Science Friday

There’s an established playbook for getting one’s affairs in order before death—create a will, name legal guardians, and so on. But there’s also a newer consideration: what will happen to our digital presences, like social media accounts, files, photos, videos, and more. So how do we manage them, and make sure we’re not turned into AI chatbots without permission? (It does happen.) 

Information scientist Jed Brubaker studies digital afterlives, and joins Host Flora Lichtman to discuss how we can manage our digital legacies. 

Guest: Jed Brubaker is an information scientist and head of the Digital Legacy Clinic at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

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

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At first blush, the plots of many horror movies don’t seem particularly appealing. Take “The Shining”: A murderous psychopath tries to kill his family in a haunted, secluded hotel. But horror movies have had devoted fans for as long as they’ve been around, and lately, scary movies and television shows like “Sinners” or “The Walking Dead” have made a big splash. Why? What draws us to horror? And why are some people more thrill-seeking or morbidly curious than others? 

Host Flora Lichtman talks with two psychologists on opposite poles of horror fandom to flesh out some of the answers: horrorphile and behavioral scientist Coltan Scriver, and psychology professor Ken Carter, who’s horrified by horror. 

Guests: Dr. Ken Carter is a psychology professor at Emory University and the author of Buzz!: Inside the Minds of Thrill-Seekers, Daredevils, and Adrenaline Junkies. 
Dr. Coltan Scrivner is a behavioral scientist at Arizona State University and the author of Morbidly Curious: A Scientist Explains Why We Can’t Look Away. 

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

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For decades, peanut allergies were on the rise in the US. But a study released on October 20 found that peanut allergies in babies and young children are now decreasing. This drop correlates with a change in guidance from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. In 2017, the agency started recommending exposing children to peanuts “early and often.” Since that recommendation, the prevalence of peanut allergies has dropped significantly.

Sharon Chinthrajah, a physician specializing in allergies and immunology, churns through the findings with Host Flora Lichtman.  

Guest: Dr. Sharon Chinthrajah is a physician specializing in allergy and immunology at the Sean N. Parker Center at Stanford University.

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

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Bacteria have been around for billions of years. Could they have come up with complex behaviors that we just don’t understand yet? Could they have their own language? Their own culture? Their own complex societies playing out right under, and in, our noses?

Microbiologist Bonnie Bassler has been studying these questions for more than 30 years. She talks with Host Flora Lichtman about the wild world of bacterial communication, and how understanding microbes could help us understand ourselves.

Guest: Dr. Bonnie Bassler is a microbiologist at Princeton University.

The transcript for this episode is available at sciencefriday.com.

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After years of development, lab-grown fish is taste-test ready for the public. Four restaurants in the US are serving up cultivated salmon made by the company Wildtype. Producer Kathleen Davis gives Host Flora Lichtman a rundown on how Wildtype tastes, initial public perception, and the upstream battle to take cultivated meat mainstream. 

Plus, SciFri heads to Burlington, Vermont, where scientists are cooking up the foods of the future—including the building blocks of cell-cultured meat. Flora digs in with foodie researchers Alexis Yamashita and Rachael Floreani about why innovation is critical to a sustainable food future.

Guests: Adam Tortosa is a chef and the owner of Robin in San Francisco, California.
Alexis Yamashita is a community organizer and PhD student in food systems at the University of Vermont. 
Dr. Rachael Floreani is a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Vermont.

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

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Do science documentaries need a refresh? What if the goal wasn’t just teaching you something, but making you feel something? A new series from the BBC, airing on PBS, called “Human” tries to do just that. It tells the tale of our ancient family tree, embracing the complex and dramatic sides of the story. It asks: Who were the different species of humans that lived on this planet before us? What must it have been like to be in their shoes? And how did we become the only ones left standing? 

Ella Al-Shamahi, a paleoanthropologist and host of “Human,” tells SciFri Host Flora Lichtman about her vision for how to tell this story so that today’s humans lean in. 

Guest: Ella Al-Shamahi is a paleoanthropologist and the host of “Human” on BBC/PBS.

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

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TikTok and other social media sites are full of mental health content—often short, grabby, first-person videos detailing symptoms for conditions like ADHD and autism. But what does this mean for teens and young adults who spend hours a day scrolling?

A new study published in PLOS One analyzes the 100 most viewed TikTok videos about ADHD to assess both how accurate they are and how young people respond to them. Researchers found that about half of the videos were inaccurate or missing key context, and that the more TikToks young adults watched, the less critical they were of the content.

For some, watching social videos about mental health conditions led them to better understand themselves and eventually get a proper diagnosis and treatment. For others it made them consider if they have conditions they don’t meet the diagnostic criteria for.

Host Flora Lichtman talks with the lead author of the ADHD TikTok study, Vasileia Karasavva, a PhD Student in clinical psychology at the University of British Columbia; and Dr. Jennifer Katzenstein, director of psychology, neuropsychology, and social work at Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Guests: Vasileia Karasavva is a PhD Student in Clinical Psychology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
Dr. Jennifer Katzenstein is Director of Psychology, Neuropsychology and Social work and Co-director of the Center for Behavioral Health at Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital in St. Petersburg, Florida. 

Transcripts for each episode are available at sciencefriday.com.

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We’re taking a polar plunge into the science of sea unicorns, also known as narwhals!

Narwhals are mysterious arctic whales with long, twirly tusks protruding from their foreheads, like a creature out of a fairy tale. And it turns out that we don’t know too much about them, partly because they live so far north in the remote Arctic.

An international team of researchers used drones to observe narwhals in the wild and learned new things about their behavior, including how they use their tusks to hunt and play.

Host Flora Lichtman gets on the horn with Dr. Gregory O’Corry-Crowe, research professor and biologist at Florida Atlantic University, who was an author on the new narwhal study, published last month in Frontiers in Marine Science.

Guest: Dr. Greg O’Corry-Crowe is a research professor at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida.

Transcripts for each episode are available at sciencefriday.com.

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Astrophysicists may have spotted evidence for “dark stars,” an unusual type of star that could possibly have existed in the earliest days of the universe, in data from the James Webb Space Telescope. Instead of being powered by nuclear fusion as current stars are, the controversial theory says that these ancient dark stars would have formed by mixing a huge cloud of hydrogen and helium with a type of self-annihilating dark matter. Dark stars would not have been dark—researchers believe that if they existed, they would actually have been bigger and brighter than current stars.

Astrophysicists Katherine Freese, who first proposed the idea of dark stars in 2007, and Cosmin Ilie, who detected the possible signs of the dark stars, join Host Ira Flatow to discuss the theory.  

Guests:
Dr. Katherine Freese is a theoretical astrophysicist and a professor of physics at the University of Texas at Austin.
Dr. Cosmin Ilie is an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Colgate University.

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

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AI is everywhere these days, and though there’s debate about how useful it is, one area where experts think it could be game-changing is scientific research. It promised to be particularly useful for speeding up drug discovery, an expensive and time-consuming process that can take decades. But so far, it hasn’t panned out.

The few AI-designed drugs that have made it to clinical trials haven’t been approved, venture capital investment in these efforts has cratered in the last few years, and many startups have shut their doors. So why has it been so hard to make AI-designed drugs? What are the fundamental issues, and what does the future of this research look like?

Joining Host Ira Flatow with some answers is Peter Coveney, who studies how chemistry discoveries can be sped up with algorithms and computers.

Guest: Dr. Peter Coveney is a professor and director of the Centre for Computational Science at University College London.

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

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