Science Friday

A new mRNA vaccine for melanoma is making headlines. Moderna and Merck recently announced results from their clinical trial suggesting that this new vaccine, in combination with the cancer drug Keytruda, reduced recurrence rates in patients. The companies have not yet released full data from the trial.

So, how does the vaccine work? And does this mark the beginning of a new era of cancer treatments using mRNA vaccine technology? Ira talks with physician Michael Postow, whose patients were part of the drug trial at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

Guest:

Dr. Michael Postow is chief of the melanoma service at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. 

Transcript will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

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When you see a mushroom popping up from the forest floor, that mushroom is just the tip of the fungal iceberg for a vast world beneath the surface. But the nature of fungal life makes it hard to answer some basic questions. What exactly does it mean to be one individual organism? And how do you tell how old a fungus is, when parts of it can recycle, regenerate, and grow again?

Flora talks with fungal researcher Kristin Aleklett about the challenge of fungal age, and how researchers are trying to better understand what fungi are doing in the world under the ground.

Guest:

Dr. Kristin Aleklett is a researcher at Lund University in Sweden.

Transcript will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

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There’s been wave after wave of bad news about the ocean: warming temperatures, overfishing, acidification, coral bleaching. But in the last few years, there have also been some big wins for the big blue—as well as a narrative shift, in which the ocean itself has almost become its own larger-than-life character in conservation conversations.

So how should we think about the future of the seas? And how do the stories we tell about the ocean shape how we think about it? Flora chats with marine biologist Helen Scales, author of “What the Wild Sea Can Be,” which is the Science Friday book club pick for September and October. Check out the SciFri Book Club to read along.

Read an excerpt from “What the Wild Sea Can Be: The Future of the World’s Ocean.”

Guest:

Dr. Helen Scales is a marine biologist and author of several books, including “What the Wild Sea Can Be: The Future of the World’s Ocean.”

Transcript will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

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When humans finally land on Mars, what should they do? A report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine lays out the science objectives for a crewed Mars mission. In January, planetary scientist Lindy Elkins-Tanton, who co-chaired the report committee, joined Host Flora Lichtman to talk about the plans to send people to Mars.

We also get an update on the mission to survey the asteroid Psyche. Elkins-Tanton tells us how she managed the team that made the Psyche mission possible, and what she learned from her mistakes.

Guest:

Dr. Lindy Elkins-Tanton is a planetary scientist. She’s the head of NASA’s Psyche mission and director of UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory.

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

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AI is popping up in many corners of society, but how are doctors using it in their practice? We asked our physician listeners to call in, and many of you did. What we heard mirrored broad trends: that more and more doctors are using AI tools for diagnosis, paperwork, and getting up to speed on patients. But they also have concerns.

So how is AI changing medical care? And how is it affecting patients? Joining Host Flora Lichtman to sort fact from hallucination is physician-computer scientist Jonathan Chen, who’s studied the accuracy of these models and how healthcare workers use them.

Guest:

Dr. Jonathan Chen is an associate professor of medicine and director for Medical Education in Artificial Intelligence at Stanford 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

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We’ve been hearing for years that climate change makes weather more extreme, and extreme weather more frequent. But what’s been more difficult to measure is exactly how climate change influences a particular weather event. For example, how much more intense was Hurricane Lala because of climate change? How much more deadly were India’s heat waves this summer? A growing field called attribution science is trying to answer questions like these.

Flora chats with climate scientist Joyce Kimutai about the field and why it's so important. Then, we hear from climate law expert Maxine Burkett about how attribution science could be used in policy, and in the courtroom, to hold emitters responsible.

Guests:

Dr. Joyce Kimutai is a climate scientist specializing in attribution science. She works for the World Weather Attribution Consortium at Imperial College London and is the principal climate scientist for the Kenya Meteorological Services.

Maxine Burkett is a professor of climate, environment, and society at Stanford University in California.

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

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GPS is such an essential part of our lives that it’s easy to forget there was once a world without it. But, like many tech advancements of the 20th century, GPS was originally created by the U.S. military. So how did it become a part of daily civilian life? And how vulnerable is it to manipulation?

Katherine Dunn has written all about this and more in her book, “Little Blue Dot: How GPS Shaped the Modern World.”

Guest:

Katherine Dunn is a science journalist and author of “Little Blue Dot: How GPS Shaped the Modern World.”

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

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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

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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

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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.