It’s hard to imagine a world without seatbelts or airbags. But five decades ago, it was the norm for car manufacturers to put glamour over safety. “It was stylistic pornography over engineering integrity,” Ralph Nader, prolific consumer advocate and several-time presidential candidate, tells Science Friday. This winter marks the 55th anniversary of Nader’s groundbreaking investigation, “Unsafe at Any Speed,” a damning look at how little auto safety technology was in vehicles back in the 1960s. The book had a massive effect on auto safety in the U.S., setting the groundwork for laws about seatbelts, and the creation of the United States Department of Transportation. Nader joins Ira to discuss what’s happened over 55 years of auto safety advances, and what kind of work is needed to make sure new technology, like self-driving cars, have the safety checks they need before going out on the roads. To stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters. 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.

Ralph Nader Reflects On His Auto Safety Campaign, 55 Years Later

Natural Sciences

Science & Medicine

Science

Life Sciences

Earth Sciences

A new study used machine learning to analyze elephant vocalizations and identified “contact rumbles” that appear to function as names. Also, on a hike in the Badlands, a family found a dinosaur bone sticking out of a rock. It joined the few teenage T. rex fossils ever discovered.Elephants Seem To Use Names For Each OtherScientists have long known that elephants exhibit some advanced social behaviors that we humans find familiar, including tool use and funerals. And a new study from Colorado State a university offers compelling evidence that African savannah elephants might engage in another human social behavior: having names for each other. Researchers applied machine learning to a database of 600 elephant vocalizations, which included “contact rumbles,” vocalizations that researchers observed that other elephants responded to. The algorithm identified repeated sections of those recordings that might represent names. When the researchers played these possible “name” sections of audio to pairs of elephants—one of which was the suspected owner of the name—the appropriate elephant responded at a rate significantly better than random chance. Guest host Annie Minoff is joined by Tim Revell, deputy editor at New Scientist, to talk about this and other science stories from the week, including the possible effects a freezing interstellar cloud had on Earth a few million years ago, the biological effects of short term spaceflight on private citizen passengers on SpaceX flights, and a new species of pterosaur found in the Australian outback with a killer tongue.Kids Discover Extremely Rare T. Rex FossilFor one family, a summer hike in the badlands of North Dakota turned into the discovery of a lifetime when they spotted a fossil jutting out of a rock. Two brothers, their dad, and a cousin found the fossil, and with the help of some dinosaur experts, they eventually learned it was a T. rex. The fossil wasn’t just of any T. rex, but a teenage one. These fossils are incredibly rare—there are only a handful of them in the world. Guest host Annie Minoff discusses this dino discovery and what it means for science with 12-year-old Jessin Fisher, a budding paleontologist and one of the brothers who discovered the fossil, as well as Dr. Tyler Lyson, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science in Colorado who helped excavate the fossil. Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.
Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Elephants Seem To Use Names For Each Other | Kids Discover Rare T. Rex Fossil

Many people think of the ocean as a quiet and serene place: Take a dip underwater and the cacophony of the world melts away. But the ocean is quite noisy, full of whale songs and echolocation, which whales and dolphins use to communicate. Cephalopods can make and hear sounds too, even without ears. Then, there’s human-made noise, including the giant ships that crisscross the globe. The effects of this continuous low-volume noise are harder to track because they do not result in immediate injury or death. Rather, scientists are studying the long-term effects on animals’ communication, mating, and food gathering. Ira talks with Amorina Kingdon, science journalist and author of the new book Sing Like Fish: How Sound Rules Life Underwater. Read an excerpt of Sing Like a Fish: How Sound Rules Life Underwater. Transcript for this segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.
Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

How Sound Rules Life Underwater

Plants called “hyperaccumulators” have evolved to absorb high levels of metals. Scientists want to harness them for greener metal mining. And, a little fern from New Caledonia is just a few inches tall, but its genome has 160.45 billion base pairs—50 times more DNA than a human.How Metal-Absorbing Plants Could Make Mining GreenerScientists are exploring a somewhat unusual green energy solution: mining metals from the earth using plants. Typically, if soil has high levels of metal, plants will either die or do everything they can to avoid it. But, one group has taken a different path: evolve to be able to safely absorb large amounts of the metals. These special plants are called hyperaccumulators. And their ability to suck metals like nickel from the earth is called phytomining. The Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy announced in March up to $10 million in funding for phytomining research. Ira talks with Dr. David McNear, professor of plant and soil sciences at the University of Kentucky, about these fascinating flora and their promise as a greener option to metal mining.A Tiny Fern Has The Largest Genome Ever DiscoveredScientists just discovered the largest genome of any living thing on Earth, and it belongs to a small, unassuming fern called Tmesipteris oblanceolata. If you were to split open one of its cells and unwind the DNA that’s coiled up in the nucleus, it would stretch out more than 300 feet—taller than the Statue of Liberty. Scientists reported the finding last week in the journal iScience. The fern is only a few inches tall and is found on the island of New Caledonia in the Southwest Pacific. Its DNA is made up of 160.45 billion base pairs—50 times more than the human genome. This finding has left scientists scratching their heads, wondering how and why a fern ended up with so much DNA. Ira Flatow talks with co-lead author of this study Dr. Jaume Pellicer, evolutionary biologist at the Botanical Institute of Barcelona, about this research and why this fern’s DNA is so puzzling. Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.
Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Metal-Absorbing Plants Could Make Mining Greener | A Tiny Fern's Gigantic Genome

When you think about connections between science and war, the obvious links are in technology—advanced radar, spy satellites, more powerful explosives—and in medical innovations that seek to heal the wounds caused by conflict. But in a new book, Stories are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind, author Annalee Newitz says that stories and narrative can be weapons too, used in battle on a psychological battlefield. Ira talks with Newitz about the history of psychological warfare, from Sun Tzu to Benjamin Franklin, and its modern American incarnation under the guidance of Paul Linebarger, who was also a science fiction author known by the pen name Cordwainer Smith. They discuss the characteristics of a psyop, how techniques of psychological warfare have been co-opted into modern politics, and whether there’s a route toward “psychological disarmament.” Read an excerpt from Stories are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind. Transcript for this segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.
Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

How Psychological Warfare Moved From Battlefields To Politics

DNA has long been studied and understood as the genetic blueprint for life on Earth. And related scientific endeavors, like the Human Genome Project, have received enormous attention. But DNA’s lesser-known counterpart, RNA, which translates the instructions from those blueprints into proteins in our cells, has received far less focus. But a lot’s changed in the last few years. The success of the mRNA COVID vaccines has led to a renewed interest in the potential medical therapies for this tiny molecular powerhouse, with applications ranging from CRISPR gene-editing to an mRNA-based cancer vaccine. Dr. Thomas Cech, distinguished professor in biochemistry at University of Colorado, Boulder, and the author of the book The Catalyst: RNA and the Quest to Unlock Life’s Deepest Secrets, joins Ira Flatow to tell us how why RNA has gotten the shorter end of the research stick for so long, how it could help us understand the origins of life, and why this misunderstood molecule might be the key to a next generation of big scientific discoveries. Read an excerpt from The Catalyst: RNA and the Quest to Unlock Life’s Deepest Secrets 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.

Ralph Nader Reflects On His Auto Safety Campaign, 55 Years Later

Download our free app to listen on your phone