Science Friday

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.

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.

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

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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.
 

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

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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.

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

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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.

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

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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.

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

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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.

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

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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.

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

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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.

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

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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.

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

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