This year, October 13 marks Ada Lovelace Day, an observance that calls attention to the role of women in computing and technology. In this conversation from 2018, Ira talks with Claire Evans, author of “Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet,” about some of the women who played key roles in the development of computing. Then, Stacy Horn joins the conversation to describe her creation, EchoNYC, an early bulletin board service.

Guests:

Claire L. Evans is the author of “Broad Band: The Women Who Made The Internet.” 

Stacy Horn is the founder of EchoNYC in New York, New York.

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.
 

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In the past few years, the idea of attachment styles has taken off, both online and in therapy offices. It’s gone from a niche psychological concept to a shorthand to describe how we show up in relationships. Here’s a crash course: Anxious attachment is when you seek constant reassurance. Avoidant attachment is when you flee when someone tries to get close. Fearful-avoidant, also called disorganized, is some combination of the two. And secure attachment is a more regulated approach to relationship stress. 

But where does your attachment style come from? Do you have more than one? Can it change? And are the ideas we hear from influencers at odds with how psychologists understand attachment theory? Flora talks with neuroscientist Amir Levine, who has written two books about attachment styles, “Attached” and “Secure.” 

Want to learn more about your attachment styles? Take this survey. 

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

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A new mRNA flu vaccine made by Moderna was approved by the FDA in August, and is currently available for people aged 50 and over. The promise of an mRNA vaccine for flu is that it can be spun up more quickly than a traditional vaccine, meaning it could better match the flu strain that’s circulating.  

Is that what happened this year? How are the side effects? And how has dysfunction at the health agencies impacted rollout? Flora discusses these questions and more with vaccine researcher Anna Durbin.

Guest:

Dr. Anna Durbin is a vaccine researcher, professor of international health, and director of the Center for Immunization Research at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

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A Kelvin wave has reached California and is creeping up the West Coast, raising both sea levels and concerns from government officials. This kind of massive internal wave begins in the western Pacific Ocean and then travels eastward to the Americas along the equator, and then up and down the coastline. While it might raise sea levels up to 12 inches, it stays below the surface instead of crashing on the shore.

Host Flora Lichtman speaks to oceanographer Andrew Leising to get the lowdown on what exactly a Kelvin wave is, and how wary West Coasters should be.

Guest:

Dr. Andrew Leising is a research oceanographer at NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Center in San Diego, California.

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.
 

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Cephalopods have a reputation for being smart and majestic. And while that may be true, the life of a cephalopod can also be dark and gritty. Have you heard of octopus death spirals? How about cephalopod cannibalism? 

Host Flora Lichtman is joined by cephalopod experts Heather Judkins and Z. Yan Wang for a conversation about the weirdest parts of being a cephalopod, and to answer some listener questions. 

Find more Cephalopod Week fun on our site!

Guests:

Dr. Heather Judkins is a Professor in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg.

Dr. Z. Yan Wang is an assistant professor of psychology and biology at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.
 

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It’s Nobel Prize week, and this year's prize in physics went to Francis Halzen “for decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin.” The IceCube is a massive neutrino detector that covers a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice, and looks for high-energy neutrinos coming from deep space. 

In 2013, Ira spoke with physicist Francis Halzen about the decision to build the IceCube at the South Pole and the challenges of constructing a map of the cosmos with neutrinos.

Guest:

Dr. Francis Halzen is a professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the 2026 recipient of the Nobel Prize in physics.

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

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On Science Friday, we love to talk about ideas, especially ideas that have the power to shape the future. But there are plenty of groundbreaking ideas that almost don’t make it out of the lab or the art studio: ideas that are birthed but then fall into a deep slumber until, years later, they’re reawakened.

Why this happens is the subject of the new book, “Sleeping Beauties: Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up,” by David Bryne, artist, musician, and lead singer for Talking Heads. He joins Flora to explain. 

Watch the interview on YouTube.

Read an excerpt from “Sleeping Beauties.”

Guest:

David Byrne is an artist, musician, and the lead singer for Talking Heads.

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

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John Wilson’s new documentary, “The History of Concrete,” has a subject matter that to most people may seem gray, drab, and boring. The film is anything but. Alongside facts about concrete’s reliance on dwindling sand reserves and New York City’s crumbling infrastructure, there are unexpected tangents. Following the idiosyncratic format of Wilson’s hit HBO show “How To,” he tells the stories of a struggling musician, a man who preserves tattoos, and a group of runners looping the same block for two months.

Ira talks with documentarian John Wilson about the documentary and their shared appreciation of concrete.

Guest:

John Wilson is an NYC-based documentarian best known for his HBO series “How To with John Wilson.” 

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

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Big news for tiny cats: an itty-bitty three-pound spotted cat from Bolivia—called the tilcayo—is the first new wild cat species described in more than a hundred years. 

Tilcayo pics have been all over the news and social media, but there’s much more to tilcayo’s tale, including the surprising story behind its discovery. 

Flora chats with Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz, the biologist who worked for nearly 10 years to describe this flashy feline. They also discuss how Paola met the tilcayo, why it was so hard to classify, and what the reaction has been in Bolivia.

Guest:

Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz is a National Geographic Explorer and biologist leading the Bolivian Felid Research and Conservation Program. She’s based in Bolivia. 

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.
 

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Leaders of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University say they can’t afford to keep the museum open to visitors. And there are rumors that another natural history museum, in Hays, Kansas, may be closing its doors. What happens to the collections, and are museums going the way of the dinosaurs? 

Jason Cryan, from the Natural History Museum of Utah, and Barbara Thiers, formerly of the New York Botanical Garden, join Host Flora Lichtman to discuss the challenges of running a natural history museum.

Guests:

Dr. Jason Cryan is The Sarah B. George Executive Director of the Natural History Museum of Utah, the largest natural history museum in America’s intermountain west.

Barbara Thiers is Director Emerita and Curator at New York Botanical Garden, and Research Associate at the Denver Botanic Gardens.

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

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In 2024, scientists using instruments on board the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft spotted a new large impact crater on the surface of the moon. Tyler Powell joins host Flora Lichtman to describe what they found, and what scientists are learning about the lunar surface from studying it. 

After, Sofia Sheikh describes different approaches to hunting for intelligent alien life through ‘technosignatures’. These are technological traces that could only be produced by intelligent life, like radio transmissions, industrial pollution, or city lights at night. Researchers from the SETI Institute have proposed sifting through lunar dust to look for tiny traces of a long-gone super advanced galactic civilization.

Guests:

Dr Tyler Powell is a planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.

 Dr. Sofia Sheikh is a Technosignature Research Scientist at the SETI Institute.

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

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It’s a conversation at playgrounds and in classrooms: parents and teachers worry that kids who spent formative years at home during the COVID-19 pandemic are set back, emotionally, socially or academically. But what does science say? Did stay-at-home life permanently impact kids who lived through it? Joining host Flora Lichtman to dig into the research are child development experts Anna Johnson and Stephanie Jones. 

Guests:

Dr. Anna Johnson, Professor of Psychology at Georgetown University in Washington D.C.

Dr. Stephanie Jones, Professor of Early Childhood Development at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

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Football season is upon us and a new study is making headlines. Researchers found that roughly 1 in 4 NFL players will develop CTE, a neurodegenerative disease, in their lifetime. While most of us are not professional athletes, concussions are still a relatively common injury. Millions of Americans get concussions each year, but the exact number is hard to pin down because many people don’t seek treatment. 

So what are we learning about how concussions affect the brain? And how are the best practices for treatment changing? To answer those questions and more Flora sits down with Teena Shetty, a former neurologist for the New York Giants and author of the new book “Healing the Brain.” 

Guest: 

Dr. Teena Shetty is a former neurologist for the New York Giants and founder of the Teena Shetty MD Concussion Clinic. She is also an associate professor of clinical neurology at Weill Cornell Medical College and author of “Healing the Brain.”

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

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For celiac disease sufferers, avoiding gluten is the only way to avoid symptoms. But that’s not always easy to do. Researchers are working on new treatments, including one that targets interleukin-15, a chemical that can cause some of the damage in celiac sufferers. Will the drugs be available to patients soon? 

Celiac expert Maureen Leonard joins Host Ira Flatow for a look at the latest in treating celiac disease. 

Guest:

Dr. Maureen Leonard is the clinical director of the Center For Celiac Research And Treatment at Mass General Hospital for Children. She’s also an associate professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School.

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

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AI safety has dominated the news cycle for weeks, precipitated in part by an AI attack where a bunch of OpenAI’s agents teamed up and hacked another AI platform, Hugging Face, without humans knowing. Since then, multiple AI researchers have come forward to say they’re worried this tech is unsafe. 

It seems every day there’s a new development: another warning from an AI researcher, an admission from a top lab that their AI systems breached another company, reassurances from CEOs. AI safety is even on the agenda for the UN General Assembly meeting this week. So how do we make sense of what’s happening in AI research right now?

Flora sits down with two researchers focusing on the engineering of AI safety: Andrea Lincoln, who studies how to mathematically understand the internal processes of AI models; and cryptographer Vinod Vaikuntanathan, who researches trust and security concerns in AI models.

GUESTS:

Dr. Vinod Vaikuntanathan is a cryptographer at MIT and a founding member of the Institute for Responsible Superintelligence. 

Dr. Andrea Lincoln is a professor of computer science at Boston University and an advisory board member for The Alignment Project at the AI Security Institute.

Image credit: Deborah Lupton / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

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During the last ice age, America’s coastlines and waterways looked much different than they do today. When glaciers melted, coasts and shorelines were inundated, burying early human settlements underwater. This is where underwater archeology comes in. Donning scuba gear and trowels, researchers are finding remarkably well-preserved artifacts that tell us more about what life was like in the early Americas.

Joining Flora to talk about this is reporter Reid Frazier, who accompanied an underwater archeology team on an excursion in Lake Erie. Then, underwater archeologist Jessi Halligan talks about her discoveries at a key site in Florida.

GUESTS:

Reid Frazier is an energy reporter for The Allegheny Front in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Dr. Jessi Halligan is an underwater archeologist and associate professor at Texas A&M in College Station, Texas. 

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

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The Hawaiian Islands tend to be insulated from the worst effects of hurricanes, but this summer has been different. In mid-August, Hurricane Lala pummeled the Big Island, damaging homes and roads and causing flooding and power outages. Then a few weeks later, Hurricane Lowell hit the islands of Ni‘ihau and Kaua‘i. 

What do scientists make of this hurricane season? And how is climate change playing out along Hawaiʻi’s coasts? Flora talks with Haunani Kane, who studies how climate change impacts the islands, about resilience, the importance of reefs, and combining different types of knowledge. 

Guest:

Dr. Haunani Kane is an assistant professor at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa studying how climate change impacts islands and island people.

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

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A lot of things in life are squishy, including your skin, your organs, and all the goo inside you. But technology tends to be rigid and hard. Figuring out how to get those two worlds to work together can be challenging. How do you connect an electronic sensor to a soft, beating heart? 

As an inventor of biocompatible electronic devices, John A. Rogers has designed things like flexible probes, a pacemaker smaller than a grain of rice, and wireless sensors that stick to skin like a temporary tattoo. He joins Host Flora Lichtman to talk about the challenges of meshing the natural and artificial worlds, and his approach to science and technology development.

Guest: 

Dr. John A. Rogers is a professor and director of the Querrey-Simpson Institute of Bioelectronics at Northwestern University.

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

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There’s a new wellness trend focused on an obscure capillary system that moves fluid around the body. Things like lymphatic walking, vibration plates, and compression boots have been touted as ways to stimulate the lymphatic system to combat bloating, flush away toxins, and generally promote health. 

So what is the lymphatic system, and what does it do? And is there anything to these claims? Flora gets some answers with the help of two experts: Timothy Padera, a researcher who has dedicated his career to better understanding how the lymphatic system works; and physical therapist Marc Miller, who treats cancer patients with manual lymphatic drainage. 

Guests:

Dr. Timothy Padera is an investigator at Mass General Research Institute and a professor of radiation oncology at Harvard Medical School. 

Dr. Marc Miller is a certified lymphedema specialist and senior physical therapist at UT MD Anderson Cancer Center. 

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.
 

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Perimenopause affects more than 4 billion people, but has historically been neglected by medicine. It’s the time before menopause when hormones start fluctuating wildly, leaving women with brain fog, hot flashes, dropping bone density, and mood changes. Thanks in part to social media, it’s more prominent in public discourse than it used to be.

But it’s not just awareness that’s blown up: It’s also the promise that you don’t have to suffer like those before you, thanks to hormone therapy. After decades of controversy over prescribing estradiol and progesterone due to concerns of increased breast cancer and heart disease risk, new research has many providers reconsidering their approach.

Joining Flora to sort out the science are reproductive endocrinologists Nanette Santoro and Genevieve Neal-Perry, who are both running some of the biggest long-term studies on perimenopause and the effects of hormone therapy. 

Guests:

Dr. Nanette Santoro is a reproductive endocrinologist at the University of Colorado Anschutz and is the president of the Endocrine Society.

Dr. Genevieve Neal-Perry is a reproductive endocrinologist and the OB-GYN department chair at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

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Where did we come from? How did humanity, with our complicated civilizations and all our human quirks and foibles, come to be? Much of what we know about those questions traces back to important fossil finds in Ethiopia.  

Paleoanthropologist Yohannes Haile-Selassie has been key in that hunt for answers. A skilled fossil-finder, he’s helped discover some of the most important known hominid fossils, including the bones used to describe the 2.5-million-year-old Australopithecus garhi, the first pieces of a 4.4-million-year-old partial skeleton of Ardipithecus ramidus, and fossils of the 5.8-million-year-old Ardipithecus kadabba, to name a few.

He joins Host Flora Lichtman to talk about what fieldwork is really like, big questions in human origins, and making the field of paleoanthropology more equitable. 

Guest:

Dr. Yohannes Haile-Selassie is the director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University, and a professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change.

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

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In 48 B.C.E., a massive fire ripped through the Library of Alexandria in Egypt, one of the largest and most significant ancient libraries. An estimated 100,000 works of literature were lost. Throughout history, there are lots of examples of things being “lost”: cities, like Pompeii, graves of figures like Genghis Khan, and works of art from masters like Leonardo da Vinci.

Author Sam Kean explores these historical losses in his new book, “The Museum of Lost Things.” He joins Host Ira Flatow to discuss what we can learn from them.

Read an excerpt from “The Museum of Lost Things: True Tales of Fabled Treasures, Legendary Cities, and Mythical Creatures That Vanished From History”

Guest:

Sam Kean is the author of eight books, including “The Museum of Lost Things." He is based in Washington, D.C.

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

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Living with black bears is complicated. They’re huge, hungry, and they really don’t care about your hostas. After a long period of being overhunted, black bears are on the rebound. And as they begin returning to parts of their native ranges, they’re finding humans there, too.

Reporter Cassandra Stephenson joins Flora to talk about how these interactions are playing out in southeastern states. Then, carnivore ecologist Nyeema Harris joins to discuss best practices for coexistence.

Guests:

Cassandra Stephenson covers issues impacting rural West Tennessee as a Report for America corps member at The Tennessee Lookout. She’s based in Nashville.

Dr. Nyeema Harris is an associate professor of wildlife and land conservation at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

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

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You’ve probably been warned that if you don’t finish that course of antibiotics, you could wind up battling antibiotic-resistant bacteria. But a growing body of research suggests that the opposite might be true. What does this mean for you and your next sinus infection? Flora talks with antimicrobial resistance expert Amy Mathers to find out.

Plus, the driver of fibromyalgia, a condition that can cause debilitating chronic pain and brain fog, has been something of a mystery. Patients’ imaging and blood work often turn up normal, and many have felt dismissed by doctors.

A recent large-scale study identified a group of genes associated with the disease, a breakthrough that may help doctors understand people’s risk of developing the condition and reveal something about the nature of this mysterious illness. Flora talks with Nasa Sinnott-Armstrong, one of the study’s lead authors.

Guests:

Dr. Amy Mathers is medical director of antimicrobial stewardship and an associate professor of medicine and pathology at the University of Virginia School of Medicine.

Dr. Nasa Sinnott-Armstrong is an assistant professor of computational biology and public health at Fred Hutch Cancer Center in Washington state.

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

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When states began legalizing recreational cannabis a couple decades ago, 25 million Americans said they used the drug. That number nearly tripled to 70 million by 2023.

There are a lot of open questions about how it affects us. Why do some people find more pain relief from THC than traditional painkillers? Is it really better for sleep? What are the effects of long-term use?

Host Flora Lichtman is joined by two scientists taking on these kinds of questions: Experimental psychologist Ryan Vandrey, who’s studied the health effects of cannabis for 26 years, and neuropsychologist Natasha Wade, who studies the effects of substance abuse on adolescent brains. She recently analyzed data from 11,000 teens to understand how cannabis affects development.

Guests:

Dr. Ryan Vandrey is an experimental psychologist and professor at the Johns Hopkins University Behavioral Pharmacology Research Unit and helps lead the Johns Hopkins Cannabis Science Lab.

Dr. Natasha Wade is an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry at UC San Diego and licensed clinical neuropsychologist.

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

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There’s a flashy new find in the hunt for dark matter—the stuff that makes up 85% of all matter in the universe, but we have no clue what it is.

A mile under Lead, South Dakota, is a giant cauldron filled with 7 tons of liquid xenon, encased in water and surrounded by super-sensitive photodetectors. Known as the LZ detector, its job is to look for flashes of light that come from particles bumping into xenon atoms. And during its observations, the researchers saw a very weird flash—a bump that doesn’t look like it came from any particle we know of.

Flora talks with physicist Richard Gaitskell about the hunt for a dark matter particle and why he’s excited about this weird little finding. 

Guest:

Dr. Richard Jeremy Gaitskell is a physicist at Brown University and a leading scientist in the search for particle dark matter. He is a co-founder of the Large Underground Xenon experiment.

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

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Once upon a time, much of what we call “science” was performed by people called “natural philosophers,” delving into mysteries of nature, physics, chemistry, and more. Physicist and author Carlo Rovelli argues that there’s still a great need for philosophy, and that the two fields can and should learn from each other in investigating reality.  

Rovelli joins Host Ira Flatow to talk about big ideas in physics, and his new book, “On The Equality of All Things: Lessons on Physics and Philosophy.”

Read an excerpt from “On The Equality of All Things.”

Guest:

Dr. Carlo Rovelli is an Italian theoretical physicist and the author of “On The Equality of Things.”

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

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Between E. coli in blueberries, glass in popsicles, and that dreaded cyclospora, this summer was all about keeping a wary eye on the groceries in the fridge. But how does the recall data stack up against previous years? And are federal cuts to food safety agencies to blame? Flora talks to food safety expert Brian Ronholm to get the big picture.

Plus, more than 1.5 million cars have been recalled this year for risk of bursting into flames. As automotive journalist Jason Torchinsky explains, it's a miracle it doesn’t happen more often.

Guests:

Brian Ronholm is the director of food policy at Consumer Reports.

Jason Torchinsky is an automotive journalist and co-founder of Autopian.

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

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On social media, the vagus nerve often gets billed as the gateway to nervous system nirvana: It’s your ticket to better rest, relaxation, and health if you “stimulate” it correctly. Where did this idea come from, and what does the research say?

In March, Host Flora Lichtman talked with neurosurgeon Kevin Tracey, a pioneer of a field called bioelectronic medicine, which uses techniques to stimulate the nervous system with electricity. Back in the 1990s, he was the first to discover that the vagus nerve regulates the immune system and inflammation.

Guest:

Dr. Kevin Tracey is a neurosurgeon, and president and CEO of the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research at Northwell Health. He is the author of The Great Nerve.

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

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Much of the code that describes the inner workings of social networks, helps apps predict your musical interests, and underlies innovations in AI traces back to advances in mathematical theory and data science that fundamentally describe how massive networks behave.

Jennifer Chayes helped create that field of math. She also spent 20 years at Microsoft building interdisciplinary research labs. Now, at UC Berkeley, her interests lie in using machine learning to work on topics like materials science, cancer immunotherapy, ethical decision-making, and climate change. She joins Flora for a wide-ranging discussion about math, networks, AI, academia, and her path between them. 

Guest:

Dr. Jennifer Chayes is the dean of the College of Computing, Data Science, and Society at UC Berkeley.

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

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A new mRNA vaccine for melanoma is making headlines. Moderna and Merck recently announced results from their clinical trial suggesting that this new vaccine, in combination with the cancer drug Keytruda, reduced recurrence rates in patients. The companies have not yet released full data from the trial.

So, how does the vaccine work? And does this mark the beginning of a new era of cancer treatments using mRNA vaccine technology? Ira talks with physician Michael Postow, whose patients were part of the drug trial at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

Guest:

Dr. Michael Postow is chief of the melanoma service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. 

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

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When you see a mushroom popping up from the forest floor, that mushroom is just the tip of the fungal iceberg for a vast world beneath the surface. But the nature of fungal life makes it hard to answer some basic questions. What exactly does it mean to be one individual organism? And how do you tell how old a fungus is, when parts of it can recycle, regenerate, and grow again?

Flora talks with fungal researcher Kristin Aleklett about the challenge of fungal age, and how researchers are trying to better understand what fungi are doing in the world under the ground.

Guest:

Dr. Kristin Aleklett is a researcher at Lund University in Sweden.

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

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There’s been wave after wave of bad news about the ocean: warming temperatures, overfishing, acidification, coral bleaching. But in the last few years, there have also been some big wins for the big blue—as well as a narrative shift, in which the ocean itself has almost become its own larger-than-life character in conservation conversations.

So how should we think about the future of the seas? And how do the stories we tell about the ocean shape how we think about it? Flora chats with marine biologist Helen Scales, author of “What the Wild Sea Can Be,” which is the Science Friday book club pick for September and October. Check out the SciFri Book Club to read along.

Read an excerpt from “What the Wild Sea Can Be: The Future of the World’s Ocean.”

Guest:

Dr. Helen Scales is a marine biologist and author of several books, including “What the Wild Sea Can Be: The Future of the World’s Ocean.”

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

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When humans finally land on Mars, what should they do? A report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine lays out the science objectives for a crewed Mars mission. In January, planetary scientist Lindy Elkins-Tanton, who co-chaired the report committee, joined Host Flora Lichtman to talk about the plans to send people to Mars.

We also get an update on the mission to survey the asteroid Psyche. Elkins-Tanton tells us how she managed the team that made the Psyche mission possible, and what she learned from her mistakes.

Guest:

Dr. Lindy Elkins-Tanton is a planetary scientist. She’s the head of NASA’s Psyche mission and director of UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory.

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

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AI is popping up in many corners of society, but how are doctors using it in their practice? We asked our physician listeners to call in, and many of you did. What we heard mirrored broad trends: that more and more doctors are using AI tools for diagnosis, paperwork, and getting up to speed on patients. But they also have concerns.

So how is AI changing medical care? And how is it affecting patients? Joining Host Flora Lichtman to sort fact from hallucination is physician-computer scientist Jonathan Chen, who’s studied the accuracy of these models and how healthcare workers use them.

Guest:

Dr. Jonathan Chen is an associate professor of medicine and director for Medical Education in Artificial Intelligence at Stanford University.

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

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We’ve been hearing for years that climate change makes weather more extreme, and extreme weather more frequent. But what’s been more difficult to measure is exactly how climate change influences a particular weather event. For example, how much more intense was Hurricane Lala because of climate change? How much more deadly were India’s heat waves this summer? A growing field called attribution science is trying to answer questions like these.

Flora chats with climate scientist Joyce Kimutai about the field and why it's so important. Then, we hear from climate law expert Maxine Burkett about how attribution science could be used in policy, and in the courtroom, to hold emitters responsible.

Guests:

Dr. Joyce Kimutai is a climate scientist specializing in attribution science. She works for the World Weather Attribution Consortium at Imperial College London and is the principal climate scientist for the Kenya Meteorological Services.

Maxine Burkett is a professor of climate, environment, and society at Stanford University in California.

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

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GPS is such an essential part of our lives that it’s easy to forget there was once a world without it. But, like many tech advancements of the 20th century, GPS was originally created by the U.S. military. So how did it become a part of daily civilian life? And how vulnerable is it to manipulation?

Katherine Dunn has written all about this and more in her book, “Little Blue Dot: How GPS Shaped the Modern World.”

Guest:

Katherine Dunn is a science journalist and author of “Little Blue Dot: How GPS Shaped the Modern World.”

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

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A controversial pipeline project in Michigan has been stuck in legal limbo for years. But this month, the Michigan Supreme Court sided with environmentalists and leaned on an ancient legal framework: the public trust doctrine.

This doctrine, which dates back to the Roman Empire, says that natural resources, like water, belong to the public, and development must do no harm. Legal experts say this argument is cropping up more and more in climate and environmental lawsuits. Joining Flora to get into the details are environment reporter Vivian La, and law professor Oday Salim.

Guests:

Vivian La is the climate solutions reporter for Interlochen Public Radio and Grist in Northern Michigan.

Oday Salim is director of the Environmental Law & Sustainability Clinic and a co-director of the Environmental and Energy Law Program at the University of Michigan Law School.

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

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When the James Webb Space Telescope started sending back images in 2022, something mysterious appeared: little red dots, speckled across the sky. They didn’t look like any known celestial objects, and astronomers began racing to figure out what they were.

There was a lot of hot debate, but researchers are making progress—the dots appear to be black holes, but black holes like we’ve never seen them before. In a recent study, astrophysicist Rohan Naidu and his team looked into one little red dot with the catchy name of MoM-BH*-1 and concluded it was a new cosmic category called a black hole star.

Guest:

Dr. Rohan Naidu is an assistant professor at the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaiʻi.

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

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In the new movie “The End Of Oak Street,” bits of a suburban Michigan neighborhood get sucked back through time to a prehistoric world of dinosaurs. It made us wonder, aside from the danger of getting snacked on by an allosaurus, what other challenges would modern humans face in that ancient world?

Flora talks with paleontologist Steve Brusatte about the conditions of the late Cretaceous era.

Guest:

Dr. Steve Brusatte is a paleontologist and author of “The Story of Birds: A New History from their Dinosaur Origins to the Present.”

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

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Microplastics have been documented throughout the human body, including the reproductive system. But the field of microplastics research is very new, and it’s not yet clear if, or how, these tiny particles affect our health.

Producer Kathleen Davis has been reporting on the handful of scientists trying to uncover what microplastics mean for pregnancy and fetal development. She joins Host Flora Lichtman to debrief what she’s learned.

Read the full story here.

This story was produced with the assistance of the Journalism & Women Symposium (JAWS) Health Journalism Fellowship, supported by The Commonwealth Fund.

Guests:

Kathleen Davis is an audio producer for Science Friday based in New York.

Dr. Phoebe Stapleton is a toxicologist and microplastics researcher at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

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

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When you think of physics, your mind might go to forces—like gravity, friction, and magnetism—or to astrophysics, like galaxies and exoplanets. But many of the same principles used to understand how the universe works can also be used to study Earth’s climate systems. At its core, climate change is a physics problem. But traditionally, research institutions have kept climate science and physics separate.

Morgan O’Neill has spent her career with one foot in the classical physics world and the other in climate change research. Now she’s on a mission to invite more traditional physicists into the field of climate science. She speaks with Ira about the overlaps between the two fields and why more physicists should join in on climate research.

Guest:

Dr. Morgan O’Neill is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto and chair of the American Physical Society’s group on the physics of climate.

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

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When you ask an LLM like ChatGPT or Claude a question, the model goes through its massive amount of training data and guesses the answer by mathematically predicting the word most likely to appear next in a sentence.

This model, experts say, will not work well for technology designed to navigate the physical world. Something like a robot that works in a warehouse will instead require a “world model” that can understand spatial surroundings, like the stuff we walk by or bang into.

But what is a world model, exactly? And how do you train AI to recognize what the real world looks like? Host Ira Flatow checks in with tech journalist Joanna Stern, who’s seen the early days of these models up close, even in her own home.

Then, we check in on the math world, where frontier AI models have made meaningful progress on decades-old problems. Mathematician Emily Riehl gives us the big picture on how significant these results actually are.

Guests:

Joanna Stern is a tech journalist who writes newsletters and creates videos for New Things Media.

Dr. Emily Riehl is a professor of mathematics at Johns Hopkins University.

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

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Watching a loved one with Alzheimer's or dementia slowly lose their cognitive abilities can be heartbreaking. While the person you once knew seems to be slipping away, sometimes people with Alzheimer's briefly seem like their old selves again. They may remember a long-forgotten name or suddenly regain the ability to have a fluid conversation. What do these moments of lucidity really mean for the progression of the disease? And what implications do they have for those living with the disease, and their caretakers?

Alzheimer’s researcher Andrea Gilmore-Bykovskyi talks to Ira about these questions and more.

Guest:

Dr. Andrea Gilmore-Bykovskyi is an associate professor of emergency medicine, and co-director of the Lucidity in Alzheimer’s and Dementia (LEAD) Network at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

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Winter in Colorado looked very different this year. Many parts of the state experienced record-high temperatures and record-low snowpack, which had downstream effects on farming, sports, tourism, and more. For those economies and livelihoods that rely on snow, what happens when snow becomes unreliable? And can we prepare for it?

Producer Kathleen Davis speaks with Halle Zander, news director at Aspen Public Radio, about how this is playing out in Aspen. Then, environmental historian Mike Childers talks us through how Colorado’s economies may need to adjust.

Guests:

Halle Zander is the news director at Aspen Public Radio.

Dr. Mike Childers is an associate professor of environmental history at Colorado State University in Fort Collins.

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

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The earth is facing a biodiversity crisis, and there’s a lot of attention on species that are threatened, or at risk of dying out completely. But, there’s another critter category that’s a little more mysterious: species that are “lost to science.” This means scientists aren’t quite sure how many of them there are out there—or if there are any left at all.

Producer Kathleen Davis talks to biologist Matt Forister, who is so dedicated to finding more information about these lost species that he created a whole scientific journal about them.

Plus, 28 of the 178 firefly species in the United States and Canada are currently lost to science, according to the community science project Firefly Atlas. We’re joined by firefly researcher Candace Fallon, who is working to confirm which firefly butts are still blinking and which have burnt out.

Want to help find fireflies near you? Find out how to participate in the Firefly Atlas.

Guests:

Dr. Matt Foristor is a professor of biology at the University of Nevada-Reno and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Lost Species.

Candace Fallon is a senior endangered species conservation biologist at the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation.

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

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President Trump has signed an executive order calling for a change to the childhood vaccination schedule. Specifically, he wants to separate the MMR vaccine, which protects against measles, mumps, and rubella, into three separate shots. There’s no scientific research to indicate that these changes would be beneficial, and the order has sparked backlash from medical associations and drug manufacturers. 

Meanwhile, over 2,400 people have contracted measles in the United States so far this year, topping the total number of cases for 2025 in just seven months. And with vaccination rates declining, there’s a lot of conversation about what’s driving vaccine hesitancy and how to combat misinformation.  

Elisabeth Marnik has lived in both worlds: She wasn't vaccinated as a kid because her parents were concerned that vaccines could do harm. In high school, she fell in love with science. She went to college, got vaccinated, and then earned a PhD in immunology. She joins Flora to talk about what people misunderstand vaccine hesitancy, and how she approaches science communication in today’s messy information ecosystem.

Guest:

Dr. Elisabeth Marnik is an immunologist and the executive director of The Evidence Collective.

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

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In a lab in the Rocky Mountains, a group of scientists is hard at work trying to find answers across biology, physics, and engineering: They’re looking into things like the hydrodynamics of insect pee and the physics of sheepdog herding, and working to designing robots that resemble squid and hearing aids that only cost a dollar.

These endeavors may seem unrelated, but they’re glued together by bioengineer Saad Bhamla’s philosophy of science driven by curiosity, and how to make the most of the lab’s time. He joins Host Flora Lichtman to talk about what led him to this approach.

Guest:

Dr. Saad Bhamla is an associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

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Human childbirth is often difficult and incredibly painful—just ask anyone who’s been through it. And for a long time, childbirth seemed to be uniquely difficult for humans. But a new study suggests that we aren’t alone: Some small primates birth offspring whose heads are nearly twice the size of the mother’s pelvic area.  

So how do those primates go through difficult childbirths? Why didn’t evolution make ours any easier? And what can this tell us about humankind? Flora explores these questions and more with anthropologist Lia Betti.

Guest:

Dr. Lia Betti is an associate professor of anthropology at University College London in the UK.

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

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Former Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe, was the first Native person to hold a cabinet position. Now she’s running to be governor of New Mexico. 

Haaland joins Host Flora Lichtman to talk about her new memoir, “A Voice Like Mine,” her time at the Interior Department, and why she thinks lawsuits are a good thing when it comes to the environment. 

Read an excerpt from “A Voice Like Mine.”

Guest:

Deb Haaland served as Secretary of the Interior under President Biden. She is a member of Laguna Pueblo tribe and lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

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