Each year, the Ig Nobel Prizes recognize scientific research that first makes you laugh, then makes you think. For instance, researchers who investigated the pizza preferences of lizards on the island of Togo. Or a man who kept track of his fingernail growth for 35 years.

As is Thanksgiving tradition, we’re sharing highlights from this year’s Ig Nobels on Science Friday. Annals of Improbable Research editor Marc Abrahams acts as master of ceremonies for the 35th First Annual Ig Nobel Prizes, which include 10 awards, several 24-second scientific lectures, and a mini-opera about indigestion.

Guest: Marc Abrahams is the editor and co-founder of Annals of Improbable Research and the founder and master of ceremonies for the Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

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A good workout can make you feel triumphant. And even if that isn’t your relationship with exercise, you’ve probably heard that working out can lift your mood, fight depression, and make you more resilient when life knocks back. But why exactly does exercise improve mental health? Is it all about those endorphins? Does the type or duration of a workout matter if you’re looking for a mental wellness boost?

To help answer those questions and more, Host Flora Lichtman talks with Eduardo Esteban Bustamante and Jack Raglin, who both study the relationship between physical activity and mental health.

Guests: Dr. Eduardo Esteban Bustamante studies the link between physical activity and mental health in kids as the director of the Healthy Kids Lab at the University of Illinois, Chicago.
Dr. Jack Raglin studies exercise and sports science as a professor of kinesiology at Indiana University.

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

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It’s a wonderful time of the year: squash, pumpkin, and gourd season. But how do those giant, award-winning pumpkins grow so big? And what’s the difference between a gourd and a squash? 

In a conversation from 2023, Ira talks with Dr. Chris Hernandez, director of the University of New Hampshire’s squash, pumpkin, and melon breeding program to explore all things winter squash and answer listener questions.

Guests: Dr. Chris Hernandez is an assistant professor of Plant Breeding at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, New Hampshire.
Dan Souza is co-Editor of Cook’s Science: How to Unlock Flavor in 50 of our Favorite Ingredients (Cook’s Illustrated, 2016). He’s based in Boston, Massachusetts.

Transcript is available at sciencefriday.com.

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Have you ever gotten to the end of, say, a jar of peanut butter and wondered if it should go in trash or recycling? If it’s worth rinsing out? And where will it actually end up?

Journalist Alexander Clapp had those same questions, and went to great lengths to answer them—visiting five continents to chronicle how our trash travels. Along the way, he discovered a multibillion-dollar trash trade run by shady waste brokers, and a global industry powered by slimy spoons, crinkled plastic bags, and all the other stuff we throw away. It’s a putrid business that we’re a part of, and many of us know little about.

In a conversation from February, Host Flora Lichtman speaks with Clapp about the garbage business and his new book Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife Of Your Trash.

Guest: Alexander Clapp is a journalist and author of Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife Of Your Trash. He’s based in Athens, Greece.

Transcript is available at sciencefriday.com.

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Twenty years ago, a young oncologist started journaling to process his experience treating cancer patients. That cathartic act became the Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.

Fifteen years after the book was published, how has our understanding of preventing and treating cancer changed? Host Flora Lichtman is joined by author Siddhartha Mukherjee to talk about what we now understand about screening, environmental risks, and rising cancer rates in young people.

Read an excerpt of the new chapters added to The Emperor of Maladies on the 15th anniversary of the book’s publication. 

This headline has been corrected from "Multi-Headed" to "Many-Headed" to accurately reflect Siddhartha Mukherjee's statement.

Guest: Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee is a cancer physician and an associate professor of medicine at Columbia University.

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African grey parrots are internet stars. It’s easy to see why—the charismatic birds sing, tell jokes, and sling profanities. But how do the endangered birds get from African forests to your feed? 

Wildlife crime reporter Rene Ebersole joins Host Flora Lichtman to describe her investigation into the global parrot trade, and the black market for wild African greys that is threatening their existence.

Guest: Rene Ebersole is Editor In Chief at Wildlife Investigative Reporters and Editors (WIRE).

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

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After years of getting your emails and phone calls, we know that SciFri listeners are in the 99th percentile when it comes to nerdy knowledge. We’re putting your fact retention skills to the test with the first ever Super Food Science Excellence Trivia Blowout (SFSETBO).

Host Flora Lichtman teams up with trivia kingpin Mangesh Hattikudur, co-host of the podcast “Part-Time Genius,” to quiz one lucky listener on her food science knowledge.

Guest: Mangesh Hattikudur is the co-host of “Part-Time Genius” and co-founder of Kaleidoscope.

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

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Some animals have a very different relationship to aging than we do: They don’t get cancer, they never go through menopause, and they live absurdly long lives. 

For instance, one bat species can live for more than 40 years, which may not sound like very long but that’s about nine times longer than expected based on its size. For comparison, if we aged on that scale, we’d live for hundreds of years. These bats aren’t the only animal super-agers—there’s a whole menagerie of them.

So what’s their secret? And can we learn anything from them that might help us live longer, healthier lives? Host Flora Lichtman talks with longevity researchers Vera Gorbunova and Juan Manuel Vazquez about what animals are teaching us.

Guests:
Dr. Vera Gorbunova is a biologist and professor at the University of Rochester, and a co-director of the Rochester Aging Research Center.
Dr. Juan Manuel Vazquez is a biologist and assistant professor at Pennsylvania State University studying the evolution of aging.

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

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Proteins are crucial for life. They're made of amino acids that “fold” into millions of different shapes. And depending on their structure, they do radically different things in our cells. For a long time, predicting those shapes for research was considered a grand biological challenge.

But in 2020, Google’s AI lab DeepMind released Alphafold, a tool that was able to accurately predict many of the structures necessary for understanding biological mechanisms in a matter of minutes. In 2024, the Alphafold team was awarded a Nobel Prize in chemistry for the advance.

Five years later after its release, Host Ira Flatow checks in on the state of that tech and how it’s being used in health research with John Jumper, one of the lead scientists responsible for developing Alphafold.

Guest: John Jumper, scientist at Google Deepmind and co-recipient of the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry.

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

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If you’ve heard the hammering of a woodpecker in the woods, you might have wondered how the birds can be so forceful. What does it take to whack your head against a tree repeatedly, hard enough to drill a hole? A team of researchers wondered that too and set out to investigate, by putting tiny muscle monitors on eight downy woodpeckers and recording them with high-speed video as they pecked away in the lab.

Integrative organismal biologist Nick Antonson, co-author of a report on the work, joins Host Flora Lichtmen to peck away at the mystery.

Plus, you can take two ant eggs with the exact same genes, and one can grow up to be a queen, the other a worker. Neuroscientist and evolutionary biologist Daniel Kronauer joins Flora to share recent research into how an ant becomes a queen.

Guests: Dr. Nick Antonson is an NSF postdoctoral research fellow in the department of ecology, evolution, and organismal biology at Brown University.
Dr. Daniel Kronauer is the Stanley S. and Sydney R. Shuman Professor in the Laboratory of Social Evolution and Behavior at The Rockefeller University in New York.

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

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