The latest segments from Science Friday

We have a new podcast! It’s called Universe Of Art, and it’s all about artists who use science to bring their creations to the next level. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

As of Friday morning, at least 55 were dead and thousands were seeking shelter on Maui, after wildfires tore across the Hawaiian island. Officials there say that the fires, once rare, have caused billions of dollars in damage, and the Biden administration has made federal disaster relief available.

The fires were driven by strong, dry winds from nearby Hurricane Dora, and were made worse by ongoing drought conditions. The region has grown hotter and drier, and highly flammable invasive grasses have been crowding out native vegetation.

Bethany Brookshire, freelance science journalist and author of the book Pests: How Humans Created Animal Villains, joins Ira Flatow to talk about this story and others from this week in science news, including an investigation into unknown genes in our genome, a 390 million year-old moss that might not survive climate change, and a fish that plays hide and seek to get to its prey.

Bluefin tuna is typically sliced into small pieces, its ruby red flesh rolled into sushi. But don’t let those tiny sashimi slices fool you. Bluefin tuna are colossal creatures—on average, they’re about 500 pounds. The biggest one ever caught was a whopping 1,500 pounds. They can travel thousands of miles at breakneck speeds, and their skin changes color!

The fish, once in danger of extinction, have now rebounded due to a combination of scientific advances and possibly as a result of climate change.

Ira talks with Karen Pinchin, science journalist and author of the new book, Kings of Their Own Ocean: Tuna, Obsession, and The Future of Our Seas about a tuna nicknamed Amelia who traveled across the world, the fisherman who tagged her, and what their stories can help us better understand about the mighty fish.

Read an excerpt of the book here.

Acadia National Park in Maine is home to more than 300 bird species. Climate change is affecting the range of many of these birds, to the extent that some may not be found in the area in the future. A team of volunteers has made it their mission to record as many bird sounds as possible—while they still can.

Laura Sebastianelli is the founder and lead researcher of the Schoodic Notes Bird Sounds of Acadia project. She’s helped collect more than 1,200 bird sounds on tape, with the hopes of aiding future researchers. Sebastianelli joins Ira to talk about the project.

Five years ago, professional gem hunters Mary and Gary Freeman stumbled upon the richest known lithium deposit in the world in the woods of western Maine. Lithium is a silvery metal many consider to be key to the transition to a clean energy future, thanks to its role in technology like lithium-ion batteries.

The Maine deposit could be a way for the United States to be independent in their lithium sourcing. But there’s stiff opposition to digging up the mineral within Maine.

Kate Cough, reporter and enterprise editor for The Maine Monitor, reported this story in collaboration with Time Magazine. Cough is a Report For America corps member. She joins Ira to discuss the debate.

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Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

We have a new podcast! It’s called Universe Of Art, and it’s all about artists who use science to bring their creations to the next level. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

In the new movie The Pod Generation, a wife named Rachel, played by Emilia Clarke, and her husband Alvy, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, want to start a family. In the movie’s near future, you don’t have to have a baby by getting pregnant, or using IVF, or going through a surrogate.

If you’re lucky, you can get a reservation at The Womb Center, where you can grow your baby inside a convenient, high-tech, egg-shaped pod. Pressured by her friends and her work’s HR department, Rachel decides to give The Womb Center a shot.

Science Friday producer and Universe of Art host D. Peterschmidt sat down with the film’s writer and director, Sophie Barthes, to talk about what inspired her to make the movie, and what may be lost in the thoughtless pursuit of technology.

The ocean’s seabed is filled with minerals like copper, nickel, and cobalt—the very raw materials that tech companies use to make electronics and batteries. Some view it as fertile ground to mine and exploit, launching an underwater mining rush.

Last month, world leaders gathered in Kingston, Jamaica to hash out the future of deep sea mining. For years, the International Seabed Authority—the organization in charge of authorizing and controlling mineral operations on the seafloor—has been trying and failing to put together a set of guidelines for deep sea mining. 

Ira talks with Dr. Diva Amon, marine biologist at the Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory at the University of California Santa Barbara and director of the non-profit SpeSeas, based in Trinidad and Tobago. They talk through the science of deep sea mining, the policies being debated, and what the world risks losing. Then, Ira talks with Solomon Pili Kahoʻohalahala, Chairperson of the non-profit Maui Nui Makai Network and Native Hawaiian Elder of the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument Advisory Council.

August is shaping up to be a great month for stargazing, with or without a telescope. Celestial wonders such as a Perseid meteor shower and a Super Blue Moon will take place soon. Saturn will also be lit up for the remainder of August, and should be visible to the naked eye on a clear night.

Joining Ira to talk about what we can see this month in the night sky is astronomer, author, and podcaster Dean Regas. Regas also talks about recently leaving his long tenure at the Cincinnati Observatory, and what’s next for his love for astronomy.

To stay updated on all-things-science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

We have a new podcast! It’s called Universe Of Art, and it’s all about artists who use science to bring their creations to the next level. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

For decades, people have been trying to figure out how to avoid contaminating other planets as they explore them—an idea called planetary protection. As missions venture forth to places such as Mars or Jupiter’s moon, Europa, the need to protect worlds that could support life becomes more critical. And at the same time, as space programs begin to bring samples back to Earth from places like Mars or asteroids, planetary protection becomes a concern in another way—the need to protect Earth from potential unknown life forms from the cosmos.

Sending humans to another world raises the stakes even more. NASA has a limit of no more than 300,000 spores (single-celled organisms) allowed on board robotic Mars landers. But human bodies contain trillions of microorganisms, making it impossible for human missions to achieve the same level of microbial cleanliness as robotic landers.

Dr. Nick Benardini is a NASA official responsible for ensuring that the proper precautions are made to prevent humans from contaminating outer space. Ira Flatow spoke to him about how to avoid spreading microbes between planets.

Most people raised in the U.S. were taught about evolution in science class growing up. But how much do you actually remember? Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species or Gregor Mendel’s pea plant experiments may ring a bell, but it’s likely most of us could use a refresher.

A good grasp on the science of evolution is extra important these days, argues Prosanta Chakrabarty, author of the new book, Explaining Life Through Evolution, and curator of fishes at Louisiana State University. In 2008, Louisiana’s governor signed the Louisiana Science Education Act, which allows schools to teach creationism as an alternative to evolution.

Chakrabarty joins Ira to talk about the science behind evolution and take questions from listeners.

Read an excerpt of the book here.

To stay updated on all-things-science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

We have a new podcast! It’s called Universe Of Art, and it’s all about artists who use science to bring their creations to the next level. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Recently, a superconducting material went viral in the scientific community. Researchers in South Korea say they’ve discovered a room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductor. If it works, it would create electricity under normal, everyday conditions.

But some scientists are hesitant to applaud this purported breakthrough. This field has a long history of supposed breakthroughs, many of which turn out to be not so superconducting after all.

In other science news, NASA has detected a ‘heartbeat’ from the Voyager 2 spacecraft, which lost contact last month. This may allow scientists to reestablish contact with the spacecraft before its expected October 15 date.

Joining Ira to talk about these stories and more is Sophie Bushwick, technology editor for Scientific American, based in New York, New York.

On the day the film Oppenheimer came out, Science Friday discussed the history of the Manhattan Project, including the legacy of the Trinity Test, where the world’s very first nuclear weapon was detonated in the desert of New Mexico. We also heard from a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing and a New Mexican downwinder.

But our listeners responded with even more questions that we couldn’t get to—including this, from Randy in Orlando, who wrote, “I’ve heard Neil deGrasse Tyson say the new bombs aren’t that dirty?”

Randy’s referring to the astrophysicist’s interview last November, in which he said: “Modern nukes don’t have the radiation problem … it’s a different kind of weapon than Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” We wanted an answer to this question—and others—about current nuclear weapons technology, an issue that Russia’s implied threats of using nuclear weapons against Ukraine also raise.

Ira talks with Dr. Zia Mian, a physicist and co-director of Princeton’s Program on Science and Global Security, about how nuclear weapons technology has evolved over the last 80 years, how many there are, and the new threats they pose.

The World Health Organization recently classified aspartame as a “possible carcinogen.” While the designation may seem scary, it simply indicates that the agency cannot rule out that the substance causes cancer. There is not enough evidence to suggest that aspartame, found in many sugar-free beverages, is linked to cancer.

Ira breaks down the science behind that decision, what we know about the health effects of artificial sweeteners, and takes listener calls with guests Marji McCullough, senior scientific director of epidemiology research at the American Cancer Society and Dr. Walter Willett, professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

To stay updated on all-things-science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

We have a new podcast! It’s called Universe Of Art, and it’s all about artists who use science to bring their creations to the next level. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Cats have formed bonds with humans for thousands of years. But what exactly is going on in our furry friends’ brains? What are they trying to tell us with their meows? And why did humans start keeping cats as pets anyway?

To help answer those questions and more, John Dankosky talks with Jonathan Losos, professor of biology at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and author of the new book, The Cat’s Meow: How Cats Evolved from the Savanna to Your Sofa.

Read an excerpt of the book at sciencefriday.com.

In Fort Defiance, one of five main communities situated on the Arizona-New Mexico border in the Navajo Nation, Taishiana Tsosie and Kimberly Belone are standing in a mobile office’s cramped bathroom.

The two researchers from the Johns Hopkins Center for Indigenous Health turn off the lights and hold up plastic bags filled with water from the bathroom sink. Each bag has five small compartments, filled with the same sink water. Where they differ is in the chemicals added to each compartment.

“This is our compartment bag, and we use this and several other chemicals and tablets to test for E. coli in the water,” Tsosie said.

Today, the researchers are testing for harmful bacteria, but they also run separate tests for dangerous metals in drinking water.

To read the rest, visit sciencefriday.com.

For generations, the Chumash tribal nation have been stewards of a vital marine ecosystem along the central coast of California, bordering St. Louis Obispo County and Santa Barbara County.

The area is home to species like blue whales, black abalone, and snowy plovers. And it’s also an important part of the Chumash tribe’s rich traditions and culture.

Tribal leaders have pushed for decades to designate the area as a national marine sanctuary. Now, the Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary is in the final stages of the approval process, which would make it the first tribally nominated national marine sanctuary in the country.

John Dankosky talks with Stephen Palumbi, professor of marine sciences at Stanford University and Violet Sage Walker, chairwoman of the Northern Chumash Tribal Council, about the importance of this region and their collaborative research project.

You might not give your car’s tires a lot of thought unless you get a flat, or you live somewhere you need to swap in snow tires. But as more people in the US make the switch to electric vehicles, some are finding they have to think about their tires more often. Some EV drivers are finding that their tires wear out more rapidly than they had with traditional internal combustion-driven vehicles—in some cases, 20 percent faster.

The problem has multiple causes. Many EVs are heavier than regular cars of a similar size, which puts more load on the tires. When combined with the almost instant torque provided by electric motors, that can lead to leaving rubber on the road—even when a driver isn’t attempting to burn rubber.

Ryan Pszczolkowski, tire testing program manager at Consumer Reports, joins Diana Plasker to talk about the special engineering that comes into play when the rubber meets the road in an electric car.

‘Barbie’ is going gangbusters at the box office, and it’s prompted a whole new interest in the iconic, if occasionally problematic, toy doll. If you’ve been moved by the movie to dig your old Barbie out from the attic, don’t be surprised if she looks…different.

The PVC (polyvinyl chloride) toy dolls of the 1950s—and for the next 50 years after that—contained plasticizers that, over time, can degrade, discolor, and even become sticky. And the chemical compounds being released by an old PVC toy might be toxic to your toddler.

Science Friday’s AAAS Mass Media Fellow Chelsie Boodoo is a big Barbie fan. She wanted to find out more about what these old Barbies are made of, and whether we should be worried. So, she turned to Dr. Yvonne Shashoua, a research professor from the National Museum of Denmark. She explains what happens to plastic dolls over time, how museums like hers preserve vintage toys, and even some tips to keep Barbie looking like new. (Hint: make room in the freezer!)

To stay updated on all-things-science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

We have a new podcast! It’s called Universe Of Art, and it’s all about artists who use science to bring their creations to the next level. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

A sobering climate study came out this week in the journal Nature Communications. It suggests that a system of ocean currents—called the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC)—could collapse sometime between 2025 and 2095, which could have dire climate consequences for the North Atlantic.

SciFri director of news and audio John Dankosky talks with Swapna Krishna, a journalist based in Philadelphia, about what this means and what could be at stake. They also chat through other big science news of the week, including the detection of water vapor around a very distant star, a new image depicting the first detection of gas giants being formed around stars, a new theory for the origin of the world’s “gravity hole,” why the fuzzy asp caterpillar packs such a scary sting, and what scientists can learn from ticklish rats.

In the year since the Supreme Court decided Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overturning the federal right to an abortion, states jumped into action.

Thirteen states banned abortion with limited exemptions, and three others have banned abortion after the first trimester. A handful of other states have extremely restrictive abortion access, or otherwise remain in legal limbo, awaiting court decisions or new laws to be signed.

Leading up to Dobbs decision, SciFri delved into the science behind reproductive health and the potential ripple effects on access to care. Now, a little over a year later, we’re following up what’s going on.

SciFri guest host and experiences manager Diana Plasker talks with Usha Ranji, associate director for Women’s Health Policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, based in San Francisco, California, about her survey of 569 OB-GYNs across the country. They discuss the growing disparities in states between where abortion is banned and where it remains legal.

Later, John Dankosky talks with Dr. Rebecca Cohen, chief medical officer at the Comprehensive Women’s Health Center, based in Denver, Colorado, about providing abortion and pregnancy care in a state where abortion is legal, and seeing patients who are traveling from states with bans in place.

Before humans arrived in New Zealand, parrots called kākāpō freely roamed across the islands. They are the world’s only living flightless parrots, and they’re a bit smaller than the average chicken. But the kākāpō’s population started crashing centuries ago, due to human interference and the arrival of predators like cats, rats, and stoats. At one point, the species was teetering on the brink of extinction.

For decades, scientists have been capturing and relocating kākāpō to safe islands, hoping their population would grow. It did, and the kākāpō’s recovery team just reached a huge milestone: bringing four birds back to the mainland, a place they haven’t existed since the 1980s.

Guest host and SciFri events manager Diana Plasker talks with Deidre Vercoe, operations manager for the New Zealand Department of Conservation’s kākāpō and takahē teams, about the history of kākāpō conservation, what this win means, and what’s next for these beloved birds.

In many urban areas across the U.S. and abroad, feral, non-native parrots have become established. This is true in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, where a colony of lime green monk parakeets have inhabited a massive nest on top of the gothic entrance gate. How exactly these parrots wound up here is a bit of a mystery.

“The lore that’s passed around is that at some point a box of parrots, perhaps at the airport, got overturned,” said science writer Ryan Mandelbaum. “What’s more likely is a combination of people releasing their [pet] parrots and parrots escaping in some critical mass.”

Mandelbaum wrote the cover story for July’s issue of Scientific American all about the resilience of parrots. SciFri producer Kathleen Davis interviewed them at Green-Wood Cemetery, where they discussed why these parrots are not just surviving, but thriving.

To stay updated on all-things-science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

We have a new podcast! It’s called Universe Of Art, and it’s all about artists who use science to bring their creations to the next level. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This week, astronomers report in the journal Nature that they’ve discovered a white dwarf—a dying star’s dense inner core—that, instead of being uniform in composition, has a surface that appears to be hydrogen on one face and helium on the other. The star rotates on its axis once every 15 minutes, bringing each face into view. Researchers spotted the unusual object with an instrument called the Zwicky Transient Facility, which initially singled out the star because of its rapidly changing brightness.

The astronomers aren’t sure why the white dwarf, which they’ve nicknamed Janus after the two-faced Roman god, has this strange divided surface. Some possible theories include shifting magnetic fields which produce areas of different density, or that it’s a step in stellar evolution only partially complete.

Tim Revell, deputy US editor at New Scientist, joins John Dankosky to talk about the two-faced star and other stories from the week in science, including the resignation of the Stanford University president amidst an ethics probe, discovery of ancient natural graphene, an earthworm invasion in the Arctic, and investigations of alcoholic fruit.

As you read this, every small action your body makes—eyes scanning the page, fingers scrolling a mouse, scratching an itch on your face—must be dictated by your brain. These actions usually happen without a second thought. But inside the brain, the motor cortex is hard at work making the body move.

For nearly a century, every neuroscience student came across the “homunculus”—a visual representation of which areas of the brain control certain body parts. But for the last few decades, some researchers have disputed this traditional view of brain mapping. This includes a recent study, led by Washington University in St. Louis.

Joining guest host John Dankosky to discuss how the brain and body are connected are study lead author Evan Gordon, assistant professor of radiology at Wash U., and Michael Graziano, professor of psychology and neuroscience at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute in Princeton, New Jersey.

To stay updated on all-things-science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

We have a new podcast! It’s called Universe Of Art, and it’s all about artists who use science to bring their creations to the next level. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This weekend, Christopher Nolan’s long awaited film Oppenheimer hits theaters. It tells the story of American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, and his road to becoming the “father of the atomic bomb.” With its release, audiences will be faced with the United States’ contentious history in developing and deploying the world’s first atomic weapons, marking a point of no return for the entire world.

Nearly 80 years since the bombs were first developed and tested in the New Mexican desert—and then dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—the world is still reckoning with the Manhattan Project and Oppenheimer’s legacies.

In this live call-in show, Science Goes To The Movies, we analyze the roles of scientists during the Manhattan project, hear from the people most affected by Oppenheimer’s work, and pick apart his life and legacy—one which asks to what extent scientists are responsible for the things they create.

To read the rest, visit sciencefriday.com.

To stay updated on all-things-science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

We have a new podcast! It’s called Universe Of Art, and it’s all about artists who use science to bring their creations to the next level. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

People have been looking for meat-alternatives for decades. Vegetarians avoid animal products for many reasons, from concerns over animal treatment and slaughtering practices to the meat industry’s climate impacts. Methane from cows and other livestock contribute about 15% of all greenhouse gas emissions.

There have been plant-based alternatives on the market for awhile now, but another method has quietly gained steam over the past decade: meat grown in a lab, using cultured cells. This past June, the U.S. Department of Agriculture approved two companies—Eat Just and Upside—to grow and sell cultivated chicken products in the U.S. Lab-developed beef will likely be next, while some companies are even working on cultivated pet food meat. (Lab-grown mouse meat kibble, anyone?)

But will growing tissue in a lab actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and … will people even want to eat it? Joining Ira to discuss this beefy topic is Casey Crownhart, climate reporter at the MIT Technology Review, who talks about how this kind of meat is made in a lab, the challenges the industry faces, and what lab-grown beef patty tastes like.

As global temperatures rise, cities are typically hotter than rural areas. Tall buildings trap heat and temperatures don’t drop nearly as low at night.

Out of sight, just below the surface, it’s also getting hotter. Scientists are beginning to document the unexpected consequences of underground climate change.

A new study measuring the phenomenon used sensors to track increasing temperatures underground in Chicago and map how the earth has shifted beneath the city as a result.

Ira talks with the lead researcher of the study, Dr. Alessandro Rotta Loria, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Northwestern University, based in Chicago, Illinois.

People who live near freshwater rivers or lakes are likely familiar with Asian Carp. The fish are not native to the U.S., but over the last few decades their populations have exploded in waterways like the Mississippi River Basin and the Illinois River.

Over the last few years, there’s been a major PR campaign to move away from the name Asian Carp, in favor of a new name: “Copi.” The reason is two-fold: First, it joins a general trend of moving species’ names away from nationalistic associations, considering anti-Asian hate crimes during the COVID-19 pandemic. The other goal is to make the fish sound more delicious—creating a market that would incentivize fishing the Copi, hopefully reducing their populations.

Joining Ira to talk about this is Jim Garvey, director of fisheries, aquaculture and aquatic sciences at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois.

Sometimes Jim Kirkland wishes he had been alive 150 years ago.

That’s when the golden age of North American dinosaur discovery began, and early titans of paleontology crisscrossed the Rocky Mountains unearthing dozens of new species that became household names, from the Stegosaurus to the Brontosaurus to the Triceratops.

But a close second to that era is what Kirkland gets to see these days in Utah.

“I am doing that kind of discovery right now,” Kirkland said. “I’m just lucky to be alive.”

Kirkland, Utah’s state paleontologist, uncovered and named the Utahraptor in 1993. The deadly predator became the official state dinosaur in 2018.

To read the rest, visit sciencefriday.com.

To stay updated on all-things-science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

We have a new podcast! It’s called Universe Of Art, and it’s all about artists who use science to bring their creations to the next level. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

It’s hot out there, and more so than normal July weather. It’s estimated that more than 100 million Americans are under heat watches, warnings, and advisories, spanning the west coast and southern states. Not only is the land hot, but the oceans are, too. The water temperature near the Florida Keys this week reached 96.8 degrees Fahrenheit, just shy of the record for global ocean temperature.

A warmer climate is having some visual effects on our oceans, too. The color of the ocean surface near the equator has gotten greener. The culprit? Phytoplankton, which are full of the pigment chlorophyll.

Joining Ira to talk about these stories and other science news of the week is Rachel Feltman, Editor at Large for Popular Science and host of the podcast “The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week,” based in Jersey City, New Jersey.

You’ve probably read the headlines about a spike in youth suicide rates, or about how social media and screen time are exacerbating teen anxiety and depression. Or maybe you read about the shortage of services for kids who need mental health treatment, waiting in emergency rooms for inpatient beds to open up.

And of course the pandemic accelerated all of these issues, leaving kids who might have been already struggling without the support of friends and teachers in their school communities.

Ira takes a closer look at what’s driving these trends with Dr. Patricia Ibeziako, associate chief for clinical services in the department of psychiatry and behavioral services at the Boston Children’s Hospital and associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Dr. Tami Benton, psychiatrist-in-chief in the department of child and adolescent psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine.

It’s that time of year when sharks are on our minds. Summer is filled with Shark Week content, viral reports of attacks, and shrieks on the beach when someone spots a fin in the water… from a dolphin.

But sharks don’t deserve this bad reputation. They are beautiful, fascinating, and—more than anything—the Earth needs them. A new children’s book called “Mother of Sharks,” by Melissa Cristina Márquez, aims to teach kids exactly that.

Ira talks with Márquez, a shark scientist and wildlife educator, about the book, shark conservation, and why she loves sharks so much.

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Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.