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. 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 Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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. 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 Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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. 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 Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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. 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 Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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. 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 Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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. 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 Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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. 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 Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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. 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 Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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. 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 Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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. 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 Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.