look for them.

A new study analyzed data, images, and recordings from platforms that crowdsource observations from all over the world to identify birds “lost to science.” In total, the project, called The Search for Lost Birds identified 126 such species.

SciFri producer Kathleen Davis is joined by Dr. John Mittermeier, director of the Search for Lost Birds at the American Bird Conservancy to talk more about the findings of this research and what it’s like to track down a “lost” bird.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Last year, almost half of the honeybee colonies in the U.S. died, making it the second deadliest year for honeybees on record. The main culprit wasn’t climate change, starvation, or even pesticides, but a parasite: Varroa destructor.

“The name for this parasite is a very Transformer-y sounding name, but … these Varroa destructor mites have earned this name. It’s not melodramatic by any means. [They are] incredibly destructive organisms,” says Dr. Sammy Ramsey, entomologist at the University of Colorado Boulder.

These tiny mites feed on the bees and make them susceptible to other threats like diseases and pesticides. They’re also highly contagious: They arrived in the US in 1987, and now they live in almost every honeybee colony in the country. Honeybees pollinate many important crops, like apples, peaches, and berries, and their pollinator services add up to billions of dollars.

Ramsey and his lab are trying to put an end to the varroa mites’ spree. Part of their research includes spying on baby bees and their accompanying mites to learn how the parasites feed on the bees and whether there’s a way to disrupt that process.

In Boulder, Colorado, SciFri producer Rasha Aridi speaks with Dr. Ramsey and fellow entomologist Dr. Madison Sankovitz about how the varroa mites terrorize bees so effectively, and what it would take to get ahead of them.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

It’s been a hot and rainy summer in many parts of the US, and it’s been hard to spend as much time in nature as many of us would like. Heat waves and unpredictable weather have sometimes made it riskier to be outside. Maybe you’ve chosen an easier hike, or doubled up on water bottles, or stayed inside when you’d much rather be outdoors with friends and family.

If you’ve been feeling apathetic about the outdoors, a new book called Forest Walking, Discovering the Trees and Woodlands of North America might be a helpful read. Co-authors Peter Wohlleben, a forester and conservation advocate, and Jane Billinghurst, an editor, author, and translator, teach readers how to engage with their local forested areas in a deeper way. And it’s what we’re reading for September’s SciFri Book Club.

Diana Plasker, Science Friday’s senior experiences manager, sat down with the authors to talk about how to decode nature’s subtle signs and why it’s important to use all five senses when exploring your surroundings.

Transcript for this segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

You know that disappointing feeling when you’re ready to make a delicious meal, but you crack open the refrigerator only to find mushy tomatoes, dried-out bread, or oozing strawberries?

Refrigeration fundamentally changes the chemistry of our food, but at this point, most of the United States’ food system relies on the use of refrigerators. Almost three-quarters of the food on an average American’s plate has been refrigerated during production, shipping, and storage. So how did we end up relying so heavily on the fridge? And on a warming planet, can refrigeration keep its cool?

A new book called Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves challenges the definition of “freshness” and our relationship with the fridge. SciFri’s John Dankosky talks with author Nicola Twilley, co-host of the podcast “Gastropod.”

Read an excerpt from Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet.

Transcript for this segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Uché Blackstock always knew she wanted to be a doctor. Her mother was a physician at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, New York. Uché and her twin sister, Oni, would often visit their mother at work, watching her take care of patients. And they loved to play with their mother’s doctor’s bag.

The sisters went on to become the first Black mother-daughter legacy students to graduate from Harvard Medical School.

SciFri producer Kathleen Davis talks with Dr. Uché Blackstock, emergency physician and founder and CEO of Advancing Health Equity, about her new memoir, Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine.

Read an excerpt from Legacy at sciencefriday.com.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

When you think about Earth, you might think of a giant rock, floating around in space, making laps around the sun. A rock that just happens to have critters, plants, and people crawling around its surface. 

A new book by Ferris Jabr called Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life argues otherwise: Life doesn’t just exist on Earth, but life is Earth, and the Earth itself is alive. 

That idea might sound radical, and it is. There’s a shift happening in how we understand the planet, and what it’ll take to save it, and ourselves, from the future humans are creating. 

Becoming Earth takes readers on adventures across the world to learn how life has transformed the Earth, from changing the color of the sky to reshaping the continents. 

Guest host Anna Rothschild talks with author Ferris Jabr, a science writer based in Portland, Oregon. 

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Did you know that almost all the wine we drink, no matter what color it is or where it’s produced, comes from a grape species called Vitis vinifera? But these grapes can’t survive the cold, harsh winters of Iowa, so researchers at Iowa State University are growing special varieties that can withstand a wider range of temperatures. Through this effort, they’re even hoping to expand Iowa’s wine industry.

Onstage in Ames, Iowa, Ira talks with Dr. Erin Norton, director of the Midwest Grape and Wine Industry Institute at Iowa State University. They chat about the science of growing cold-hardy grapes, taste a selection of Iowan wines, and explore the basics of viticulture.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

New research suggests that polymetallic nodules found 13,000 feet deep produce “dark oxygen” by electrolyzing water. Also, at higher altitudes, the air is less dense, which makes it harder for birds in flight to generate lift. The turkey vulture has a solution. 

Deep-Sea ‘Nodules’ May Produce Oxygen, Study Finds

An international team of researchers recently discovered that some 13,000 feet below the ocean’s surface, oxygen may be produced through natural electrolysis. The group found that small lumps called polymetallic nodules at the bottom of the ocean appeared to act as geo batteries, producing enough electricity to break down water and make oxygen.

That observation challenges the idea that photosynthesis is necessary to produce enough oxygen for living organisms. The researchers hypothesize that this could be a source of oxygen for deep-sea creatures. But while it gives some answers as to how life can thrive at the bottom of the sea, it also raises a lot of new questions.

Science Friday guest host and producer Charles Bergquist is joined by the lead electrochemist of the study, Dr. Franz Geiger, the Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Chemistry at Northwestern University, to answer some of these questions.

One Bird’s Physics Trick For Flying At High Altitudes

If you’ve ever taken a trip to a higher elevation, you know that the air gets thinner as you go up. If you’re not acclimated to the altitude, it can feel harder to breathe. That thinner air also makes it more difficult for birds and airplanes to fly, because it’s harder to produce the lift forces in thinner air. But it turns out that turkey vultures have a way of dealing with that problem.

Researchers observed turkey vultures in flight at different altitudes and found that rather than flapping harder or more rapidly to deal with decreased lift, the turkey vulture exploits the lower drag in thinner air to fly faster, using increased speed to help balance the lift equation. Dr. Jonathan Rader, a postdoctoral research associate in biology at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and an author of a report on this research published in the Journal of Experimental Biology, joins SciFri’s Charles Bergquist to explain how flying things work to adapt to different flight conditions.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

In 1977, NASA launched Voyager 1 and 2. Their mission? To explore the farthest reaches of our galaxy. Their missions were only supposed to last about four years, but it’s been almost 50. They’re now in interstellar space, navigating the region between stars.

But since November, Voyager 1 has been sending unintelligible data back to Earth, raising concerns that it could be nearing the end of its mission.

Ira talks with Maggie Koerth, science writer and editorial lead at Carbon Plan, about Voyager 1 and other science news of the week, including work on detecting neutrinos with forests, calculating the age of giant sand dunes, uncovering the origins of cells, investigating why we don’t have tails anymore, and how a man walking his dog discovered a dinosaur fossil.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Many people think of the ocean as a quiet and serene place: Take a dip underwater and the cacophony of the world melts away.

But the ocean is quite noisy, full of whale songs and echolocation, which whales and dolphins use to communicate. Cephalopods can make and hear sounds too, even without ears.

Then, there’s human-made noise, including the giant ships that crisscross the globe. The effects of this continuous low-volume noise are harder to track because they do not result in immediate injury or death. Rather, scientists are studying the long-term effects on animals’ communication, mating, and food gathering.

Ira talks with Amorina Kingdon, science journalist and author of the new book Sing Like Fish: How Sound Rules Life Underwater.

Read an excerpt of Sing Like a Fish: How Sound Rules Life Underwater.

Transcript for this segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Roe v. Wade was overturned almost two years ago, and a lot has changed in terms of abortion choices in the United States. Some states have effectively banned abortion, while others have such confusing laws that it’s difficult for the people who live there to know what their reproductive rights are.

The post-Dobbs landscape hasn’t just affected the care people can receive: It’s also changed where physicians choose to work, especially if they’re in states where they can be criminally prosecuted for performing abortions.

Last month, the Idaho Coalition for Safe Healthcare published a report that found that 22% of ob-gyns have left the state since June of 2022 — a massive amount for a state that already has the fewest physicians per capita in the country. Ongoing research in Wisconsin has found that the Dobbs decision has affected where medical students choose to study, and has even dissuaded some from choosing obstetrics as a specialty.

Joining Ira to talk about this are two ob-gyns from states with abortion restrictions: Dr. Sara Thomson, based in Boise, Idaho, and Dr. Abby Cutler, assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.

Transcript for this segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

It may seem like everyone is either getting COVID-19 this summer, or knows someone who has. That’s because for the fourth year in a row, COVID cases are experiencing a summer surge.

The CDC now tracks COVID-19 mostly through wastewater and found that viral activity has multiplied more than four times from the beginning of May to now. The CDC classifies the viral activity level as “high.”

So what’s behind this surge? And why does it keep happening in the summer?

SciFri’s John Dankosky talks with Jessica Malaty Rivera, infectious disease epidemiologist and science communicator at the de Beaumont Foundation, about what’s behind the surge and how to stay safe.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

In the trees, through the water, and under the dirt: Snakes evolve faster than their lizard relatives, allowing them to occupy diverse niches. Also, researchers are working to understand just how baleen whales are able to produce their haunting songs.

Snakes Are Evolutionary Superstars

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, new research shows that snakes deserve our recognition as evolutionary superstars. The study, published last week in the journal Science, found that snakes evolve faster than other reptiles, allowing them to thrive in a wide range of environments.

It shouldn’t be too surprising: Many of the nearly 4,000 snake species occupy extremely specialized niches in their ecosystems. The blunt-headed tree snake, for example, eats through batches of treefrog eggs in Central and South America. Pythons, which can grow to 20 feet long, can take down large mammals like antelopes.

Joining Ira to talk about the evolutionary speed of snakes is study co-author Dr. Daniel Rabosky, evolutionary biologist and curator of the Museum of Zoology at the University of Michigan.

Whale Song Is All In The Larynx

Whale songs can be both beautiful and haunting. But the exact mechanism that the 16 species of baleen whales, like humpback and minke whales, use to make those noises hasn’t been well understood. The finer points of whale anatomy are hard to study, in part because the soft tissues of beached whales often begin to decompose before researchers can preserve and study them. And until the relatively recent advent of monitoring tags that can be attached to individual whales, it’s been hard to associate a given underwater sound with any specific whale.

For a recent study, published in the journal Nature, researchers took advantage of several well-preserved beached whales to investigate the mysteries of the baleen whale larynx and its role in whale song. Dr. Coen Elemans of the University of Southern Denmark joins Ira to discuss the work, which included a MacGyveresque contraption involving party balloons and exercise bands that blew air at controlled pressures through preserved whale larynx tissues. The researchers found that there are limits to both the frequencies these whales can produce, and the depths at which they are physically able to sing.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Data from the Mars InSight lander points to the presence of liquid water underneath its crust. Also, some national and state parks are changing the way they open up campsite reservations online to make them more accessible to everyone.

Scientists Find Strong Evidence For Liquid Water On Mars

Scientists discovered that there could be oceans’ worth of liquid water hidden underneath Mars’ surface. More than 3 billion years ago, Mars had lakes, rivers, and maybe even oceans on its surface. It was very different from the arid red planet we know today.

But the question remains—when Mars’ atmosphere changed, where did all that water go? This discovery could offer up new clues and possibly spur on the search for life on Mars.

Ira talks with Maggie Koerth, science writer and editorial lead for Carbon Plan, about this discovery and other science news of the week, including why the WHO declared mpox a global health emergency, the microbiome of your microwave, a green-boned dinosaur named Gnatalie, and how love is in the air for brown tarantulas.

Releasing Campsite Reservations In Waves Makes Booking Fairer

Back in 2022, Science Friday discussed how campsites in state and national parks were virtually impossible to reserve, unless you had a lot of time on your hands and knew exactly when those reservations were going online. Research had shown that the people able to reserve these sites were often wealthy, educated, and white, leaving lots of other people out of the fun of camping.

But two years later, the same team that found those results says there’s good news: Many state and federal campgrounds have changed how their booking windows work, and as a result, camping has become more equitable.

For example, Saddlehorn Campground near Grand Junction, Colorado, was identified as a campground with an inequitable reservation system in a 2022 study. After its publication, campground managers reached out to the study authors to see how they could do better.

“They’ve created what I would call the gold standard in an equitable recreation rationing spectrum for these campsites,” said Dr. Will Rice, assistant professor of outdoor recreation and wildland management at the University of Montana in Missoula.

This method is to release campsites in waves: Some become available six months in advance, some two weeks in advance, and some day-of. This allows more flexibility for people to book, and is an easy fix on the part of the campgrounds.

Rice joins Ira Flatow to talk about these advancements. Since his first appearance on Science Friday, Rice has testified before Congress about the importance of camping reservation equity, and has helped both federal and state campgrounds change their booking reservation windows.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Solar holds great promise as a clean energy solution, as the sun is an incredibly abundant resource, and panels can be placed unobtrusively on roofs and in fields. And solar panel technology has advanced quite a bit over the past few decades: panels have become less expensive, more efficient, and more widely used. Panels also generally fare well, considering that they’re outside in inclement weather year after year.

Recent advancements with perovskite solar cells—a type of cell whose name refers to the structure of a compound it contains—have many clean energy enthusiasts excited. Perovskite solar cells are a thin, flexible technology that can even be painted onto a structure and conduct electricity. Much of the work on these has been conducted at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) based in Golden, Colorado.

At Science Friday Live in Boulder, Colorado, Ira sat down with two solar experts from NREL, Dr. Joseph Berry and Dr. Laura Schelhas, to discuss perovskite solar cell advancements and the future of this clean energy technology.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Several states have reported cases of the rare but serious mosquito-borne illness eastern equine encephalitis. And, the new sci-fi movie "Slingshot," about an astronaut’s mental breakdown, prompts questions about how to prepare humans for long-term space travel.

Mosquito-Borne Diseases Are Spreading As Temperatures Rise

This week, a New Hampshire man died of eastern equine encephalitis (EEE), a rare but extremely serious disease caused by a mosquito-borne virus. Human cases of EEE have also been reported in Wisconsin, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Vermont, causing some municipalities to step up mosquito control efforts or attempt to limit outdoor activities during peak mosquito times at dawn and dusk.

Other mosquito-borne diseases are on the rise as well. Oropouche fever, a viral disease typically found in South America, has been spotted in the US—and in Brazil, health officials are reporting an 800% increase in the disease. Dengue fever, also spread by mosquitoes, has been increasing across Europe. Experts attribute all the surges to climate change, which has brought warmer, wetter weather that has allowed mosquito populations to thrive and expand their ranges.

Sophie Bushwick of New Scientist joins guest host Rachel Feltman to talk about climate, mosquitoes, and disease, and how communities are trying to curb the spread. They also tackle other stories from the week in science, including a puzzling result in a dark matter search, how fruit flies change their threat perception during courtship, and investigations into how marmoset monkeys call each other by name.

‘Slingshot’ Imagines A Yearslong Space Mission Gone Wrong

The new movie “Slingshot,” a sci-fi thriller about a yearslong mission to Saturn’s moon Titan, is out in theaters today. It follows the crew members, played by Casey Affleck, Laurence Fishburne, and Tomer Capone, as they start to unravel, highlighting how long, lonely missions can put astronauts’ well-being in peril.

While the movie is certainly a work of science fiction, it does remind us that a lot can go wrong in space, both physically and mentally. So as humans get closer to embarking on long missions to places like Mars and beyond, how are real space agencies thinking about keeping them happy and safe?

Science Friday’s digital producer of engagement Emma Gometz sat down with “Slingshot” director Mikael Håfström, and former NASA organizational psychologist Dr. Kelley Slack, to answer those questions and more.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

The words “black hole” might bring to mind an infinite darkness. But the area right around a black hole, called the accretion disk, is actually pretty bright, with matter compressing hotter and hotter into a glowing plasma as it is sucked in. And amid that maelstrom, there are even brighter areas—bursts of energy that astronomers call flares.

Scientists are trying to better understand what those flares are, and what they can tell us about the nature of black holes. This week in the journal Nature Astronomy, a group of researchers published a video that they say is a 3D reconstruction of the movement of flares around the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way.

Dr. Katie Bouman, an assistant professor of computing and mathematical sciences, electrical engineering and astronomy at Caltech in Pasadena, California, joins guest host Arielle Duhaime-Ross to talk about the research, and how computational imaging techniques can help paint a picture of things that would be difficult or impossible to see naturally.

Transcripts for this segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

For the first time, scientists have recorded how salps form chains and swim in corkscrews to reach the ocean’s surface each night. Also, a wind utility company in Wyoming is trying to make wind turbines more visible to birds by painting just one blade black.

The Small Jelly Creatures That Link Up And Swim in Corkscrews

Salps are small, transparent barrel-shaped jelly creatures. They are sometimes confused with jellyfish, but they are so much more complex. Salps have nervous, circulatory, and digestive systems that include a brain, heart, and intestines.

Salps are known to link themselves together in long chains. And each night they journey from the depths of the ocean to the surface to feast on algae. New research shows that the key to their efficiency is swimming in corkscrews.

Ira talks with Dr. Kelly Sutherland, associate professor of biology at the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology at the University of Oregon, about her work studying salp swimming patterns.

Painting Wind Turbine Blades To Prevent Bird Collisions

Wind energy is expected to be a big part of the transition away from fossil fuels. But that comes with consequences, including the potential for more deadly collisions between turbines and birds and bats. One experiment underway in Wyoming is studying a potentially game-changing—and simple—solution to this problem.

In the Mountain West, large and iconic avian species—such as owls, turkey vultures and golden eagles—are consistently colliding with the human world. At the Teton Raptor Center in Wilson, Wyo., veterinarians, avian scientists and volunteers often treat birds for lead poisoning, crashes into infrastructure, gunshot wounds or other injuries.

For the center’s conservation director, Bryan Bedrosian, his work is about preserving the wildlife that makes Wyoming special.

“We should be proud of the fact that we in Wyoming have some of the best wild natural spaces and some of the best wildlife populations,” he said. I think, unfortunately, it comes with a higher degree of responsibility.”

Wyoming is a critical habitat area for many species, especially golden eagles. Tens of thousands live here year-round and the state is also a huge migration corridor between Alaska and Mexico. Unlike its cousin the bald eagle, the golden eagle population is stable at best and could potentially decline in parts of the U.S. Bedrosian said wind energy growth is a threat for a species that has always been “at the top of the food chain.”

Read the full story at sciencefriday.com.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

If you have a problem with your phone, like a bad battery or a cracked screen, you might decide to just buy a new one. That’s partly because we don’t have a lot of options to repair our devices: Manufacturers can make it extraordinarily difficult—or expensive—to do so.

But for years now, the right-to-repair movement in the US has been pushing for legislation that forces companies to provide consumers with more options to fix the products they actually own, instead of having to go through manufacturers to get them fixed.

And in the past year, multiple states, including California, New York, Minnesota, and Oregon, have adopted such laws. Companies like Apple and John Deere have been fighting these kinds of measures for years.

Guest host Arielle Duhaime-Ross speaks to Jason Koebler, co-host of the 404 Media podcast, about the growing adoption of legislation, why companies have been lobbying against it, and what he thinks the future of the movement is.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Are plants intelligent? Until recently, botanists were hesitant to ask that question, at least publicly. But that’s changing.

In recent years researchers have learned more about how plants communicate with each other, respond to touch, store memories, and deceive animals for their own benefit: All bits of evidence that suggest plants possess a unique form of intelligence that humans have been overlooking.

Guest host Arielle-Duhaime Ross talks with science journalist Zoë Schlanger about her new book, The Light Eaters: How The Unseen World Of Plant Intelligence Offers A New Understanding Of Life On Earth. Schlanger is currently a staff writer at the Atlantic covering climate change.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

The first Women’s World Cup was in 1991, and the games were only 80 minutes, compared to the 90-minute games played by men. Part of the rationale was that women just weren’t tough enough to play a full 90 minutes of soccer.

This idea of women as the “weaker sex” is everywhere in early scientific studies of athletic performance. Sports science was mainly concerned with men’s abilities. Even now, most participants in sports science research are men.

Luckily things are changing, and more girls and women are playing sports than ever before. There’s a little more research about women too, as well as those who fall outside the gender binary.

SciFri producer Kathleen Davis talks with Christine Yu, a health and sports journalist and author of Up To Speed: The Groundbreaking Science of Women Athletes, about the gender data gap in sports science.

Read an excerpt of Up to Speed: The Groundbreaking Science of Women Athletes at sciencefriday.com.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

"I heard elders talk about 'the shakes,' but I now know that language reflects deep historical inequities that have denied us access to healthcare, knowledge, and research that could help us alleviate burdens and strengthen our health—enough with the shakes!" —Senegal Alfred Mabry, in Cell

Parkinson’s disease is the second most common neurodegenerative disorder in the United States. According to a 2022 study, some 90,000 people a year in the US are diagnosed with Parkinson’s. It’s a progressive disease that worsens over time, producing unintended or uncontrollable movements, such as tremors, stiffness, and difficulty with balance and coordination.

Researchers are working to better understand the causes of the disease, how it connects to other health conditions, and how to slow or prevent its effects. Senegal Alfred Mabry is a third year PhD student in neuroscience at Cornell University, and was recently named a recipient of this year’s Rising Black Scientist Award by Cell Press. His research involves interoception—a sense that allows the body to monitor its own processes—and the autonomic nervous system. He joins Ira to talk about his research into Parkinson’s disease, and the importance of scientific research being connected to communities.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Silk is one of the most luxurious fabrics for clothing and bedding. Unlike cotton or linen, silk is made most commonly by insects—often the Bombyx mori, a domesticated moth that feeds on the leaves of mulberry trees. Humans have a 4,000-year history with the textile and the creatures that make it, as documented in the new book Silk: A World History.

Since silk has an unconventional origin as a secretion rather than a plant product, it has unique biological qualities that make it strong and enduring. And because it’s a natural protein fiber, it’s biodegradable, so scientists think it could have a future as a sustainable alternative to plastics and electronic parts.

Guest host Arielle Duhaime-Ross speaks with Dr. Aarathi Prasad, biologist and author of Silk: A World History. They discuss the ways humans have changed silk-creating creatures through domestication, future applications of the textile, and Prasad’s experience growing silkworms of her own.

Read an excerpt from Silk: A World History at sciencefriday.com.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

A recent study looked into life-threatening Acanthamoeba infections, and a few deaths, linked to the use of tap water with devices like neti pots. And, in ‘The Balanced Brain,’ Dr. Camilla Nord explores the neuroscience behind mental health, and how our brains deal with life’s challenges.

Scientists Warn Against Nasal Rinsing With Unboiled Tap Water

Researchers at the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention published a study Wednesday that examined 10 cases of life-threatening Acanthamoeba infections that occurred after people cleaned their sinuses with neti pots, squeeze bottles, or other nasal rinsing devices. In most of these cases, which occurred in immunocompromised individuals over the span of a few decades, individuals had used tap water for nasal rinsing.

Tap water, while generally safe to drink, is not sterile. Microorganisms and germs live in distribution systems and pipes that the water travels through, and Acanthamoeba amebae was the main link between the 10 cases, three of which resulted in death.

Although contracting the Acanthamoeba pathogen is extremely rare, many people are unaware of the unsterile nature of tap water and use it for their sinuses, according to a survey study published last year. A third of participants incorrectly believed U.S. tap water is sterile, and almost two-thirds assumed it was safe to rinse your sinuses with it.

The CDC and FDA recommend using distilled or sterile water for nasal rinsing. If you want to use tap water, they recommend boiling it for three to five minutes and allowing it to cool. While slightly more time consuming, it is an effective way to get sterile water.

Rachel Feltman, host of “The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week,” joins Ira to talk about this story and other news in science this week, including a new study that links microplastics in the human body to increased risk of heart disease and death, why the U.S. maternal mortality rate might be inflated, and why cicadas produce high-speed jets of urine.

How Your Brain Constructs Your Mental Health

If you’ve ever struggled with a mental health issue like anxiety or depression, or know someone who has, it’s pretty clear that what works for one person might not work for another. Antidepressants only work in about 50-60% of patients. Meditation or yoga may be a gamechanger for some people, but ineffective for others.

Over the past few decades, neuroscientists have made huge advances in our understanding of the human brain. How can we use the latest neuroscience research to help improve our mental well-being? And what is the relationship between physical and mental health?

To answer those questions and more, SciFri producer Shoshannah Buxbaum talks with Dr. Camilla Nord, director of the Mental Health Neuroscience Lab at the University of Cambridge and author of the new book The Balanced Brain: The Science of Mental Health.

Read an excerpt of The Balanced Brain at sciencefriday.com.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

In a conversation from 2014, Ira talks marinade myths, charcoal chemistry, and the elusive “smoke ring”—the science behind barbecue and grilling.

Are marinades a myth? How does the elusive “smoke ring” form? And can the debate over gas versus charcoal be settled at last? In this episode of our “Food Failures” series, barbecue and grilling expert Meathead Goldwyn looks at the science behind the grill and offers tips for controlling smoke, temperature, and moisture.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

What A Rodent Brain Shows Us About Love–And Loss

Love has the reputation of being a fairly unique human emotion. If we’re lucky, we can experience lots of love in our lives: with romantic partners, children, family, friends. But with love comes the possibility of another, less desirable emotion: heartbreak.

Neuroscientists at the University of Colorado Boulder have found that these feelings seem to actually leave a mark on the brain, with dopamine and other feel-good chemicals flooding to the brain’s reward centers when lovers are reunited.

The source for this data may be surprising: prairie voles, tiny rodents that are among the small percentage of mammals that form monogamous pair bonds. By studying their brains when the voles were united with their mates, researchers were able to pinpoint this dopamine flood that they suspect happens in humans’ own brains under the same conditions.

When the voles were separated for four weeks—long enough for them to consider their pairing “over” and find new mates, the broken-up voles had much more muted dopamine response when reunited. Researchers say that could be good news for heartbroken humans because it shows the brain could have something of a “reset” mechanism that allows individuals to go on and form new bonds.

Joining Ira to talk about this research is Dr. Zoe Donaldson, associate professor of behavioral neuroscience at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

If You Rolled Colorado Out Into A Brownie, How Big Would It Be?

The surface area of Colorado is 104,094 square miles, according to the US Geological Survey, making it the 8th largest state in the country.

But the state, unlike our neighbors to the east, has a lot of extra geographical stuff — like mountains.

One Coloradan who loves to spend time in those big hills wondered if our dear state wasn’t getting a bit short-changed. Denver-based photographer and editor Howard Paul also happens to love baked goods. So when he posed his question to Colorado Wonders, he couldn’t help but combine his two passions.

Paul had a hunch that such a squishing would make Colorado the largest state in the lower 48. Bigger than Texas. Smaller than Alaska. (For whatever it’s worth, this numerically-challenged reporter thought that was an eminently reasonable guess.)

The first bit of due diligence was to research if this quandary had been approached before. Well, what do you know, the headline of a March 2005 article from Ski Magazine reads “How big would Colorado be if you steamrolled all of the mountains?”

Read the rest on sciencefriday.com.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Plants called “hyperaccumulators” have evolved to absorb high levels of metals. Scientists want to harness them for greener metal mining. And, a little fern from New Caledonia is just a few inches tall, but its genome has 160.45 billion base pairs—50 times more DNA than a human.

How Metal-Absorbing Plants Could Make Mining Greener

Scientists are exploring a somewhat unusual green energy solution: mining metals from the earth using plants.

Typically, if soil has high levels of metal, plants will either die or do everything they can to avoid it. But, one group has taken a different path: evolve to be able to safely absorb large amounts of the metals. These special plants are called hyperaccumulators. And their ability to suck metals like nickel from the earth is called phytomining.

The Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy announced in March up to $10 million in funding for phytomining research.

Ira talks with Dr. David McNear, professor of plant and soil sciences at the University of Kentucky, about these fascinating flora and their promise as a greener option to metal mining.

A Tiny Fern Has The Largest Genome Ever Discovered

Scientists just discovered the largest genome of any living thing on Earth, and it belongs to a small, unassuming fern called Tmesipteris oblanceolata. If you were to split open one of its cells and unwind the DNA that’s coiled up in the nucleus, it would stretch out more than 300 feet—taller than the Statue of Liberty.

Scientists reported the finding last week in the journal iScience. The fern is only a few inches tall and is found on the island of New Caledonia in the Southwest Pacific. Its DNA is made up of 160.45 billion base pairs—50 times more than the human genome.

This finding has left scientists scratching their heads, wondering how and why a fern ended up with so much DNA. Ira Flatow talks with co-lead author of this study Dr. Jaume Pellicer, evolutionary biologist at the Botanical Institute of Barcelona, about this research and why this fern’s DNA is so puzzling.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

There are products on the market that monitor your brain waves through caps or headbands: Some aim to improve mental health, sleep, or focus, while others can plunge users into virtual reality for gaming.

What happens to the neural data that neurotechnology companies collect from these devices? Consumers may be accustomed to their personal data from apps and social media being sold to third parties. However, the potential sale of brain data to a third party raises additional privacy concerns.

There are no federal laws governing the data collected by these wearable devices. But Colorado recently became the first state in the country to pass legislation protecting neural data in consumer products.

Guest host Arielle Duhaime-Ross talks with Jared Genser, general counsel and co-founder of The Neurorights Foundation about the current landscape of neuro privacy.

Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

When you think about connections between science and war, the obvious links are in technology—advanced radar, spy satellites, more powerful explosives—and in medical innovations that seek to heal the wounds caused by conflict. But in a new book, Stories are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind, author Annalee Newitz says that stories and narrative can be weapons too, used in battle on a psychological battlefield.

Ira talks with Newitz about the history of psychological warfare, from Sun Tzu to Benjamin Franklin, and its modern American incarnation under the guidance of Paul Linebarger, who was also a science fiction author known by the pen name Cordwainer Smith. They discuss the characteristics of a psyop, how techniques of psychological warfare have been co-opted into modern politics, and whether there’s a route toward “psychological disarmament.”

Read an excerpt from Stories are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind.

Transcript for this segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

At first glance, Mars might seem rather different from our own planet. Mars is dry, with little atmosphere, and no liquid water on its surface. It is half the size of Earth, lacks a planetary magnetic field, and does not appear to have active plate tectonics or volcanic activity. In some ways it is a world frozen in time, affected only by the force of wind and the occasional meteorite impact.

That static nature, however, could give scientists clues to conditions that once existed on Earth, but have been lost to the effects of plate tectonics and weathering. Ira talks with planetary geologist Dr. Valerie Payré of the University of Iowa about her research into the geology of Mars, and what it could tell scientists about early Earth.

Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

China’s Chang’e 6 return capsule landed in Mongolia, carrying samples from the far side of the moon. Also, Paris has invested $1.5B in cleaning up the Seine for open-water swimming events, but recent tests indicate it’s not yet safe.

A Sample From The Far Side Of The Moon Lands On Earth

This week, the return capsule from China’s Chang’e 6 lunar mission returned to Earth, touching down in a remote part of Inner Mongolia. Inside were dust and rock samples collected from the far side of the moon. Researchers hope that the samples could shed light on both the moon’s formation, and conditions in the ancient solar system.

Rachel Feltman, host of the podcast “The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week,” joins guest host Anna Rothschild to talk about the mission and other stories form the week in science, including a CDC warning about dengue fever, a trans-oceanic butterfly flight, and the possibility of seeing a stellar nova in the coming weeks.

Will The Seine Be Clean Enough For Olympic Swimmers?

The Paris Summer Olympics are fast approaching. Opening ceremonies for the games kick off on July 26. And all eyes are on the notoriously polluted River Seine. Due to aging infrastructure, sewage has sometimes flowed directly into it. For the past 100 years swimming in the river was banned. Now, the French government has spent roughly $1.5 billion to upgrade sewage treatment in Paris in order for athletes to be able to swim in the Seine.

Earlier this week, Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo was set to take a dip in the river to prove its cleanliness. In protest some Parisians threatened to poop in the Seine to show their dislike of the disruptions and high price tag of the Games.

The dip was postponed until after upcoming elections, but recent water quality tests indicate that the river is not yet safe to swim in.

Guest host Anna Rothschild talks about the current state of the river with Dr. Dan Angelescu, founder and CEO of Fluidion, a water testing company based in Paris, France.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

While the US was known for its railroads in the 1800s, we’ve fallen behind places like Japan, China, and Europe, which have invested in trains that go upwards of 200 miles per hour. There are economic, environmental, and practical benefits of electrified high-speed rail. But for generations, the US decreased passenger rail service and invested instead in highways and car-centric infrastructure.

But it appears we’re hitting a turning point. After decades in development, major sections of California’s high-speed rail project, which aims to connect Los Angeles to San Francisco, have been completed. And the project recently received a $3.1 billion federal grant to aid in further construction. Additionally, Amtrak is expanding service and increasing the speed of its trains. And private industry is also stepping in to fill the void—a rail company called Brightline has been operating in Florida since 2018. It now provides service between Miami and Orlando, and just broke ground on a high-speed route between Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

But it’s not just California and Florida where growth is happening. Multiple regions in the US, including Texas and the Pacific Northwest, are actively planning high-speed rail lines between cities that are generally too long to drive between, but too close to justify air travel. (France recently banned short-hop flights over those kinds of distances to reduce carbon emissions and encourage people to take existing passenger rail.)

Rod Diridon Sr., co-chair for the US High Speed Rail Association, fills Ira in on the current state of faster passenger rail in the US, what challenges it still faces, and why he thinks there’s been a shift in public opinion about expanded train service.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

The Boeing capsule is having issues with its thrusters and cannot bring astronauts back to Earth. Also, move over, Farmer’s Almanac. A more accurate long-term weather forecast could be on the horizon.

Boeing’s Starliner Leaves Astronauts Stuck On The Space Station

In another blow to Boeing’s Starliner program, which is meant to ferry astronauts and supplies to the International Space Station, NASA announced Wednesday that the troubled spacecraft would not be able to take astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore back to Earth due to issues with its thrusters.

The two astronauts arrived at the International Space Station in June for a mission that was supposed to last eight days. But with the current problems, the pair might be stuck on the space station, where Starliner remains docked, until early next year. NASA is considering bringing them back in an upcoming SpaceX Dragon mission.

Ira Flatow is joined by Umair Irfan, senior correspondent at Vox, who breaks down this and other top science stories this week, including how the Olympic Games are adjusting to abnormally high temperatures in France, why the EPA banned a widely used weedkiller, and what the moon’s atmosphere is made of.

Could We Get Weather Forecasts Years—Or A Decade—In Advance?

Access to weather forecasts has been made easier than ever with the advent of smartphones. Most of the time, we can get accurate information about weather for the next few hours up through the next few days. But a week or two out, those predictions get less reliable.

In the near future, it may be possible to get accurate weather forecasts weeks, months, or even a decade ahead of schedule. While this sounds like science fiction, researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) are working on this very challenge.

Earth system predictions, as the field is called, combines a variety of factors including atmospheric conditions, ocean currents, and even what’s happening in the soil to form predictions. These forecasts are in high demand as the climate changes, particularly as farmers need more information about incoming heat and precipitation. There’s even the possibility that Earth systems predictions could help regions prepare for dangerous natural hazards well ahead of time.

At Science Friday Live in Boulder, Colorado, Ira sat down with two NCAR scientists, Dr. Yaga Richter and Dr. Jerry Meehl about their work in this field.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

In the past few years pharmaceutical companies have developed a string of new Alzheimer’s drugs called anti-amyloids, which target amyloid plaques in patients’ brains. These plaques are one of the key biomarkers of the disease.

The first of these drugs, Aduhelm, was approved by the FDA in 2021 amid enormous controversy. The FDA approved the drug despite little evidence that it actually slowed cognitive decline in patients. Biogen, the maker of Aduhelm, pulled the plug on further research or sales of the drug last month.

In January 2023 The FDA approved another anti-amyloid medication from Biogen, lecanemab, sold under the brand name Leqembi. This time, there was much stronger evidence. Clinical trial results showed that the drug showed a modest improvement in cognitive decline in the early phases of the disease. But the drug comes with risks, including brain swelling and bleeding.

Most recently, at the beginning of March, the FDA delayed approval of another anti-amyloid drug, donanemab, created by Eli Lilly. The FDA said it will be conducting an additional review to further scrutinize the study design and efficacy data.

From the outside looking in, these Alzheimer’s drugs appear to be mired in controversy. How well do they actually work? And why has there been so much back and forth with the FDA?

To answer those questions and more, guest host Arielle Duhaime-Ross talks with Dr. Jason Karlawish, professor of medicine, medical ethics and health policy, and neurology at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, and co-director of the Penn Memory Center.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

The United States eliminated measles back in 2000, but it still pops up every now and then. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a total of 35 measles cases across 15 states had been reported this year as of February 22. Early last month, a measles outbreak began at an elementary school in Broward County, in southern Florida. As of February 28, the Florida Department of Health reported 9 cases for Broward County—out of 10 for the whole state.

Measles is one of the most infectious diseases in the world, and it has a safe and effective vaccine called MMR—for measles, mumps, and rubella—that saves lives. Kids usually get the vaccine early in life, and it provides lifelong protection.

But childhood vaccination rates have declined in some areas, so preventable diseases like measles are on the rise. In Florida, the state’s surgeon general, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, has been criticized for how he’s handling the outbreak—for example, by not explicitly encouraging parents to get their kids vaccinated.

So how did the measles outbreak in Florida get to this point? And is it a reflection of a broader public health risk?

Ira talks with pediatrician Dr. Rana Alissa, who is vice president of the Florida Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, and an associate professor at the University of Florida in Jacksonville. He is also joined by Dr. Paul Offit, pediatrician and director of the vaccine education center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Many kids dream of becoming marine biologists. But even folks who commit fully to studying life in the sea face a lot of barriers to entry in this competitive field—especially if they aren’t white and male.

Jasmin Graham has an unparalleled passion for sharks, but a few years ago she started to feel that the traditional path in academia wasn’t designed for her to succeed. Instead of giving up, she forged a path of her own. And now she’s bringing other young researchers of color along with her.

Guest host Rachel Feltman talks with marine biologist Jasmin Graham, co-founder of Minorities in Shark Sciences (MISS) and author of Sharks Don’t Sink: Adventures of a Rogue Scientist.

Read an excerpt of Sharks Don’t Sink: Adventures of a Rogue Scientist.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

“Cancer” is a dreaded word in the doctor’s office. But about 40% of us will be diagnosed with cancer at some point during our lives, the most common being breast, prostate, and lung cancer, according to the National Institutes of Health.

But in the last few decades, major progress has been made in the world of cancer treatment and prevention. Cancer death rates have decreased by about 30% over the last quarter century, with some of the largest decreases seen in lung, melanoma, and myeloma cancers. The Biden administration’s Cancer Moonshot program aims to reduce the number of cancer deaths by at least 50% by 2050.

Early detection methods like mammograms and colonoscopies have improved outcomes for many types of cancer, and new treatment options, like cancer vaccines, immunotherapy, and targeted genetic therapies, have shown promising early results. And the breakthroughs made from the development of the mRNA covid vaccines are bringing even more promise for hard-to-treat cancers.

Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Emperor of all Maladies: The Biography of Cancer, joins guest host John Dankosky to give a broad update on the progress made in cancer treatment and prevention. They also discuss the role AI can play in new breakthroughs, and why some cancers are still particularly difficult to treat.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Wildlife ecologist Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant has tracked bears through the mountains, lived with lions, been chased by elephants, and trekked after lemurs in a rainforest. Now, she co-hosts the renowned nature television show “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom Protecting the Wild.”

Dr. Wynn-Grant’s new memoir, Wild Life: Finding My Purpose in an Untamed World, documents her many adventures as well as her experience navigating conservation as a Black woman and landing her dream job as a nature television host.

Read an excerpt from Wild Life here.

Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

In July 1945, the US deployed the world’s first nuclear weapon during the Trinity Test. Since then, the US has tested more than 200 nukes above ground in places including New Mexico, Nevada, and several Pacific Islands.

For decades to come, “downwinders,” or people who lived near those test sites, and those involved manufacturing these weapons, were exposed to dangerous levels of radiation. They’ve disproportionately suffered from diseases like cancer, autoimmune disorders, and more.

The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) was established in 1990 to provide victims of the US nuclear program a one-time payment to help cover medical bills. But the program has fallen short of helping everyone affected—like the downwinders living around the Trinity Test site in New Mexico.

A new bill, which was passed in the Senate earlier this year, would expand the program to include more people and provide more money. It’s up to the House now to pass it, but Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana won’t call a vote. And the clock is ticking, because RECA expired on June 10. So what happens now?

SciFri’s John Dankosky speaks with Tina Cordova, downwinder and co-founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium in Albuquerque; Loretta Anderson, co-founder of the Southwest Uranium Miners’ Coalition Post ‘71, from the Pueblo of Laguna in New Mexico; and Lilly Adams, senior outreach coordinator at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Colorectal Cancer Rates Are Rising In Young People

Gastrointestinal medicine practitioners have noticed something strange in recent years: More and more young people are being diagnosed with colorectal cancer.

It used to be incredibly rare for anyone under the age of 50 to be diagnosed with colorectal cancer. Cases were generally limited to people with excess weight who live a sedentary lifestyle. But practitioners are increasingly seeing people in their 40s, 30s, and even 20s without prior risk factors being diagnosed with colorectal cancer.

Jennifer Fijor is one nurse practitioner who has seen this rise in cases firsthand at Virginia Mason Franciscan Health in Seattle, Washington. Jennifer has been spreading awareness about this rise on her social media accounts.

Jennifer speaks with guest host Kathleen Davis about the warning signs of colorectal cancer, such as sudden changes in bowel movements, and how patients can advocate for themselves to get screened early.

What An AI Learns From A Baby’s-Eye View Of The World

There’s a lot to learn in the first couple of years of a child’s life—not the least of which is how to talk. But little kids don’t sit down and study a vocabulary book. They soak up language from daily experiences, which are often filled with parents and caregivers saying things like “look at the kitty cat.” Scientists wondered whether an artificial intelligence model could learn about language using a similar strategy—not by being fed a curated set of pictures and words, but by eavesdropping on the day-to-day activities of a small child.

They found that associating images and sounds from 60 hours of video captured by a camera mounted on a baby’s head could teach a computer model a set of several dozen basic nouns, such as “car,” “cat,” and “ball.” And the learning was generalizable, meaning that the computer was able to properly identify cars and cats that it had not seen before.

Dr. Wai Keen Vong, a research scientist in the Center for Data Science at New York University and one of the authors of a study recently published in the journal Science, joins SciFri’s Kathleen Davis to talk about the research and what it can teach us about learning.

Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

If nations are to meet their sustainable energy goals, experts argue that batteries will be a crucial part of the equation. Not only are batteries key for many technologies, they’ll also be necessary to meet energy demands with a power grid that is mainly supplied by renewable energy sources like wind and solar. Without batteries, power from those sources can’t be stored for use when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing.

Right now, many technologies depend on lithium-ion batteries. While they certainly work well and have revolutionized mobile devices and electric vehicles, there are drawbacks. First, the lithium, cobalt, and nickel they require can only be found in some countries, and there have been accusations of unethical mining practices, including child labor. The mining and production processes also emit a large amount of CO2, and the batteries themselves can explode and cause fires, although these incidents are becoming less common.

A promising, greener solution to our battery needs could be something called a solid-state battery. Lithium-ion batteries conduct electricity through a liquid electrolyte solution, while solid-state batteries do so with solid materials, such as ceramic, glass, and sulfides. This means they have lower risk of fires, charge faster, have higher voltages, and can be recycled. However, their development has taken longer than expected, due to cost, production hurdles, and lack of large-scale, real-world testing.

Earlier this month, teams at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and the University of California San Diego published a paper in Nature Energy demonstrating the world’s first anode-free, sodium-based, solid-state battery architecture, which can charge quickly and last for several hundred cycles. Its main ingredient, sodium, is much more abundant than lithium, cobalt, and nickel, which could mean more affordable and environmentally friendly batteries in the future.

Ira Flatow sits down with Dr. Y. Shirley Meng, a professor at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and chief scientist for energy storage science at Argonne National Laboratory, to talk about the advancement, and when we could expect to see these unique batteries in our devices.

Transcript for this segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Sharks are somewhat notorious for their sense of smell and ability to sniff out prey deep in the ocean. There’s that persistent myth that sharks can smell a drop of human blood from a mile away. But that’s not exactly true. While sharks can smell human blood, they are more interested in sniffing out what’s for dinner: other fish, crustaceans, and molluscs. Ocean currents also play a role in how far a scent can travel. However, shark noses are just as powerful as any other fish in the sea. 

SciFri producer Kathleen Davis talks with Dr. Lauren Simonitis, a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow in biology at University of Washington and Florida Atlantic University, about her shark nose research, and what questions remain about shark snoots.

Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Last year, almost half of the honeybee colonies in the U.S. died, making it the second deadliest year for honeybees on record. The main culprit wasn’t climate change, starvation, or even pesticides, but a parasite: Varroa destructor.

“The name for this parasite is a very Transformer-y sounding name, but … these Varroa destructor mites have earned this name. It’s not melodramatic by any means. [They are] incredibly destructive organisms,” says Dr. Sammy Ramsey, entomologist at the University of Colorado Boulder.

These tiny mites feed on the bees and make them susceptible to other threats like diseases and pesticides. They’re also highly contagious: They arrived in the US in 1987, and now they live in almost every honeybee colony in the country. Honeybees pollinate many important crops, like apples, peaches, and berries, and their pollinator services add up to billions of dollars.

Ramsey and his lab are trying to put an end to the varroa mites’ spree. Part of their research includes spying on baby bees and their accompanying mites to learn how the parasites feed on the bees and whether there’s a way to disrupt that process.

In Boulder, Colorado, SciFri producer Rasha Aridi speaks with Dr. Ramsey and fellow entomologist Dr. Madison Sankovitz about how the varroa mites terrorize bees so effectively, and what it would take to get ahead of them.

Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

It wasn’t that long ago that scientists didn’t think animals could rival humans in terms of intelligence, emotions, or empathy. But the groundbreaking work of Dr. Frans de Waal helped change all of that. De Waal spent his life studying the lives of animals — especially our closest cousins, chimpanzees and bonobos.

The primatologist died last week at the age of 75, and we wanted to remember him by sharing one of our favorite conversations with him on the show. It’s from 2019, when he published his book Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves.

In it, he tells the story of a female chimp who didn’t produce enough milk to feed her young. When de Waal taught her to feed her baby with a bottle instead, she repaid him with what most of us would recognize as gratitude: holding both of his hands, and whimpering sadly if he tried to leave.

Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Last month the FDA approved a new treatment for sickle cell disease, the first medical therapy to use CRISPR gene editing technology. It works by identifying the gene or genes causing the disorder, modifying those genes and then returning them to the patient’s body.

There are now two gene therapies offered by pharmaceutical companies for sickle cell disease: Casgevy from Vertex Pharmaceuticals and CRISPR Therapeutics, and Lyfgenia from BlueBird Bio. But prices for these one-time treatments are steep: Casgevy costs $2.2 million per patient and Lyfgenia $3.1 million.

Both promise a full cure, which would be life-changing for patients with this debilitating condition. Over 100,000 Americans, mostly of African descent, have sickle cell disease.

This milestone raises more questions: What will be the next disease that CRISPR can help cure? And is it possible to reduce the costs of gene therapy treatments?

Ira talks with Dr. Fyodor Urnov, professor of molecular and cell biology and scientific director of technology and translation at the Innovative Genomics Institute, based at the University of California, Berkeley, about the future of CRISPR-based cures.

Transcripts for this segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

In the 2015 film “Inside Out,” audiences met 11-year-old Riley and her team of emotions: Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger, each represented by a different character. They lived inside Riley’s mind to help guide her feelings and actions, and towards the end of the film, their emotional control center gets an upgrade with a puberty button.

That’s where the new film “Inside Out 2” picks up. Riley is now 13 years old and dealing with the slew of emotions that come with puberty. In the new film, moviegoers meet a new crew of characters: Anxiety, Envy, Embarrassment, and Ennui, who is always bored.

But what’s the science behind Riley’s newfound teenage angst? Guest host Annie Minoff talks with psychologist Dr. Lisa Damour, who served as a science advisor to the film.

“Inside Out 2” is now playing in theaters.

Transcript for this segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

The space elevator has been a staple of science fiction for decades, from The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke to the Apple TV show “Foundation.” But the work and theories to make it a reality have been in development since the late 19th century.

It’s a simple concept: Imagine a long cable, stretching from the Earth’s surface to a satellite locked in orbit 22,000 miles high. It would work like elevators here on Earth, enabling us to send things—and people—up into space. And it would make the need for the expensive rockets we use today obsolete.

Although it has never been considered feasible due to the exorbitant cost and the engineering challenges it poses, the idea refuses to go away.

One of Japan’s biggest construction companies, the Obayashi Corporation, which built the Tokyo Sky Tree, had plans to build a space elevator in 2025 but has reportedly delayed that goal.

So what are the hurdles that keep us from building it? And why does it seem that the space elevator is always 25 years away? Ira Flatow is joined by Dr. Dennis Wright, president of the International Space Elevator Consortium to talk about the feasibility of this megaproject.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Two mannequins walk into a science lab, and one’s got a big tick problem. She can teach humans how to check for ticks. Also, researchers used citizen science observations and machine learning to understand where fireflies are and what they need to thrive.

In Wisconsin, Mannequins Help Teach People How To Spot Ticks

Nationwide, Wisconsin is a hot spot for Lyme disease. And cases are rising, as climate change and development alter how humans interact with the ticks that transmit this disease. In Wisconsin, cases reported annually have more than doubled in the last two decades.

With tick season underway, tick checks are one of the most important ways you can prevent infection. I recently visited the Midwest Center of Excellence for Vector-borne Disease, which is housed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where researchers are using a new tool to teach people how to do tick checks — mannequins.

Read the rest at sciencefriday.com

Protecting A Flickering Symbol Of Summer Nights

When people talk about watching fireflies, a common comment is “You know, I don’t see as many fireflies as I used to.” Researchers are trying to figure out whether that impression is actually accurate, and which of the over 2,000 firefly species might be affected—and to do so, they need a lot more data. A recent paper published in the journal Science of the Total Environment used over 24,000 citizen science observations as well as machine learning models to try to better identify where certain species of fireflies can be found, and what types of habitat and climate they need to thrive.

Dr. Sarah Lower, a firefly researcher at Bucknell University and a co-author of the study, joins guest host Annie Minoff to talk about some ways to protect fireflies near you, including preserving darkness and providing moist, permeable, natural soils for firefly larvae.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Four years ago this week, the world as we know it changed. Schools shut down, offices shuttered, and we hunkered down at home with our Purell and canned foods, trying to stay safe from a novel, deadly coronavirus. Back then most of us couldn’t fathom just how long the pandemic would stretch on.

And now four years later, some 1.2 million people have died in the U.S alone and nearly 7 million have been hospitalized as a result of a COVID-19 infection, according to the CDC.

So, what have we learned about how COVID-19 attacks the body? What can be done for long COVID sufferers? And what can we expect in the future?

Ira analyzes this era of the pandemic with Hannah Davis, co-founder of the Patient-Led Research Collaborative in New York City, and Dr. Akiko Iwasaki, immunobiologist at Yale Medical School in New Haven, Connecticut.

Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

It’s a common refrain from elementary school to adulthood: “I’m bad at math.” It’s a hard subject for a lot of people, and it has a reputation for being—let’s face it—boring. Math isn’t taught in a flashy way in schools, and its emphasis on memorization for key concepts like multiplication tables and equations can discourage students.

It’s not hard to understand why: Math has long been seen as a boy’s club, and a straight, cis boy’s club at that. But Kyne Santos, a drag queen based in Kitchener, Ontario, wants to change that.

Kyne is on a mission to make math fun and accessible to people who have felt like math isn’t for them. Her new book, “Math in Drag,” is one part history lesson, one part math guidebook, and one part memoir. Kyne speaks with Ira about “celebrity numbers,” Möbius strips, and why math and drag are more similar than you may think.

Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

It’s become clear to farmers and home gardeners alike that climate change is affecting the gardening landscape, literally. The climate is warming, pests are moving into different regions, and there’s a growing need for vegetable varieties that are resilient to the stresses of this new age.

In the world of organic farming, the job of creating those new varieties falls to a plant breeder: someone who, often painstakingly, crosses plants until they create a new variety. Dr. Jim Myers, one of the most accomplished plant breeders in the country, has lots of experience with this.

Myers created the Indigo Rose tomato, a strikingly purple variety with the same antioxidants as blueberries. He also created the green bean cultivar predominantly used by Oregon producers, and is debuting two new varieties of low-heat habanero peppers next month, dubbed “Mild Thing” and “Notta Hotta.”

Myers joins Ira Flatow from Corvallis, Oregon, where he’s a professor of agricultural science at Oregon State University. They discuss his decades-long career in plant breeding and what he sees as the biggest challenges for the plant breeders of the future.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

There’s a phenomenon known as the “overview effect,” a changed perspective some people experience after seeing the Earth from space. Retired astronaut Dr. Cady Coleman says that for her, it was a sense of home and connection.

“First of all, I just don’t feel that far away,” she said. “I feel like home is bigger than we thought and I just happened to be the one of the furthest out people. But the overwhelming sort of sentiment that I have is if only everyone knew how connected they could be, there’s literally nothing we couldn’t solve.”

Coleman flew on two space shuttle missions, spent 159 days on board the International Space Station, and operated the robotic arm during the deployment of the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Her new book is Sharing Space: An Astronaut’s Guide to Mission, Wonder, and Making Change.

She joins Ira to talk about her experiences in space and some of the challenges she faced in getting to orbit, from selection to training to the problem of obtaining a properly-fitting space suit.

Read an excerpt of Sharing Space: An Astronaut’s Guide to Mission, Wonder, and Making Change.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Your teeth don’t just chew your food—they connect you to the deepest of deep history on Earth. Teeth have existed, in some form, for half a billion years, making them more than 250 million years older than dinosaurs. They came before the evolution of warm bloodedness, eggs, and even limbs. From that very first set of chompers emerged a bewildering and diverse group of teeth, including narwhal tusks, sharks’ pearly teeth, snake fangs, and, of course, ours.

Now teeth are the subject of a new book called Bite: An Incisive History of Teeth from Hagfish to Humans. Guest host Maggie Koerth talks with zoologist and author Dr. Bill Schutt about how teeth evolved, why they’re so neat, and what we can learn from studying them.

Read an excerpt of Bite: An Incisive History of Teeth from Hagfish to Humans.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

America’s most-consumed fruit is at risk from a fungal disease. Researchers in North Carolina are on a mission to save Cavendish bananas. Also, birds move their vocal organs while they sleep, mimicking how they sing. Scientists have translated those movements into synthetic birdsong.

Fighting Banana Blight In A North Carolina Greenhouse

Bananas are the world’s most popular fruit. Americans eat nearly 27 pounds per person every year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. A deadly fungus could destroy most of the world’s crops, but a company in Research Triangle Park is trying to save the banana through gene editing.

When it comes to growing bananas, RTP may not be the first place that pops in your head. But Matt DiLeo has a greenhouse full of them.

DiLeo is Vice President of Research and Development at Elo Life Systems, a biotechnology firm that’s exploring how gene editing can improve fruits and vegetables.

On a cloudy afternoon in early April, DiLeo opened the greenhouse door and stepped into a steamy atmosphere with a slightly floral odor. This greenhouse is packed floor to ceiling with banana trees. You’ve got to duck to keep the giant leaves from hitting your face. Some of the bananas are yellow, some are green, some are tiny and pink. DiLeo says they all share an important trait.

“Many of these are naturally resistant to the TR-4 fungus,” DiLeo said.

Read the rest of the article at sciencefriday.com.

Do Birds Sing In Their Dreams?

When birds sleep, what are they dreaming about? Researchers from the University of Buenos Aires have figured out a way to tap into bird dreams. When a bird slumbers, its voice box, called the syrinx, can move in ways that are similar to when they sing while they’re awake. Essentially, birds are silently singing in their dreams.

Now, researchers have figured out how to translate that vocal muscle movement into a synthetic bird song, meaning you can listen to how birds sing in their dreams.

Guest host Maggie Koerth talks with Dr. Gabriel Mindlin, professor of physics at the University of Buenos Aires about his latest bird dream research, published in the journal Chaos.

Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Private Spacecraft Makes Historic Moon Landing

Thursday evening, the Odysseus moon lander successfully soft-landed on the moon, becoming the first U.S spacecraft to do so in over 50 years. The lander mission wasn’t created by NASA or another government space agency, but by the company Intuitive Machines, making it the first commercial mission to successfully soft-land on the surface of the moon. The mission was part of a NASA program called the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, which aims to make lunar missions faster and cheaper. There are other commercial moon missions planned for later this year. Umair Irfan, senior correspondent at Vox, joins guest host Sophie Bushwick for an update on the mission.

They’ll also talk about other stories from the week in science, including the move by some automakers toward plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, work on freezing antimatter, a strange meat-rice hybrid, and progress towards a universal snake antivenom.

A New Recipe For Cloud Seeding To Boost Snowfall In Idaho

We’re taught in school that water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit.

“It usually happens like that in the lake or on the ground,” said Derek Blestrud, a Senior Atmospheric Scientist at Idaho Power.

But the process differs in the sky, he said. Clouds contain supercool water that doesn’t turn to ice until it reaches about -40 degrees F. That is, unless some other substance initiates the freezing.

“Water’s really dumb,” Blestrud likes to say. “It doesn’t know how to freeze unless something else teaches it how to freeze.”

That’s where scientists like Blestrud step in. They help clouds produce more snow through cloud seeding, which involves releasing tiny particles that serve as nuclei for snowflakes to form.

Read the rest at sciencefriday.com.

Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Last month, the first psychedelic therapy treatment came before the Food and Drug Administration for a vote. It entailed using MDMA, also known as ecstasy or molly, to treat PTSD.

MDMA therapy has looked promising as a treatment for PTSD and other mental health conditions in some studies. But the FDA scientific advisory panel that evaluated this treatment voted overwhelmingly against approving it.

Many of the arguments against approval had less to do with MDMA itself than with the methodology of the clinical trials done by Lykos Therapeutics, formerly the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS. The FDA panel was presented with allegations of misconduct and incongruous data, including a letter by trial participant Sarah McNamee.

McNamee, who joined the trial for treatment of PTSD, is also a licensed psychotherapist and researcher of trauma and psychotherapy at McGill University in Montreal. She joins guest host Rachel Feltman alongside Dr. Eiko Fried, a methodologist and psychologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands, to discuss the decision.

If you or someone you know is struggling with PTSD or other mental health conditions, call 988 for the suicide and crisis lifeline.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Cancer, at its core, is a genetic disease: the result of DNA mutations that cause cells to grow out of control and develop tumors. And over the years, scientists have identified certain chemicals, called carcinogens, that are directly linked to those cancer-causing mutations, like those found in cigarettes.

But the rates of some cancers, like colorectal and lung, are rising dramatically in certain populations, leaving scientists to wonder what carcinogens they might be missing, and how traditional models of detecting them are falling short.

Last year, a landmark study published in the journal Nature confirmed a theory that toxicologists and cancer researchers had long suspected: that certain chemicals, like those found in air pollution, may not directly lead to cancerous mutations, but instead prime already vulnerable mutated cells to become cancerous. Some scientists have dubbed these chemicals “dark matter” carcinogens; they know they’re out there, exerting some kind of effect on increasing cancer rates, but they don’t fully understand what these chemicals are.

Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University, wrote about this scientific detective mystery in The New Yorker. This week, he joins Ira to talk about how scientists are rethinking their approach to identifying carcinogens, and why he’s hopeful for the future of cancer research in light of this new paradigm.

Transcripts for this segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Astronomers have confirmed they found an atmosphere around an Earth-like rocky exoplanet for the first time. Also, Boeing’s Starliner craft was scheduled to carry humans to the International Space Station in 2017. Its launch is now set for May 17, 2024.

In A First, JWST Detects An Atmosphere Around A Rocky Exoplanet

Earlier this week, astronomers announced they had discovered an atmosphere around a rocky Earth-like planet named 55 Cancri e, about 40 light-years away from Earth, thanks to instruments onboard the JWST telescope. Finding an atmosphere around a rocky planet is a big step for exoplanet exploration: Earth’s atmosphere is crucial to its ability to sustain life, and astronomers need to be able to identify rocky planets that have atmospheres to search for life outside the solar system.

However, 55 Cancri e is likely far too hot to have any life: Researchers estimate the surface temperature to be about 3,100 F, thanks to its close proximity to its sun and a probable magma ocean that envelops the planet. But this could also give clues to Earth’s formation, as its own surface was also once covered by lava.

Jason Dinh, climate editor at Atmos, joins guest host Sophie Bushwick to talk about this and other top news in science this week, including tightening restrictions on risky virus research in the US, possible evidence for a sperm whale “alphabet,” and how environmental changes are leading to an increase in disease in humans, animals, and plants.

Boeing Plans To Fly Humans To The ISS Next Week

When NASA retired its space shuttle program in 2011, the agency had to find a new way to transport astronauts and supplies to the International Space Station (ISS). Russia’s Soyuz program has met that need in the meantime, but NASA has wanted a more local solution. So they started awarding contracts to private US companies who could act as space taxis, including SpaceX, with its Dragon capsule, and Boeing with its Starliner capsule, through the United Launch Alliance (ULA).

Unlike SpaceX, Boeing has yet to fly humans in its spacecraft. But it plans to do so no earlier than next Friday, carrying Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, NASA astronauts and former Navy pilots to the ISS. Starliner was originally supposed to launch this week, but due to issues with a pressure regulation valve on the Atlas V rocket’s upper stage, ULA had to delay the launch to replace the valve.

Brendan Byrne, assistant news director at Central Florida Public Media, talks with guest host Sophie Bushwick about Boeing’s rocky road to the ISS and how NASA hopes to split the workload of ferrying astronauts between Boeing and SpaceX.

Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

A Massachusetts man who received a kidney from a genetically modified pig is recovering well. Also, on April 8, a total solar eclipse will plunge parts of North America into darkness. Scientists answer the questions you asked.

Recipient Of Pig Kidney Transplant Leaves The Hospital

Last month, Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston announced that a team of doctors had transplanted a kidney from a genetically engineered pig into a living human for the first time. This week, that patient, a 62-year-old man living with end-stage kidney disease, was sent home from the hospital, having recovered enough to be discharged. Sixty-nine genes were edited in the donor pig, including three that coded for a certain sugar found on the surface of pig cells. The edits, hopefully, will make it less likely for the human recipient to reject the transplant.

Umair Irfan, senior correspondent at Vox, joins Ira Flatow to talk about the xenotransplantation advance, and how it could affect patients awaiting donor organs. They’ll also talk about other stories from the week in science, including how power grid operators are preparing for the upcoming solar eclipse, NASA’s search for a new lunar rover, an advance in getting robots to make appropriate faces, research into using a drug similar to the obesity medication Ozempic to delay Parkinson’s symptoms, and plans for a new time zone—on the moon.

Answering Your Questions About Monday’s Eclipse

After months of excitement, the 2024 total solar eclipse is almost here! On Monday, April 8, the moon will line up perfectly between the Sun and the Earth. For a few short minutes, it’ll plunge parts of North America into total darkness—right in the middle of the day.

More than 30 million people live in the path of totality—where the moon will completely block off the sun. It stretches from northwest Mexico, across the US, and into southeastern Canada. Depending how far you are from the path, you might experience a partial eclipse. Magical, nonetheless.

Ira talks with Dr. Padi Boyd, astrophysicist at NASA and host of the agency’s podcast Curious Universe, and Mark Breen, meteorologist and planetarium director at the Fairbanks Museum & Planetarium in Vermont. They answer questions our readers and listeners have submitted about the eclipse, and discuss why we should be excited, how to prepare, and what scientists can learn from this phenomenon.

For more eclipse-day tips and facts, visit our website.

Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

The larger Pacific striped octopus is unusually social. But it wasn’t recognized by scientists until 2015, despite one man’s efforts. And, a deep-sea squid in the family Gonatidae was filmed cradling large eggs for its body size, which suggests it’s an entirely new species.

Why It Took Decades For This Octopus To Be Recognized

Octopus mating behaviors can be quite deadly. Many species are cannibalistic, making the entire prospect of mating dangerous, and female octopuses often die after laying one clutch of eggs. Their cannibalistic tendencies mean that octopuses don’t socialize as much as other animals.

But the larger Pacific striped octopus (LPSO) is different. For one, they live together in colonies. And mating is not only a safer proposition, it involves beak-to-beak “kissing.” Plus, females can lay eggs repeatedly, even tending to embryos at various stages of development.

But because these behaviors are so uncharacteristic of most octopuses, the scientific community didn’t officially recognize their existence until 2015, despite the decades-long effort of a Panamanian diver and artist named Arcadio Rodaniche. When he tried to share his findings about the LPSO at a symposium and publish them in a journal, he was flatly rejected. But his persistent research and documentation of the species would eventually be validated when researchers were able to obtain and observe the octopuses in captivity.

SciFri producer Kathleen Davis sits down with freelance science writer Kenna Hughes-Castleberry to talk about an article she reported for Science Friday about the late Rodaniche and his yearslong effort to get official scientific recognition for the LPSO.

Read the story at sciencefriday.com.

Squid With ‘Giant’ Eggs Could Be A New Species

To finish up our celebration of Cephalopod Week we wanted to share a bit of squid news. A group of researchers recently identified a potentially new squid species in the family Gonatidae. Scientists took a closer look at some video footage captured back in 2015 and found a deep-water squid that was cradling some rather large eggs, which was not in line with other squid of the same family.

John Dankosky talks with Dr. Bruce Robison, midwater ecologist and senior scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, about this new discovery.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

You might’ve heard this phrase before: data equals power. Because when you have data, you can decide how they’re used and who gets to use them.

The history of research on Indigenous communities in the United States is full of stories of exploitation, power imbalances, and stolen knowledge. Be it through the iodine experiments of the 1950s in Alaska, the racist and pseudoscientific conclusions drawn by American anthropologists in the 20th century, or through more recent examples in which genetic data from communities were used in studies without their consent— these practices have caused lasting mistrust and harm.

The growing field of Indigenous data sovereignty demands that Native communities maintain the right to decide how data about their people are collected, owned, and used.

Guest host Arielle Duhaime-Ross talks with two people at the forefront of this movement: Dr. Stephanie Carroll is the director of the Collaboratory for Indigenous Data Governance and an associate professor of public health at the University of Arizona in Tucson. She is also Ahtna and a citizen of the Native Village of Kluti-Kaah in Alaska. Dr. Krystal Tsosie is a co-founder of the Native BioData Consortium and an assistant professor and geneticist-bioethicist at Arizona State University in Tempe. She’s a member of Navajo Nation. They discuss how data on Indigenous Peoples has been used and abused, why data sovereignty is more important than ever, and what solutions look like.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

The term “living fossil” has been applied to any number of animals, from sharks to turtles to the coelacanth. It’s the idea that those animals look very much the same way their species may have looked millions of years ago, with limited evolutionary change over that time.

After analyzing the genomes of many different species on that “living fossil” list, researchers report they may have found an animal that evolves more slowly than all the others—a group of fish called gar. The rate of molecular change in gar genomes is the slowest of any jawed vertebrate, the researchers say. In fact, gar genomes change so slowly that two gar species that diverged from each other over 105 million years ago can still interbreed and produce fertile offspring. In evolutionary time, that’s comparable to the distance between humans and elephants. The researchers believe that the slow rate of change in gars may be due to an exceptional ability to repair mutations and other errors in their genes.

Dr. Solomon David, assistant professor of aquatic ecology at the University of Minnesota, and Chase Brownstein, a graduate student in Yale’s department of ecology and evolutionary biology, join Ira to discuss the findings, recently reported in the journal Evolution.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

A new potential Alzheimer’s therapy uses 40-hertz frequencies of light and sound to stimulate the brain. Research applying this treatment to mice showed a substantial decrease in amyloid plaques, a key biomarker for the disease, and an improvement in cognitive function. Clinical trials testing the efficacy of this method in humans are underway.

But how exactly does this treatment work? Could it be a game changer in Alzheimer’s patients? And what potential does it have for other degenerative diseases, like multiple sclerosis?

Ira talks with Dr. Li-Huei Tsai, professor of neuroscience and director of Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, about her work developing this therapy.

Transcript for this segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

The explosion of AI-powered chatbots and image generators, like ChatGPT and DALL-E, over the past two years is changing the way we interact with technology. Their impressive abilities to generate lifelike images from written instructions or write an essay on the topic of your choosing can seem a bit like magic.

But that “magic” comes at a steep environmental cost, researchers are learning. The data centers used to power these models consume an enormous amount of not just electricity, but also fresh water to keep everything running smoothly. And the industry shows no signs of slowing down. It was reported earlier this month that Sam Altman, the CEO of leading AI company OpenAI, is seeking to raise about $7 trillion to reshape the global semiconductor industry for AI chip production.

Ira Flatow is joined by Dr. Jesse Dodge, research scientist at the Allen Institute for AI, to talk about why these models use so much energy, why the placement of these data centers matter, and what regulations these companies could face.

Transcripts for this segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Researchers say the Wet Bulb Globe Temperature is a better indicator of heat stress. Also, cancer is the leading cause of death in dogs. A new vaccine has increased survival rates in clinical trials, offering hope for dogs and humans.

Yes, It’s Hot. But How Hot?

Much of the country has been enduring a heat wave this week, with millions sweating from Maine to the Midwest. But describing exactly how hot it is—and when temperatures become hazardous—can be challenging. Beyond the basic temperature, there’s the heat index, invented in 1978, which incorporates humidity measurements and is supposed to give a better indication of how a person might feel outside. Some health researchers are calling for more attention to a different type of temperature measurement known as the wet bulb globe temperature. It tracks temperature, humidity, and sunlight, and improves upon the heat index standard.

Umair Irfan, senior correspondent at Vox, joins SciFri’s Kathleen Davis to talk about measuring temperatures and protecting yourself from extreme heat. Plus, they discuss other stories from the week in science, including advances in tornado prediction, a delay in a return flight from the International Space Station, and a newly-described horned dinosaur that once roamed the US.

A Canine Cancer Vaccine Shows Promising Results

Dogs are by far the most popular pet in the United States: 62 million households have at least one. They are humans’ best friends, after all. Sadly, cancer is the leading cause of death in domestic dogs. And when a pet gets sick, it can be devastating for the entire family.

Lucky for dogs (and their people), there may soon be a breakthrough in treating canine cancer: a vaccine that can slow and even stop the spread of tumors. Clinical trial results are quite promising so far, increasing 12-month survival rates in dogs with some cancers from 35% to 60%. The research team also reports that in many dogs the vaccine shrinks tumors.

Joining guest host Kathleen Davis to talk about this novel therapy is Dr. Mark Mamula, professor of medicine at the Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut. Mamula discusses this important breakthrough, and possible future applications for human cancer therapies.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

The Greek philosopher Pythagoras had specific ideas about the mathematical ratios behind music. It turns out that he was wrong. Also, the charcoal-like substance known as biochar packs carbon into a stable form, making it less likely to escape into the atmosphere.

Pythagoras Was Wrong About Music

The ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras proposed a mathematical argument for what music sounds best to the ear: According to legend, he said listeners preferred music with chords adhering to perfect mathematical ratios, like 3:2. This concept has persisted in modern Western music, specifically for building harmonies.

But new research out of the University of Cambridge disputes this idea. A set of behavioral experiments with more than 4,000 participants in the US and South Korea found that listeners actually prefer chords with a slightly imperfect mathematical ratio, particularly when played with non-Western instruments.

Tim Revell, deputy US editor of New Scientist joins Ira to talk through this story, as well as other big science stories of the week, including a big change to YouTube’s algorithm, a new battery breakthrough for electric cars, and the Smokehouse Creek Fire in Texas.

Farmers And Environmentalists Alike Are Excited About Biochar

In a former biomass plant in Greenville, wood chips are flowing from hoppers into long tubes about three feet in diameter.

Pat Jones is the president of Clean Maine Carbon, which burns wood in high-temperature, low-oxygen conditions known as pyrolysis. “It starts out as wood” he said. “And as you can see when we come over here what comes out the other end is biochar.”

In the quest for climate solutions, Jones is among the Maine entrepreneurs banking on this charcoal-like substance. They say it can bind up carbon for decades, and improve agricultural soils at the same time.

The end product has high carbon density, and is very stable, so less of the carbon will be released into the atmosphere than if it were left to decompose. So while Jones is making biochar, his business plan is focused on selling carbon credits to corporations.

Read more at sciencefriday.com.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Tinnitus, a condition commonly described as a persistent ringing in the ears, affects millions of people around the world. In the US, the prevalence of tinnitus is estimated at around 11% of the population, with 2% affected by a severe form of the condition that can be debilitating. But despite it being so common, the exact causes of some tinnitus, and how best to think about treating the condition, are still unclear. In some cases, it’s brought on by exposure to loud noise, while in others, an ear infection or even earwax can be to blame.

Dr. Gabriel Corfas, director of the Kresge Hearing Research Institute at the University of Michigan, joins guest host Sophie Bushwick to talk about current research into the condition and possible treatments, from regrowing nerve cells, to devices that provide electrical stimulation.

Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

How Election Science Can Support Democracy

This week, the election season shifted into full gear with the Super Tuesday slate of primaries. But as the ballot options become more cemented, it’s not just pollsters and campaign operatives who are preparing for the elections—scientists are too.

The Union of Concerned Scientists has established what it calls an election science task force, looking at everything from ballot design to disinformation to voting security. Dr. Jennifer Jones, program director for the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, joins Ira to describe the goals of the effort in the weeks and months ahead.

The Genetic Roots Of Antibiotic Resistance

Antibiotic resistance—when pathogens no longer respond to the conventional antibiotic medications—is a serious medical problem. According to the CDC, over 2.8 million antibiotic-resistant infections occur in the U.S. each year, causing some 35,000 deaths. It’s in part due to overprescription of antibiotics in medicine, and the widespread use of antibiotics in animal agriculture. But the problem isn’t entirely of humans’ making. The roots of antibiotic resistance go back millions of years.

A recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences collected hundreds of soil and poop samples from around the world, to try to trace back the genetics of how resistance arose in Enterococcus, a genus of bacteria that live in the guts of pretty much every land animal. In the course of their analysis, the researchers identified 18 entirely new species in the genus Enterococcus, with over 1,000 genes that had never been seen before.

Dr. Michael Gilmore, the Chief Scientific Officer at Mass Eye and Ear, joins Ira to talk about the study and what the team hopes to learn about the causes of antibiotic resistance.

Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

College basketball’s March Madness concluded this week, meaning that now the national sports attention can turn fully to baseball.

The next time you’re at the ballpark—whether you’re devoted enough to fill in the box scores by hand, or are just there for the peanuts and crackerjacks—take some time to appreciate the physics of the game. There are tricky trajectories, problems of parabolas, converging velocities, and the all-important impacts.

Dr. Frederic Bertley, the president and CEO of the Center of Science and Industry in Columbus, Ohio, joins Ira to talk about the science of sports, and about how sports can be a gateway to scientific literacy.

Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

In 2005, futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil popularized the term “the singularity” to capture the idea that man and machine will merge as the next stage of evolution. This was the basis for Kurzweil’s book The Singularity is Near, which has been essential reading for technology buffs and critics since its publication nearly 20 years ago.

In the meantime, we’ve seen huge advances in artificial intelligence, computing power, and technological research. In response to all this growth, Kurzweil has published a followup to bring us up to date, The Singularity is Nearer: When We Merge With AI. Ira Flatow speaks to Kurzweil about the book and his more than six decades of experience in the field of artificial intelligence.

Read an excerpt from The Singularity is Nearer: When We Merge With AI.

Transcript for this segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

A new study uses artificial intelligence to show that each of our ten fingerprints are remarkably similar to one another. Plus, honey could be the secret ingredient in building a more eco-friendly “memristor,” which transmits data through malleable pathways.

Is Each Fingerprint On Your Hand Unique?

We often think about each fingerprint as being completely unique, like a snowflake on the tip of your finger.

But a new study shows that maybe each person’s fingerprints are more similar to each other than we thought. Researchers trained artificial intelligence to identify if a thumbprint and a pinky print came from the same person. They found that each of a person’s ten fingerprints are remarkably similar in the swirly center.

Ira talks with study author Gabe Guo, an undergraduate at Columbia University majoring in computer science, based in New York City.

In This Computer Component, Data Slides Through Honey

A honey bear is probably one of the weirder things you’d see in a science lab, especially in a lab making computer parts.

“It’s just processed, store-bought honey,” said Ph.D. student Zoe Templin. “Off the shelf — a little cute bear so we can put it in photos.”

But for Templin and her colleagues at Washington State University, Vancouver, the honey is key.

“It is cheap and it is easily accessible to everyone,” said master’s student Md Mehedi Hassan Tanim.

The honey also has natural chemical properties that make it a promising foundation for a new kind of environmentally friendly computer component — one that could make computing faster and more energy efficient while reducing the impact on the environment.

Read the rest of this article on sciencefriday.com.

Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

For many people in the US, the threat of nuclear weapons is out of sight and out of mind. But the nuclear complex is alive and well. In fact, the state of nuclear weapons is evolving in the US. The United States, among other countries, is giving its nuclear arsenal—which contains about 5,000 weapons—a makeover. This modernization costs around $50 billion a year, which will amount to more than $1.5 trillion over the next few decades.

With the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons in place, countries should be stopping the spread of nuclear weapons and technology. That raises the question: If nearly all countries have agreed not to nuke each other, why are nuclear arsenals being updated? And what does that signal to the world?

In her new book Countdown: The Blinding Future of Nuclear Weapons, science journalist and author Sarah Scoles analyzes the current nuclear age, speaks with the scientists in charge of nuclear weapons, and asks, do more nukes keep us safer?

Scoles talks with Ira about why the US is modernizing its nuclear arsenal, the role of science in nuclear deterrence, and why this moment in nuclear history is so important.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Rare earth elements are a group of 17 metals used in a wide range of things that make modern life possible, including batteries, magnets, LED light bulbs, phone screens, and catalytic converters.

These elements are essential to a green economy because they are integral to many technologies designed to have low environmental impact. However, mining these metals is a dirty, complex, and costly process. And as the world transitions towards more clean energy production, the demand for them will continue to grow.

One possible solution is to recycle rare earth elements when they’re discarded in electronics waste. On stage in Ames, Iowa, Ira Flatow talks with Dr. Ikenna Nlebedim and Dr. Denis Prodius, two materials scientists from the Critical Materials Institute at the Ames National Laboratory who have developed a new acid-free method to recycle rare earth metals found in magnets.

Transcript for this segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Most scientific studies that get published have “positive results,” meaning that the study proved its hypothesis. Say you hypothesize that a honeybee will favor one flower over another, and your research backs that up? That’s a positive result.

But what about the papers with negative results? If you’re a researcher, you know that you’re much more likely to disprove your hypothesis than validate it. The problem is that there aren’t a lot of incentives to publish a negative result.

But, some argue that this bias to only publish papers with positive results is worsening existing issues in scientific research and publishing, and could prevent future breakthroughs.

And that’s where the Journal of Trial and Error comes in. It’s a scientific publication that only publishes negative and unexpected results. And the team behind it wants to change how the scientific community thinks about failure, in order to make science stronger.

Guest host Anna Rothschild talks with Dr. Sarahanne Field, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Trial And Error, and assistant professor in behavioral and social sciences at University of Groningen.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

The Ada Hayden Herbarium preserves hundreds of thousands of specimens, including some collected by George Washington Carver. And, as the “Universe of Art” podcast turns one, listeners discuss solar music boxes and what it’s like making art with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

Inside Iowa State’s Herbarium With 700,000 Plant Specimens

Herbariums are plant libraries—they contain fragile specimens of plants collected from near and far, and they are meticulously described and cataloged so that someone can reference them in the future. At Iowa State University, the Ada Hayden Herbarium contains more than 700,000 specimens, about half of which are from Iowa.

Ira talks with herbarium’s director, Dr. Lynn Clark, and curator Deb Lewis about how plants are preserved, why herbariums are so important, and what it takes to manage a plant archive.

Science-Inspired Art From Two ‘Universe of Art’ Listeners

Last week, we kicked off a first-anniversary celebration for Universe of Art, our science-meets-art spinoff podcast. A lot of listeners have written in since the start of the podcast, telling us about the science-inspired art they’ve made in their spare time.

Last week, host D. Peterschmidt spoke with Todd Gilens, a visual designer who worked with the city of Reno, Nevada, to create a mile-long poem on the city’s sidewalks about the connections between urbanism and stream ecology.

This time, we’ll meet two listeners. Craig Colorusso is a punk rock guitarist-turned-sound artist who creates public sculptures and experiences that enhance visitors’ connection to nature. Two of his projects, Sun Boxes and The Bridges At Coler, use solar panels to play reflective, calming music he composed. “You have this idea where you are in nature and you are listening to something that is powered by nature,” he said. “I think that’s perfect.”

And we’ll meet a listener who prefers to go by Chris, who was an engineer and avid artist who made mosaics and crocheted before developing Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS). It’s a debilitating condition characterized by extreme fatigue that can’t be improved by rest, and can also include brain fog, pain, and dizziness. It’s similar to what many Long COVID patients experience. Chris’ condition is considered severe, and caused her to lose the use of her hands, and thus her preferred art mediums.

However, Chris could still use her left hand with a rollerball mouse and realized that she could use programs like Chaotica to create fractals that she adds to collages in Photoshop, resulting in colorful collages. “They’re just beautiful and I’m doing art again and I’m so happy about it,” she said.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Dr. Anthony Fauci has a long history with Science Friday. Ira first met him in the early 1980s while covering the HIV/AIDS epidemic. He has been a frequent guest on the program, discussing everything from the common cold to SARS, food allergies to Ebola, and malaria to the recent COVID-19 pandemic.

After leading the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for 38 years, Fauci stepped down in December 2022. But he certainly hasn’t disappeared from the public eye. He’s been called to testify regularly before Congress and he’s written a new book, On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service. He joins Ira for a wide-ranging discussion of AIDS, COVID-19, public health vulnerabilities, and his new post-government role as a teacher.

Transcript for this segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Almost 70 years ago—in the middle of the Cold War—the United States and the Soviet Union kicked off the race to space, and that high-stakes sprint transformed humanity’s relationship with space forever. Ultimately the USSR launched the first satellite, Sputnik, and the U.S. put the first humans on the moon.

Now we’re in a different space race. But this time, there are a lot more contenders. There are more satellites in orbit than ever before, NASA is trying to put humans on Mars, countries are still sending landers to the moon, and billionaires are using rockets as tourist vehicles. All this activity raises some serious questions: Who is in charge of space? And who makes the rules?

Journalist Khari Johnson explored these questions in a recent feature for Wired magazine, featuring experts at the forefront of these issues. Guest host Sophie Bushwick is joined by two of them: Dr. Timiebi Aganaba, assistant professor of space and society at Arizona State University, and Dr. Danielle Wood, assistant professor and director of the Space Enabled Research Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They discuss the role of space lawyers, what cases they may argue, and how the rules of space—and the potential for conflicts—are evolving.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the maternal mortality rate in the United States is very high compared to other wealthy countries: About 22.3 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births. This is on par with China and Iran, based on UNICEF data.

So why is the US maternal mortality rate so high? It may have to do with how we fill out death certificates.

A study from earlier this year found that misfiling of information in death certificates may be inflating the numbers. The study authors concluded that the US maternal mortality rate was actually half of the CDC-reported rate—about 10.4 per 100,000 live births—which is in line with countries like Canada and the United Kingdom.

But if death certificates can skew maternal mortality statistics by such a huge margin, what else could they be influencing? And how does our system for filling out death certificates work?

To answer these questions, guest host Maggie Koerth is joined by Dr. Robert Anderson, chief of the statistical analysis and surveillance branch at National Center for Health Statistics.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Sequoia National Park is largely designated as wilderness. That complicates efforts to protect its iconic trees from worsening wildfires. Also, archaeologists keep finding older and older cave art. Here’s what it could tell us about how humans evolved over time.

Protecting Sequoias From Wildfire Raises Tricky Questions

Sequoia National Park in California is known for its towering, iconic sequoia trees, some of which are thought to be thousands of years old. Severe wildfires fueled by climate change and a long history of fire suppression have put these trees at risk. One solution to this problem is to plant new sequoias. But an interesting debate has sparked between those in favor of this and those against it.

The vast majority of the park is officially considered “wilderness,” a federal designation that describes an area “untrammeled by man.” This concept of “untrammeled” has become more complicated in the age of climate change: Some people argue that it means humans shouldn’t intervene, even when the ecosystem is changing because of human-made climate change.

Guest host Maggie Koerth speaks with Marissa Ortega-Welch, host and producer of the “How Wild” podcast from KALW and NPR. The first episode of this podcast, “Untrammeled,” highlights this debate.

What Newly Discovered Cave Art Tells Us About Human Creativity

In July, researchers discovered the oldest known cave art. It was found in a cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, and it shows three human-like figures and a wild pig. The painting was dated at 51,200 years old—5,000 years older than any other known cave art.

The finding continues a trend of researchers unearthing older and older examples of human-made art, including those found outside of Spain and Southern France, where most cave art discoveries have been made.

Guest host Maggie Koerth is joined by Dr. Isobel Wisher, a postdoctoral researcher with the Evolution of Early Symbolic Behavior project at Aarhus University in Denmark, to discuss how this field of archeology has changed over the years, how new technology is making these ancient cave paintings more accessible to the public, and what they can tell us about the human experience.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Half of the cells in the brain are neurons, the other half are glial cells.

When scientists first discovered glia over a century ago, they thought that they simply held the neurons together. Their name derives from a Greek word that means glue.

In the past decade, researchers have come to understand that glial cells do so much more: They communicate with neurons and work closely with the immune system and might be critical in how we experience pain. They even play an important role in regulating the digestive tract.

Ira is joined by Yasemin Saplakoglu, a staff writer at Quanta Magazine who has reported on these lesser-known cells.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Ever since we learned that an asteroid slammed into Earth, wiped out the dinosaurs, and changed the course of life on this planet, scientists have wondered if it could happen again. It turns out there is an asteroid, called Bennu, that has a very small chance of colliding with our planet in the year 2182.

But beyond that, Bennu could hold information that would help unlock our solar system’s secrets, like how it began and where life originated. NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission launched in 2016 to collect a sample from Bennu. It was successful, and this past fall, the spacecraft safely delivered its asteroid sample to scientists waiting on Earth.

In a new memoir, The Asteroid Hunter: A Scientist’s Journey to the Dawn of our Solar System, Dr. Dante Lauretta, principal investigator of OSIRIS-REx, gives readers a behind-the-scenes account on this high-stakes mission.

Ira talks with Dr. Lauretta, a planetary scientist at University of Arizona in Tucson, about why he chose to study Bennu, what it was like to run such a nail-biting mission, and what Bennu could reveal about our galaxy.

Read an excerpt from The Asteroid Hunter.

Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Some food has a larger carbon footprint when grown in urban settings than on commercial farms, while for other foods the reverse is true. Also, what’s the difference between wildflowers blooming in the desert each spring, and the rare phenomenon of a “superbloom”?

The Carbon Cost Of Urban Gardens And Commercial Farms

If you have a home garden, you may be expecting that the food you grow has less of an environmental impact than food grown on large commercial farms. But new research throws some cold water on that idea. A study led by scientists at the University of Michigan examined 73 small urban gardening sites across the U.S., the U.K., France, Poland, and Germany, and found that food grown in urban settings produced six times more carbon emissions per serving than commercially grown food. The bulk of these emissions (63%) came from the building materials used for items like raised garden beds.

However, there are some foods that have a smaller carbon footprint when grown at home. They include crops like tomatoes and asparagus, which sometimes need to be flown long distances or require power-hungry greenhouses when grown commercially.

Jason Hawes, PhD candidate in the School for Environment and Sustainability at University of Michigan and lead author of the study which was published in Nature Cities, breaks down the results of the research with Ira. They talk about how urban farmers have responded to the findings, the positive social benefits of community gardens, and what home gardeners can do to lessen their carbon footprint.

Why There Won’t Be A Superbloom This Year

In California, wildflowers are in bloom.

Last year, there was a superbloom. Though there’s no official criteria, a superbloom is when there is an above average number of wildflowers blooming, mostly in desert regions of California and Arizona. It’s an explosion of color in regions that typically have sparse vegetation.

About a month ago, a few news articles hinted that maybe, just maybe, we were in for another superbloom year. Turns out we’re not.

Who decides when there’s a superbloom anyway? And why did this year turn out not to be a superbloom after all?

To answer those questions and provide an update on the state of California’s wildflowers, SciFri producer Kathleen Davis talks with Dr. Naomi Fraga, director of conservation programs at the California Botanic Garden, and research assistant professor at Claremont Graduate University.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann won a defamation lawsuit against two conservative writers last week.

The verdict was 12 years in the making. In 2012 writers Rand Simberg and Mark Steyn accused Mann of manipulating his data related to his famous 1998 “hockey stick” graph, which depicts rising global temperatures after the industrial revolution. Simberg compared him to former Penn State football coach and convicted child sex abuser Jerry Sandusky in a blog post for a libertarian think tank. Steyn later referenced Simberg’s article in a National Review piece, calling Mann’s work “fraudulent.”

Reviews by Penn State (Mann’s home institution at the time) and the National Science Foundation, found no scientific wrongdoing. And in fact the iconic graph has since been supported by numerous studies.

What does this ruling signal about the public’s understanding of climate change research? And the limitations of free speech?

Ira talks with Dr. Michael Mann, professor of Earth & environmental science at the University of Pennsylvania and author of Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons from Earth’s Past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

As the James Webb Space Telescope marks two years of operations, NASA unveils a new image of two galaxies interacting. And, new research shows that cats’ tendency to scratch is affected by stress, certain kinds of play, and how active they are at night.

Galaxies ‘Dance’ In Stunning New JWST Image

The James Webb Space Telescope, the most powerful telescope created by humans, has been successfully operating in space for two years now. Since its launch, the telescope has dazzled astronomers and the public with new kinds of scientific data about the universe and with stunning, highly detailed pictures. And on its two-year anniversary, the telescope continues to return impressive visuals: NASA released a mesmerizing image today of two intermingling galaxies nicknamed the Penguin and the Egg.

Jason Dinh, climate editor at Atmos, joins guest host Kathleen Davis to talk about that and other top science stories of the week, including a new study that shows that children with autism have a unique microbiome, new FEMA rules that factor in climate change when rebuilding in flood-prone areas, and how invasive insects use hitchhiking to spread their populations.

Why Some Cats Scratch Furniture So Much

If you have a cat, you’ve probably endured your fair share of unwanted furniture scratching. Maybe you’ve purchased scratching posts, rearranged your furniture, or played with your cats before bed, to try to prevent it. And yet, you wake up to shredded upholstery or bedding.

Furniture scratching is often a stress response, and cats who live with kids or are more playful and active at night are more likely to scratch.

SciFri producer Kathleen Davis spoke with Dr. Yasemin Salgirli Demirbas, a physiology professor at Ankara University in Turkey and visiting fellow at the Atlantic Veterinary College at the University of Prince Edward Island, about her recently published study which tracked why some cats are more prone to scratching destruction than others and explored the best way for cat owners to achieve a mostly intact living room.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Earlier this year, the Smithsonian National Zoo in Washington announced that pandas would be returning to the capitol. This news was met with great fanfare because the zoo’s resident pandas had returned to China last fall, leaving the District panda-less for the first time in more than 50 years.

After the pandas left D.C. in the fall, SciFri producer Rasha Aridi and journalist Aja Drain dug into the juicy political history of panda conservation and how it shaped panda research. In this segment from December 2023, they look back at 80 years of panda conservation, and how “panda diplomacy” paved the way for groundbreaking science. And they try to answer the multi-million dollar question: Was it all worth it?

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

A Week Of Milestones For Spaceflight

This has been a week of milestones for human spaceflight. After years of delays, Boeing’s Starliner capsule, carrying astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, successfully launched Wednesday on the United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rocket. On Thursday, it docked with the International Space Station.

Also on Thursday, SpaceX’s Starship rocket made its first successful launch and reentry after three previous attempts (the massive rocket burned up in the atmosphere on the last launch). And on a more sobering note, NASA announced that its famous 34-year-old Hubble Space Telescope is experiencing issues with its gyroscopes and is opting to only use one for the time being. The agency says Hubble can still do science, but less efficiently than it once could.

Maggie Koerth, science writer and editorial lead for Carbon Plan, joins Ira to discuss those and other top stories in science this week, including why the viral Joro spider you may have seen online does not pose a threat to humans, how a virus that’s spreading due to deforestation in South America could overwhelm local healthcare, and why the FDA voted against the medical use of MDMA.

Mexico Has Elected A Scientist President. What Will That Mean?

This week, Mexico elected a historic president: Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, who will be the first woman to lead the nation, and was also an environmental engineer before entering politics.

Despite the president-elect’s scientific past, Sheinbaum Pardo has committed to following the lead of her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, whose science policies were deeply unpopular with many researchers in the country.

Mexico’s scientific community is split on how this election will impact science and research in the country. Rodrigo Pérez Ortega, a reporter at Science Magazine, joins Ira to talk through the complexities of this election and how scientists are reacting.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

If successful, Odysseus will be the first U.S. spacecraft to land on the moon since the Apollo mission. And, in East Palestine, Ohio, the stream that flows under residents’ houses is still polluted following a train derailment and chemical spill.

Odysseus Lander Is On Its Way To The Moon

Just after 1:00 a.m. on Thursday, February 15, SpaceX successfully launched a commercial spacecraft from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Its destination? The moon. If the lander—named Odysseus—makes it all the way there, it’ll be the first U.S. spacecraft to land on the moon since the Apollo mission, more than 50 years ago.

If successful, this mission will also mark another historic milestone: the first commercial spacecraft to touch down on the moon.

Ira talks with Casey Crownhart, climate reporter at MIT Technology Review, about this latest lunar mission and other science news of the week, including: a satellite to detect methane leaks from space, the development of lithium-sulfur batteries, the first treatment for frostbite, the development of “heart-on-a-chip” devices, a frog with a mushroom growing out of its leg, and how eavesdropping on the love songs of Skywalker gibbons helped scientists estimate their population size.

A Year After Chemical Spill, Ohio Community Is Still Recovering

Christina Siceloff and Randy DeHaven walk down a short bank to Sulphur Run, a creek that winds between houses in East Palestine, Ohio. They make their way to a section of the stream about three-quarters of a mile from where the Norfolk Southern train derailed last February 3rd. Siceloff has brought a shovel, but she doesn’t even need one to show the condition of the stream. She just pushes her rubber boot into the sandy streambed, and an oily sheen erupts out of the muddy bottom, spreading on the top of the brownish-grey water.

“Kind of like what you would see in a puddle at a gas station,” Siceloff said.

Siceloff has brought a mask because the creek water still gives her headaches. For much of the past year, she’s been helping DeHaven and a group of volunteers document the condition of the stream. Siceloff lives a few miles away in Darlington, Pennsylvania, and could see smoke from the 2023 derailment and subsequent fire from her bedroom window. She was sick for five and a half months, as were her father and son.

“I had migraines, congestion, runny nose. I had pressure in my ears, burning in my nose, eyes and throat,” Siceloff said. She now has tremors in her hands, and her eyes twitch. She sneezes in the laundry soap aisle at Walmart and can’t stand the chlorine smell at a swimming pool.

In the days after the derailment and subsequent chemical spill, over 40,000 fish and other species died. DeHaven, who lives in town and has been filming the stream for much of the past year, saw it firsthand. “Most of the frogs were belly up,” DeHaven says. “There was a few fish floating, but a lot of them were just laying on the bottom.”

Now, a year after the derailment, regulators say they have cleaned up the site, and that the air in town is clear.

But the stream running through the middle of town is still contaminated and some in the area still worry about whether the chemicals sitting at the bottom of the stream are going to make their way into peoples’ bodies.

Read more at sciencefriday.com.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

OpenAI, the company behind the chatbot ChatGPT and the image generator DALL-E, unveiled its newest generative AI product last week, called Sora, which can produce extremely realistic video from just a text prompt. In one example released by the company, viewers follow a drone’s-eye view of a couple walking hand-in-hand through snowy Tokyo streets. In another, a woman tosses and turns in bed as her cat paws at her. Unless you’re an eagle-eyed AI expert, it’s nearly impossible to distinguish these artificial videos from those shot by a drone or a smartphone.

Unlike previous OpenAI products, Sora won’t be released right away. The company says that for now, its latest AI will only be available to researchers, and that it will gather input from artists and videographers before it releases Sora to the wider public.

But the fidelity of the videos prompted a polarizing response on social media. Some marveled at how far the technology had come while others expressed alarm at the unintended consequences of releasing such a powerful product to the public—especially during an election year.

Rachel Tobac, an ethical hacker and CEO of SocialProof Security, joins guest host Sophie Bushwick to talk about Sora and what it could mean for the rest of us.

Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

A new study measuring microplastics in organs of the recently deceased found that about two dozen brain samples were 0.5% plastic by weight. Also, having an IUD inserted in the uterus is extremely painful for some people. The CDC now recommends that doctors use local anesthetics.

Study Finds A Staggering Amount Of Plastic In Human Brains

It only takes a quick look at our streets and waterways to be reminded that plastic pollution is a big problem. But that’s just the plastic that we can see. An increasing amount of scientific literature points to microplastics accumulating inside our bodies, particularly in organs.

A recent preprint published by the National Institutes of Health found a staggering amount of microplastics in livers, kidneys, and brains of recently deceased cadavers. The brains, however, were the biggest shock: They had 10 to 20 times more microplastics than the other organs studied. Twenty-four of the brain samples measured were found to be about 0.5% plastic by weight.

Joining guest host Maggie Koerth is Tim Revell, executive editor of New Scientist based in London. The two discuss this and other top stories of the week, including a possible explanation for an “alien” radio signal, a look into how orb spiders use fireflies to lure other insects, and a study that says playing video games is good for you, actually.

CDC Updates Guidelines For Managing Pain From IUD Insertion

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently announced updated guidelines for managing pain from inserting a popular form of birth control called an intrauterine device, or IUD. The recommendations now advise doctors to consider using local anesthetics like lidocaine to help manage patients’ pain.

An IUD is a small T-shaped device that is passed through the vagina and cervix and placed in the uterus, where it can remain for several years. Figures vary, but this insertion process can be very painful for roughly 10%-20% of patients. In recent years there’s been an outpouring of patients speaking out on social media about just how painful their IUD insertions were. Many people have recounted how their doctors did not provide anything to help mitigate their pain or, in some cases, dismissed their experiences altogether.

Guest host Maggie Koerth talks with Dr. Beverly Gray, associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Duke University to discuss the significance of these new guidelines.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Looking into space can be pretty daunting. How do we make sense of the vast expanse above our heads, the millions of stars we might be able to see, and the billions more we can’t?

Now, what about listening to space? That’s the task that Sam Harnett and Chris Hoff gave themselves, for their series “Cosmic Visions.” They’re the team behind “The World According to Sound,” a podcast that’s brought our listeners close to the sounds of science over the last few years.

This new series takes listeners through the history of astronomy and the study of the cosmos, from ancient Babylon to the Hubble Telescope. Harnett and Hoff join guest host John Dankosky to talk about why different ways of knowing are helpful for scientists, how images of nebulae share a striking resemblance to photos of the American West, and what their favorite space sounds are.

Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

A team of scientists in Ecuador is on a mission to describe new-to-science tarantula species to help secure conservation protections. And, undergraduate researchers pasted striped capes onto termites’ backs to see if a well-known warning sign would fend off predators.

Protecting The ‘Satan’ Tarantula and Other Lovable Giant Spiders

A team of scientists in Ecuador is on a mission to find and describe species of an understudied, often unpopular group of critters: mygalomorphs, a group of large, stocky spiders that includes tarantulas. In late 2023, two of these researchers published a paper in the journal ZooKeys describing two new-to-science tarantula species, including one named Psalmopoeus satanas—affectionately called the “Satan tarantula” because of its erratic behavior.

Tarantulas are understudied in Ecuador, and there are many species left to describe. They’re also threatened by mining, agriculture, and the illegal pet trade. That’s what led Pedro Peñaherrera-R., a researcher at Universidad San Francisco de Quito to found the Mygalomorphae Research Group. Its members are working to describe these spiders and secure conservation protections before they possibly disappear.

Producer Rasha Aridi talks with Peñaherrera-R. and his co-author and fellow group member Roberto José León about how the Satan tarantula earned its name, how they discover and classify spiders, and why we should all show spiders a little more love.

If Termites Wore Stripes, Would Spiders Still Eat Them?

The animal kingdom is filled with colors and patterns. Sometimes, those colors are to signal to members of an animal’s own species, in a mating display for instance. In other cases, a bright color or vibrant pattern serves as a warning to potential predators—a signal saying “don’t eat me, I’m toxic.” That type of warning coloration, known as aposematism, can be seen in the bright colors of a poison dart frog, or the black, white, and yellow stripes of a monarch butterfly caterpillar.

Bigger animals, like birds, are known to consider that sort of warning signal when hunting. Researchers at the University of Florida were interested in whether jumping spiders might also take that sort of striped warning coloration into account when choosing their prey. To find out, they applied tiny striped capes to the backs of laboratory termites to study whether those stripes affected the behavior of hungry jumping spiders. They found that while the test spiders did notice the striped termites more than termites wearing solid colors, the spiders were less likely to attack striped termites when given the chance to do so.

Behavioral ecologist Dr. Lisa Taylor joins Ira to discuss the purpose of the project—and former lead undergraduate researcher Lauren Gawel describes the challenges of trying to get termites to dress up as superheroes.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

If you’ve tried to get prescriptions filled in the last year or so, a pharmacist may have told you, “Sorry, we don’t have that drug right now.” That’s because there are some 323 active and ongoing drug shortages in the United States. That’s the highest number of such shortages since the American Society of Health System Pharmacists started tracking this data back in 2001.

These drug shortages touch every part of the healthcare system. Doctors are having to reconfigure their treatment plans due to short supply of certain drugs, like cancer treatments. And patients can be left going from pharmacy to pharmacy to get even the most common medications, like antibiotics.

SciFri’s John Dankosky talks with freelance journalist Indira Khera and journalist and physician Dr. Eli Cahan, who looked into why drug shortages happen, how they’re affecting the healthcare system, and what solutions are on the horizon.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

The foot-long meteor passed through the Earth’s atmosphere near the Statue of Liberty. Don’t worry, it was fine. Also, the follow-up to the 1996 movie “Twister” is a whirlwind of tornado science. A weather expert decodes its lingo—and real-life tornado trends.

A Small Meteor Blazes Over New York City

Tuesday morning, some New York area residents heard a loud boom and saw a daytime fireball streaking overhead. According to observers, a small meteor entered the Earth’s atmosphere over New York City, passed by the Statue of Liberty, and proceeded west to New Jersey, moving at some 38,000 miles per hour. Meteor experts said that the object, estimated to be around a foot in size, posed no threat, as debris from an object that small would have burned up before reaching the ground.

Science Friday’s Charles Bergquist joins guest host Rachel Feltman to talk about the overhead display, and about other science news from the week, including a newly planned mission to fly by a near-Earth asteroid. They’ll also talk about a new pool of data for human genetics research, efforts to predict rogue waves, and the challenges of making food taste right in orbit.

The Tornado Science To Know Before Seeing ‘Twisters’

“Twisters,” the long awaited follow-up to the 1996 movie “Twister” drops in theaters today, July 19. It’s about a scientist (Daisy Edgar-Jones) who goes back to her home state of Oklahoma to try and stop a massive tornado outbreak from wreaking havoc on its citizens. On the way, she meets a quirky cast of storm chasers, and butts heads with a band of unorthodox “tornado wranglers” led by a YouTube personality (Glen Powell). “Twisters” delights in name-dropping tornado jargon, and its science advisory team said they hoped to make the movie as accurate as possible.

The movie makes science thrilling, but it also shows the ways that tornadoes affect people’s lives in the real world. For example, earlier this week, the Chicago area was hit with multiple tornadoes during a night of extreme weather, leaving thousands without power, and four tornadoes hit upstate New York, killing one person. This comes after a powerful, and some say unusual, tornado season in the Midwest. But just how tornadoes will continue to change is still unknown.

Digital producer Emma Gometz talks with Dr. Bill Gallus, a meteorology professor at Iowa State University, to decode some of the science from “Twisters” and understand how real-life tornadoes are changing.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Dr. Eric Topol discusses the promise of “opportunistic” AI, using medical scans for unintended diagnostic purposes. Also, a study in mice found that the brain tags new memories through a “sharp wave ripple” mechanism that then repeats during sleep.

How AI Could Predict Heart Disease From Chest X-Rays

Research on medical uses for artificial intelligence in medicine is exploding, with scientists exploring methods like using the retina to predict disease onset. That’s one example of a growing body of research on “opportunistic” AI, the practice of analyzing medical scans in unconventional ways and for unintended diagnostic purposes.

Now, there’s some evidence to suggest that AI can mine data from chest x-rays to assess the risk of cardiovascular disease and detect diabetes.

Ira talks with Dr. Eric Topol, founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute and professor of molecular medicine.

Neurons ‘Tag’ New Memories For Storage During Sleep

All day long we’re taking in information and forming memories. Some stick around, others quickly fade away. But how does your brain push those memories into long term storage? And how does our brain recognize which memories should be kept and which should be discarded?

This topic has been debated for decades, and a recent study in mice may help scientists understand this process.

Researchers found that during the day, as the mice formed memories, cells in the hippocampus fired in a formation called “sharp wave ripples.” These are markers that tell the brain to keep those memories for later. Then, while the mice slept, those same sharp wave ripples activated again, and locked in those memories.

Ira talks with Dr. György Buzsáki, professor of neuroscience at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, about the findings of the study, which was published in the journal Science.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. 

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Science Friday is in Ames, Iowa, home to prairies, greater prairie chickens, and an array of wildlife. Also, the co-emergence of two periodical cicada broods is underway. Scientists have tips for how to experience the event.

Science From Iowa’s Prairies

This week, SciFri is coming to you from Ames, Iowa. We’re kicking off the sciencey Iowa celebrations by spotlighting some of the plants, animals and unique ecosystems of the Hawkeye state. Ira talks with Charity Nebbe, host of the “Talk of Iowa” at Iowa Public Radio, about the state’s largest prairie restoration project, the conservation of prairie chickens, and its rebounding wildlife.

Planning To Go See Cicadas? Here’s What To Know

In parts of the American South and Midwest, two broods of cicadas are emerging: Brood XIX, known as the Great Southern Brood, and Brood XIII, called the Northern Illinois Brood.

The dual emergence of these two particular broods is a rare event, since the Great Southern Brood emerges on a 13-year cycle and the Northern Illinois Brood emerges on a 17-year cycle. The last time they were seen together was in 1803. The two could overlap this spring in parts of Illinois and Iowa, where cicada enthusiasts will gather in parks to observe the emergence.

“Plan to spend an afternoon or two,” recommends entomologist Dr. Laura Iles from Iowa State University. “Here in Iowa it tends to be pretty patchy even within a park, so talk to someone, a ranger, about what path to hike on and the best places to go see them.”

Ira Flatow speaks with Dr. Iles about the fascinating life cycle of cicadas, how best to approach cicada tourism, and why gardeners should hold off on planting new trees this year.

Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

An early study found that electrical stimulation could improve hand and arm function in people with spinal cord injuries. Also, for thousands of years, Indigenous communities in Guatemala have used observations and mathematics to track astronomical events.

Zapping Nerves Into Regrowth

Results of an early trial published this week in the journal Nature Medicine found that people with cervical spinal cord damage showed some improvements both in strength and movement in arm and hand function after they received electrical stimulation near the site of their injury. The improved function persisted even after the stimulation stopped, indicating that the treatment may be inducing nerve cells to regrow in the damaged area.

Sophie Bushwick, senior news editor at New Scientist, joins Ira to talk about the work and what it could mean for people with severe spinal cord injuries. They also talk about other stories from the week in science, including creating the most powerful X-ray pulse ever reported, investigations into the microbiome of the scalp, and some epic cosplay—testing out the practicality of some ancient Greek armor in combat scenarios.

Celebrating the Maya Calendar In Guatemala’s Highlands

Every 260 days, Indigenous communities in the highlands of Guatemala celebrate a new cycle of the Maya calendar. This ceremony has persisted for thousands of years, from pre-Columbian times to today. The latest of these ceremonies happened in early May.

Joining Ira to talk about the importance of astronomical ceremony is Willy Barreno, a Maya calendar keeper based in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, and Dr. Isabel Hawkins, astronomer and senior scientist at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, California.

Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

A long-awaited rule from the EPA limits the amounts of six PFAS chemicals allowed in public drinking water supplies. Also, some spiders, beetles, and centipedes spend winter under snow in a layer called the subnivium. Plus, a drumroll for the total solar eclipse.

EPA Sets Limits On ‘Forever Chemicals’ In Drinking Water

This week, the EPA finalized the first-ever national limits for the level of PFAS chemicals that are acceptable in drinking water supplies. Those so-called “forever chemicals,” per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, have long been used in products like fire retardants and oil-and water-repellent coatings, and are now ubiquitous in the global environment. Water treatment plants will now have to test and treat for several varieties of the chemicals, which have been linked to a variety of health problems in people.

Sophie Bushwick, senior news editor at New Scientist, joins SciFri producer Kathleen Davis to talk about the rule and its potential impact on water agencies. They’ll also talk about other stories from the week in science, including research into a new vaccine against urinary tract infections, theories that extend the multiverse into a many-more-worlds interpretation, the passing of particle physicist Peter Higgs, and a new front in the war on pest rats: rodent contraceptives.

Where Snowpack Meets Soil: An Important Winter Home For Bugs

When winter rolls around and snow piles up, many insects head down to a small layer called the subnivium for the season.. This space, between snowpack and soil, shelters small insects, amphibians,and mammals from freezing temperatures.

Arthropods as a whole are understudied, says Chris Ziadeh, graduate of the University of New Hampshire and lead author of a recent study about the distinct communities that live in the subnivium. Better understanding which creatures call the subnivium home in the winter, as well as their behavior, could help us conserve them as the climate warms.

Guest host Kathleen Davis talks to Ziadeh about winter arthropod activity, species diversity, and why we should all care about protecting insects in our communities.

Drumroll Please! A Performance For The Solar Eclipse

People found all manner of ways to celebrate the solar eclipse that happened earlier this week, but one Science Friday listener found a particularly musical way to take in the experience.

Matt Kurtz, a sound artist and musician based in Akron, Ohio, realized his town would be in the path of totality for the April 8 eclipse. So with some funding from Akron Soul Train, a local artist residency, he put together a percussion section (complete with a gong) to perform a drumroll and build suspense up until the moment of totality. They performed in Chestnut Ridge Park to a crowd of onlookers.

“When you hear a [drumroll], it forces you to be like, something’s about to happen,” he said in an interview. “It’s a way to pay attention.”

As the gong rang out and the crowd cheered, Kurtz put down his sticks and experienced his first solar eclipse totality. “It was a release,” he said. “I had a couple minutes of peace where I got to look at the stars and feel where all this work went to.”

Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Over the past few years, many cities around the world have changed dramatically as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, with shifts in office use and commuting patterns as well as where people choose to live, work, and play. But there are other major changes to communities on the horizon as well—such as the need to adapt to the changing climate and sea level rise, and move urban infrastructure away from dependence on fossil fuels.

Andy Cohen and Diane Hoskins are co-CEOs of Gensler, a global architecture and design firm, and authors of the new book Design for a Radically Changing World. They join guest host John Dankosky to talk about how design can help communities adapt to global crises, and the importance of involving local communities in design decisions.

Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

The World Meteorological Organization’s report confirms last year had the highest temperatures on record and predicts an even hotter 2024. Also, NASA’s new PACE satellite will study how these tiny creatures could affect Earth’s climate, and how aerosols influence air quality.

UN Report Confirms 2023 Was Hottest Year On Record

A new report from the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization shows that last year had the hottest average global temperatures since recording began 174 years ago. Ocean temperatures also reached a 65-year high last year, and 2024 is on track to be even hotter.

Ira talks with Jason Dinh, climate editor at Atmos Magazine about that and other top science news of the week including cannibal birds, fighting Dengue fever with bacteria-infected mosquitos and the evolutionary benefit of whale menopause.

Why This NASA Satellite Is Studying Plankton

Did you know you can see plankton … from space? Earlier this year, NASA launched a satellite to do exactly that. It’s called PACE, which stands for Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, and ocean Ecosystem, and NASA hopes that the satellite can tell us more about how these tiny creatures interact with Earth’s atmosphere and influence our climate.

Some species of plankton, called phytoplankton, are microscopic plants that absorb carbon dioxide and produce oxygen. PACE has equipment that can identify different species of phytoplankton by the kind of light they give off, giving NASA real-time information about their location and population size, which can also aid fisheries and coastal communities when algal blooms occur.

PACE will also study how aerosols affect air quality on Earth. Additional instruments on the satellite can differentiate between different kinds of aerosols by studying how they reflect light back into space, which will help scientists refine their climate models so that more accurate forecasts can be made.

Ira Flatow talks to Dr. Ivona Cetinic, PACE’s science lead for ocean biogeochemistry, about the satellite, her favorite species of plankton, and how the public can benefit from the data that the mission will provide.

Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.