Science, Quickly

By Scientific American

Technology Science & Medicine

What's Science, Quickly about?

Leading science and tech journalists dive into a rich world of scientific discovery in this bite-size science variety show. To view all of our archived  material, go to:  www.scientificamerican.com/podcast .

4.4

1,051 ratings

Download our free app to listen on your phone

LAST EPISODE

Song of the Stars, Part 2: ...

09.27.2023

In 2014, a blind astronomer “sonified” the universe’s most explosive event: a gamma-ray burst. By listening to, rather than looking at, the data, she made a critical discovery and changed the field of astronomy.

Science, Quickly episodes:

09.27.2023 Song of the Stars, Part 2: Seeing in the Dark In 2014, a blind astronomer “sonified” the universe’s most explosive event: a gamma-ray burst. By listening to, rather than looking at, the data, she made a critical discovery and changed the field of astronomy.
09.25.2023 Song of the Stars, Part 1: Transforming Space into Symphonies Space is famously silent, but astronomers and musicians are increasingly turning astronomical data into sound as a way to make discoveries and inspire people who are blind or visually impaired.
09.22.2023 This Researcher Captured Air from the Amazon in Dive-Bombs--And Found Grim Clues That the Forest Is Dying One researcher has been hiring planes to strafe the sky over the Amazon rain forest to collect the air coming off the trees, and what she is finding is cause for alarm.
09.20.2023 Should You Get a Blood Test For Alzheimer's? Consumers can now get easy tests for Alzheimer’s. But these tests may not really help patients that much–yet.
09.18.2023 Ada Limón's Poem for Europa, Jupiter's Smallest Galilean Moon U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón discusses her involvement in NASA’s Europa Clipper mission and the inspiration behind her poem, which will travel onboard the spacecraft.
09.15.2023 How the Woolly Bear Caterpillar Does Something Pretty Amazing to Survive the Winter Caterpillars can’t regulate their body temperatures, so they have to come up with a totally different strategy to make it through the coldest months of the year.
09.13.2023 Bees 'Buzz' in More Ways Than You Might Think A honeybee swarm has as much electric charge as a thundercloud, and the insects’ mass movements in the atmosphere might even have some influence on the weather.
09.11.2023 Scientists Are Beginning to Learn the Language of Bats and Bees Using AI The new field of digital bioacoustics is using machine learning to try decipher animal speak, including honeybee toots and quacks and whoops.
09.08.2023 Trying to Train Your Brain Faster? Knowing This Might Help with That Are you working really hard to learn something? Remember this counterintuitive fact, and you might improve your learning curve.
09.06.2023 This Tick Bite Makes You Allergic to Red Meat The bite of the lone star tick makes people allergic to a sugar found in mammalian products, and many doctors don’t know about it.
09.04.2023 This Lesbian Monkey Love Triangle Tells Us Something Really Interesting about Darwin's 'Paradox' A “Darwinian paradox” is that homosexual activity occurs even though it does not lead to or aid in reproduction. But if you visit three capuchin monkeys in Los Angeles, they’ll show you how beneficial their liaisons are.
09.01.2023 What the Luddites Can Teach Us about AI The Luddites did not hate technology—but they did fight the way it was used to exploit humans.
08.30.2023 A Pig Kidney Was Just Transplanted Into a Human Body, and It Is Still Working Xenotransplants could help to solve the organ transplant crisis—if researchers can get the science right.
08.28.2023 Migratory Birds Are in Peril, but Knowing Where They Are at Night Could Help Save Them Light is a very dangerous, if not so obvious, threat to birds who migrate at night. But researchers are using weather radar to track birds and provide “lights out” forecasts to help keep their paths clear of visual distraction.
08.25.2023 Artificial Intelligence Is Helping Us 'See' Some of the Billions of Birds Migrating at Night Science is turning to machines to unlock the secrets of the vast, mysterious pulse-of-the-planet phenomenon that is nocturnal migration.
08.23.2023 Here's How You Go Birding in the Middle of the Night If you really want to challenging your bird identification skills, try using them at night, when bird calls are less than 100 milliseconds long.
08.21.2023 Using Human-Sized Microphones and Hay Bales, They Unlocked the Mysteries of Bird Migration For thousands of years, no one truly knew how birds migrated—that is, until a few unlikely pioneers sat in an empty field with hundreds of pounds of kludged together recording gear and waited to hear sounds that no one had ...
08.18.2023 They Tap Into the Magical, Hidden Pulse of the Planet, but What is the Nighttime Bird Surveillance Network? On any given night, dense clouds of dark, ghostly figures pass over your head as you sleep. Maybe you never knew they were there, but there are people out there who are deciphering all the unseen movement that happens amid ...
08.16.2023 Hearing Aids Stave Off Cognitive Decline Hearing aids may help maintain better brain functions in older people and better health overall.
08.14.2023 In This Ancient Garden, Plants Can Cure or Kill You Apothecaries founded this famous garden—one of the most ancient botanical gardens in Europe—to teach their students which plants poison and which plants cure.
08.10.2023 Racism in Health: The Roots of the U.S. Black Maternal Mortality Crisis What is behind the Black maternal mortality crisis, and what needs to change? In this podcast from Nature and Scientific American, leading academics unpack the racism at the heart of the system.
08.09.2023 The Fungi Economy, Part 3: Can Climate Modeling from Space Save Our Forests? Here’s how scientists are planning on getting underground fungi data from space using satellites.
08.07.2023 The Fungi Economy, Part 2: Here's How Plants and Fungi Trade beneath Our Feet Atmospheric carbon is a currency that plants use to “buy” nutrients from fungi in the soil. To find out where this economy will go next, the devil is in the details. And the details are in the dirt.
08.04.2023 The Fungi Economy, Part 1: Just like Us, Trees Are Experiencing Inflation Like us, plants and fungi have complex economies. By burning fossil fuels, we’ve been devaluing their currency.
08.02.2023 Could Weight-Loss Drugs Curb Addiction? Your Health, Quickly, Episode 12 Drugs such as Wegovy and Ozempic might help people tackle substance abuse as well as shed pounds.
07.31.2023 How to Roll a Joint Perfectly, according to Science Scientists used a smoking machine—complete with a 3-D-printed mouthpiece—to figure out how to get the most cannabinoid per puff.
07.28.2023 Here's How AI Can Predict Hit Songs With Frightening Accuracy New AI technology predicts hit songs—by listening to someone’s body.
07.26.2023 Here's Why Actors Are So Worried about AI Here’s what’s behind the A.I technology that has worried so many actors—including something called “the orb.”
07.24.2023 Are You a Lucid Dreamer? A sleep researcher who studies what dreams can tell us about the possible onset of some mental disorders believes lucid dreamers might hold a lot of answers in their head.
07.21.2023 Here's What 'Oppenheimer' Gets Right--And Wrong--About Nuclear History Here’s what a historian who has studied J. Robert Oppenheimer for two decades has to say about the new Christopher Nolan film on the father of the atomic bomb.
07.19.2023 How Stress Messes With Your Gut Inflammatory bowel disease flare-ups can be traced to mental stress
07.17.2023 Should We Care About AI's Emergent Abilities? Here’s how large language models, or LLMs, actually work.
07.14.2023 What That Jazz Beat Tells Us about Hearing and The Brain Very small delays in swing jazz point to our evolution as a supremely auditory species.
07.12.2023 Who Was Alessandra Giliani, 14th-Century Teen Anatomist? Was a teenager named Alessandra Giliani the Western world’s first female anatomist? In 14th-century Italy, women were strictly barred from medical research. One flouted that rule—disguised as a man.
07.10.2023 Just like People, Orangutans Get Smoker's Voice New research has discovered that wildfire smoke hurts these primates’ voice—and health.
07.07.2023 Doctor AI Will See You Now ChatGPT and other AI programs can offer medical advice. But how good are they?
07.05.2023 El Niño is Back. What Does That Mean For You? The famous climate pattern El Niño could usher in a new hottest year on record and will have domino effects on the world’s weather.
06.29.2023 The Kavli Prize Presents: How Your Brain Maps the World [Sponsored] John O’Keefe shared the Kavli Prize in Neuroscience in 2014 for discovering that neurons in the hippocampus encode an animal’s location and create a cognitive map for navigation. This podcast was produced for the Kavli Prize by Scientific American Custom ...
06.29.2023 The Universe Is Abuzz with Giant Gravitational Waves, and Scientists Just Heard Them (Maybe) Researchers, using the galaxy as a detector, believe they have detected gravitational waves from monster black holes for the first time.
06.26.2023 Poisons and Perils on the Salton Sea Toxic dust plagues marginalized communities on the shores of this disappearing salt lake.
06.23.2023 These Ants Are Probably Better at Navigating Than You Are Desert ants living in the featureless salt plains of Tunisia count their steps and erect tall entrances at their nests to find their way back home.
06.21.2023 How to Cool Down Fast in Summer Heat Your body has a secret cooling method, and scientists explain how to use it.
06.19.2023 Follow a Hurricane Expert into the Heart Of the Beast Along with an expert, we take you into some of nature's most monstrous storms.
06.16.2023 Have Astronomers Seen the Universe's First Stars? The James Webb Space Telescope is giving us our first glimpse of stars in the early universe.
06.14.2023 Cleo, the Mysterious Math Menace In 2013 a new user named Cleo took an online math forum by storm with unproved answers. Today she’s an urban legend. But who was she?
06.12.2023 MDMA Moves from Party Drug Back to Therapy Tool The party drug MDMA could soon be approved for treating people with severe PTSD.
06.09.2023 Five Things You Need to Know about Wildfire Smoke Right Now Where is it coming from? How long will it last? What's in the smoke? Whose health is at risk? How do you clean your own air?
06.07.2023 These Predators Had a Face like an Axe and Will Haunt Your Nightmares Terror birds were the grizzly bears of birds, the great white sharks of the land, Jack the Ripper but with feathers. They were also truly fascinating.
06.05.2023 This Thunderous Goose Relative Was Built like a Tank with the Wings of a Songbird Officially, these prehistoric birds are the dromornithids, but everyone who studies them calls them thunderbirds—and for good reason.
06.02.2023 This Gargantuan Bird Weighed as Much as a Sports Car The elephant bird was the heaviest bird to ever walk the earth. Also, its eggs were 150 times the size of a chicken egg and thick as a dinner plate.

Older episodes

Science, Quickly

What's Science, Quickly about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Science, Quickly episodes:

Song of the Stars, Part 2: Seeing in the Dark

Song of the Stars, Part 1: Transforming Space into Symphonies

This Researcher Captured Air from the Amazon in Dive-Bombs--And Found Grim Clues That the Forest Is Dying

Should You Get a Blood Test For Alzheimer's?

Ada Limón's Poem for Europa, Jupiter's Smallest Galilean Moon

How the Woolly Bear Caterpillar Does Something Pretty Amazing to Survive the Winter

Bees 'Buzz' in More Ways Than You Might Think

Scientists Are Beginning to Learn the Language of Bats and Bees Using AI

Trying to Train Your Brain Faster? Knowing This Might Help with That

This Tick Bite Makes You Allergic to Red Meat

This Lesbian Monkey Love Triangle Tells Us Something Really Interesting about Darwin's 'Paradox'

What the Luddites Can Teach Us about AI

A Pig Kidney Was Just Transplanted Into a Human Body, and It Is Still Working

Migratory Birds Are in Peril, but Knowing Where They Are at Night Could Help Save Them

Artificial Intelligence Is Helping Us 'See' Some of the Billions of Birds Migrating at Night

Here's How You Go Birding in the Middle of the Night

Using Human-Sized Microphones and Hay Bales, They Unlocked the Mysteries of Bird Migration

They Tap Into the Magical, Hidden Pulse of the Planet, but What is the Nighttime Bird Surveillance Network?

Hearing Aids Stave Off Cognitive Decline

In This Ancient Garden, Plants Can Cure or Kill You

Racism in Health: The Roots of the U.S. Black Maternal Mortality Crisis

The Fungi Economy, Part 3: Can Climate Modeling from Space Save Our Forests?

The Fungi Economy, Part 2: Here's How Plants and Fungi Trade beneath Our Feet

The Fungi Economy, Part 1: Just like Us, Trees Are Experiencing Inflation

Could Weight-Loss Drugs Curb Addiction? Your Health, Quickly, Episode 12

How to Roll a Joint Perfectly, according to Science

Here's How AI Can Predict Hit Songs With Frightening Accuracy

Here's Why Actors Are So Worried about AI

Are You a Lucid Dreamer?

Here's What 'Oppenheimer' Gets Right--And Wrong--About Nuclear History

How Stress Messes With Your Gut

Should We Care About AI's Emergent Abilities?

What That Jazz Beat Tells Us about Hearing and The Brain

Who Was Alessandra Giliani, 14th-Century Teen Anatomist?

Just like People, Orangutans Get Smoker's Voice

Doctor AI Will See You Now

El Niño is Back. What Does That Mean For You?

The Kavli Prize Presents: How Your Brain Maps the World [Sponsored]

The Universe Is Abuzz with Giant Gravitational Waves, and Scientists Just Heard Them (Maybe)

Poisons and Perils on the Salton Sea

These Ants Are Probably Better at Navigating Than You Are

How to Cool Down Fast in Summer Heat

Follow a Hurricane Expert into the Heart Of the Beast

Have Astronomers Seen the Universe's First Stars?

Cleo, the Mysterious Math Menace

MDMA Moves from Party Drug Back to Therapy Tool

Five Things You Need to Know about Wildfire Smoke Right Now

These Predators Had a Face like an Axe and Will Haunt Your Nightmares

This Thunderous Goose Relative Was Built like a Tank with the Wings of a Songbird

This Gargantuan Bird Weighed as Much as a Sports Car

Other shows like Science, Quickly: