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Being able to belt out a tune like Adele or Pavarotti is not just about raw talent. The best singers in the world have to work on their technique—like how to control their breath and develop the stamina to hit note after note for a two-hour concert. But pop stars and opera singers aren’t the only vocalists who have figured out how to harness their voices for maximum impact.

Death metal vocalists also train their voices to hit that unique guttural register. And those iconic screams are not as easy to master as they might seem.

Vocal scientists at the University of Utah are now bringing death metal singers into the lab to try to understand how they make their extreme vocalizations. What they’re finding is not only insightful for metalheads, but might also help improve treatment for people with some types of vocal injuries.

Host Flora Lichtman talks with Dr. Amanda Stark, speech pathologist and vocology researcher at the University of Utah, and Mark Garrett, vocal coach and lead singer of the band Kardashev.

Universe of Art is hosted and produced by Dee Peterschmidt, who also wrote the music. The original segment was produced by Shoshannah Buxbaum. Our show art is illustrated by Abelle Hayford. And support for Science Friday’s science and arts coverage comes from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Imagine you’re diving into a cell. You’re paddling around in the cytoplasm, you’re climbing up a mitochondria. If you’re having a hard time picturing this, that’s okay! There are professionals who do this for a living.

We wanted to learn more from expert science interpreters, who take the results section of a research paper and translate it into something tangible, like a 40-foot dinosaur skeleton or a 3D animation of cellular machinery too small to see.

At a live event in Salt Lake City in March, Host Flora Lichtman spoke with Dr. Janet Iwasa, head of the University of Utah’s Animation Lab and director of the Genetic Science Learning Center; and Tim Lee, director of exhibits at the Natural History Museum of Utah, about how they bring these out-of-reach worlds to life.

Universe of Art is hosted and produced by Dee Peterschmidt, who also wrote the music. Our show art is illustrated by Abelle Hayford. And support for Science Friday’s science and arts coverage comes from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Do you have science-inspired art you’d like to share with us for a future episode? Send us an email or a voice memo to [email protected].

What is it actually like to work in an emergency room? To deal with overcrowded waiting rooms, a shortage of hospital beds, and a constant flow of life-and-death health conditions—while trying to maintain your sanity at the same time?

That’s the focus of “The Pitt,” a new medical drama on Max from the creators of “ER,” starring one of that show’s key actors, all grown up: Noah Wyle. The first season takes place over a single shift, and each episode is one hour of that shift in real time. And medical professionals are praising the show for its accuracy.

Joining Host Ira Flatow to talk about the accuracy of the show is one of its medical consultants, Dr. Sylvia Owusu-Ansah,  associate professor of pediatrics and emergency medicine at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

Universe of Art is hosted and produced by Dee Peterschmidt, who also wrote the music. Our show art is illustrated by Abelle Hayford. And support for Science Friday’s science and arts coverage comes from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Do you have science-inspired art you’d like to share with us for a future episode? Send us an email or a voice memo to [email protected].

If you’ve played Rollercoaster Tycoon, Cities: Skylines, the Civilization series—even Animal Crossing—you’re probably familiar with this gameplay pattern: extract some kind of resource from the land, industrialize it into a theme park or a city, and (step three) profit, ad infinitum. 

But Terra Nil, a new game from the studio Free Lives, fundamentally challenges this oft-used game loop. Instead of maximizing profit at the expense of the local ecosystem, the player’s focus is to make a healthier, natural landscape instead. You start with a barren wasteland (one that you assume has been completely desolated by human activity, perhaps the aftermath from one of the previously mentioned games), and with the help of advanced eco-tech—like wind turbines, soil purifiers, irrigators, and more—restore it to a thriving, diverse ecosystem. The player’s ultimate goal is to take all the tech they used to restore the land, recycle it into an airship, and fly away, leaving no human presence behind.

SciFri producer Dee Peterschmidt speaks with Sam Alfred, the lead designer and programmer of Terra Nil, about how Free Lives designed this “reverse city-builder,” how the studio took inspiration from the flora of their local Cape Town, and how he hopes the game challenges players how they think about traditional gameplay systems and their effect on our world.

Universe of Art is hosted and produced by Dee Peterschmidt, who also wrote the music. Our show art is illustrated by Abelle Hayford. And support for Science Friday’s science and arts coverage comes from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Do you have science-inspired art you’d like to share with us for a future episode? Send us an email or a voice memo to [email protected].

The widespread infection of roughly four million virtual characters all started with a giant snake demon. In 2005, the massively multiplayer online video game World Of Warcraft introduced a special event raid, where groups of players could team up to fight a giant snake demon named Hakkar the Soulflayer. Hakkar would cast a spell called “Corrupted Blood” on players, which would slowly whittle down their health.

The effect of the spell was only supposed to last inside the raid arena—when players returned to the main world of the game, the spell would dissipate. But thanks to a software glitch, that wasn’t the case if the player had a pet companion. When the pets returned to the main world, they started infecting players and non-playable characters with the Corrupted Blood spell. If the player wasn’t powerful enough to heal themselves, they would die and erupt in a fountain of blood before turning into a skeleton.

What followed was a virtual pandemic that startlingly resembled today’s COVID-19 pandemic, from the spread, human behavior, and cultural response. Blizzard, the developer of the game, wanted players to social distance. Some players listened, but others flouted the rules, traveling freely and spreading the disease with them. Conspiracy theories formed about how the virus was engineered by Blizzard on purpose, and others placed blame on players with pets as the cause of the outbreak, mirroring the racist anti-Asian attacks and rhetoric surrounding COVID-19 today. 

Coincidentally, two epidemiologists, Nina Fefferman and Eric Lofgren, were there to witness the World Of Warcraft outbreak unfold. They studied and used the incident to model human behavior in response to a pandemic. Their findings were published in The Lancet in 2007. Many of their observations came to pass in 2020 when COVID-19 appeared. 

Today, we're revisiting a 2021 conversation that SciFri producer Dee Peterschmidt had with Eric Molinsky, host of the podcast Imaginary Worlds, who reported this story for his show. He talks about the epidemiologists who studied the outbreak and how it prepared them for the public responses to COVID-19.

Universe of Art is hosted and produced by Dee Peterschmidt, who also wrote the music. Our show art is illustrated by Abelle Hayford. And support for Science Friday’s science and arts coverage comes from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Do you have science-inspired art you’d like to share with us for a future episode? Send us an email or a voice memo to[email protected].

In the new Adult Swim show “Common Side Effects,” an eccentric scientist has a secret: He’s discovered a strange mushroom that can cure any illness or injury, and he wants to get it to people in need. The only problem is that a pharmaceutical company doesn’t want that secret to get out and will do anything to make sure he’s stopped.

Joining Host Flora Lichtman to break down this fungal drama, and the science that inspired it, are the show’s creators, Steve Hely, who previously wrote for “30 Rock” and “Veep;” and Joe Bennett, creator of the animated sci-fi show “Scavengers Reign” on Max.

“Common Side Effects” is now streaming on Max.

Universe of Art is hosted and produced by Dee Peterschmidt, who also wrote the music. Our show art is illustrated by Abelle Hayford. And support for Science Friday’s science and arts coverage comes from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Do you have science-inspired art you’d like to share with us for a future episode? Send us an email or a voice memo to[email protected].

From down here on Earth, life on the International Space Station seems magnificent: floating through the day, enjoying stunning views out your window, having an experience only a handful of other people will ever get.

But what’s it really like to live up there? How does experiencing 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets every day change your perception of time? How do you cope with being so far from the people you love?

Those are some of the questions explored in the novel Orbital, which won the Booker Prize late last year. In the book, author Samantha Harvey imagines the inner life of astronauts aboard the ISS.

Host Flora Lichtman is joined by Samantha Harvey, along with astronaut Dr. Cady Coleman, who spent almost six months on the Space Station, and is an author herself. They talk about the unexpected mundanities of living in space, how Harvey was inspired to write the book during lockdown, and how astronauts make sense of their new reality when separated from the rest of humanity.

Universe of Art is hosted and produced by Dee Peterschmidt, who also wrote the music. Our show art is illustrated by Abelle Hayford. And support for Science Friday’s science and arts coverage comes from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Do you have science-inspired art you’d like to share with us for a future episode? Send us an email or a voice memo to [email protected].

The science fiction film “Interstellar” turns 10 years old this month. For many of us, it was our first encounter with some pretty advanced astrophysics, taking sci-fi concepts like wormholes and time warping, and backing them up with actual science. Now, we’re revisiting the impact that movie’s science had on pop culture, and how astrophysics has advanced in the past decade. If it were made today, what would be different?

Ira Flatow sits down with “Interstellar” science advisor Dr. Kip Thorne, a professor of theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology. Since the film’s release, he has won a Nobel Prize for his contributions to the detection of gravitational waves generated from black holes. They discuss how the film inspired people to pursue scientific careers and how recent astrophysics discoveries, like gravitational waves, could’ve made it into the movie.

Universe of Art is hosted and produced by Dee Peterschmidt, who also wrote the music. Our show art is illustrated by Abelle Hayford. And support for Science Friday’s science and arts coverage comes from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Do you have science-inspired art you’d like to share with us for a future episode? Send us an email or a voice memo to [email protected].

People are finding all sorts of uses for mushrooms these days, but we’re going to focus on two of them: how scientists are using them in robots and how playwrights are using them in theater. A few weeks ago, SciFri producer and host of our “Universe of Art” podcast Dee Peterschmidt moderated a panel at the Science In Theater Festival in Brooklyn, New York.

The festival is put on by a company called Transforma Theatre that stages science-inspired plays. Each year, they pair playwrights with scientists to make short plays that explore the research focus of the scientist.

Director and playwright Hannah Simms was paired with Dr. Andrew Adamatzky, a professor of unconventional computing, who’s learning how to connect various parts of nature, like mushrooms, to computers, and consulted with Hannah during the writing process. The play, called “Fruiting Body,” is about a fungal-computing scientist who, while pregnant, creates a fetal heart monitor powered by mycelium, which turns out to be sentient. While the concept is definitely science fiction, it is based on real unconventional mushroom research.

Dee talks with Hannah to learn why she wanted to explore her pregnancy through the lens of mushroom research. They’re also joined by Dr. Anand Mishra, a research associate at Cornell University’s department  of mechanical and aerospace engineering, who explains how he helped build a robot that’s powered by king oyster mushroom mycelium.

Universe of Art is hosted and produced by Dee Peterschmidt, who also wrote the music. Our show art is illustrated by Abelle Hayford. And support for Science Friday’s science and arts coverage comes from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Do you have science-inspired art you’d like to share with us for a future episode? Send us an email or a voice memo to [email protected].