Today's bonus episode features the full interview with Dr. Christina May, who shares her thoughts on the wonders of working with flies, and a peek into the effect of sugar on the brain.

Creator & Host: Houda Khaled

Link to the papers:

• https://doi.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2019.04.027

• https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.54530

Music by Blue Dot Sessions (⁠www.sessions.blue⁠):

• Castor Wheel Pivot

• GriddleKake

*Minor correction: The human brain has closer to ~100 billion neurons, rather than a trillion - Dr. May's initial guess. Still orders of magnitude more than the ~100K in a fly!*

Dr. William Ja uses fruit flies to study food comas. Do flies get sleepy after eating? Do we? Why is that even worth knowing? And what do flies and Lamborghini's have in common? Dr. Ja discusses his research, the unknown purpose of food comas, and how what we eat might affect our sleep (and vice versa)!

Creator & Host: Houda Khaled

Music by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue)

Link to paper: https://elifesciences.org/articles/19334

Full transcript at: https://frivolousscience.substack.com/

Dr. Ralph Emilio Peterson follows rats around New York City with a mic and a camera. Is it a silly pet project, or a creative pest control solution? Dr. Peterson discuss his research, and we get a sneak peak into the secret "language" of rats.

Creator & Host: Houda Khaled

Music by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue)

Link to the preprint: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.21.665423v1.full

Full transcript and rat videos at https://frivolousscience.substack.com/

***Correction: I say that the rat recordings are pitched up for us to hear, but they are actually pitched down! They are altered from high frequency (that we can't hear) to lower frequency.***

Are your taxes being wasted on scientist pet projects? What do headlines get wrong when they lambast studies on "fruit flies in Paris" and "shrimp on treadmills"? Welcome to Frivolous Science, where we meet with scientists behind some of the silliest sounding studies to get to the bottom of what their research is really about. The first episode premieres December 1st - tell all your friends!

Creator & Host: Houda Khaled

Music by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue)

Full transcript at https://frivolousscience.substack.com/⁠