Science Friday

Wind And Solar Were Europe’s Top Energy Sources In 2022

The European Union reached a major renewable energy milestone in 2022. For the first time, wind and solar generated more energy in the European Union than any other power source. Ira talks with science writer Roxanne Khamsi about Europe’s energy future and other top science stories of the week, including deer harboring old COVID strains, an endangered marsupial who’s losing a lot of sleep in search of sex, and why mammals live longer in groups.

Late last month, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission gave final approval to the first small-modular nuclear reactor design, known in the industry as SMR. It’s not the kind of power plant you might picture when you think of nuclear—gone is the massive cooling tower and tall, domed containment building, in favor of a 15-foot-diameter steel cylinder equipped with passive cooling. And instead of being bespoke designs built to order on site, these reactors can be manufactured in a factory and hooked together in the field—an approach that can shave years off the construction time for a new nuclear facility.

Read the rest at sciencefriday.com.

The Last of Us, a new TV show from HBO, has had audiences hooked from the very first episode. The sci-fi show and the video game it’s based on tells the story of people trying to survive a mass fungal outbreak: one that turns ordinary people into murderous, mind-controlled monsters.

The fungus in the story, Cordyceps, is a real one. It’s known to take over the minds of insects like ants, moths, and beetles and control them to advance its own survival, but that doesn’t happen with humans. Dr. Patty Kaishian, mycologist and visiting professor of biology at Bard College, joins Ira to talk about the science behind The Last of Us. They dig into what’s real, what’s fiction, and how fungi shape our lives.

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

Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that’s keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-472-4374

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Meet The Blind Birder Reimagining Accessibility In The Outdoors

For many blind and low vision people, accessing outdoor spaces like parks can be challenging. Trails are often unsafe or difficult to navigate, signs don’t usually have Braille, guides generally aren’t trained to help disabled visitors, and so on.

But nature recordist Juan Pablo Culasso, based in Bogata, Colombia, is changing that. He’s designed a system of fully accessible trails in the cloud forests of southwest Colombia that are specifically tailored to help visually disabled people connect with nature. The trails are the first of their kind in the Americas, and Culasso drew on his own experiences as a blind person and a professional birder to design the system.

He talks with Maddie Sofia about how he designed the trail system and takes listeners on an adventure through the cloud forest he works in.

If you follow health or fitness influencers, at some point you’ve probably heard something about people needing six to eight ounces glasses of water a day to be healthy. The question of the right amount of water needed for health and happiness is still an open one, and varies from person to person. But a recent study in the journal Science looked at just how much water people actually do consume each day.

The study didn’t just ask people how many sips they had taken. Instead, it tracked the amount of water that flowed through the bodies of over 5,000 people around the world, using labeled isotopes to get data on “water turnover”—how much water was consumed and excreted. The researchers found a large range of water use, driven in part by differences in body size and socioeconomic status. A small, not very active woman might drink less than two liters per day, while a large, very active woman might gulp almost eight liters a day, a four-fold difference.

Dr. Dale Schoeller, a professor emeritus in the Department of Nutritional Sciences and the Biotechnology Institute at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, joins SciFri producer Kathleen Davis to talk about the study, the importance of water consumption, and how people can do better at estimating the amount of water they need.

This winter has already brought significant snowfall to much of the U.S. Historically, more snow has meant more road salt. It’s an effective way to clear roads — but also brings cascading environmental impacts as it washes into rivers and streams.

But amid one powerful winter storm that walloped the Midwest in December, employees from the La Crosse County Facilities Department did something a little different.

As usual, they clocked into work well before dawn to plow the county’s downtown parking lots. They were followed by facilities director Ryan Westphal, who walked each of the lots, checking for slick spots. Finding none, he didn’t lay any salt down on top.

That’s a major departure from how he would have handled the situation a few years ago – before their department made the decision to dramatically cut back on salt use to prevent it from flowing into waters like the nearby Mississippi River, which new data show has been growing saltier for decades.

Under the previous protocol, in Westphal’s words, his crew would have “salted the crap” out of the lots after a snowfall like this, without giving deference to whether they actually needed it. Today, there’s a careful calculation after each time it snows to ensure they’re using just the right amount of salt.

To read the rest, visit www.sciencefriday.com.

In her novel The Terraformers, author Annalee Newitz takes readers thousands of years into the future to a far-away planet that’s under construction. It’s in the process of being terraformed, or transformed into a more Earth-like world that can support human life.

The main character Destry, a ranger for the Environmental Rescue Team, and her partner, Whistle the flying moose, are working on the corporate-owned planet when they encounter an underground society. The Terraformers explores themes of resilience, colonization, conservation, equity, and capitalism through a sci-fi lens as Newitz invites readers to reimagine a new future.

Guest host Maddie Sofia talks Newitz about the inspiration behind the book and how real-world problems made their way into sci-fi.

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

Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that’s keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-472-4374

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What’s Behind The Strange Slowing Of The Earth’s Core?

Even though some days feel more chaotic than others, the rotation of the surface of the planet proceeds at a pretty constant rate—about one full rotation every 24 hours. But the rotational speed of the inner core is less stable, and has been known to shift over time. Now, researchers are reporting in the journal Nature Geoscience that according to seismic data, the Earth’s inner core may have recently paused its rotation, and could even go on to reverse direction relative to the rest of the planet.

Tim Revell, deputy United States editor of New Scientist, joins SciFri producer Kathleen Davis to talk about the shift in rotation and other stories from the week in science, including shared language characteristics between humans and wild apes, and a wolf population that has started to enjoy snacking on sea otters. They’ll also talk about an ancient Egyptian mummy with a heart of gold, research into why some mushrooms glow in the dark, and a tiny robot with morphing liquid metal capabilities straight out of Hollywood.

Just a few months into the pandemic, it became clear that in some people, the SARS-CoV-2 virus caused a cascade of symptoms for months after their initial infections. These lingering effects are now commonly referred to as Long COVID. And as long as the pandemic barrels on, the population of Long COVID patients will continue to grow. Over the past three years, researchers have closely studied these symptoms, seeking to better understand its underlying causes and improve treatment.

Guest host Maddie Sofia talks with Hannah Davis, co-founder of the Patient-Led Research Collaborative and co-author of a recently published comprehensive review on the state of Long COVID research, and Dr. Bhupesh Prusty, principal investigator at the Institute for Virology and Immmunobiology at the University of Würzburg in Germany.

At the end of last year, a big case was decided in the world of art crime. Qatari Sheikh Hamad al Thani won a case against his former art dealer, after nearly $5 million dollars worth of purchased ancient artifacts were all determined to be fake. Among the artifacts was a Hari Hara sandstone statue purported to be from 7th century Vietnam. In reality, the piece was made in 2013. Art experts say forged antiquities are extremely common in museums and private art collections: Former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Thomas Hoving estimated 40% of artworks for sale at any given time were fake.

The task of determining what art is real and what art is fake falls to scientists, who use tools like X-rays and carbon dating to get accurate readings of time and place of origin for artifacts. Joining guest host Kathleen Davis to talk about this are Erin Thompson, art crime professor at the City University of New York, and Patrick Degryse, professor of archeometry at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium.

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

Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that’s keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-472-4374

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Why Are Gas Stoves Under Fire?

If you were online at all last week, you probably encountered conversations about gas stoves. The sudden stove discourse was sparked by a comment made by a commissioner on the Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC) to a Bloomberg reporter, in which the commissioner discussed plans to regulate gas stoves. Those comments morphed via repetition into inaccurate rumors of an impending ban on stoves fueled by ‘natural gas,’ or methane, currently used in around 38% of US homes. The CPSC later clarified that the agency was “researching gas emissions in stoves and exploring new ways to address health risks,” but was not looking to ban gas stove use.

That said, studies have found that gas stoves are a major source of indoor air pollution, and can emit nitrogen oxides that have been found to exacerbate asthma symptoms. Last summer, the American Medical Association adopted a resolution informing physicians of the stoves’ link to asthma. A report published in December estimates that over 12% of childhood asthma cases may be attributable to gas stove emissions.

The stove debate flares beyond asthma, however. Some municipalities, including New York City, are moving to phase out the use of natural gas in new construction for reasons related to climate change. And Washington state has put in place rules mandating the use of electric heat (with fossil fuel-derived heating allowed as a backup option) in new construction this year.

Rebecca Leber, senior reporter covering climate at Vox, joins Ira to explain the heated words over gas stove use, and how they fit into a larger battle over fossil fuel usage and climate change.

What Will The Next Generation Of COVID-19 Vaccines Look Like?

The first COVID-19 vaccine was approved just over two years ago. Since then, the virus continues to mutate. With each new variant, the virus seems to evade our current vaccines more effectively, faster than we can make effective new mRNA boosters.

Coronaviruses frequently spill over from animals to humans, like the original SARS and MERS viruses, which are both types of coronaviruses. Researchers are working on the next generation of coronavirus vaccines that aim to protect us against multiple emerging variants—and even prevent future pandemics.

Ira talks with Dr. Pamela Bjorkman, professor of biology and bioengineering at the California Institute of Technology, about her work to develop a vaccine that would protect against several types of coronaviruses.

And later, Ira talks with Dr. Akiko Iwasaki, professor of immunobiology and molecular, cellular, and developmental biology at Yale University, about the nasal vaccine she’s researching and the hurdles in bringing it to market.

Stringed instruments can be a joy to the ears and the eyes. They’re handcrafted, made of beautiful wood, and the very best ones are centuries old, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, or sometimes even millions.

But there’s a new violin in the works—one that’s 3D-printed. It costs just a few bucks to print, making it an affordable and accessible option for young learners and classrooms.

Dr. Mary-Elizabeth Brown is a concert violinist and the founder and director of the AVIVA Young Artists Program in Montreal, Quebec, and she’s been tinkering with the design of 3D-printed violins for years. She talks with Ira about the science behind violins, the design process, and how she manages to turn $7 worth of plastic into a beautiful sounding instrument.

Learn more about the project, as well as its progress, beta testing, and release date at www.printaviolin.com.

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

Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that’s keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-472-4374

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Why Are Children’s Antibiotics So Hard To Find Right Now?

Mary Warlo has been extremely worried lately. Her baby Calieb, who is six months old, has sickle cell disease. In early December he went for a few days without liquid penicillin, a medication that he—and thousands of other children in the U.S.—rely on to prevent potentially life threatening infections.

Warlo couldn’t easily find a pharmacy in Indianapolis that had the medicine in stock. She and her husband frantically drove around for hours, stopping at five different pharmacies before they were able to get their prescription filled. “It was extremely stressful and I am worried about what will happen the next time we need to fill his prescription two weeks from now,” she said. Pediatric sickle cell disease specialists say they are alarmed by signs that the stock of liquid penicillin is dwindling in some places. They say children’s lives depend on this medication, and a penicillin shortage could spell disaster.

Read the rest at sciencefriday.com.

What do death metal vocalists and bats have in common? Both use their ventricle folds, or “false vocal cords,” to extend their vocal ranges to hit a lower register. This gives bats a huge vocal range—seven full octaves. Humans typically tap out at about three to four octaves. Even people with really impressive vocal ranges, like Mariah Carey, just can’t compete with a bat.

A study recently published in the academic journal PLOS Biology examines how and why different anatomical structures might help bats achieve such extreme frequency range. Ira talks with one of the study’s authors, Coen Elemans, a professor in bioacoustics and animal behavior at the University of Southern Denmark based in Odense, Denmark.

Dr. Alan Lightman has been around the block a few times. Over the past five decades, he has been a theoretical physicist, professor at MIT, and bestselling author—often at the same time. His most notable novel, Einstein’s Dreams, has been adapted into dozens of plays and musicals since its publication in 1992, becoming one of the most famous examples of mixing art and science. 

Lightman’s work follows a philosophical way of thinking about life’s biggest questions, like the origins of consciousness. His new venture brings this way of thinking to the silver screen. Searching: Our Quest for Meaning in the Age of Science consults scientists and faith leaders to grapple with some of these theoretical quandaries. And Lightman gives a good argument for why the journey to these answers can be more impactful than the answers themselves. 

Ira speaks with Alan Lightman about the new program, available to watch now online and on your local public television station. 

Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that’s keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-472-4374

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Technology Trends to Watch in 2023

The start of a new year is often a time to contemplate the future and what might lie ahead on the horizon. This week, the magazine MIT Technology Review unveiled its annual list of 10 technologies to watch—innovations that it thinks are on the verge of rapid adoption or causing significant cultural changes, or already in the process of creating such a shift. This year’s list includes items from the amazing astronomy enabled by JWST, to the ‘inevitable’ electric vehicle, as well as technologies that are further down the road, such as the ability to grow replacement organs to order.

Amy Nordrum, an executive editor at MIT Technology Review, joins Ira to talk about some of the innovations and the difficulties of narrowing a universe of possibilities into a list of 10 key technologies to watch. They also discuss some technologies highlighted in the past that went on to make a big difference—cloud computing, anyone?—as well as some projects the magazine highlighted in the past that did not turn out to be as significant as once thought.

Join us as we enter the rat’s nest. The snake pit. The mouse trap. What, precisely, is it that untangles an animal friend from foe? This week, we’re taking a close look at pests—critters with a notorious reputation for being destructive, annoying, and even villainous.

We’re also going to get a little philosophical and ask: What do those opinions tell us about ourselves?

Science journalist Bethany Brookshire is the author of Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains. She joins Ira to talk about her new book, challenge our perspectives on what makes a pest, and answer listener’s pest-y questions live.

To read an excerpt of the book, visit sciencefriday.com.

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

Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that’s keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-472-4374

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Early Migration To North America Likely Wasn’t A One-Way Road

The story of how early humans migrated to North America might not be as simple as we once thought. The prevailing theory was that ancient peoples traveled from Siberia to modern-day Alaska using the Bering strait as a land bridge. But new genomic research, published in Current Biology, reveals movement in the opposite direction, back to Asia, as well.

Ira talks with Sophie Bushwick, technology editor at Scientific American, about the new research, and other top science stories of the week, including a new AI voice generator, a green comet visible visit in the night sky for the first time in 50,000 years, and how a specific atmospheric weather pattern caused historic flooding in California.

The United States is one of the largest consumers of meat in the world, with the average American eating 273 pounds of meat per year That’s not to say that tastes aren’t changing: Nearly a quarter of Americans say they have cut down on meat consumption, and 41% of Americans under 50 have tried plant-based meat.

There’s been a wave of companies and academic institutions working on cellular agriculture—a fancy way of saying animal products grown from cells in labs, and not from a meat farm. While lab-grown meat is not available in grocery stores yet, the FDA gave approval to make meat from animal cell culture for the first time in November. Upside Foods, the company making the product, makes chicken from cells grown in tanks.

Joining Ira to talk about cell agriculture are Andrew Stout, cellular agriculture biologist based in Boston, Massachusetts, and Aryé Elfenbein, co-founder of Wildtype, based in San Francisco, California, a company working on growing seafood from cells.

Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that’s keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-472-4374

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FDA Expands Pharmacy Options for Abortion Pills

This week, the FDA finalized rules that would allow more retail pharmacies to stock and fill prescriptions for the abortion drug mifepristone. Previously, the medication had been available only via certain specialty pharmacies or via mail order. Now, major retail pharmacies such as CVS and Walgreens can apply for permission to fill prescriptions for the medications, which now account for about half of all abortions performed in the United States.

The immediate effects of the rule change are not entirely clear, however—a patchwork of state and local laws govern the availability of these medications, and may prevent their availability in some areas. Around half of the states have some restriction on abortion pills.

Katherine Wu, science writer at The Atlantic, joins Ira to unpack the rule change and other stories from the week in science, including news of a new surging COVID variant called XBB.1.5, the injury to NFL player Damar Hamlin, a stray snowy owl visiting southern California, a likely farewell to the Mars InSight lander, and a study looking at how an island rat population can affect offshore coral reefs.

A scientist and a comedian walk into a bar—for an interview about the craft of science comedy. Ira talks to comedians Chuck Nice, Kasha Patel, and Kyle Marian Viterbo about their work bringing the joke format to science communication.

While all three have different approaches to science—whether it’s sneaking the knowledge into “regular” jokes, or going straight for the factual jugular—they agree that the practice of stand-up has much in common with the scientific process. “We normally start with an observation or a question,” says Nice. “The experimentation is the joke itself, seeing whether or not it will get a laugh… you have to tell it in front of an audience. And after that you go, ‘Wow, that sucked. I can’t believe that wasn’t funny.’”

Plus, why comedy can itself be a science, and what good comedy has in common with good (science) communication. “It’s a long term skillset in playing with, and communicating, and connecting with your audience,” says Viterbo. “To be able to really listen to our audience, which these days we need more of.”

Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that’s keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-472-4374

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How Redlining Shaped Baltimore’s Tree Canopy

Redlining was pervasive in American cities from the 1930s through the late 1960s. Maps were drawn specifically to ensure that Black people were denied mortgages. These discriminatory practices created a lasting legacy of economic and racial inequality which persists today.

Less obvious is how redlining has shaped nature and the urban ecosystem. A recent study found that previously redlined neighborhoods in Baltimore have fewer big old trees and lower tree diversity than other parts of the city. These findings are part of the Baltimore Ecosystem Study, a collaborative research project which has tracked the city’s changing urban environment for the past 25 years.

But it’s not all bad news. The city has a comprehensive tree replanting initiative and is now working to restore its tree canopy. In 2007, Baltimore set a goal to increase the tree cover from 20% to 40% by 2037. Since then, officials have been working closely with non-profit community organizations to plant trees all over the city—especially in previously redlined and otherwise under-served neighborhoods.

Ira talks with Karin Burghardt, assistant professor of entomology at the University of Maryland about her latest research into the effect of redlining on Baltimore’s tree ecosystem. And later, Ira speaks with Ryan Alston, communications and outreach manager for Baltimore Tree Trust, which has planted over 16,000 trees in the city to date.

Pocket gophers, also known as gophers, are often viewed as a pest species. But their extensive tunnel networks are good for soil and help shape healthy ecosystems everywhere gophers are found.

Producer Christie Taylor talks to two University of Florida researchers who investigated the mystery of the pocket gopher—why does a single gopher build such a large network of tunnels?

What they found led to deeper questions about how gophers get enough food for their extensive energy needs, and whether they might even be cultivating roots in a deliberate act of farming. Plus, why pocket gophers deserve our appreciation as ecosystem engineers.

Activated carbon filters have become common household items as water filters in pitchers, or directly on your faucet. These activated carbon filters are also used in industrial processes like wastewater treatment and to filter out chemicals released in smokestacks.

Dr. Kandis Leslie Abdul-Aziz, assistant professor of chemical and environmental engineering at University of California Riverside, has created activated carbon filters from agricultural waste like corn stover and orange peels.

Abdul-Aziz talks with Ira about her research, and what it will take to shift manufacturing processes to be more sustainable and less harmful to the planet.

It’s something most of us know from experience: When it’s cold outside, you’re likely to see a lot of people sneezing and coughing. Upper respiratory infections, like the flu, colds or even COVID-19 are common in winter. But understanding the biological reasons why hasn’t been known—until now.

Researchers at Mass Eye and Ear cracked the mystery in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology last month. The study points to the cold-sensitive nose—specifically extracellular vesicles inside nose cells—as the key immune response impacted by temperature. It turns out that a temperature drop of about 40 degrees Farenheit triggers a severe decrease in the quantity and effectiveness in EVs, decreasing the body’s ability to prevent infection.

Ira speaks to the study’s lead author Benjamin Bleier, associate professor at Mass Eye and Ear in Boston, Massachusetts, about this breakthrough and the impact it could have on future treatments for respiratory illness.

Glass frogs have a superpower: If you look at them from above, they look like regular green frogs. But if you flip one over, you can see right into their bodies: hearts, intestines, bones, and all.

As these frogs doze off, however, something changes: They disappear. Well, almost. A new study shows that the frogs can hide their red blood cells as they sleep, becoming expert camouflagers.

Dr. Carlos Taboada, a biologist at Duke University, is a co-author on this study and he joins Ira to talk about the glass frogs’ tricks.

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

Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that’s keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-472-4374

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Keeping The Bubbly In Your Holidays, With Fizzical Science

As the year winds to a close, you may be attending gatherings where a festive flute of champagne is offered. Champagne production starts out with a first fermentation process that turns ordinary grape juice into alcoholic wine. A second fermentation in the wine bottle produces the dissolved carbon dioxide responsible for the thousands of fizzy bubbles that are a distinctive part of the experience of drinking champagne and other sparkling wines. 

In this archival interview from 2012, Ira talks with Stanford University chemist Richard Zare about the interplay between temperature, bubbles, the surface of the glass in which the drink is served, and surprising factors such as lipstick chemistry that can influence the sparkliness of each sip, and delves into the age old question of the best ways to keep an opened bottle of champagne bubbly for longer.  

66 million years ago, a massive asteroid hit what we know today as the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico. Many people have a general idea of what happened next: The age of the dinosaurs was brought to a close, making room for mammals like us to thrive.

But fewer people know what happened in the days, weeks, and years after impact. Increased research on fossils and geological remains from this time period have helped scientists paint a picture of this era. For large, non-avian dinosaurs like Triceratops and Tyrannosaurus rex, extinction was swift following the asteroid impact. But for creatures that were able to stay underwater and underground, their post-impact stories are more complicated.

Joining Ira to discuss her book The Last Days of the Dinosaurs is Riley Black, science writer based in Salt Lake City, Utah.

The path to becoming a scientist is not unlike the scientific process itself: Filled with dead ends, detours, and bumps along the way.

Danielle Lee started asking questions about animal behavior when she was a kid. She originally wanted to become a veterinarian. But after being rejected from veterinary school, she found a fulfilling career as a biologist, doing the type of work she always wanted to do—but never knew was possible for her.

Science Friday producer Shoshannah Buxbaum talks with Dr. Danielle Lee, a biologist, outreach scientist, and assistant professor in biology at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville in Edwardsville Illinois about what keeps her asking questions, what rodents can help us understand about humans, and the importance of increasing diversity in science.

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

Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that’s keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-472-4374

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This Soundscape Artist Has Been Listening To The Planet For Decades

Jim Metzner is one of the pioneers of science radio—he’s been making field recordings and sharing them with audiences for more than 40 years. He hosted shows such as “Sounds of Science” in the 1980s, which later grew into “Pulse of the Planet,” a radio show about “the sound of life on Earth.”

Over the decades, Metzner has created an incredible time capsule of soundscapes, and now, his entire collection is going to the Library of Congress.

John Dankosky talks with Metzner about what he’s learned about the natural world from endless hours of recordings and what we can all learn from listening. Plus, they’ll discuss some of his favorite recordings. To hear the best audio quality, it might be a good idea to use headphones if you can.

One of the summer’s biggest blockbusters has been the alien horror film Nope, from director Jordan Peele. Nope has elements of many classic UFO films, with the Spielbergian charm of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the horror and destruction from The War of the Worlds.

For the spoiler-averse, this is your warning to turn back now.

The big twist in Nope that differentiates it from other alien films is that it isn’t a UFO (or UAP if you’re up to date on the lingo) hanging out in the skies above our main characters. The saucer-shaped figure is the alien itself.

Writer and director Jordan Peele attributes much of the inspiration for the alien as coming from sea creatures. He enlisted the help of scientific consultants including marine biologist Kelsi Rutledge to help bring the creature, known in the film as Jean Jacket, to life. She even gave it a scientific name: Occulonimbus edoequus, meaning “hidden dark cloud stallion eater.”

Kelsi, who is a PhD candidate at UCLA in Los Angeles, California, talks to Ira about the ingredients that went into creating a new creature to scare audiences.

Life on the International Space Station throws some wrenches into how food and eating work. There’s very little gravity, after all. And there are big differences between nutritional needs on Earth and in space.

Astronauts must exercise two hours each day on the International Space Station to prevent bone and muscle loss, meaning daily caloric intake needs to be somewhere between 2,500 and 3,500 calories. Sodium must also be reduced, as an astronaut’s body sheds less of it in space. Astronauts also have an increased need for Vitamin D, as their skin isn’t able to create it from sunlight as people on Earth do.

So, how do all these limitations affect the food astronauts eat? Joining guest host Kathleen Davis to answer these gustatory questions is Xulei Wu, food systems manager for the International Space Station in Houston, Texas.

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

Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that’s keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-472-4374

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Glitter Gets An Eco-Friendly Glimmer

Glitter—it’s everywhere this time of year. You open up a holiday card, and out comes a sprinkle of it. And that glitter will seemingly be with you forever, hugging your sweater, covering the floor. But glitter doesn’t stop there. It washes down the drain, and travels into the sewage system and waterways. Since it’s made from microplastics, it’s never going away.

As it turns out, all that glitters is not gold—or even biodegradable.

But what if you could make glitter that was biodegradable? Silivia Vignolini, professor of chemistry at the University of Cambridge joins Ira to discuss her latest discovery—eco-glitter made from plant cellulose.

The Resurrection Of The American Chestnut

At the turn of the 20th century, the American chestnut towered over other trees in forests along the eastern seaboard. These giants could grow up to 100 feet high and 13 feet wide. According to legend, a squirrel could scamper from New England to Georgia on the canopies of American chestnuts, never touching the ground.

Then the trees began to disappear, succumbing to a mysterious fungus. The fungus first appeared in New York City in 1904—and it spread quickly. By the 1950s, the fungus had wiped out billions of trees, effectively driving the American chestnut into extinction.

Now, some people are trying to resurrect the American chestnut—and soon. But not everyone thinks that’s a good idea. Reporter Shahla Farzan and “Science Diction” host and producer Johanna Mayer bring us the story of the death and life of the American chestnut.

When science involves visualizing the intricate movements of DNA through time and space, examining minutiae like how DNA folds and rearranges itself during cell division, or the relationships between miniscule beads on microscopic strings, the data can get complicated really fast.

Which is why biophysicist Adam Lamson is collaborating with artist Laura Splan in a project the two of them call ‘Sticky Settings.’ It’s a kind of an inside joke about the nature of DNA strands, and the kinds of digital transformations that can be applied to data in animation software.

But the result of this partnership has been anything but a joke. From giant tapestries that present maps of DNA in colorful, tactile formats, to otherworldly animations set to music, their art invites a non-scientific audience to literally walk into the processes our own cells are undergoing every day.

Producer Christie Taylor talks with Splan and Lamson about their partnership, and the natural intersection between an artist’s creativity and a scientist’s. Plus how an artist’s interpretation can bring new insights to difficult data.

This time of year, it’s not uncommon to see a little sprig of greenery hanging in someone’s doorway. It’s probably mistletoe, the holiday decoration that inspires paramours standing beneath it to kiss.

But as it turns out, we may have miscast mistletoe as the most romantic plant of the Christmas season. In reality, the plant that prompts your lover’s kiss is actually a parasite. Ira talks with evolutionary biologist Josh Der about the myth and tradition behind the parasitic plant, and what it may be up to the other 11 months of the year.

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A Look Back At The Top Science Stories of 2022

2022 was chock full of big science news. Scientists announced an important milestone toward the feasibility of nuclear fusion. Doctors transplanted a pig heart into a human for the very first time. And NASA returned to the moon with the successful launch of the Artemis I mission.

Ira recaps the year in science news with Tim Revell, deputy United States editor of New Scientist, including what the James Webb Space telescope has taught us about our universe, the significance of ChatGPT on the future of artificial intelligence, the spread of Mpox, and more.

The American beaver, Castor canadensis, nearly didn’t survive European colonialism in the United States. Prized for its dense, lustrous fur, and also sought after for the oil from its tail glands, the species was killed by the tens of thousands, year after year, until conservation efforts in the late 19th century turned the tide.

In her new book, Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America, author Leila Philipp tells that tale—and the ecological cost of this near-extermination. But she also has good news: beavers, and their skillful engineering of waterways, have the potential to ease the fire, drought and floods of a changing climate. She talks to Ira about the powerful footprint of the humble beaver.

This book is the SciFri Book Club’s January 2023 pick. Find out more about our book club on this month’s main page.

On a Saturday afternoon walk, Kelly Schofield and her husband turned a corner onto a road near their house in Bow. They sensed something was wrong with the beaver pond before they saw it. “You could smell it. It was pretty strong. And then when we got down to the pond where you could really see the pond, you could see it was gone,” she said.The pond was drained. Left behind was a huge tract of mud, and creatures trying to survive. Neighbors took videos of fish floundering as the water receded.

Beavers are beloved by some and considered a nuisance by many. But Schofield and others who lived on the pond agreed: nature’s engineers made their property more valuable, and made their lives better. They took their kids down to the water to learn about frogs and turtles; watched ducks stop by as they migrated south.

Read the rest at sciencefriday.com.

Nothing beats the smell of a live Christmas tree in your home, but how can you keep the needles on your tree and off your carpet? Rick Bates, professor of horticulture at Penn State University, offers tips for how to properly care for your Christmas tree this holiday season.

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Scientists Reach Breakthrough In Nuclear Fusion

This week, researchers announced a big breakthrough in the field of nuclear fusion. Scientists have been slamming atoms into each other for decades in the hope that they will fuse together, and release more energy than was put in. And for the first time ever, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory did just that in early December, using very powerful lasers.

But just how quickly will the mission to develop scalable nuclear fusion become a reality? Ira talks with Casey Crownhart, climate reporter at MIT Technology Review, about that and other top science news of the week, including an uptick in methane, an investigation into telehealth data sharing practices, and the newly-identified snake clitoris.

Multiple myeloma is an incurable blood cancer that affects cells inside a patient’s bone marrow. Nearly all multiple myeloma patients will relapse at some point in their treatment, becoming resistant to first one, then another frontline intervention.

But a new kind of therapy, a bispecific antibody called Talquetamab, has been showing promise in clinical trials—both in treating the cancer, and keeping patients in remission longer. A bispecific antibody works as a kind of bond between a T-cell that might otherwise not be doing its job and the myeloma cell itself, forcing the T-cell to attack the cancer.

Ira talks to Dr. Ajai Chari, who is leading the clinical trials of Talquetamab, about the historic difficulty of treating multiple myeloma, and why this new therapeutic approach may lead to more patients living longer lives.

For those who celebrate Christmas, the decision over a Christmas tree can be hotly debated. For those who hold out for a real tree, there are dozens of species available for American consumers—catering to Douglas fir aficionados, Fraser fir fans, and Noble admirers. But climate change could soon affect the selection at a tree lot near you.

Chal Landgren, a Christmas tree specialist at Oregon State University, manages a program that for decades has bred and developed seedlings raised to become Christmas trees. Oregon is responsible for growing 25% of all Christmas trees in the country, but heatwaves and drought have made this future tenuous. “My kind of anecdotal information is that between this summer and the heat dome, we probably lost 50% of the seedlings that were planted,” Landgren told Science Friday.

Read more at sciencefriday.com.

There were many exciting science fiction and science gaming titles released this year. Whether you enjoy video games, board games, learning about mendelian genetics, getting immersed in hard tactical sci-fi, or just want to be a cat wandering around a gorgeous cyberpunk city, we have you covered. Joining us to discuss our favorite sci-fi and science-y games this year (and the slightly recent past) are Maddy Myers, Deputy Editor of Games at Polygon and co-host of the gaming podcast Triple Click, and Mandi Hutchinson and Suzanne Sheldon of Salt And Sass Games.

See the full list at sciencefriday.com.

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

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Medicine Is Failing Disabled Patients. Meet The Doctors Pushing For Change

“More than sixty-one million Americans have disabilities, and increasing evidence documents that they experience health care disparities.” That’s the conclusion of a series of studies, in which researchers pulled back the curtain on how doctors perceive disabled patients.

A study from last year found that more than half of surveyed physicians do not feel fully confident that they can provide disabled and non-disabled patients the same level of care. And in another paper, some doctors went as far to say that if you have a disability then “I am not the doctor for you.”

So how do we change that? Ira talks with two researchers, who are disabled themselves, about how the medical field needs to better serve the disabled community. He hears from Dr. Lisa Iezzoni, an author on those studies and a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, who is based at the Health Policy Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Also joining Science Friday is Dr. Feranmi Okanlami, a physician and assistant professor at the University of Michigan Medical School, based in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

To Stop Whale Strikes, Ships Were Asked to Slow Down. It Worked.

The Santa Barbara Channel is like an underwater national park with marine mammals, seabirds, fish and even shipwrecks.

Ocean currents from the north and south meet and mix here to create an ideal feeding grounds for marine life.

“Just the other day I was flying over the channel and we counted over 40 humpback whales in a rather small region feeding on fish,” said Sean Hastings, the Policy Management and Information Officer for the Channel Islands Marine Sanctuary—part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or NOAA.

We met at the Santa Barbara Maritime Museum, close to his office, and sat in the museum’s library which is filled with books that are different shades of blues and greens—the colors you’d expect books about the ocean to be.

Hastings continues his story about a recent flight over the channel spotting all those whales.

To read the rest, visit sciencefriday.com.

75 years ago this month, research scientists working at Bell Labs first created, then unveiled to the world a new device—the point contact transistor. Some call it the greatest invention of the 20th century. That first transistor was a clunky looking thing, with two gold contacts on a plastic wedge pressed against a crystal of germanium. But that early device had a magical property: A voltage in one part of the device could control the flow of electrons in another part of the transistor. It could be a switch, or an amplifier.

That device and the ones that followed and improved on it would become an essential part of modern life. From the first transistor radios to modern computers, hearing aids, and more, transistors are everywhere, in great numbers. An ordinary cell phone today likely has billions of transistors in it. In fact, the transistor has become so ubiquitous that one estimate puts the number of transistors on the planet as about three million per square foot.

The three researchers credited with the invention of the transistor, William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain, went on to share the Nobel Prize in Physics—but they saw limited financial gain from their creation, and had a rocky personal relationship. Michael Riordan, a physicist, science historian, and coauthor of “Crystal Fire: The Invention of the Transistor and the Birth of the Information Age,” joins Ira to look back on the invention, the scientists who got credit for the device, and where transistor technology has gone since 1947.

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

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The Science Behind The Psychedelics Boom

There’s been an explosion of new research into therapeutic uses for psychedelics. This includes drugs like psilocybin, the hallucinogenic chemical found in “magic mushrooms,” and ketamine—which was originally used as an anesthetic, and later became a popular party drug also known as “special K.”

Esketamine, a form of ketamine, was approved by the FDA in 2019 for use in treatment resistant depression. And just last month Colorado residents voted to legalize medicinal use of psilocybin. Following on the heels of Oregon’s legalization in 2020, which is now in the process of being implemented.

A recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed promising results in using psilocybin to help patients with treatment-resistant depression. About a third of those who received the highest dose were in remission 3 weeks later. This was the largest look at psilocybin’s effect on depression to date, involving 233 participants across ten countries in Europe.

Ira talks with Dr. Steve Levine, senior vice president of patient access and medical affairs at COMPASS Pathways, the company that funded the study.

Later, Ira takes a closer look into the latest psychedelic research and takes listener calls with Dr. Gerard Sanacora, professor of psychiatry and director of the Yale Depression Research Program at the Yale School of Medicine, and Dr. Alissa Bazinet, Clinical Psychologist, Co-Founder and Director of Research and Development at the Sequoia Center, and Associate Director of the Social Neuroscience and Psychotherapy Lab at Oregon Health and Science University.

Back in August, controversy erupted around the winning submission of the Colorado State Fair’s art content. The winning painting wasn’t made by a human, but by an artificial intelligence app called Midjourney, which takes text prompts and turns them into striking imagery, with the help of a neural network and an enormous database of images.

AI-based text-to-image generators have been around for years, but their outputs were rudimentary and rough. The State Fair work showed this technology had taken a giant leap forward in its sophistication. Realistic, near-instant image generation was suddenly here—and reactions were just as potent as their creations.

Tech enthusiasts lauded the achievement, while artists were largely concerned and critical. If anyone could make a painting in just a few seconds, why would someone need to commission an artist to produce an illustration, or even bother spending years learning art at all?

Read the rest on sciencefriday.com.

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

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Wish A Happy 190th Birthday To Jonathan The Tortoise

A birthday should always be celebrated. For Jonathan the tortoise, who turned 190 this week, that celebration involved a salad cake and a three-day party. Jonathan is the oldest known living animal, hatched in 1832. Jonathan, who calls the island of St. Helena home, may be blind and unable to smell, but he maintains a good quality of life and even continues to mate with his companions. Jonathan’s ripe old age surpasses the typical tortoise life expectancy of 150 years.

In other “old” news, scientists have found fragments of DNA one million years older than the previous record: making these samples two million years old. The fragments were found in Ice Age sediment in Northern Greenland, and are from a time where the climate was much warmer than it is now.

Vox staff writer Umair Irfan joins Ira to talk about these and other science stories of the week, including an end to the monoclonal antibodies we have for COVID and the FDA’s first approval of fecal transplant therapy.

The state of the birds is not looking good. That’s the conclusion from a new report that looks at decades of community-collected population data from surveys like the annual Christmas Bird Count and the Breeding Bird Survey. Species that inhabit grasslands seem to fare the worst, with their populations down over 30 percent in the last 50 years. Meanwhile, dozens of newly identified “tipping point” species have lost 50 percent of their populations in the same time, and are poised to lose the same proportion in the coming half century.

Dr. Amanda Rodewald of Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology helps unpack the report’s key findings, including the good news: Decades of cooperative efforts to protect waterfowl have paid off in thriving duck populations. Rodewald explains what this can tell us about reversing declines in other habitats.

Plus, birder and science writer Ryan Mandelbaum joins Ira and listeners to talk about the joys of winter birding, the upcoming Christmas Bird Count, and the feathery sightings that brighten our lives.

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

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Hawai’i’s Mauna Loa Volcanic Eruption Sparing Homes For Now

Hawai’i’s famed Mauna Loa volcano began to erupt this past weekend, after weeks of increasing small earthquakes. So far the flow of lava is posing no risk to homes in nearby Hilo, though that could change rapidly. But in the meantime, an important climate research lab is without power and unable to make measurements. And as lava flows and cools into new rock formations, one unusual product, called Pele’s Hair, looks uniquely soft and straw-like—while being dangerously sharp.

Ira talks to FiveThirtyEight’s Maggie Koerth about the less high profile side effects of a major volcanic eruption. Plus, a new analysis of the magma under Yellowstone National Park, the leadership potential for wolves infected with a cat parasite, and other research stories.

This year, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to Carolyn Bertozzi of Stanford University, Morten Meldal of the University of Copenhagen, and K. Barry Sharpless of the Scripps Research Institute “for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry.” In “click chemistry,” molecular building blocks snap together quickly and efficiently to let chemists build more complicated molecules. But bioorthogonal chemistry takes that work one step farther, allowing the technique to be used within living organisms without damaging cells.

“When someone is thinking outside the box, or in a very different way, we like to think of that as orthogonal thinking,” Dr. Bertozzi explained. “So biorthogonal means not interacting with biology. Totally separate from biology.” Her research began with an interest in developing ways to see specific sugar molecules on the surface of cells. But it has developed into an approach that can be used for advanced drug delivery in fields such as chemotherapy. Bertozzi joins Ira Flatow for a wide-ranging conversation about her research, chemistry education, her early music career, and the importance of diversity in the field of chemistry.

Swing is a propulsive, groovy feeling that makes you want to move with the music. It’s hard to put into words, but if you listen to jazz, you’ve probably felt it yourself. Now, researchers have arrived at a better understanding of what generates that feeling: Their work, published in Communications Physics, focuses on timing differences between a group’s soloist and its rhythm section.

Joining Ira to discuss the new findings are Theo Geisel, a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Göttingen and the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self Organization, and Javier Arau, a saxophonist and the founder and executive director of the New York Jazz Academy.

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

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Consider Empathy For The Yeti Crab (And Other Sea Creatures, Too)

It’s easy to empathize with certain animals: soft fur, big eyes, and family units make it simple to relate to creatures like panda bears, cats, and dogs. Even some undersea critters like dolphins and whales have large fan bases among land-dwelling humans.

But the ocean is filled with many more creatures than just mammals, and many of them fall in the category of “weird.” Defector staff writer Sabrina Imbler thinks a lot about these critters that evade our categorization of “cute.” Things like deep sea worms, jelly-like invertebrates called salps, and the ghostly, hairy yeti crab are Imbler’s bread and butter.

Imbler’s new book, How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures, is filled with essays comparing aspects of their life to bizarre creatures of the deep sea. From exploring their queer identity through the underwater dance parties of the yeti crab, to grappling with living as a mixed-race person through hybridized fish, each essay is poetic and intimate. SciFri producer Kathleen Davis chats with Imbler from their home in Brooklyn, New York, about the importance of finding empathy with the strangest creatures on our planet.

Read an excerpt from How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures here.

Earlier this year a pig heart was successfully transplanted into a human for the very first time. Unfortunately, the patient lived for just under 2 months. But it still marks a big milestone in the field of xenotransplantation, or transplanting organs from one species to another.

Scientists are optimistic that advances in pig-to-human organ transplantation could save the lives of some of the over 100,000 people in the waiting for organ donations in the United States.

Ira talks with Dr. Muhammad Mohiuddin, professor of surgery and director of the Cardiac Xenotransplantation Program at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, about what he’s learned in the 10 months since the historic heart transplant, and about the barriers to widespread acceptance of interspecies organ transplantation.

Later, Ira talks with Dr. Megan Sykes, professor and director of the Center for Translational Immunology at Columbia University about how scientists decided that pigs were suitable organ donors in the first place, and the latest advancements in pig-to-human organ transplantation research.

If you’ve ever tried to connect a new Internet of Things device in your home, such as a smart plug or light, you know it can be a complicated process. Not every device works with every other device, and even the most tech-savvy customer may find themself turning to Reddit for help troubleshooting.

These are problems a new Internet of Things standard called Matter aims to solve. Created by a coalition of home device companies, Matter allows devices that run it to speak to each other, set up seamlessly, and communicate securely. The standard officially launched in early November with dozens of new Matter-enabled devices.

Ira talks to Jennifer Pattison Tuohy of The Verge about the problems Matter aims to solve, and some of the practical hitches along the road to a more seamless smart home.

Every time you turn on the tap, you become the last stop in a complicated journey.

Water from snow and streams collects in lakes and reservoirs, and cities pump it through complex filtration systems to make it pure enough to drink. The particular balance of invisible minerals in each pour from your kitchen tap makes for subtle differences in every glass. One might call it the terroir of tap water.

In a bustling hotel ballroom, surrounded by exhibition booths showing off the latest pipes, pumps and filters, a panel of judges gathered to spot those differences.

I was one of them.

The American Water Works Association assembled a panel of water wonks for its Rocky Mountain regional meeting in the ski resort town of Keystone. Here, we put tap water to the test, blind tasting samples from six cities across Colorado to crown a winner.

To read the rest of the article, visit sciencefriday.com. 

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

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Building The World’s Largest Animal Crossing Outside of LA

There’s a spot on Highway 101 in Agoura Hills, it’s pretty inconspicuous. There’s brown and green rolling hills on either side of the highway. Homes are sprinkled here and there. And then a small metal gate that leads off on a hiking trail. You probably wouldn’t know it, but soon this spot will be the location of the world’s largest animal crossing.

This crossing will reconnect habitats that have been cut off from each other for three quarters of a century and it’ll do it over a highway that is constantly buzzing with cars — 300,000 pass by this spot every single day.

In this piece we’re going on a geography voyage — from the north side of the highway to the south, and up the hills, above the highway, to get the real view.

We’ll start here — there’s a big open space on the northern side of the highway. It’s at the entrance to Liberty Canyon and where I meet Beth Pratt.

To continue reading, go to sciencefriday.com.

In March, the NASA Exoplanet Archive logged the 5,000th confirmed planet outside of our solar system. This marks a huge advance since the first exoplanet discovery in 1992, when astronomers Aleksander Wolszczan and Dale Frail announced the discovery of two planets orbiting the pulsar PSR 1257+12. Now, the Archive contains confirmed sightings of planets in a wide range of shapes and sizes—from “hot Jupiters” to “super Earths”—but they still haven’t found any solar systems just like our own. In many cases, all astronomers know about these distant planets is their size and how far away from their stars they orbit.

The TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) mission currently in orbit may eventually add ten thousand more candidates to the lists of possible planets. The Nancy Grace Roman Space telescope and ESA’s ARIEL mission, both planned for launch later this decade, could add thousands more. And the James Webb Space Telescope, currently undergoing commissioning, will attempt to characterize the atmospheres of some of the planets astronomers have already discovered.

Astronomer Jessie Christiansen, the NASA Exoplanet Archive Project science lead, joins John Dankosky to talk about what we know about planets around distant suns, and how researchers are working to learn more about these far-off worlds.

Two decades ago, scientists announced they had sequenced the human genome. What you might not know is that there were gaps in that original sequence—about 8% was completely blank.

Now, after a years-long global collaboration, scientists have finally released the first fully complete assembly of the human genome. Researchers believe these missing pieces might be the key to understanding how DNA varies between people.

Six scientific papers on the topic were published in a special edition of the academic journal Science.

Ira talks with Karen Miga and Adam Phillippy, co-founders of the Telomere to Telomere Consortium, an international effort that led to the assembly of this new fully complete human genome.

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

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From Tiny Krill To Concrete Jungles: 2022’s Best Science Books For Kids

The holidays are right around the corner, which means for those who give gifts in December, now is the time to start putting together that shopping list. If you have a young person in your life who loves science, why not expand their library and get a book or two?

Joining Ira to give their recommendation for the best children’s science books of the year—both fiction and nonfiction—are Melissa Stewart, science book author based in Boston, Massachusetts, and Kristina Holzweiss, education technology specialist based on Long Island, New York.

See the books at sciencefriday.com.

Indigenous Knowledge Is Central To Climate Solutions

As the United States observes Earth Day this year, many will be thinking about their personal relationship with—and responsibility to—the planet. But in an era of multiple planetary crises, including extinctions, global warming, and contaminated water, what about the Indigenous peoples whose millennia-old relationship with their land has been disrupted and sometimes severed by colonialism and other displacements? 

Indigenous environmental scientist and author Jessica Hernandez talks to Ira about the harms the Western science has perpetuated against colonized people, as white environmentalists created national parks on Indigenous lands and “helicopter scientists” continue to do research in the global south while using the wealth of Western institutions. And she explains why greater recognition of Indigenous science, and partnerships that center Indigenous peoples and their research questions, is good for the entire planet.

Prizes went to researchers for analyzing what makes legal documents unnecessarily difficult to understand. And for creating a moose crash-test dummy. And for explaining, mathematically, why success most often goes not to the most talented people, but instead to the luckiest.

If that sounds like a strange set of awards—that’s because it’s the Ignobel Prize Ceremony. This year, for the 32nd year in a row, laureates gathered (virtually) to be recognized for their unusual contributions to the world of science and engineering. In the words of Marc Abrahams, editor of the Annals of Improbable Research and awards ceremony ringleader, “It’s not about good or bad. If you win an Ignobel Prize, it means you’ve done something that will immediately cause anyone who hears about it to laugh, and then to think about it for the next few days or weeks.”

Abrahams joins Ira to talk about the backstory of the awards, and to introduce some highlights from this year’s online prize ceremony.

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

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The Science Behind Your Favorite Thanksgiving Dishes

Thanksgiving is right around the corner, and for many people, that means it’s time to start thinking about what will be on the menu for dinner that night. Many people will opt for a classic turkey: others, a vegetarian-focused meal. Regardless of the plan, preparing food for the holiday can take some planning, and there’s a lot of science that goes into it.

Cookbook author Kenji López-Alt thinks about the science behind cooking a lot. He’s the author of The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science, and he lists Thanksgiving as his favorite holiday. That makes him the expert on all things brine, sides, and pie. López-Alt joins Ira from his home in Seattle, Washington, to answer questions about the science behind Thanksgiving foods.

Early Wednesday morning the Artemis 1 mission launched, the first integrated flight test of NASA’s Space Launch System—a massive rocket that NASA hopes will enable an eventual lunar landing. The uncrewed launch was a long time coming. Elements of the program have been under development for over a decade. If all goes according to plan, a second Artemis flight—this time, with crew—will take place in 2024, with a crewed lunar landing in 2025.

Another component of the program, a tiny spacecraft called Capstone, entered into lunar orbit several days prior to Artemis. It will test a complicated orbit planned for a potential lunar space station called Gateway, which would serve as a way station for astronauts moving between Earth and the Moon.

Ira talks with Jim Free, NASA’s Associate Administrator for Exploration Systems Development, and Brendan Byrne, space reporter for WMFE and host of the Are We There Yet podcast, about the test flight and what lies ahead for the Artemis program.

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

Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that’s keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-472-4374

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There Are Now Eight Billion People On Earth. What’s Next?

Humankind just hit a big milestone this week: a world population of eight billion people. A hundred years ago, there were less than two billion, and now we’ve more than quadrupled that. But after decades of quick population growth, what will the next few decades hold?

Sophie Bushwick, technology editor at Scientific American, explains this to Ira live from the studio. They also talk about other science news this week, like a new initiative from COP 27 to help transition poor countries away from fossil fuels, an ambitious plan to put solar panels in space, how mental health apps aren’t protecting user data, what the discovery of the earliest cooked meal in history tells us about human evolution, and the very first lab-grown meat to gain FDA approval.

Early in 2019, Ed Galbraith faced a crowd of some 200 unhappy Springfield, Missouri residents. He wanted to make amends. Galbraith, then director of Missouri Department of Natural Resources’ environmental quality division, acknowledged that the state agency in charge of protecting the environment should have announced sooner that contaminated water had spread from an old industrial site near the Springfield-Branson National Airport. Residents had recently found out that a harmful chemical known to cause cancer had been detected in the groundwater. The contamination came from the site of the now-shuttered Litton Systems, a former defense contractor that had employed thousands of people in Springfield to make circuit boards for the Navy and telecommunications industry.

Read the rest at sciencefriday.com.

Late last year, Mark Zuckerberg took the company then known as Facebook in a new direction. He renamed it Meta, short for “metaverse.” And he promised the company would go all in on building a virtual reality world like the first famous metaverse—the fictional topic of Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel “Snow Crash.”

While many companies have tried to make metaverses in the 30 years since “Snow Crash” came out, including the popular virtual world called Second Life, we seem to be entering a new era of metaverse hype: besides Zuckerberg, Apple seems to be investing in a VR world. And even Nike wants to make a metaverse.

So what are users actually getting if these companies succeed at their goals? And are there other, perhaps better, ways to go about bringing people together virtually? Ira talks to science fiction writer and tech journalist Annalee Newitz, and Avi Bar-Zeev, a pioneer of extended-reality technologies for companies like Disney, Apple, and others.

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Science Was Big On The Ballot This Week. Here’s What Went Down

Another chaotic election week has come and gone. Across the U.S., science was on the ballot, and people cast their votes on issues like healthcare, climate change infrastructure, conservation, and abortion policy.

Nsikan Akpan, health and science editor at WNYC in New York City, joins Ira to talk about how the science ballot initiatives panned out this week. They discuss the outcomes of the abortion initiatives, California’s move to ban flavored tobacco, and what this election could mean for the future of the U.S.’ climate goals.

Plus, they discuss the mess that is COP 27 climate conference, why this hurricane season is so strange, how an in utero procedure successfully treated a rare genetic disorder, and new footage of octopuses hurling objects at each other.

In recent years, Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, has become a prominent public figure and one of the public faces of the U.S. government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

However, Science Friday has been talking to Dr. Fauci for decades, beginning in 1994, about topics ranging from HIV/AIDS to Ebola, interviewing him about everything from the Zika virus to advances in allergy research. Fauci has been in his current role at NIAID for 38 years, and has served as an advisor to seven presidents. He is the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

He spoke with Ira about his career in medical research, the things he’s most proud of achieving in his time with the NIH, and the challenges the nation still faces in dealing with the pandemic, and other disease outbreaks yet to come.

In 2003, the world became captivated by two rovers launched by NASA on a mission to Mars, known as Spirit and Opportunity. The rovers were sent to the Red Planet to discover what was on the surface. The rovers were only expected to last 90 days. Instead, Opportunity led a 15-year life of discovery, including the bombshell that Mars may once have been suitable to sustain microbial life.

The story of these twin rovers is the subject of a new documentary out this month: “Good Night Oppy,” evoking the nickname of the Opportunity rover. The film features footage taken over nearly two decades, from the building of the rovers to recent interviews with scientists involved in the mission.

Ira speaks with “Good Night Oppy” director Ryan White, as well as featured scientist Doug Ellison, engineering camera payload uplink lead at NASA, based in Alhambra, California.

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

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How Past Extinctions At The La Brea Tar Pit Can Teach Us About Our Climate Future

If you drive through Los Angeles, you’ll pass by some of California’s most iconic sites—the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Universal Studios, the Santa Monica Pier. But if you don’t look for it, you may miss the La Brea tar pits—a place where Ice Age life from around 50 thousand years ago got trapped and preserved in sticky black ooze. Visitors can see megafauna, including skeletons of saber tooth cats and dire wolves, along with a vast collection of specimens, including things as small as beetle wings and rodent dung.

La Brea was recently named as one of the world’s most important geological heritage sites by the International Union of Geological Sciences. The museum is currently planning an extensive redesign that will seek to connect visitors to research, offering lessons about climate, extinction, and survival. Dr. Lori Bettison-Varga, president and director of the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History, joins Ira to explain the significance of the site, and how a trove of Ice Age specimens can serve as a modern-day climate laboratory.

If you have a child—or interact with children on a regular basis—odds are you’ve heard about a very contagious virus: RSV, or respiratory syncytial virus. This isn’t a new illness, but it has been surging across the country. This has left parents and caretakers stressed about how to keep their kids safe.

Hospitals across the country are having trouble coping with this year’s surge, which has come earlier and stronger than normal. This week, Science Friday is spotlighting two regions affected by the wave: Wisconsin and Washington, D.C.

The two regions have their own challenges when it comes to the RSV surge. In Wisconsin, care deserts and a large elderly population make containing this virus important to avoid dangerous consequences. In Washington, D.C., hospitals are feeling the effects of years of shutting down pediatric units to make room for adult beds.

Joining Ira to talk about RSV in Wisconsin and Washington D.C. are two journalists who have been following this: Jenny Peek, news editor for Wisconsin Public Radio and Aja Drain, reporter at WAMU public radio.

Respiratory syncytial virus, known as RSV, is the number one cause of infant hospitalizations in the United States, and cases are soaring this year. Because young children have spent part—if not most—of their childhoods isolated, masking, or staying home due to the pandemic, many of their immune systems haven’t been exposed to RSV until now. It’s caused a huge surge in cases, and placed a heavy burden on pediatric clinics and hospitals.

What do you need to know about the spike in infections? Ira talks with Dr. Carol Kao, a pediatrician and assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, who has treated RSV for years. They dig into why this surge is happening now, the basics of the virus, how RSV is treated, and where we stand with an RSV vaccine.

Brain regions are associated with different functions—the hippocampus is responsible for long-term memory, for example, and the frontal lobe for personality, behavior, and emotions.

After decades of research using sophisticated brain imaging, there’s a growing consensus among neuroscientists that understanding the connections between brain regions may be even more important than the functions of the regions themselves. When it comes to understanding human cognition, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Ira speaks with Dr. Stephanie Forkel, assistant professor at the Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging at Radboud University in Nijmegen in the Netherlands, who wrote a review article in the journal Science about the importance of brain connectivity, and what it means for the future of neuroscience.

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

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Why Contraceptive Failure Rates Matter In A Post-Roe America

Birth control options have improved over the decades. Oral contraceptives are now safer, with fewer side effects. Intrauterine devices can prevent pregnancy 99.6% of the time. But no prescription drug or medical device works flawlessly, and people’s use of contraception is inexact. “No one walks into my office and says, ‘I plan on missing a pill,’” said obstetrician-gynecologist Dr. Mitchell Creinin. “There is no such thing as perfect use, we are all real-life users,” said Creinin, a professor at the University of California-Davis who wrote a widely used textbook that details contraceptive failure rates.

Even when the odds of contraception failure are small, the number of incidents can add up quickly. More than 47 million women of reproductive age in the United States use contraception and, depending on the birth control method, hundreds of thousands of unplanned pregnancies can occur each year. With most abortions outlawed in at least 13 states and legal battles underway in others, contraceptive failures now carry bigger stakes for tens of millions of Americans.

Read the rest at sciencefriday.com.

The Quest For New COVID-19 Solutions

As we head towards our third pandemic winter, the nation still is facing about 2,500 weekly deaths from COVID, and over 3,000 people a day entering the hospital due to the virus. Dr. William Haseltine is chair and president of ACCESS Health International, a former professor at Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health, and the founder of several biotechnology companies, including Human Genome Sciences. “This thing knows everything about our immune systems,” Haseltine says. “We have to find new drugs that it has never seen before, and new combinations of those. That’s what’s worked for HIV. That’s what we have to do now—and we’re doing a very poor job of that.”

Haseltine joins Ira to help explore the viral landscape, and where he sees viral research headed—from new vaccines to antiviral drugs and antibody cocktails.

When you think of evolution, you might imagine a slow process that takes millions of years. Take Tiktaalik, for example: The ancient fish, an important human ancestor, took 375 million years from climbing out of water to get to the humans you see now.Now that we’re here, we’re changing the world at an unprecedented rate. Threats like climate change, deforestation, and pollution are wiping out entire animal species in just one generation. Can evolution punch back? Or are some species fighting a losing battle?

Dr. Shane Campbell-Staton joins Ira to discuss rapid evolution in the anthropocene, and whether that’s enough to keep these species afloat.

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

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Using Family Photos Of Fall Foliage To Track Climate Change

Leaf-peeping, or tourism based on observing the colors of fall foliage, is a big industry in parts of the Northeast. So as leaves continue to change across the northern United States with the turning of the seasons, researchers are working to better understand how climate change may be affecting fall colors—changes that may affect the bottom line for those tourism-rich areas. But to tease out the factors involved with the timing of peak leaf color, the researchers need data on when leaves started to change color, when they arrive at their peak color, and when the leaf-peeping season ends. Unfortunately, satellite imagery showing leaf color is only available dating back to the year 2000—and so Stephanie Spera of the University of Richmond is trying to get data in some unconventional ways.

Spera and colleagues are engaging in a massive citizen-science project, asking for tourist snapshots of Acadia National Park that show the colors of fall. While they’ll accept your cellphone selfies, they’re especially interested in older, pre-digital images—the sort of vacation pictures that might be in your family albums, or in shoe boxes in an elderly relative’s attic. Adding those images to their data set, she says, will both help them to validate the satellite data and to extend the boundaries of their data set outwards.

Heather Goldstone, host and executive producer of Living Lab Radio on WCAI, joins Ira to talk about the project and how listeners can participate.

45 years ago, the Voyagers 1 and 2 spacecraft were launched into the cosmos from Cape Canaveral in Florida. Since then, they’ve traveled over 14 billion miles from Earth, on a grand tour of our solar system, and beyond. The mission is still running, making Voyager 1 the farthest human-built artifact from Earth.

Even before launch, scientists and engineers were hard at work planning and designing the mission. Last week, NASA announced the retirement of Dr. Ed Stone, who some called the ‘grandfather’ of the mission. Dr. Stone shepherded the Voyager program as its project scientist for 50 full years.

In this conversation from 2013, just after Voyager 1 had entered interstellar space, Ira spoke with Dr. Stone for a status update on the mission.

If two people are presented with the same set of facts, they will often draw different conclusions. For example, judges often dole out different sentences for the same case, which can lead to an unjust system. This unwanted variability in judgments in which we expect uniformity is what psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls “noise.”

The importance of thoughtful decision-making has come in stark relief during the pandemic and in the events leading up to the January 6th insurrection.

Ira talks with Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman about the role of ‘noise’ in human judgment, his long career studying cognitive biases, and how systematic decision-making can result in fewer errors.

Kahneman is the co-author of “Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment,” along with Oliver Sibony and Cass R. Sunstein, now available in paperback.

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is 13.6 billion years old, all-knowing, and a little sassy. It has a rich social life of friends, frenemies, and even love interests—all other galaxies in the local group, including the stunning Andromeda. And the Milky Way is a little disappointed that we’ve stopped telling as many stories about it.

Or at least, that’s how folklorist and astronomer Dr. Moiya McTier imagines the galaxy’s personality when writing her new book, The Milky Way: An Autobiography of Our Galaxy. The book stretches from the beginning of the universe to the birth of our planet, and then on to the eventual theoretical end of the cosmos. Along the way, we learn both the science of how stars form and galaxies collide, and the many stories and myths humans have told about these bodies throughout our relatively brief lives.

McTier joins Ira to tell all (on behalf of the Milky Way), and explain the importance of story in scientific knowledge and discovery.

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

Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that’s keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-472-4374

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Why Do Cats Purr? An Investigation Into A Purr-fect Mystery

Science Friday recently received a voicemail from a listener named Violet from Maui, Hawai’i, who wanted to know: Why do cats purr?

We wanted to see what other cat lovers knew about cat purring. So we sent our talented SciFri colleagues Diana Montano and Kyle Marian Viterbo to the Meow Parlor, a cat cafe in New York City to find out.

Guest host Katherine Wu, who recently wrote about why cats purr for The Atlantic, also talks with Robert Eklund, professor of language, culture, and phonetics at Linköping University in Linköping, Sweden. He explains what we do and don’t know about how and why cats purr.

James Earl Jones played Darth Vader for 45 years. But this September, he officially stepped down from the role. Fear not, Star Wars fans—the villain isn’t gone for good. Instead, the filmmakers have teamed up with the Ukrainian AI company Respeecher to recreate his voice.

Respeecher can convert one person’s speech into the voice of another. The company’s work has appeared in the Star Wars canon already, as Young Luke Skywalker in “The Mandalorian” and “The Book of Boba Fett.” And just last month, they debuted their Darth Vader mimic in the T.V. show “Obi-Wan Kenobi.”

They always knew that it would be challenging to recreate Vader’s iconic voice. But their job got a whole lot harder when Russian troops invaded their nation.

Respeecher chief technology officer Dmytro Bielievtsov and sound engineer Bogdan Belyaev join guest host Kathleen Davis to talk about their work.

Toxic mushrooms are not unusual in the Mountain West.

“This is probably a lepiota,” said Susan Stacy, looking at a mushroom on a recent afternoon in a Boise, Idaho, neighborhood not far from downtown. “See that little dark nub in the middle and little flecks around here?”

Stacy turned to her mushroom identification book.

“Edibility: to be avoided. Perhaps poisonous,” she said.

While this little mushroom could be problematic for a curious dog or child, it doesn’t compare to one of the world’s deadliest mushrooms – which Stacy discovered in Boise last September.

She remembers that it was a hot day, and she decided to take a detour from her normal route to check out a busier area where many lawns were “generously” watered.

“And here I come upon this mushroom, and I knew it was an Amanita because I had seen them before. And an Amanita, to my mind, is a gorgeous, statuesque, elegant creation. They’re just stately,” she said.

The genus Amanita includes, incidentally, the species on which the red and white mushroom emoji is likely based, which also happens to be poisonous.

Read the rest of this story on sciencefriday.com

The ocean is filled with delicious ingredients, but our favorite seafood items might not stick around on menus forever … thanks to climate change taking its toll on fisheries. As a result, scientists are thinking more and more about what the future of food is going to look like—what ingredients we should eat more, and what we should eat less. That could mean we’ll eat more items like kelp, oysters, and mussels, which are a great source of nutrients, since they can be sustainably harvested.

But there’s another seafood that’s being encouraged as a food of the future. But it’s a little more unfamiliar—and maybe surprising—to most of the world. It’s jellyfish. Although it’s a fairly common ingredient in several countries, like China and Vietnam, it hasn’t quite broken into the international market yet.

Guest host Katherine Wu talks with Agostino Petroni, a journalist based in Rome who reported on the topic for Hakai Magazine, and Dr. Antonella Leone, a researcher at the Italian National Research Council’s Institute of Sciences of Food Production, based in Lecce, Italy. They talk about the benefits of jellyfishing, what it’s going to take to catapult jellyfish into the international seafood market, and their favorite jellyfish recipes.

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

Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that’s keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-472-4374

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Don’t Trust What You See On TikTok This Election Season

Midterm elections in the United States are just under two weeks away. And new research suggests a significant risk of misinformation for American social media users—particularly from the video-sharing platform TikTok. Cybersecurity researchers at NYU published their findings after submitting misleading advertisements to YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok.

The ads contained either the wrong dates or voter requirements for upcoming elections, or perpetuated narratives about the validity of past elections. And while TikTok prohibits all political advertising, 90% of those test ads were approved. Meanwhile, YouTube performed the best in rejecting all of the ads, and Facebook accepted about 30% of English-language ads.

New Scientist’s Tim Revell joins co-host Kathleen Davis to talk about the misinformation implications of social media advertisements. Plus, the dramatic electrical charge of swarming honeybees, the good news about declining monkeypox cases, and other stories.

Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants was first published nearly a decade ago—but in 2020, the book made the New York Times best-seller lists, propelled mainly by word of mouth. The book explores the lessons and gifts that the natural world, especially plants, have to offer to people. Kimmerer writes that improving our relationship with nature requires the acknowledgment and celebration of a reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. “I think we can care better for one another, for the land, and in fact we can do better science when we consider all of these streams of evidence, and assumptions, about the living world,” says Kimmerer.

Kimmerer is a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and the founder and director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. In this SciFri Book Club discussion, recorded before a live Zoom audience, she discusses the book, the role of ceremony in our lives, and the challenge of addressing ecological issues such as exotic species within a reciprocal framework.

As winter approaches in the northern hemisphere, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are monitoring the rise of new COVID-19 variants—all, so far, descendants of 2021’s highly transmissible Omicron variant, whose emergence kicked off a deadly winter wave. Will any new variants emerge with the same potential?

Guest host Katherine Wu talks to viral evolution researcher Dr. Verity Hill about the forces that may encourage the emergence of another concerning variant, and why new variants are more likely to evade our immune system’s defenses.

Meanwhile, pediatric departments around the country are seeing more children with influenza and RSV than usual, heralding an early and potentially more severe start to the winter respiratory virus season. Duke University’s Dr. Ibukun Kalu joins to share about how multiple viruses may add to the risks COVID poses, as well as the toll the pandemic has already taken on healthcare’s capacity.

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

Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that’s keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-472-4374

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The Science Behind Why You Should Ask For Help

Sometimes asking for help—even for the smallest of favors—can feel awkward, or like you’re inconveniencing someone else. But the odds are, you’re probably wrong. Studies show that people are much more willing to lend a helping hand than you would think, and both parties usually end up happier.

Guest host Shahla Farzan talks with Dr. Xuan Zhao, a psychologist at Stanford University, about the psychology behind asking for help.

Long-lasting chemicals known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, are used widely in everything from firefighting foam to microwavable popcorn bags. The chemicals are a popular component of polymer coatings that resist heat, grease, stains and water.

PFAS compounds (a family that includes roughly 12,000 different substances are often called “forever chemicals” in popular science coverage, because they’re designed to be super stable and don’t break down in the environment. But what makes them last “forever” from a chemistry perspective? And what can we do about it?

Current PFAS disposal methods are expensive and labor-intensive, blasting the chemicals with temperatures over 1,000 degrees C in a high-pressure environment. But a research study published in Science has found a possible Achilles’ heel: a weak spot in the chemical bonds. The research points to a new possible method for disposing of PFAS chemicals, which uses special reagents to knock off a group of oxygen atoms at the tail end of PFAS, triggering a cascade of reactions that breaks the PFAS chemicals down into harmless components.

The paper’s lead author, Brittany Trang, joins guest host Shahla Farzan to discuss this development in PFAS research.

We’ve all been there—standing by the recycling bin, holding some sort of plastic object, and trying to figure out if it can go in the bin.

There are many different types of plastic out there, from the film that wraps the meat at the grocery store, to the plastic in your milk jug. But they all differ in their ability to be recycled, and in the specific procedures and recipes that it takes to process them. Writing in the journal Science, a team of researchers describes a demonstration process that can break down a mixed bag of plastics, even dirty ones, and produce a single chemical output that could be used in industry.

The process starts with a catalytic oxidation process involving metal salts, an acetic acid solvent, heat, and oxygen. That process is essentially a “controlled combustion,” says Dr. Gregg Beckham of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. The oxidation process breaks the plastics in the reaction into a blend of liquid chemicals. Then, that blend of products is fed to a strain of engineered bacteria that have been designed to be able to eat each of those chemical breakdown products, and use them to make a specified product.

Beckham says that in the initial experiment, they created two different products—one a biodegradable plastic, and one a precursor to a type of recyclable nylon—but the method could conceivably be adapted to any product that bacteria can be enabled to grow via synthetic biology. Beckham joins SciFri’s John Dankosky to talk about the demonstration, and the challenges of moving this technology out of the laboratory and into an operating recycling process.

Science has yet to pinpoint exactly why some people experience depression and others do not. And it may never be able to give a fully satisfying answer. While people with depression may have similar symptoms, each person’s story is just a little different. And there’s no “one size fits all” treatment.

Guest host John Dankosky talks with John Moe, who has spent a lot of time thinking about the nuances of depression through a humorous lens. Moe is the host and creator of the podcast Depresh Mode and author of The Hilarious World of Depression, which shares a name with his previous podcast. 

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

Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that’s keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-472-4374

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A Boost For U.S. Electric Vehicle Battery Production

This week, the Biden administration announced it would issue grants totaling some $2.8 billion to increase U.S.-based production of electric vehicle batteries and mining of the minerals used in their manufacture. The grants would go to companies in 12 states to help boost domestic production of key battery ingredients such as lithium, graphite and nickel, reducing the country’s reliance on China and other foreign battery producers. Casey Crownhart, a climate and technology reporter at MIT Technology Review, joins John Dankosky to talk about the plan and the road ahead for U.S.-based electric vehicles.

They also talk about a surge in renewables use in Europe, new options for COVID vaccine boosters, charges of environmental racism against the state of Louisiana, and new research into why some of us seem to be magnets for mosquito bites.

Climate change is already driving many visible effects in our world, from extreme flooding to the extinction of species. It threatens agriculture and life on coastal lands. But researchers predict a changing climate can also affect humans in other, more nuanced ways, including changes in human behavior and mental health.

Co-host Shahla Farzan talks to Stanford researcher Marshall Burke, whose research has looked at the link between climate extremes, including heat waves and drought, and historic and contemporary conflicts. Plus, John Dankosky interviews Queens College neuroscientist Yoko Nomura about her work finding high rates of childhood psychiatric disorders among children whose mothers were pregnant, and under extreme stress, during 2012’s Superstorm Sandy—a hint at the generational toll of intensifying disasters. They discuss why the answer to both challenges may be providing more social and economic support to those most vulnerable to stress as the globe warms.

The Mysterious Case Of Alaska’s Crabs

For the first time ever, the Bering Sea snow crab fishery will not open for the upcoming season. Alaska’s Department of Fish and Game announced the closure Monday afternoon. The Bristol Bay red king crab fishery will also be closed this year — for a second year in a row. Gabriel Prout co-owns the F/V Silver Spray with his dad and brothers. The Silver Spray is a 116-foot steel crabber that’s homeported in Kodiak. He said he wasn’t surprised that Fish and Game closed the king crab fishery — in a normal year, he’d go out for king crab, too. But numbers have been on the decline and that fishery didn’t open last year, either.

“The real shocking part is the total and complete collapse of the snow crab fishery which no one expected last year when it happened, and a complete closure this year was equally as shocking,” Prout said. Miranda Westphal, an area management biologist with Alaska’s Department of Fish and Game, said the sudden decline in snow crab came as a shock to biologists as well. Back in 2018, there was record recruitment in the Bering Sea snow crab stock. Those numbers started to go down in 2019, and there was no survey in 2020 due to the pandemic.

Read the rest at sciencefriday.com.

In Hawai’i, Conservation Has Also Provided Fishermen Economic Benefits

Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, along the northwestern Hawaiian islands, has been under some kind of conservation protection since the days of Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency. It is a deeply sacred place to native Hawaiians. And at more than 583,000 square miles, it’s also the world’s largest fully protected no-fishing zone, after its expansion under the Obama administration in 2016.

Marine protected areas like Papahānaumokuākea are designed to provide refuge to fish and other marine mammals that have been overexploited and otherwise threatened by human activities. But research has remained inconclusive on if these protections provide enough benefits to nearby areas to blunt the economic impact of exclusion zones. This is especially debated in the case of big, mobile, migratory species like Hawai’i’s all-important bigeye and yellowfin tuna.

Now, new research from an interdisciplinary team of economists and ecologists looked at how well Hawaiian tuna fishermen did when they fished close to the monument, and further away. And they found, to their surprise, that there was a strong benefit, which increased in the years after the monument’s expansion. Fishermen near the monument caught more tuna, for the same amount of effort, than fishermen further away.

Co-host Shahla Farzan talks to first author Sarah Medoff about the surprising findings, and why the economics of a marine protected area might matter to conservation decisions.

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

Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that’s keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-472-4374

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Burying Green: Eco-Friendly Death Care On The Rise

Dying, it turns out, isn’t carbon neutral. Like many of the choices we make in our lifetimes, the choice to cremate or preserve our bodies after death comes with tradeoffs as well. With preservation and burial, there’s the carbon cost of cemetery space, the materials to make a coffin, and the chemicals required to prevent decay. With cremation, the body’s carbon is released into the atmosphere through the burning of natural gas.

This is one of the reasons why companies are starting to offer more eco-friendly options, such as water-assisted cremation. Composting human bodies is another option, allowing our carbon to be sequestered in the soil, and providing nutrients for ecosystems or gardens. But in the United States, these lower-carbon funereal options are often against the law.

Now, that’s slowly changing, with pressure from people who wish to use those options for themselves when the time comes. Producer Kathleen Davis discusses these issues and more with mortician Caitlin Doughty and Katrina Spade, founder of Recompose, a company that has pioneered the practice of human composting. Plus, the relationship between grief, ritual, and the choices we have for our mortal remains.

When people hear the word “prosthetic,” they’ll probably think of an arm or a leg. But what about a prosthetic for the brain? A team of neuroscientists is designing a device that could “zap” the brain into remembering information better, and it’s targeted for people with memory loss. They’re doing so by studying the electrical patterns involved in memory, then mimicking them with electrodes implanted in the brain.

Ira speaks with Dr. Robert Hampson, neuroscientist at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, who is working on the implant.

Life on the International Space Station throws some wrenches into how food and eating work. There’s very little gravity, after all. And there are big differences between nutritional needs on Earth and in space.

Astronauts must exercise two hours each day on the International Space Station to prevent bone and muscle loss, meaning daily caloric intake needs to be somewhere between 2,500 and 3,500 calories. Sodium must also be reduced, as an astronaut’s body sheds less of it in space. Astronauts also have an increased need for Vitamin D, as their skin isn’t able to create it from sunlight as people on Earth do.

So, how do all these limitations affect the food astronauts eat? Joining guest host Kathleen Davis to answer these gustatory questions is Xulei Wu, food systems manager for the International Space Station in Houston, Texas.

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

Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that’s keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-472-4374

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Scientists Are Trying To Study Human Neurons… In Rat Brains?

Scientists have a tricky time studying neurons, partially because they are remarkably difficult to grow in a lab. They need other cells around them, and they don’t replicate or reproduce like other cells do. In a new study in Nature, researchers figured out that they can take a ball of human brain tissue and frankenstein it into a rat’s brain, and the rat can respond to it. This exciting discovery could offer scientists a new way to study the human brain.

This week’s co-host Kathleen Davis talks with Umair Irfan, staff writer at Vox, about this story and other science news of the week. They chat about neurons that can play ping pong, COVID updates, a disturbing uptick in STI cases, how deep sea mining could destroy an underappreciated ecosystem, and how a mummified dinosaur named Dakota is challenging what paleontologists knew about dino preservation.

Gamers often spend hours embarking on quests, unlocking new levels, and collecting badges. But what about when aspects of games start popping up in other parts of life—like work, school, and exercise? Adrian Hon created the fitness app “Zombies, Run!” and has thought a lot about how the principles of gaming have crept into so many different corners of our lives, and why it may not always be as innocent as it seems.

Ira and co-host Kathleen Davis talk with Adrian Hon, author of You’ve Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All. Hon is also the CEO and founder of the game developer, Six to Start, based in Edinburgh, United Kingdom.

If you’re a person who enjoys beer, you’ve likely been aware of the craft beer boom of the last couple of decades. India Pale Ales, or IPAs, have become some of the most popular types of beer brewed in local breweries. But it doesn’t get more local than a type of beer that most people have never heard of: the gruit.

The gruit traces its origins back to the 11th century. Historically, instead of hops, brewers used herbs and spices native to wherever they lived. This results in a flavorful beer that changes taste depending on the plant life in the region.

Fast forward a few hundred years to now, and you’ll find brewers getting back to this hyper-local brewing tradition. Those brewers include Isaac Patient, head brewer of Sixpoint Brewery in Brooklyn, New York. His team partnered with Saara Nafici and Brendan Parker at Red Hook Farms to procure four key herbs for the brew: rosemary, tarragon, lemongrass, and mugwort.

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

Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that’s keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-472-4374

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The Politics Of Science: Voters Have An Important Voice

This November’s general election season covers every level of government, from Congress at the federal level, to state governors and local ballot initiatives. Also on the ballot are many issues where understanding science better might result in better policy—think zoning questions about building next to rising seas or fire-prone wildlands, or questions about drug legalization and abortion access. Even whether to invest in education that might create more STEM workers—that’s a science question too.

Ira talks to Rachel Kerestes of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s ‘Science is US’ initiative, and Howard Learner of the Environmental Law & Policy Center. They cover region-specific and state-specific science concerns, the need to connect more policy makers to scientific expertise, and how voters can have a voice in science issues even at the local and state level.

Make your voice heard! Go to www.sciencefriday.com to fill our our survey about which science issues you see on your ballot.

This week, geneticist Svante Pääbo was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Pääbo is the director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, and his research looks at finding bits of genetic material from ancient hominid lineages embedded within the modern human genome. The prize committee awarded the prize “for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution.”

Pääbo described his work as like an archeological dig. “We sort of make excavations in the human genome,” he said. “What we do is to look for the genetic material, for DNA, from people who have lived here long before us, and try to see how they are related to us, and how they are related to other forms of humans that were also here, such as Neanderthals.”

In a conversation recorded in 2017, Pääbo describes his research, and how his team has developed molecular techniques to see where fragments of ancient DNA might still be found in the modern human genome. Spoiler alert—we’re all a little bit Neanderthal.

About one in 10 Americans have diabetes, and most of the cases are Type 2, in which cells become more resistant to insulin. But wouldn’t it be cool if we could flip a switch so those cells become sensitive to insulin again?

That’s pretty much what bears do when they hibernate. A new study in the journal iScience identifies the eight proteins that allow bears to turn their insulin on and off, which keeps them from burning through their fat stores while they snooze.

Although they hibernate for months, bears wake up from their slumber with their muscle still toned, bones intact, and organs functioning normally. But after a few weeks on bedrest, humans can’t. By studying how bears hibernate, researchers hope to find ways to cure human ailments.

Dr. Blair Perry, a postdoc studying genomics at Washington State University, joins Ira to talk about what we can learn from bear biology.

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

Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that’s keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-472-4374

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Hurricane Ian Destroys Iconic Florida House Meant To Survive Hurricanes

The Cape Romano Dome House, built in 1982, was an iconic—if more recently unsightly—piece of Florida architecture. The six interconnected domes located in Collier County, Florida, were built to be hurricane resistant and self-sustaining, with solar power, rainwater harvesting, and other innovations.

However, erosion and rising sea levels had put the structure at risk, with the structure’s foundation pillars being completely underwater by 2009. Last week’s Hurricane Ian finally destroyed the structure. Sophie Bushwick, technology editor at Scientific American, joins Ira to talk about the symbolic loss of the building and other stories from the week in science. They discuss possible approaches to repair the damaged Nord Stream gas pipeline, the finding that certain cancerous tumors contain their own microbiomes of bacteria and fungi, and the delicate process of interpreting the behavioral cues of your feline friends.

California and New York recently adopted regulations which ban sales of new gas-powered vehicles by 2035. Several other states are likely to quickly follow suit. But the uptick in vehicle demand will also require new infrastructure, and increase demand for mining metals used to produce car batteries.

Jessika Trancik, professor at the Institute for Data, Systems and Society at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and David Reichmuth, senior engineer for the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Clean Transportation Program, join Ira Flatow to discuss the future of electric vehicles. Plus, Eric Gebhardt, chief technology officer at Wabtec, an industrial locomotive company, discusses the challenges and promise of battery-electric trains.

Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that’s keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-472-4374

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New Alzheimer’s Drug Reduces Cognitive Decline, Say Biotech Firms

This week, the biotech firms Biogen and Eisai released preliminary data from the clinical trials for their new Alzheimer’s drug, lecanemab. The companies said that the drug slowed cognitive decline by 27% in patients treated with the intravenous medication. It’s likely the drug will get the FDA’s approval by the end of the year.

This all comes after the recent controversy surrounding Biogen’s last Alzheimer’s drug Aduhelm. Medicare recently announced that they will not cover that drug and others like it, unless patients are enrolled in a clinical trial.

Guest host John Dankosky talks with science journalist Roxanne Khamsi about this and other top science news of the week including a diamond that hints that Earth’s mantle contains water, brainy birds, and hearing aids made of false teeth.

The People’s Republic of Bangladesh is one of the most densely populated countries on Earth, with a population of 165 million people living in an area a bit smaller than the state of Iowa. To feed all those people, farmers in Bangladesh work year-round: Instead of just growing crops during the rainy monsoon season, they grow a second or even third crop during the dry season—using groundwater to irrigate, and creating a more food-secure region.

Research published in the journal Science this month found something amazing about all that groundwater. By pumping water for crops in the dry season, Bangladeshi farmers were leaving space in the aquifers to recharge during the rainy monsoon season. And this space allowed the aquifers to recapture more than 20 trillion gallons of water, or twice the capacity of China’s massive Three Gorges Dam, over the last 30 years.

The researchers call this the Bengal Water Machine, evidence for a similar concept that was first proposed nearly 50 years ago called the Ganges Water Machine.

Guest host John Dankosky talks to lead author Mohammad Shamsudduha and International Water Management Institute researcher Aditi Mukherji about how this groundwater pumping benefits farmers, and the need for more data as climate change continues.

Jim Metzner is one of the pioneers of science radio—he’s been making field recordings and sharing them with audiences for more than 40 years. He hosted shows such as “Sounds of Science” in the 1980s, which later grew into “Pulse of the Planet,” a radio show about “the sound of life on Earth.”

Over the decades, Metzner has created an incredible time capsule of soundscapes, and now, his entire collection is going to the Library of Congress.

John Dankosky talks with Metzner about what he’s learned about the natural world from endless hours of recordings and what we can all learn from listening. Plus, they’ll discuss some of his favorite recordings. To hear the best audio quality, it might be a good idea to use headphones if you can.

Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that’s keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-472-4374

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After Hurricane Ian, Robots To The Rescue

Hurricane Ian made landfall in southwest Florida Wednesday, with winds over 150 miles per hour, high storm surge and heavy rains. As the storm, now weaker, is projected to move northward, search and rescue operations are setting out to assess the damage – with help from robots, both flying and swimming.

Producer Christie Taylor talks with David Merrick, who is leading the emergency management team responsible for flying drones over areas hit by disasters like Ian, about what it takes to use robots in these contexts and how they help speed up response and recovery efforts.

Vague legal safeguards for medical marijuana users in Pennsylvania are forcing patients to choose between their job and a drug they say has changed their life, and leaving skittish employers vulnerable to lawsuits, according to a three-month Spotlight PA investigation.

While state law protects workers from being fired or denied a job just for having a doctor’s permission to use marijuana, those protections become opaque when people actually take the drug — regardless of whether they do it in their personal time.

“It essentially makes no sense,” Pittsburgh attorney John McCreary Jr., who represents employers, told Spotlight PA.

Some jobs are specifically regulated by state and federal drug testing rules, but most fall into a gray area that leaves the interpretation of the rules up to employers and the courts. That leads to inconsistency and what employers see as a lose-lose scenario: Either risk a wrongful termination suit, or potentially allow an unsafe work environment.

Read the rest of the article at sciencefriday.com.

This week, a small spacecraft slammed into an asteroid—on purpose. The mission, known as DART (for ‘Double Asteroid Redirection Test’) was an effort to try out a potential means of planetary defense. NASA wanted to discover: Is it possible to change the path of an approaching asteroid by slamming something into it?

On Monday evening, the DART spacecraft slammed into the small asteroid moonlet Dimorphos, which orbits a slightly larger asteroid called Didymos. Pictures taken from onboard the spacecraft showed the rocky, rubbly terrain of Dimorphos approaching closer and closer, then disappearing, while telescopes observing the impact and cameras on a neighboring Italian Space Agency CubeSat showed a plume of debris ejected from the asteroid.

Dr. Nancy Chabot, the DART coordination lead and a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, which built the spacecraft and is managing the mission for NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office, joins host John Dankosky. They talk about the impact, and what scientists hope to learn about asteroids and planetary defense from the crash.

Rabies is one of the deadliest diseases in the world. It’s fatal in 99% of cases. Because of that, rabies prevention has been one of the most important—and successful—public health initiatives in the US.

To contain rabies outbreaks, the USDA leads a mass vaccination effort from August to October to keep the disease from being carried by critters. It’s an action-packed adventure involving raccoons, helicopters, and fish-flavored candy.

SciFri’s director of news and audio, John Dankosky, speaks with Jordona Kirby, the rabies field coordinator for the USDA’s National Rabies Management Program. She’s based in Milton, Florida.

As the invasive spotted lanternfly continues to spread west in the United States, researchers are trying to better understand—and perhaps find a way to control —the behavior of the pretty, but ravenous, insects. Important agricultural crops, including grapes, peaches, and apples are especially at risk from the spreading infestation.

As the lanternflies feed on tree sap, they excrete a sweet-smelling liquid known as honeydew. That liquid can attract other insects, and can also allow fungus to grow on affected trees. Writing in the journal Frontiers In Insect Science this week, researchers from the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service report that chemicals in the honeydew may act as a signaling agent among the lanternflies—in some cases attracting others of the species. The finding may help explain the way in which the insects can infest a given tree in huge numbers, while leaving neighboring trees largely alone.

John Dankosky talks with the paper’s lead author, Dr. Miriam Cooperband of USDA APHIS, about her research, and whether the finding may lead to a way to bait or repel the invasive insects.

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

Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that’s keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-472-4374

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Sperm Swim Together To Help Each Other Reach The Egg

New research is complicating our understanding of how, exactly, sperm are able to reach eggs. The predominant theory is that sperm compete against each other, with the strongest swimmer fertilizing the egg.

But a new study, using cow sperm, suggests that sperm might actually swim together, forming clusters to help each other swim upstream to reach the egg.

Researchers created a device that has some of the features of a female reproductive tract, which they tested using a polymer substance that mimics cervical mucus. The intensity of the flow of this mucus-like fluid influenced how well the sperm clustered together. The faster the flow, the more likely the sperm were to band together to swim upstream.

Ira talks with Dr. Chih-Kuan Tung, associate professor of physics at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University about his research on sperm motility, and how it could improve infertility testing in the future.

When you hear the word ‘rover,’ it’s likely your brain imagines another planet. Take Mars, for instance, where the steadfast rolling science labs of Perseverance and Curiosity—and the half dozen robotic rovers before them—slowly examine the geology of the Red Planet for signs of past habitability.

But Earth has rovers too. The autonomous, deep-sea Benthic Rover II, engineered by researchers at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), trawls a desolate surface too—this one 4,000 meters below the surface of the ocean, on a cold abyssal plain, under the crushing weight of 6,000 pounds per square inch of pressure.

Deep beneath the surface, the rover is seeking data about carbon: What carbon sources make it down to such a deep sea floor? And does that carbon return to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, where it might contribute to global warming, or sequestered safely as an inert part of the ocean sediment?

Ira Flatow talks to engineer Alana Sherman and ecologist Crissy Hufford, both of MBARI, about the work it takes to make a rover for the deep sea, and the value of its data as we look to the future of our oceans.

Igor Klymenko is a 17-year-old inventor from Ukraine, and he recently won the Chegg.org Global Student Prize—a $100,000 award given to a young change-maker. Klymenko won it for his invention, the Quadcopter Mines Detector, which is designed to locate underground landmines. The issue of unexploded landmines cannot be understated—some estimates show there could be about 100 million of them scattered across the globe.

Klymenko is a student at both the University of Alberta in Canada and the Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute in Ukraine. He joins Ira this week to talk about the Quadcopter Mines Detector, and how he’s trying to help his home country, Ukraine, through engineering.

If you’re looking for a new sport or hobby to try, forget about rock climbing or kitesurfing. If you don’t mind getting a bit dirty, consider competitive soil judging—a contest in which contestants work to best analyze, identify, and describe the layers of soil in a 5-foot-deep trench dug into a field. People can compete either individually, or in a team format, where different members of the team work to describe the soil’s characteristics—from color, to grain size, to how it interacts with water.

Clare Tallamy, a senior at Virginia Tech majoring in environmental science, recently won the individual competition in an international soil judging contest held in Scotland as part of the 2022 World Congress of Soil Science. She joins Ira to describe how soil judging works, gives an introduction to soil taxonomy, and explains the practical significance of being able to excel at judging a sample of soil.

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

Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that’s keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-472-4374

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Biden Declares The COVID-19 Pandemic Over. Is It?

During an interview with 60 minutes last weekend, President Joe Biden said “the pandemic is over.”

“The pandemic is over. We still have a problem with covid, we’re still doing a lot of work on it. But the pandemic is over. If you notice, no one is wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape, “ Biden said at the Detroit auto show.

This comment has prompted some dismay from the public health community. The World Health Organization hasn’t declared the pandemic over just yet. And the criteria to declare a pandemic over is nuanced and cannot be declared by the leader of a single country.

Ira talks with Katherine Wu, staff writer at the Atlantic, about that and other top science stories of the week including a new ebola outbreak in Uganda, the latest ant census, and Perseverance’s rock collection.

 Diving Into The Biggest Ideas In The Universe

Can mere mortals learn real physics, without all the analogies? Dr. Sean Carroll, Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University and author of The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space, Time, and Motion, says yes—if you’re willing to accept a bit of math.

Carroll says that he dreams of a world in which ordinary people can have informed ideas on physics, and might argue about the latest black hole news as urgently as they might debate a sports team’s performance in last night’s game. His new book starts with some of the basics of motion that might be taught in an introductory physics class, then builds on them up through concepts like time and black holes.

Carroll joins Ira to talk about the book, exploring where physics equations leave off and philosophical concepts begin, and the nebulous world in between.

To read an excerpt of The Biggest Ideas In The Universe: Space, Time, and Motion, visit sciencefriday.com.

Was Soylent Green Right About 2022?

In the spring of 1973, the movie Soylent Green premiered. The film drops us into a New York City that’s overcrowded, polluted, and dealing with the effects of a climate catastrophe. Only the city’s elite can afford clean water and real foods, like strawberry jam. The rest of the population relies on a communal food supply called Soylent. There’s Soylent Red, Soylent Yellow… and a new product: Soylent Green.

The year the film takes place? 2022. And spoiler alert: Soylent Green is people.

While the 2022 the film depicts is—thankfully—much darker than our current situation, the message still holds up. When the film premiered, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and the Clean Air Act were very much in the country’s consciousness. 50 years later, warmer temperatures, soil degradation, and social inequality are more relevant than ever.

Joining Ira to talk about the importance of Soylent Green 50 years later is Sonia Epstein, associate curator of science and film at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City. Also joining is soil scientist Jo Handelsman, director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery in Madison, Wisconsin.

 Saturn’s Rings Might Be Made From A Missing Moon

Saturn’s rings are one of the most stunning, iconic features of our solar system. But for a very long time, Saturn was a ring-less planet. Research suggests the rings are only about 100 million years old—younger than many dinosaurs. Because Saturn wasn’t born with its rings, astronomers have been scratching their heads for decades wondering how the planet’s accessories formed. A new study in the journal Science suggests a new idea about the rings’ origins—and a missing moon may hold the answers.

Co-author Dr. Burkhard Militzer, a planetary scientist and professor at UC Berkeley, joins Ira to talk about the surprising origins of Saturn’s rings.

Want to know more? Listen to this previous Science Friday episode about Saturn’s formation.

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

Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that’s keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-472-4374

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Pulling Water From Thin Air? It’s Materials Science, Not Magic.

You’ve probably seen a magic trick in which a performer makes a playing card, coin, or even a rabbit appear out of thin air. Writing in the journal Nature Communications, researchers at UT Austin describe an experiment where they seem to pull water out of dry air—but it’s not magic, and it’s not a trick. Carefully applied materials science and engineering allows the team to extract as much as six liters of water per day from one kilogram of their polymer, even in areas with 15% humidity. That’s drier than the Sahara Desert.

The material itself contains two main ingredients. First, a konjac gum, which can be found in Asian cooking, rapidly absorbs water from the air. (In scientific terms, it’s a “hygroscopic material.”) The second ingredient, hydroxypropyl cellulose, responds dramatically to changes in temperature. So at lower temperatures, the team’s polymer film absorbs water, but can rapidly release that water when the film is heated by the sun or artificial heating.

Dr. Guihua Yu, a professor of materials science and mechanical engineering at UT Austin and one of the authors of the report, joins Ira to talk about the material, its applications, and what challenges remain before it can be put into widespread use.

An AI Partnership May Improve Breast Cancer Screenings

Reading a mammogram is a specialized skill, and one that takes a lot of training. Even expertly-trained radiologists may miss up to 20% of breast cancers present in mammograms, especially if a patient is younger or has larger, denser breasts.

Researchers have been working since the advent of artificial intelligence to find ways to assist radiologists in making more accurate diagnoses. This July, a German research team, publishing in The Lancet Digital Health, found that when AI is used to help sort mammograms into low, uncertain, and high risk categories, a partnership between the radiologist and the algorithm leads to more accurate results.

To explain how this result may be translated into real clinical settings, Ira talks to Harvard’s Constance Lehman, a longtime researcher in the field of breast imaging. She talks about the promise of AI in breast cancer screening, its limitations, and the work ahead to ensure it actually serves patients.

A Smoky Aftertaste: Keeping Wildfires Out Of Your Wine Glass

Readers who love wine: It’s time to have a serious talk. California, Washington and Oregon are three of our largest wine-producing states. They’re also some of the states most prone to wildfires.

The West Coast is in the midst of its wildfire season, which makes us wonder: How does smoke impact the wines that come from this region? And what could this mean for those who enjoy a Napa Valley merlot, or an Oregon pinot noir?

There’s an area of food science research dedicated to answering these questions. Factors like the length of smoke exposure, the chemical composition of that smoke, and the type of wine being created all factor into how the final wine product tastes. The best side of a smoked wine spectrum is a mild campfire flavor. The bad side is burning tires.

Joining Ira to talk about how scientists are working to better understand how wildfire smoke impacts wine is Dr. Cole Cerrato, assistant professor of food science at Oregon State University in Corvallis, Oregon.

Artemis Update: What Will It Take To Make It Back To The Moon?

Sixty years ago this week, President John F. Kennedy gave an historic address at Rice University, in which he laid down a challenge to the nation and the world.

“But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”

Six decades later, going to space is still hard. This week, a flight of Blue Origin’s ‘New Shepard’ rocket experienced ‘an anomaly’ during a launch, triggering the escape system for the capsule (which, thankfully, was uncrewed.) And the Artemis 1 mission, the first test flight of America’s planned return to the moon, is on hold while a leaking fuel line is addressed.

Dr. John Blevins, the chief engineer for the Space Launch System, the massive rocket powering the Artemis 1 flight, joins Ira to provide an update on the mission, and why, after 60 years, the trip to the moon still contains so many challenges to be overcome.

When you look into the sky, the space between stars looks empty and void—but it isn’t. That’s where stars are born. And since astronomers and astrophysicists can’t reach these stellar nurseries, they rely on data collected by telescopes to peer into space.

But what if you could hold part of the galaxy in their hands? Or peer into an orb and see the birthplace of stars? By combining astrophysics and art, that’s exactly what Dr. Nia Imara does. She’s a visual artist and assistant professor of astronomy at UC Santa Cruz, based in Santa Cruz, California. Imara talks with Ira about studying stellar nurseries, how she creates stellar nursery spheres, and what she can learn from holding them in her hand.

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

Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that’s keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-472-4374

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Why The Owner of Patagonia Gave Away The Whole Company

Earlier this week, the founder and owner of Patagonia Yvon Chouinard—the company known for their famous puffer jackets and outdoor gear—gave away the whole company. Who’d he give it to? The Earth.

“Hopefully this will influence a new form of capitalism that doesn’t end up with a few rich people and a bunch of poor people,” Chouinard told David Gelles for The New York Times. “We are going to give away the maximum amount of money to people who are actively working on saving this planet.”

Purbita Saha, deputy editor at Popular Science, debriefs Ira on Chouinard’s decision, as well as other science stories of the week. They talk about if it’s safe to get the COVID booster and flu shot at the same time, how a new blood test could catch early stages of cancer, why the night sky is bluer, the reason why NASA is crashing a spacecraft into an asteroid, and the fight over trash between cockatoos and Australians.

In 2001, a now classic Zoloft commercial hit the airwaves—featuring a sad little blob with a rain cloud following it around. The commercial explains that “while the cause is unknown, depression may be related to an imbalance of natural chemicals between nerve cells in the brain. Prescription Zoloft works to correct this imbalance.”

That theory of depression as a chemical imbalance is based on a simple premise: Depressed people’s brains lack serotonin. If a patient takes a serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), like Prozac or Zoloft, it boosts their serotonin levels, and their depression lifts. The trouble is that when researchers started testing this theory they found it didn’t hold up. Serotonin is certainly involved in depression. But it’s way more complicated than it originally seemed.To be clear, there is a body of research showing that antidepressants do work—it’s just unclear exactly how they work.

Read the rest at sciencefriday.com.

Understanding Metabolism Genes Might Improve Depression Treatment

Sometimes finding the right antidepressant medication is basically trial and error. Scientists are still trying to figure out why some antidepressants work for some people, but not others. Researchers at the Veterans Administration wanted to know if genetic testing might help doctors with prescribing the antidepressant best suited for their patients. Specifically, they examined genes that indicate whether or not someone is able to properly metabolize a medication.

Ira is joined by Dr. David Oslin, professor of psychiatry at the Crescenz Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center and University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, to explain his latest research and its broader implications.

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

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COVID-19’s Lingering Toll On The Heart

As new omicron-specific boosters against COVID-19 unroll in cities around the US, research is revealing more about the longterm consequences of even one infection with the SARS-CoV2 virus. Writing this week in Nature Medicine, a team of researchers from Germany describe finding long-lasting signs of heart disorders in the majority of recovered patients in their study group–even up to nearly a year later.

FiveThirtyEight’s Maggie Koerth joins Ira to describe the research and how it fits into what we’re learning about the scope of Long Covid. Plus taking the temperature of the melting Thwaites Glacier, new insights into the genes of both immortal jellyfish and human astronauts, and a post-mortem of the world’s first known amputation.

Why Are Dead Fish Piling Up Across The San Francisco Bay?

Thousands of dead fish are piling up across the Bay Area.

From the concrete outer edges of Oakland’s Lake Merritt to the sandy beaches of San Francisco’s Fort Funston and the pebbled banks of Oyster Point in San Mateo County, the carcasses of fish likely poisoned by a harmful algal bloom — more commonly known as a red tide — are washing ashore.

It’s a mass-death event the San Francisco Bay hasn’t seen the likes of in years, says Jon Rosenfield, senior scientist with environmental group San Francisco Baykeeper.

“From a fish’s point of view, this is a wildfire in the water,” he said.

By SF Baykeeper’s count, the number of fish dying off in the San Francisco Bay could easily exceed hundreds of thousands, and that, Rosenfield said, might even be a “low” estimate.

His field investigator confirmed “easily tens of thousands of fish dead” in Lake Merritt alone. But Rosenfield cautioned, “What you see is just the hint of what’s actually happening further beneath the water’s surface and in places you’re not getting to on the shoreline. So it’s really an uncountable number.”

It may be harmful to humans, too. An algal bloom of this size can cause skin irritation and respiratory problems, and the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board is advising people to avoid swimming, kayaking or other activities on the water until the bloom subsides.

Read the full story at sciencefriday.com.

As Temperatures Get Warmer, Fish Are At Risk

Climate change is expected to have a big effect on a sensitive group of creatures: fish. A new study out of the University of Arkansas predicts that there is likely to be a six-fold increase in large fish mortality events between now and 2100, specifically in freshwater lakes in Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Known as “summerkills” and “winterkills”, seasonal die-offs are a part of fishy nature, but have been happening at a greater frequency as temperatures increase. That’s due to climate change-related factors like algal blooms, infectious disease, and oxygen deprivation.

Joining Ira to talk about the future for freshwater fish is Simon Tye, PhD candidate in biology at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.

 As The World Decarbonizes, Sulfuric Acid May Be In Short Supply

A move towards more alternative energy sources and away from fossil fuel production is a net positive for the world. But there’s an unanticipated side effect—a possible global sulfuric acid supply shortage.

Eighty percent of the world’s sulfuric acid is the byproduct of fossil fuel production. Cutting back on coal, oil, and natural gas means producing less sulfur acid. That’s important as sulfuric acid is critical to making fertilizer, as well as green technology like solar panels and batteries.

Ira talks with Mark Maslin, professor of Earth System Science at University College London, about his latest research, which points to a looming sulfur shortage.

The New G.O.A.T Of Park Systems Is An Actual Goat

If you walk into a park, the odds are pretty high that you’ll find an invasive plant species, like buckthorn, giant hogweed, or multiflora rose. These resilient plants can often grow uncontrollably and out-compete native species for resources, which has consequences for native wildlife that depend on other native plants. They can also be incredibly difficult to remove. That’s why a growing number of parks across the United States are turning to unlikely helpers: goats.

Conservation grazing is a practice in which livestock are used to maintain biodiversity. Because goats eat almost everything, they chow down on invasive plants and make them much easier to remove.

Radio producer Rasha Aridi speaks with Hillary Steffes, the chief goat herder at Allegheny GoatScape in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, about using goats as a conservation tool. Then, Rasha takes a trip to Riverside Park in NYC to meet some goats, and talk with Marcus Caceres, a field supervisor at the Riverside Park Conservancy.

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

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The Hot And Cold Past Of The Air Conditioner

In the Northeast, the leaves have started changing colors, heralding the season of pumpkins, sweaters, and the smell of woodsmoke. But in some parts of the country, the heat hasn’t let up. In cities like Dallas, Phoenix, and Miami, temperatures were up in the high 80s and low 90s this week—and with climate change, the U.S. is only getting hotter.

But humans have come up with an ingenious way to keep the heat at bay: air conditioning. Widely considered one of the greatest engineering achievements of the 20th century, the technology has transformed how and where people live—and it’s prevented countless deaths. But it comes at a cost, and if we’re going to keep up with a warming climate, we’re going to need some other tricks to stay cool.

Remembering Frank Drake, Who Listened To The Cosmos

Last week, astronomer and SETI pioneer Dr. Frank Drake died at the age of 92. Dr. Drake was a key figure in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence—from Project Ozma in 1960, to the founding of the SETI Institute. He collaborated on the ‘Golden Record’ that Earth sent to the stars on board the Voyager space probes. Drake also created a mathematical way of estimating the probability of discovering signs of intelligent life, a calculation that became known as the Drake Equation, and spent years advocating for the search for alien life.

Drake appeared on Science Friday many times over the years. Here, in excerpts from conversations recorded in 2010 and 2016, he talks with Ira about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and his role with the Voyager Golden Record project. Our condolences to his family, friends, and colleagues.

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

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New, Extra Protective COVID Vaccines Are On The Way

Earlier this week, the FDA approved brand new COVID-19 vaccines from both Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech that are designed to better protect people from the BA.4 and BA.5 omicron subvariants. At the same time, the U.S. is scaling back free testing and precautionary measures, putting more pressure on vaccines. Casey Crownhart, a climate and technology reporter at MIT Technology Review, joins Ira to talk about COVID updates and other science news of the week.

They also discuss how the U.S. is bracing for a record-breaking heatwave, the devastating floods in Pakistan, how the city of Jackson, MI ended up without running water, why Greenland’s “zombie ice” is causing concern, a massive investment in solar power, and a clue as to how the Ancient Egyptians built the pyramids of Giza.

The Turtle Clan of the Ramapough Lenape Nation has lived in the wooded hills around Ringwood for centuries, enduring the impacts of European settlement and the building up of America. But the toxic waste that now surrounds the Passaic County community is from an invasion of an entirely different kind. And it wasn’t long before residents started getting sick.

When the federal government created the National Priorities List, better known as Superfund, in 1980, abandoned iron mines in Ringwood were among the first sites to be listed; they made the list in 1983. Between 1965 and 1974, the Ford Motor Company dumped hundreds of thousands of gallons of paint sludge, solvents and other waste into the mines scattered throughout the Turtle Clan’s homeland. By then, the southern portion of the site had been sold off by Ford to the Ringwood Solid Waste Management Authority, which went on dumping more waste onto and into the already toxic land. Arsenic and lead, benzene and 1,4-dioxane leached into groundwater. Kids played among slabs of hardened paint sludge. Adults scavenged the dump sites for copper and other valuable metals.

Read the rest at sciencefriday.com.

Coming Soon: A Germ-Killing Countertop?

From restaurant tables to office door knobs, not to mention anything inside a hospital, the world is full of surfaces that need sanitizing, lest someone catch a surface-borne viral or bacterial infection like the flu or MRSA. The typical solution involves sanitizing those surfaces with sprays and fluid cleaners. Or, sometimes, using materials that are hostile to microbes, such as silver or copper.

But a team of engineers at the University of Michigan has another solution in mind: a spray-on coating that combines the stabilizing power of polyurethane with the well-documented germicidal qualities of essential oils such as cinnamon, tea tree, and lemon. As the team reports in the journal Matter this week, their coating seems to kill pathogens like SARS-CoV2, MRSA and E. coli within minutes—and lasts for months before it must be refreshed. Research co-author Anish Tuteja joins Ira to talk about the innovation, and how he thinks it might be useful.

One of the summer’s biggest blockbusters has been the alien horror film “Nope,” from director Jordan Peele. “Nope” has elements of many classic UFO films, with the Spielbergian charm of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” and the horror and destruction from “The War of the Worlds.”

For the spoiler-averse, this is your warning to turn back now. The big twist in “Nope” that differentiates it from other alien films is that it isn’t a UFO hanging out in the skies above our main characters. The saucer-shaped figure is the alien itself.

Writer and director Jordan Peele attributes much of the inspiration for the alien as coming from sea creatures. He enlisted the help of scientific consultants including marine biologist Kelsi Rutledge to help bring the creature, known in the film as Jean Jacket, to life. She even gave it a scientific name: Occulonimbus edoequus, meaning “hidden dark cloud stallion eater.” Kelsi, who is a PhD candidate at UCLA in Los Angeles, California, talks to Ira about the ingredients that went into creating a new creature to scare audiences.

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

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Why Is It So Hard To Agree On When Human Life Starts?

After decades of deliberations involving physicians, bioethicists, attorneys, and theologians, a U.S. presidential commission in 1981 settled on a scientifically derived dividing line between life and death that has endured, more or less, ever since: A person was considered dead when the entire brain—including the brainstem, its most primitive portion—was no longer functioning, even if other vital functions could be maintained indefinitely through artificial life support.

In the decades since, the committee’s criteria have served as a foundation for laws in most states adopting brain death as a standard for legal death.

Now, with the overturning of Roe v. Wade and dozens of states rushing to impose abortion restrictions, American society is engaged in a chaotic race to define the other pole of human existence: When exactly does human life begin? At conception, the hint of a heartbeat, a first breath, the ability to survive outside the womb with the help of the latest technology?

To read the full article, visit sciencefriday.com.

Last week, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy announced a new directive requiring federally-funded science be made available to the public for free, and faster.

Set to take effect by the end of 2025, the new rule would do away with the Obama-era policy that journals can keep research with taxpayer funding behind paywalls for up to one year. In addition, more kinds of research would qualify than previous policies have required.

So how does freely accessible research benefit the people who pay for it—or the scientists who do the work itself? Nobel Prize-winning medical researcher and open science advocate Harold Varmus joins Ira to discuss.

It’s late in the summer, meaning any outdoor gathering with food and drink has a good chance of being visited by a pesky, buzzing wasp. But don’t reach for that rolled-up newspaper or can of bug spray. The wasps in your world play an important role that’s often overlooked.

Far beyond the social hornets and yellowjackets people think about when they picture a wasp, the wasp world includes thousands of species. Some are parasitic, injecting their eggs into unwilling prey. Others hunt, either paralyzing prey for their young to feed on, or by bringing bits of meat back to a nest for their young. Some are strictly vegetarian, and live on pollen. Some are needed for the pollination of figs and certain species of orchids.

Dr. Seirian Sumner, a behavioral biologist at University College London, says that if people understood the services provided by wasps the same way that they understand the need for bees, they might be more willing to overlook an occasional wasp annoyance—and might even be thankful for the wasps in their lives. In her book Endless Forms: The Secret World of Wasps, Sumner makes the case for wasps as nature’s pest control agents, as important pollinators that should be celebrated.

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

Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that’s keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-472-4374

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California Accelerates Its Push For Electric Cars

This week, air pollution regulators in California voted to phase out sales of new gasoline-powered vehicles, with a complete ban on gas car sales by 2035. The decision could have a larger impact on the automobile industry, however, as many states choose to follow California’s lead with regard to air quality and emissions decisions. Sophie Bushwick, technology editor at Scientific American, joins guest host Roxanne Khamsi to help unpack the decision.

They also discuss some of the other science stories from this week, including a survey-based study showing that Americans really do care about climate change and support mitigation measures, a look at how sugar substitutes can change the microbiome, and an engineer’s advice for how to build the sturdiest sandcastles.

For many decades, autistic people have been defined by non-autistic people, including in science. Since the very beginning of research about autistic people, neurotypical scientists and institutions have been at the helm. The field has largely been defined by what neurotypical researchers are curious about learning, instead of prioritizing research that the autistic community asks for.

Because of that, and the invisibility of autistic adults in our society, a large chunk of this research has neglected the needs of autistic people. In many cases, it’s caused harm to the very people the research aims to help. Until recently, there have been very few openly autistic researchers who study autism. But there is a growing body of openly autistic scientists who are using both their expertise and their own lived experiences to help shape the future of autism research.

Guest host Roxanne Khamsi speaks with Dr. TC Waisman, a leadership coach and researcher studying autism and higher education, based in Vancouver, British Columbia, and Patrick Dwyer, a Ph.D. candidate studying sensory processing and attention in autism at the University of California, Davis. They talk about the history of autism research, why the inclusion of autistic people in research leads to more helpful outcomes, and how they see the future of autism research changing.

Ira Kraemer consulted on this story.

Most people wouldn’t be excited by a call offering a basement full of canned salmon dating back to the 1970s. But for researchers trying to establish baselines for what’s normal and what’s not when it comes to aquatic parasite populations, the archive of fishy tins, maintained by the Seattle-area Seafood Products Association, was a valuable resource.

Natalie Mastick and colleagues combed through the tins with tweezers, counting the numbers of parasitic anisakid worms they found. (Since the salmon was cooked, the worms—though gross—posed no risk to human eaters.) The team found that in their samples of chum and pink salmon, the incidence of parasitic infection increased over the 40 years covered by the salmon archive. The finding might be good news—an increase in the numbers of marine mammals in the area, key hosts for the parasites, could be responsible for the wormy increase. Natalie Mastick, a PhD candidate in the University of Washington’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, joins guest host Roxanne Khamsi to explain the study.

What was life like back in medieval England? You might think that the learned friars who lived in the town of Cambridge—scholars, with access to innovations like latrines and places to wash their hands—might have lived healthier lives than the common folk. But a recent study published in the International Journal of Paleopathology says that, at least when it comes to intestinal parasites, the friars may have been worse off.

Dr. Piers Mitchell runs the Cambridge Ancient Parasites Laboratory and is a senior research associate in the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. Mitchell and colleagues excavated soil samples from around the pelvises of medieval skeletons in one Cambridge cemetery, then examined the soil microscopically looking for parasite eggs. They found that friars in the cemetery had almost twice the incidence of intestinal parasites as commoners in the town—a fact they speculate could be related to friars using human feces, from the friary latrine, to fertilize the gardens. Mitchell joins guest host Roxanne Khamsi to explain the study.

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

Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that’s keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-472-4374

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Attracting Birds To Prime Habitat By Playing Recordings Of Their Calls

How do you know a restaurant is good? If the parking lot is full of cars, that’s a pretty good indication. If it’s empty, you probably won’t bother stopping.

In this case, the restaurant is a newly restored wetland in Michigan and the customers are rails. The birds migrate at night, so if they don’t hear other rail calls in an area, they’re not likely to stop. Researcher Dustin Brewer is broadcasting recorded rail calls to try to bring the secretive birds to prime habitat—to feed and mate. Rails are declining, mostly due to habitat loss. Experts say if rails are influenced by these recordings, it could help increase the bird’s population.

When you hear the words “urban wildlife,” you might think of rats scampering across a street, pigeons plopped on railings, or crows fighting over a pizza crust. But urban wildlife are so much cooler and more diverse than they get credit for, and scientists have a lot to learn from them. In the blink of an evolutionary eye, urban wildlife have quickly adapted to changing landscapes and learned to take advantage of sprawling urban areas.

Guest Roxanne Khamsi speaks with Dr. Chris Schell, an assistant professor studying urban ecology at the University of California, Berkeley. They chat about why urban wildlife is so cool, how scientists can study them, and what we can learn from our scrappy neighbors.

Roughly 476,000 people in the United States are diagnosed and treated for Lyme disease each year, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates. However, the CDC says that this number is likely an overcount because many patients receive treatment based on symptoms without a positive test result.

On top of that, there are some limitations of the diagnostic tests available for Lyme disease. The FDA-approved Lyme disease tests can only determine if a patient has had Lyme disease in the past, not if they currently have an infection. The test cannot determine if antibiotic treatment was successful, or if a positive test result is due to a re-infection.

Guest host Roxanne Khamsi talks with Pete Gwynne, a molecular and microbiologist at the Tufts Lyme Disease Initiative, who is working to solve some of these problems by developing a new diagnostic test for Lyme disease.

The path to becoming a scientist is not unlike the scientific process itself: Filled with dead ends, detours, and bumps along the way.

Danielle Lee started asking questions about animal behavior when she was a kid. She originally wanted to become a veterinarian. But after being rejected from veterinary school, she found a fulfilling career as a biologist, doing the type of work she always wanted to do—but never knew was possible for her.

Science Friday producer Shoshannah Buxbaum talks with Dr. Danielle Lee, a biologist, outreach scientist, and assistant professor in biology at Southern Illinois University about what keeps her asking questions, what rodents can help us understand about humans, and the importance of increasing diversity in science.

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Teen Innovator’s New AI Tool Helps Create Affordable Drugs

The U.S. has some of the highest prescription drug prices in the world, which can push patients into bankruptcy over medications they cannot afford. More than three in four American adults think the prices of prescription drugs are unaffordable, prompting the Senate to recently pass a bill intended to help lower prescription drug costs for seniors.

One young innovator set out to find his own solution. 17 year-old Rishab Jain developed ICOR, a tool to improve the rapid production of drugs like COVID-19 vaccines. Ira talks with  Jain from Portland, Oregon, about his innovation and vision for the future.

The spotted lanternfly, an invasive species, was first introduced to the U.S. in Pennsylvania, around 2014. Since then, it has spread aggressively, and has now been spotted in 11 states. The bug is pretty—adult spotted lanternflies are about an inch long, and feature striking spotted forewings and a flashy red patch on the hindwings. But they are also very hungry, and pose a significant threat to agricultural crops, including grapevines.

Many control efforts have focused on either stomping the insects on sight, or on spotting and destroying the egg masses that the lanternflies lay in the fall. However, researchers have been developing trapping techniques for the bugs as well. One, involving a sticky band looped around a tree, is effective—but can also snare other insects and even birds. Experts at the Penn State Extension have come up with a new style of circle trap for lanternflies, based upon an existing trap for pecan weevils. Now, STEM educators at Rutgers University are using that design as the starting point for an engineering design challenge, asking K-12 teachers and students to come up with improvements to the design. Read the rest at sciencefriday.com.

Should Kids Get Vaccinated If They’ve Already Had COVID-19?

It’s nearing the end of August, which means it’s back-to-school season. There’s a big difference between this school year and last: All children are now eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine. This means the risk of disease will likely be way down, compared to the past two autumns, according to vaccine researcher and pediatrician Paul Offit.

But for kids who have already been infected by COVID-19, will the vaccine add meaningful immunity?

“My answer to that question is yes,” Dr. Offit tells Ira. “Then you can be sure that they will then develop the kind of immunity that will likely lead to fairly long-lived protection against serious illness.” Ira and Dr. Offit also discuss the risk of monkeypox and polio spreading in schools, and how to best keep our kids safe against infectious disease this fall.

NASA’s largest and most powerful rocket ever began inching its way to Launch Pad 39B at Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Tuesday night. Over twelve years in the making, the long-delayed, over-budget Space Launch System rocket is finally nearing its first chance for liftoff at the end of this month. The August 29th targeted launch will mark the beginning of the Artemis program—NASA’s series of missions designed to send humans to the Moon and, eventually, Mars.

The multi-billion dollar orange rocket now stands taller than the Statue of Liberty, resembling a colossal upside-down carrot. Its maiden uncrewed flight will carry a trio of mannequins equipped with radiation sensor vests in preparation for crewed flights slated for 2024. These future missions will be the first to return people to the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972. Read the rest at sciencefriday.com.

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

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Will A Colorado River Drought Dry Up Energy Supplies?

This week, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, a federal agency that manages water in the Western U.S., started the process of cutting water use allotments along the Colorado River after seven states missed a deadline for coming up with their own reduction plan.

The area has been under a long-running drought—and with water in demand for everything from drinking to agriculture to industry, and with the population of the area on the rise, agreements over water use are difficult to come by. The drought has another less obvious effect on the area as well—drops in water allocation could lead to declines in power production in a region that relies on several major hydroelectric facilities.

Umair Irfan, staff writer at Vox, joins Ira to talk about the plan for distributing western water and other stories from the week in science—including a possible reprieve for nuclear power plants in Germany and California, a geomagnetic storm sparking an astronomical light show, orders for future supersonic aircraft, and investigations into why thinking hard makes you physically tired.

SARS-CoV2. HIV. CMV. HSV-1 and HSV-2. MPX. EBV. HPV. WPV. WNV.

The alphabet soup of viruses that infect us may seem long and daunting. But as scientist and author Joseph Osmundson writes in Virology: Essays for the Living, the Dead, and the Small Things In Between, these viruses are vastly dwarfed by the total number of harmless or even beneficial viruses on our planet. “It’s a rounding error larger than zero,” he writes. A single ounce of seawater will contain more than seven billion individual viruses incapable of doing us harm.

Osmundson’s book is both COVID-19 quarantine memoir, and reflections of a self-described queer man coming of age after the identification of the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS. In it, he questions the war-like language we ascribe to “fighting” pathogens, explores the non-binary nature of health and illness, and advocates for a world where we are more ready to care for each other.

“The problem wasn’t illness,” he writes of HIV’s death toll before the development of effective treatments. “The problem never is. Illness is a fact of life. The problem is our inability to provide care to all.”

Osmundson talks to producer Christie Taylor about making new meanings for viruses through biomedicine and public health interventions. Plus, lessons for the monkeypox global public health emergency, and all the viruses to come.

Florida’s offshore marine habitat is in peril. Populations of fish are dwindling in many places, and manatees have been dying in record numbers. The basis for much of this life lies in seagrass just under our boats. We join scientist on a trip into one of the healthiest seagrass meadows in the Gulf of Mexico. 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. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that’s keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-472-4374

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Some Grasses Can Stop Lead From Spreading In Soil

Lead left behind in soil from mining and smelting poses a major health risk to people who live nearby. Researchers in Nebraska and Kansas believe plant life and organic material can limit lead’s spread.In parts of the Midwest where lead mining and smelting lasted for over a century, communities are still dealing with toxic waste left behind by the industry.

Lead, a dangerous neurotoxin, persists in the environment, including in water and soil, where it can pose a threat to the health of people living nearby. The risk is especially acute for children, who can unintentionally ingest lead by putting their hands in their mouths and whose brains and bodies are still developing.

It can be spread to other areas, like yards and schools, by rainfall, and can also taint aquifers or vegetables in gardens, making them harmful to consume.

Now researchers are working to limit the impact of lead in the environment on people, and they believe they’ve found a promising solution: Plant life.

Phytostabilization involves moving lead from soil into the roots, stems and leaves of plants to prevent it from spreading and to limit people’s contact with it.

“One of the goals of phytostabilization is to take the site with lead and put it in a stable state, so that the risk is reduced, and the issues related to lead in the soil can be managed,” said Larry Erickson, a professor emeritus at Kansas State University and former director of the university’s Center for Hazardous Substance Research.

Read the rest on sciencefriday.com.

Artificial limb technology has come a long way since the first prosthetic—a big toe made of wood and leather developed in ancient Egypt.

Today’s cutting-edge robotic limbs use mind-control and even give users a sense of touch, helping them feel sensations like a warm cup of coffee or a mushy banana. Still, these state-of-the-art prosthetics often involve invasive brain surgeries and can be exorbitantly expensive.

Hearing of these issues, one teenager set out to create a solution. Seventeen-year-old Benjamin Choi has developed a non-invasive, affordable prosthetic arm. His Star Wars-inspired technology reads a user’s mind with only two sensors—one on the forehead and the other clipped to the earlobe. And he doesn’t plan on stopping there. He sees his work in artificial intelligence expanding to help ALS patients, wheelchair users, and beyond.

Ira speaks with Benjamin Choi from McLean, Virginia about how he developed this arm and what it means to be a young innovator.

CAR T cell therapy, a type of immunotherapy in which a patient’s own immune cells are modified to create a hybrid immune cell that destroys cancer cells, was first developed over a decade ago.

Now, researchers are continuing to find success in treating new types of blood cancers with the therapy, and are working on applying the technology to solid state cancers like those of the pancreas and brain.

Scientists are also at the early stages of testing CAR T cells to treat autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis (MS) and lupus.

Ira talks with Dr. Carl June, one of the pioneers of CAR T cell therapy, a professor of immunotherapy and director of the Center for Cellular Immunotherapies at the University of Pennsylvania, based in Philadelphia.

Five years ago, Stephanie Barish was tired of the public’s attitude about climate change. “Most people at that time were just so negative about climate,” she said. “It was doom and destruction, and I thought, wow, to make positive change, you have to really look at this from a solutions perspective.”

Stephanie is the founder and CEO of Indiecade, an organization that supports indie video game developers and hosts events like the Climate Jam—the goal of which was to change the gloomy public narrative around climate change. So, with the help of organizations like Earth Games, participants around the globe gather every year to make video games about climate change optimism, solutions, and justice.

Teams can also consult with subject matter experts, like Dargan Frierson, an associate professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington, and also a judge for the Climate Jam. If teams wonder what climate change would look like on a different planet, they can go to him for answers. “We always look for scientific accuracy,” he said. “I think it’s very important to keep things within the realm of possibility, even when you’re looking at fiction.”

Read the rest of the article and check out some of the games at sciencefriday.com.

Brooklyn-based artist J.C. Fontanive is a master of the moving image—but in analogue. As an animator, he creates mechanical, perpetual motion ‘flipbooks,’ with help from old clocks and colorful illustrations of flying birds, butterflies, and other scenes from nature.

Fontanive joins Ira to talk about the act of invention, the ‘primal’ language of art, and how to create visceral work in a digital age.

See the flipbooks in gorgeous action at sciencefriday.com.

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

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