After 7 Years, NASA Gets Its Asteroid Sample About a week ago, space nerds got the delivery of a lifetime: a sample from Bennu, an asteroid soaring through the galaxy, currently about 200 million miles away. The capsule of rocks and dust came courtesy of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx, the first U.S. mission to collect a sample from an asteroid. Scientists hope it’ll help unveil some of the mysteries of our universe, like how the sun and planets came to exist or how life began. Guest host and musician Dessa ...
Sep 29, 2023•48 min•Ep. 620
Florida’s Reefs Are Vanishing. Can Scientists Save Them? This was a bad year for Florida’s coral reefs. Since the 1970s, reef cover in the Florida Keys has decreased by 90%. Those remaining reefs have been subjected to water temperatures higher than 100 degrees Fahrenheit, alongside other threats like disease and ocean acidification. This is a big problem for the largest reef in the continental U.S., which plays an important role in protecting the shorelines from erosion and storms. Scientists a...
Sep 22, 2023•47 min•Ep. 619
A Week Of Climate Protests, Meetings, Pledges, And Action Climate Week NYC is wrapping up, where hundreds of events took place across the city (including one from Science Friday), all with the goal of encouraging conversation and action around our climate crisis. The weeklong event takes place alongside the UN General Assembly meeting, where world leaders discussed climate change, alongside other topics, including the war in Ukraine and universal health coverage. While President Biden emphasized...
Sep 22, 2023•47 min•Ep. 618
New COVID Boosters Arrive Amid Rise In Infections This past week, the FDA and CDC recommended new COVID vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna for anyone over the age of six months. They’re expected to be in larger pharmacies by the end of the week. It’s welcome news for some, as cases have ticked up over the summer, accompanied by higher hospital admissions and deaths. The boosters join a suite of other vaccines to combat respiratory illness this fall, including this year’s flu shot and the new RSV v...
Sep 15, 2023•48 min•Ep. 617
Astronomers Find Exoplanet That May Be Covered In Water Scientists using the James Webb Space Telescope made an exciting discovery this week: Exoplanet K2-18 b , 120 light years away from our solar system, could be covered by a water ocean, similar to Earth. Astronomers say this could be a big leap in our exploration of life on other planets. This news comes amid another JWST discovery: The earliest black holes seem to be much larger than black holes today. This news also provides evidence that ...
Sep 15, 2023•47 min•Ep. 616
Where Soil Grows Above The Trees You might be used to the feeling of Earth under your feet, but did you know that there’s soil high above your head? Way up in the treetops, where ferns, mosses, flowers, and even trees grow on top of the forest. A new study in Geoderma describes the factors that contribute to how canopy soil is formed. Ira talks with lead author Jessica Murray, an ecologist and PhD candidate at Utah State University in Logan, Utah. They discuss the importance of canopy soil, what...
Sep 08, 2023•47 min•Ep. 615
Scientists Develop Human Embryo Model Without Sperm Or Eggs This week, research published in the journal Nature detailed a model of a 14-day old human embryo created without using sperm or eggs. The hope is to shine a light into a previously unavailable window of an embryo’s development, potentially helping to better understand miscarriages and side effects of medications taken during pregnancy. Ira talks with Casey Crownhart, climate and energy reporter at MIT Technology Review to talk about th...
Sep 08, 2023•47 min•Ep. 614
What’s That Smell? An AI Nose Knows If you want to predict the color of something, you can talk about wavelengths of light. Light with a wavelength of around 460 nanometers is going to look blue. If you want to predict what something sounds like, frequencies can be a guide—a frequency of around 261 Hertz should sound like the musical note middle C. Predicting smells is more difficult. While we know that many sulfur-containing molecules tend to fall somewhere in the ‘rotten egg’ or ‘skunky’ categ...
Sep 01, 2023•48 min•Ep. 613
What To Expect From Hurricane Season We’re approaching the peak of hurricane season, which is usually around mid-September. It’s that time of year when it feels like there’s a new storm every week, and we blow through the alphabet trying to name them. This week, Hurricane Idalia made landfall around Florida’s Big Bend as a Category 3 storm, which caused a few fatalities, left hundreds of thousands of people without power, and some without homes. So what do we know about Idalia, and what can we e...
Sep 01, 2023•47 min•Ep. 612
How Early Humans May Have Transformed L.A.’s Landscape Forever Join us on a time traveling adventure, as we go back 15,000 years to visit what’s now southern California. During the last Ice Age, saber-toothed cats, wooly mammoths, and dire wolves prowled the landscape, until … they didn’t. The end of the Ice Age coincided with the end of these species. And for decades, scientists have been trying to figure out a big question: Why did these animals go extinct? A new study in the journal Science o...
Aug 25, 2023•47 min•Ep. 611
Countries Seek To Return To The Moon On Wednesday, the Indian space agency ISRO celebrated as its Chandrayaan-3 craft successfully made a soft landing at the lunar south pole. This is the first mission to explore the region around the moon’s southern pole, and a major success for ISRO. The mission plans to use a robotic rover to conduct a series of experiments over the course of about 2 weeks, largely centered around the availability of water and oxygen-containing materials. Less than a week ear...
Aug 25, 2023•47 min•Ep. 610
Challenging The Gender Gap In Sports Science This weekend, Spain and England face off in the Women’s World Cup Finals in Sydney, Australia. The first Women’s World Cup was in 1991, and the games were only 80 minutes, compared to the 90-minute games played by men. Part of the rationale was that women just weren’t tough enough to play a full 90 minutes of soccer. This idea of women as the “weaker sex” is everywhere in early scientific studies of athletic performance. Sports science was mainly conc...
Aug 18, 2023•47 min•Ep. 609
Youth Climate Activists Score A Win In Montana This week, a state court in Montana ruled in favor of a group of 16 youth climate activists , who argued that a state environmental law was in violation of a provision in the state constitution. The Montana constitution states: “The state and each person shall maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment in Montana for present and future generations.” The ruling will allow (but not require) regulators to consider climate impacts when evalu...
Aug 18, 2023•47 min•Ep. 608
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 . Devastating Fires Might Become More Common In Hawaii 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 th...
Aug 11, 2023•45 min•Ep. 607
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 Pod Generation,’ Pregnancy Goes High-Tech 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, o...
Aug 11, 2023•47 min•Ep. 606
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 . Protecting Other Planets From Earth’s Germs 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 prot...
Aug 04, 2023•47 min•Ep. 605
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 Possible Breakthrough Superconductor Has Scientists Split 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 ...
Aug 04, 2023•47 min•Ep. 604
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 . What Is Your Cat’s Meow Trying To Tell You? 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 ...
Jul 28, 2023•48 min•Ep. 603
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 . No, The Gulf Stream Is Not Collapsing 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 h...
Jul 28, 2023•48 min•Ep. 602
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 . Astronomers Spy A Two-Faced Star 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 st...
Jul 21, 2023•47 min•Ep. 601
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 . Revisiting The Nuclear Age With ‘Oppenheimer’ 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 face...
Jul 21, 2023•47 min•Ep. 600
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 . Where’s The Beef? Lab-Grown Meat Gets U.S. Approval 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 an...
Jul 14, 2023•47 min•Ep. 599
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 . The Oceans Are Getting Hotter—And Greener 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...
Jul 14, 2023•48 min•Ep. 598
How The Humble Beaver Shaped A Continent The American beaver, Castor canadensis, nearly didn’t survive European colonialism in the United States. Prized for its dense, lustrous fur, and also sought after for the oil from its tail glands, the species was killed by the tens of thousands, year after year, until conservation efforts in the late 19th century turned the tide. In her new book, Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America , author Leila Philipp tells that tale—and the ecological cost o...
Jul 07, 2023•47 min•Ep. 596
Meet The Blind Birder Reimagining Accessibility In The Outdoors For many blind and low vision people, accessing outdoor spaces like parks can be challenging. Trails are often unsafe or difficult to navigate, signs don’t usually have Braille, guides generally aren’t trained to help disabled visitors, and so on. But nature recordist Juan Pablo Culasso, based in Bogata, Colombia, is changing that. He’s designed a system of fully accessible trails in the cloud forests of southwest Colombia that are ...
Jul 07, 2023•48 min•Ep. 597
How Fungi Are Breaking The Binary: A Queer Approach To Ecology As Pride month comes to a close, many people are reflecting on the past, present, and future of the LGBTQIA+ community. An interdisciplinary group of scientists, researchers, and artists are using queerness as a lens to better understand the natural world, too. It’s a burgeoning field called queer ecology , which aims to break down binaries and question our assumptions of the natural world based on heterosexuality. For example, there...
Jun 30, 2023•48 min•Ep. 595
Scientists Can Now Hear The Background Hum Of The Universe For the first time ever, scientists have heard the “low pitch hum” of gravitational waves rippling through the cosmos. It’s this ever-present background noise set off by the movement of massive objects—like colliding black holes—throughout the universe. Scientists have theorized that it’s been there all along, but we haven’t been able to hear until now . So what does this hum tell us about our universe? SciFri producer Kathleen Davis tal...
Jun 30, 2023•47 min•Ep. 594
We have a new podcast! It's called Universe Of Art , and it features conversations with artists who use science to bring their creations to the next level. Listen on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , or wherever you get your podcasts . When The Promise Of Social Media Becomes Perilous Despite social media’s early promises to build a more just and democratic society, over the past several years, we’ve seen its propensity to easily spread hate speech, misinformation and disinformation. Online platforms h...
Jun 23, 2023•47 min•Ep. 593
We have a new podcast! It's called Universe Of Art , and it features conversations with artists who use science to bring their creations to the next level. Listen on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , or wherever you get your podcasts . A See-Through Squid Success Story Adult octopuses have about 500 million neurons, which is about as many neurons as a dog. Typically, more neurons means a more intelligent and complex creature. But it’s a bit more complicated than that. Unlike dogs, or even humans, octop...
Jun 23, 2023•47 min•Ep. 592
Curly Hair Keeps Your Scalp Cooler According to a fascinating new study , curly locks are better than straight hair at keeping your scalp cool. Researchers shone bright lights on three different manikins—one with no hair, one with loosely curled hair and another with tight curls. Solar radiation bounced off the tightly curled hair, and less heat reached the manikin’s scalp than the straight haired manikin. The manikin with loose curls was right in the middle. The research is part of an effort to...
Jun 16, 2023•48 min•Ep. 591
