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Science Friday

Science Friday is a captivating radio program and podcast that celebrates the wonders of science and the thrill of discovery. Hosted by Ira Flatow, this engaging show brings together leading scientists, researchers, and experts to explore the latest advancements, tackle intriguing questions, and shed light on the mysteries of our universe. From uncovering the secrets of the natural world to exploring cutting-edge technology, Science Friday invites you to embark on a fascinating journey into the realms of scientific exploration and understanding.

  • Ever since we learned that an asteroid slammed into Earth, wiped out the dinosaurs, and changed the course of life on this planet, scientists have wondered if it could happen again. It turns out there is an asteroid, called Bennu, that has a very small chance of colliding with our planet in the year 2182.But beyond that, Bennu could hold information that would help unlock our solar system’s secrets, like how it began and where life originated. NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission launched in 2016 to collect a sample from Bennu. It was successful, and this past fall, the spacecraft safely delivered its asteroid sample to scientists waiting on Earth.In a new memoir, The Asteroid Hunter: A Scientist’s Journey to the Dawn of our Solar System, Dr. Dante Lauretta, principal investigator of OSIRIS-REx, gives readers a behind-the-scenes account on this high-stakes mission.Ira talks with Dr. Lauretta, a planetary scientist at University of Arizona in Tucson, about why he chose to study Bennu, what it was like to run such a nail-biting mission, and what Bennu could reveal about our galaxy.Read an excerpt from The Asteroid Hunter.Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.
  • The next time you go to the zoo, take a few minutes by the sea lion habitat to watch the way they swim. While most high-performance swimmers use powerful kicks from hind appendages to power through the water, sea lions instead use their front flippers, moving with a pulling motion. With their propulsion source close to their center of gravity and their flexible bodies, sea lions are extremely agile under water, able to weave in and out among the stalks of an undersea kelp forest.Researchers are studying the movements of these exceptional swimmers to try to design improved underwater vehicles. Mimicking some of the sea lion’s tricks could allow more maneuverable, quieter vehicles that produce less turbulence in the water.SciFri’s Charles Bergquist talks with Dr. Megan Leftwich of George Washington University about her work with sea lions, and other research into fluids and biomechanics, including the fluid mechanics of human birth.Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.
  • There’s a thriving black market to buy and sell endangered plants, and the Department of Agriculture and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service monitor endangered species that are brought into the United States illegally. When they are discovered, the plants’ home country has 30 days to accept them. If they aren’t claimed, they get rescued. Then where do they go? To one of 62 plant rescue centers across the country at botanic gardens, zoos, and arboretums, operating according to an agreement through the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Flora and Fauna (CITES).Ira talks with Dr. Susan Pell, executive director of the U.S. Botanic Garden, and Amy Highland, plant curator at the U.S. Botanic Garden in Washington, DC, about the garden’s plant rescue program.Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.
  • The World Meteorological Organization’s report confirms last year had the highest temperatures on record and predicts an even hotter 2024. Also, NASA’s new PACE satellite will study how these tiny creatures could affect Earth’s climate, and how aerosols influence air quality.UN Report Confirms 2023 Was Hottest Year On RecordA new report from the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization shows that last year had the hottest average global temperatures since recording began 174 years ago. Ocean temperatures also reached a 65-year high last year, and 2024 is on track to be even hotter.Ira talks with Jason Dinh, climate editor at Atmos Magazine about that and other top science news of the week including cannibal birds, fighting Dengue fever with bacteria-infected mosquitos and the evolutionary benefit of whale menopause.Why This NASA Satellite Is Studying PlanktonDid you know you can see plankton … from space? Earlier this year, NASA launched a satellite to do exactly that. It’s called PACE, which stands for Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, and ocean Ecosystem, and NASA hopes that the satellite can tell us more about how these tiny creatures interact with Earth’s atmosphere and influence our climate.Some species of plankton, called phytoplankton, are microscopic plants that absorb carbon dioxide and produce oxygen. PACE has equipment that can identify different species of phytoplankton by the kind of light they give off, giving NASA real-time information about their location and population size, which can also aid fisheries and coastal communities when algal blooms occur.PACE will also study how aerosols affect air quality on Earth. Additional instruments on the satellite can differentiate between different kinds of aerosols by studying how they reflect light back into space, which will help scientists refine their climate models so that more accurate forecasts can be made.Ira Flatow talks to Dr. Ivona Cetinic, PACE’s science lead for ocean biogeochemistry, about the satellite, her favorite species of plankton, and how the public can benefit from the data that the mission will provide.Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.
  • The term “living fossil” has been applied to any number of animals, from sharks to turtles to the coelacanth. It’s the idea that those animals look very much the same way their species may have looked millions of years ago, with limited evolutionary change over that time.After analyzing the genomes of many different species on that “living fossil” list, researchers report they may have found an animal that evolves more slowly than all the others—a group of fish called gar. The rate of molecular change in gar genomes is the slowest of any jawed vertebrate, the researchers say. In fact, gar genomes change so slowly that two gar species that diverged from each other over 105 million years ago can still interbreed and produce fertile offspring. In evolutionary time, that’s comparable to the distance between humans and elephants. The researchers believe that the slow rate of change in gars may be due to an exceptional ability to repair mutations and other errors in their genes.Dr. Solomon David, assistant professor of aquatic ecology at the University of Minnesota, and Chase Brownstein, a graduate student in Yale’s department of ecology and evolutionary biology, join Ira to discuss the findings, recently reported in the journal Evolution.Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.
  • Four years ago this week, the world as we know it changed. Schools shut down, offices shuttered, and we hunkered down at home with our Purell and canned foods, trying to stay safe from a novel, deadly coronavirus. Back then most of us couldn’t fathom just how long the pandemic would stretch on.And now four years later, some 1.2 million people have died in the U.S alone and nearly 7 million have been hospitalized as a result of a COVID-19 infection, according to the CDC.So, what have we learned about how COVID-19 attacks the body? What can be done for long COVID sufferers? And what can we expect in the future?Ira analyzes this era of the pandemic with Hannah Davis, co-founder of the Patient-Led Research Collaborative in New York City, and Dr. Akiko Iwasaki, immunobiologist at Yale Medical School in New Haven, Connecticut.Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.
  • Think about the best meal you’ve ever eaten: Maybe it was in a restaurant in a far-off city, or perhaps it was a home-cooked meal made by someone you love. No matter where or what it was, odds are what made it so memorable was the flavor.Flavor is arguably the most important part of a meal. If the flavor of something is off, or undetectable, it can jeopardize your enjoyment. There’s a lot of chemistry and biological science behind how and what we taste.Flavorama: A Guide to Unlocking the Art and Science of Flavor is a new book that breaks down the mechanisms that go into these processes. Ira is joined by author Arielle Johnson, who holds a PhD in chemistry and co-founded the fermentation lab at the world-famous Copenhagen restaurant Noma.Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.
  • Roe v. Wade was overturned almost two years ago, and a lot has changed in terms of abortion choices in the United States. Some states have effectively banned abortion, while others have such confusing laws that it’s difficult for the people who live there to know what their reproductive rights are.The post-Dobbs landscape hasn’t just affected the care people can receive: It’s also changed where physicians choose to work, especially if they’re in states where they can be criminally prosecuted for performing abortions.Last month, the Idaho Coalition for Safe Healthcare published a report that found that 22% of ob-gyns have left the state since June of 2022 — a massive amount for a state that already has the fewest physicians per capita in the country. Ongoing research in Wisconsin has found that the Dobbs decision has affected where medical students choose to study, and has even dissuaded some from choosing obstetrics as a specialty.Joining Ira to talk about this are two ob-gyns from states with abortion restrictions: Dr. Sara Thomson, based in Boise, Idaho, and Dr. Abby Cutler, assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.Transcript for this segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.
  • A recent study looked into life-threatening Acanthamoeba infections, and a few deaths, linked to the use of tap water with devices like neti pots. And, in ‘The Balanced Brain,’ Dr. Camilla Nord explores the neuroscience behind mental health, and how our brains deal with life’s challenges.Scientists Warn Against Nasal Rinsing With Unboiled Tap WaterResearchers at the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention published a study Wednesday that examined 10 cases of life-threatening Acanthamoeba infections that occurred after people cleaned their sinuses with neti pots, squeeze bottles, or other nasal rinsing devices. In most of these cases, which occurred in immunocompromised individuals over the span of a few decades, individuals had used tap water for nasal rinsing.Tap water, while generally safe to drink, is not sterile. Microorganisms and germs live in distribution systems and pipes that the water travels through, and Acanthamoeba amebae was the main link between the 10 cases, three of which resulted in death.Although contracting the Acanthamoeba pathogen is extremely rare, many people are unaware of the unsterile nature of tap water and use it for their sinuses, according to a survey study published last year. A third of participants incorrectly believed U.S. tap water is sterile, and almost two-thirds assumed it was safe to rinse your sinuses with it.The CDC and FDA recommend using distilled or sterile water for nasal rinsing. If you want to use tap water, they recommend boiling it for three to five minutes and allowing it to cool. While slightly more time consuming, it is an effective way to get sterile water.Rachel Feltman, host of “The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week,” joins Ira to talk about this story and other news in science this week, including a new study that links microplastics in the human body to increased risk of heart disease and death, why the U.S. maternal mortality rate might be inflated, and why cicadas produce high-speed jets of urine.How Your Brain Constructs Your Mental HealthIf you’ve ever struggled with a mental health issue like anxiety or depression, or know someone who has, it’s pretty clear that what works for one person might not work for another. Antidepressants only work in about 50-60% of patients. Meditation or yoga may be a gamechanger for some people, but ineffective for others.Over the past few decades, neuroscientists have made huge advances in our understanding of the human brain. How can we use the latest neuroscience research to help improve our mental well-being? And what is the relationship between physical and mental health?To answer those questions and more, SciFri producer Shoshannah Buxbaum talks with Dr. Camilla Nord, director of the Mental Health Neuroscience Lab at the University of Cambridge and author of the new book The Balanced Brain: The Science of Mental Health.Read an excerpt of The Balanced Brain at sciencefriday.com.Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.
  • It’s a common refrain from elementary school to adulthood: “I’m bad at math.” It’s a hard subject for a lot of people, and it has a reputation for being—let’s face it—boring. Math isn’t taught in a flashy way in schools, and its emphasis on memorization for key concepts like multiplication tables and equations can discourage students.It’s not hard to understand why: Math has long been seen as a boy’s club, and a straight, cis boy’s club at that. But Kyne Santos, a drag queen based in Kitchener, Ontario, wants to change that.Kyne is on a mission to make math fun and accessible to people who have felt like math isn’t for them. Her new book, “Math in Drag,” is one part history lesson, one part math guidebook, and one part memoir. Kyne speaks with Ira about “celebrity numbers,” Möbius strips, and why math and drag are more similar than you may think.Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.