Science Friday

Endometriosis is a painful disease that occurs when endometrium-like tissue grows outside of the uterus. It’s extremely common—if you have a uterus, you have a 1 in 10 chance of getting it. Yet, it takes seven years on average to receive a formal diagnosis. What does the latest science tell us about the biology of the condition and how to treat it? And why do so many people have such a difficult time getting diagnosed? Host Flora Lichtman is joined by endometriosis researcher and patient Linda Griffith to answer those questions and more. Guest: Dr. Linda Griffith is a biological engineer and Scientific Director of The MIT Center for Gynepathology Research. Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

We've figured out how to harness renewable energy from many natural systems, like solar, wind, and geothermal power. But what about the ocean’s waves? It might seem like converting wave power into electricity on a large scale would’ve been figured out by now, but the tech is actually just getting its sea legs. Why has it been so hard to develop? And just how promising is it? Host Flora Lichtman talks with Oregon Public Broadcasting reporter Jes Burns, who reported on Oregon’s massive wave energy test site; and then she checks in with Deborah Greaves, an offshore renewable energy researcher, for a look at what’s happening in the rest of the world. Guests: Jes Burns is a science and environment reporter and host of "All Science. No Fiction." at Oregon Public Broadcasting. Dr. Deborah Greaves is a professor of ocean engineering at the University of Plymouth in England. Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

For Halloween, we bring you an ode to three quintessentially creepy creatures: bats, arachnids, and snakes. First, bat researcher Elena Tena joins Host Flora Lichtman to describe tracking the greater noctule bat in flight and learning that it can feed on migratory birds. Then, arachnologist Paula Cushing describes the camel spider, which is neither a camel nor a spider. And herpetologist Sara Ruane highlights one of her favorite snakes, the tiger keelback, which is both venomous and poisonous. Plus, what makes a lake spooky? A pond possessed? Flora talks with Geo Rutherford, creator of the Spooky Lake Month series on TikTok and Instagram, to learn about some of the spookiest, most mysterious lakes on the planet. Guests: Dr. Elena Tena is the national coordinator for the Spanish Bat Atlas project. Dr. Paula Cushing is senior curator of invertebrate zoology at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science in Denver, Colorado. Dr. Sara Ruane is curator of herpetology at the Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois. Geo Rutherford is the author of Spooky Lakes: 25 Strange and Mysterious Lakes That Dot Our Planet and the creator of Spooky Lake content TiKTok and Instagram. You can find her @geodesaurus. Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

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. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

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. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

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. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

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. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

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. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

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. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

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. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

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. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

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. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

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. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

It’s easy to take maps for granted. After all, most of us have a pretty good map in our pockets at all times, ready to show us how to get anywhere on the globe. But to make a map useful, you have to decide what to keep in and what to leave out—and, most importantly, which mathematical equations to use. Beyond navigating from point A to point B, math and maps come together for a wide variety of things, like working out the most efficient route to deliver packages, calculating the depth of the ocean floor, and more. Host Ira Flatow is joined by Paulina Rowińska, mathematician and author of Mapmatics: A Mathematician's Guide to Navigating the World, to go on a journey through the math at the heart of all kinds of maps. Guest: Dr. Paulina Rowińska is a mathematician, writer, science journalist and author of Mapmatics: A Mathematician's Guide to Navigating the World. Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

It seems like every week, there’s a new headline about some kind of sci-fi-esque organ transplant. Think eyeballs, 3D-printed kidneys, pig hearts. In her new book, Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy, science writer Mary Roach chronicles the effort to fabricate human body parts—and where that effort sometimes breaks down. Host Flora Lichtman speaks with Roach about everything from hair transplants to 3D-printed hearts, and why our anatomy is so hard to replicate in the first place. Guest: Mary Roach is a science writer and the author of Replaceable You: Adventures in Human Anatomy. Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Remember “The Biggest Loser”—the show where people tried to lose as much weight as quickly as possible for a big cash prize? The premise of the show was that weight loss was about willpower: With enough discipline, anyone can have the body they want. The show’s approach was problematic, but how does its attitude toward weight loss match our current understanding of health and metabolism? The authors of the book Food Intelligence, nutrition scientist Kevin Hall, who studied “Biggest Loser” contestants at the NIH; and science writer Julia Belluz, join Host Flora Lichtman and answer listener questions about nutrition, diet fads, and metabolism. Read an excerpt of Food Intelligence: The Science of How Food Both Nourishes and Harms Us. Guests: Julia Belluz is a science journalist based in Paris. Dr. Kevin Hall is a nutrition scientist and former NIH researcher based in Kensington, Maryland. Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

In July 1925, physicist Werner Heisenberg wrote a letter to Wolfgang Pauli sharing his new ideas about what would eventually become known as quantum theory. A hundred years later, that theory has been expanded into a field of science that explains aspects of chemical behavior, has become the basis of a new type of computing, and more. But it’s still really weird, and often counterintuitive. Physicist Chad Orzel joins Host Ira Flatow to celebrate 100 years of quantum science, and separate quantum fact from science fiction. Guest: Dr. Chad Orzel is the R. Gordon Gould Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy, and chair of the department, at Union College in Schenectady, New York. Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to three people whose combined discoveries outlined the role of the peripheral immune system—how the immune system knows to attack just foreign invaders and not its own tissues and organs. But when the phone rang for Shimone Sakaguchi, Mary E. Brunkow, and Fred Ramsdell, only two of them picked up. Host Ira Flatow talks with Nobel Prize winner Fred Ramsdell, co-founder and scientific advisor at Sonoma Biotherapeutics. Plus, Ira talks with bioengineering professor César de la Fuente, who looks for solutions to the antibiotic resistance crisis in unexpected places. Now, he’s used AI to help identify promising antibiotic candidates lurking in ancient archaea, small organisms that can survive some of the most extreme conditions in the world. Guests: Dr. Fred Ramsdell is the co-founder and scientific advisor at Sonoma Biotherapeutics. Dr. César de la Fuente is an associate professor of bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania. Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

It’s World Space Week, and we’re fueling up the rocket for a tour of some missions and projects that could provide insights into major space mysteries. Astrophysicist Hakeem Oluseyi joins Host Flora Lichtman to celebrate the wonders of space science, from the recently launched IMAP, which will study the solar environment, to the new Vera Rubin Observatory, and big physics projects like LIGO. Plus, the latest in climate tech: MIT Technology Review has published its annual list of climate tech companies that show great promise in work ranging from producing sodium ion batteries to recycling rare earth magnets. Host Ira Flatow talks with climate reporter Casey Crownhart about trends in climate tech and what companies she’s excited about. Guests: Dr. Hakeem Oluseyi is an astrophysicist and author of the upcoming book, Why Do We Exist? The Nine Realms of the Universe That Make You Possible, and host of the video podcast “Particles of Thought.” Casey Crownhart is a senior climate reporter for MIT Technology Review based in New York City. Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

The Klamath River, which runs from southern Oregon to California, used to be a top salmon run. But after a series of hydroelectric dams was installed along the river around 100 years ago, salmon populations tanked. This is the prologue to a remarkable story of a coalition that fought to restore the river. Led by members of the Yurok Nation, who’ve lived along the river for millennia, a group of lawyers, biologists, and activists successfully lobbied for the removal of the dams. The fourth and final dam was taken down last year. Joining Host Flora Lichtman to go behind the scenes of the dam removal and what’s happened since are Amy Bowers Cordalis, former general counsel for the Yurok Nation and author of the forthcoming book The Water Remembers: My Indigenous Family’s Fight to Save a River and a Way of Life; and Barry McCovey Jr., director of the Yurok Tribes Fisheries Department. Read an excerpt from The Water Remembers: My Indigenous Family’s Fight to Save a River and a Way of Life. Guests: Amy Bowers Cordalis is an attorney, member of the Yurok Nation, and author of The Water Remembers: My Indigenous Family’s Fight To Save A River And A Way Of Life. Barry McCovey Jr. is the director of the Yurok Tribes Fisheries Department, based in Klamath, California. Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.