PODCAST · science
Science Friday
by Science Friday and WNYC Studios
Covering the outer reaches of space to the tiniest microbes in our bodies, Science Friday is the source for entertaining and educational stories about science, technology, and other cool stuff.
Episodes
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Jennifer Doudna on what it takes to be a good scientist
In 2020, Jennifer Doudna shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry for the development of the gene-editing technique CRISPR. Along with related techniques, it has become an essential tool in genetics, allowing specific sections of genetic code to be cut and replaced in a genome. It’s an advance that…
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Getting the billion-dollar PRIMA space telescope off the ground
In late September 2026, NASA announced that a new telescope called PRIMA was getting a green light and advancing to something called Phase B of the development process. But what does that mean exactly? How does a billion-dollar space project get thought up, designed, approved, and constructed?...
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Ayana Elizabeth Johnson on making climate action cool
Ayana Elizabeth Johnson is one of the most prominent voices in the climate movement. She’s a marine biologist by training, but as she saw the effects of the climate crisis intensify, she took on more public-facing advocacy work. Her work is expansive: She helped organize the March for Science…
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Could a whale swallow a human, 'Whalefall' style?
In the new movie “Whalefall,” a scuba diver (Austin Abrams) gets accidentally swallowed by a sperm whale. What follows is a tense battle against time and the whale’s digestive system, to escape before his air supply runs out. But could a whale actually swallow a human? And how might this play out...
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Why do politicians talk like that?
With the midterms approaching, politicians are out in full force to convince voters to elect them. And that means that we’re hearing a lot of “politician speak.” You know it when you hear it: those folksy turns of phrase, the vague promises. But what do linguists have to say about this vocal...
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Sargassum superblooms are choking coastlines around the Atlantic
An unwelcome visitor is arriving on beaches from West Africa to the Caribbean, and Brazil to Florida. It’s brown, it’s stinky, and it’s more abundant than ever: sargassum. This free-floating seaweed has become a major problem for coastal ecosystems, communities, tourism, and infrastructure. So…
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Celebrating Ada Lovelace Day and the women who made the internet
This year, October 13 marks Ada Lovelace Day, an observance that calls attention to the role of women in computing and technology. In this conversation from 2018, Ira talks with Claire Evans, author of “Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet,” about some of the women who...
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Are attachment styles more than a social media trend?
In the past few years, the idea of attachment styles has taken off, both online and in therapy offices. It’s gone from a niche psychological concept to a shorthand to describe how we show up in relationships. Here’s a crash course: Anxious attachment is when you seek constant reassurance.…
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The science and politics of the new mRNA flu vaccine
A new mRNA flu vaccine made by Moderna was approved by the FDA in August, and is currently available for people aged 50 and over. The promise of an mRNA vaccine for flu is that it can be spun up more quickly than a traditional vaccine, meaning it could better match the flu strain that’s...
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What is the Kelvin wave on the West Coast?
A Kelvin wave has reached California and is creeping up the West Coast, raising both sea levels and concerns from government officials. This kind of massive internal wave begins in the western Pacific Ocean and then travels eastward to the Americas along the equator, and then up and down the...
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The punk rock life of cephalopods
Cephalopods have a reputation for being smart and majestic. And while that may be true, the life of a cephalopod can also be dark and gritty. Have you heard of octopus death spirals? How about cephalopod cannibalism? Host Flora Lichtman is joined by cephalopod experts Heather Judkins and Z. Yan...
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The Nobel winner searching for deep-space neutrinos in Antarctica
It’s Nobel Prize week, and this year's prize in physics went to Francis Halzen “for decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin.” The IceCube is a massive neutrino detector that covers a cubic kilometer of Antarctic...
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How important ideas get reawakened, with David Byrne
On Science Friday, we love to talk about ideas, especially ideas that have the power to shape the future. But there are plenty of groundbreaking ideas that almost don’t make it out of the lab or the art studio: ideas that are birthed but then fall into a deep slumber until, years later, they’re...
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'The History of Concrete' with John Wilson
John Wilson’s new documentary, “The History of Concrete,” has a subject matter that to most people may seem gray, drab, and boring. The film is anything but. Alongside facts about concrete’s reliance on dwindling sand reserves and New York City’s crumbling infrastructure, there are unexpected...
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The tilcayo is the new wild cat on the block
Big news for tiny cats: an itty-bitty three-pound spotted cat from Bolivia—called the tilcayo—is the first new wild cat species described in more than a hundred years. Tilcayo pics have been all over the news and social media, but there’s much more to tilcayo’s tale, including the surprising…
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Are natural history museums going extinct?
Leaders of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University say they can’t afford to keep the museum open to visitors. And there are rumors that another natural history museum, in Hays, Kansas, may be closing its doors. What happens to the collections, and are museums going the way of the...
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Examining a new lunar crater + searching for signs of alien technology
In 2024, scientists using instruments on board the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft spotted a new large impact crater on the surface of the moon. Tyler Powell joins host Flora Lichtman to describe what they found, and what scientists are learning about the lunar surface from studying it....
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Did the COVID pandemic stunt kids’ development?
It’s a conversation at playgrounds and in classrooms: parents and teachers worry that kids who spent formative years at home during the COVID-19 pandemic are set back, emotionally, socially or academically. But what does science say? Did stay-at-home life permanently impact kids who lived through...
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How do concussions affect the brain?
Football season is upon us and a new study is making headlines. Researchers found that roughly 1 in 4 NFL players will develop CTE, a neurodegenerative disease, in their lifetime. While most of us are not professional athletes, concussions are still a relatively common injury. Millions of…
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Are new treatments for celiac disease on the horizon?
For celiac disease sufferers, avoiding gluten is the only way to avoid symptoms. But that’s not always easy to do. Researchers are working on new treatments, including one that targets interleukin-15, a chemical that can cause some of the damage in celiac sufferers. Will the drugs be available to...
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Everyone is calling for safer AI. So what does that mean?
AI safety has dominated the news cycle for weeks, precipitated in part by an AI attack where a bunch of OpenAI’s agents teamed up and hacked another AI platform, Hugging Face, without humans knowing. Since then, multiple AI researchers have come forward to say they’re worried this tech is unsafe....
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Underwater archeology reveals clues about Ice Age humans
During the last ice age, America’s coastlines and waterways looked much different than they do today. When glaciers melted, coasts and shorelines were inundated, burying early human settlements underwater. This is where underwater archeology comes in. Donning scuba gear and trowels, researchers…
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Climate change is increasing hurricane risk for Hawaiʻi
The Hawaiian Islands tend to be insulated from the worst effects of hurricanes, but this summer has been different. In mid-August, Hurricane Lala pummeled the Big Island, damaging homes and roads and causing flooding and power outages. Then a few weeks later, Hurricane Lowell hit the islands of...
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Bringing hard electronics into soft and squishy bodies
A lot of things in life are squishy, including your skin, your organs, and all the goo inside you. But technology tends to be rigid and hard. Figuring out how to get those two worlds to work together can be challenging. How do you connect an electronic sensor to a soft, beating heart? As an...
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What is lymphatic drainage, anyway?
There’s a new wellness trend focused on an obscure capillary system that moves fluid around the body. Things like lymphatic walking, vibration plates, and compression boots have been touted as ways to stimulate the lymphatic system to combat bloating, flush away toxins, and generally promote...
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Hot flashes, hormone therapy, and the science of perimenopause
Perimenopause affects more than 4 billion people, but has historically been neglected by medicine. It’s the time before menopause when hormones start fluctuating wildly, leaving women with brain fog, hot flashes, dropping bone density, and mood changes. Thanks in part to social media, it’s more...
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Telling the tale of human origins, one fossil tooth at a time
Where did we come from? How did humanity, with our complicated civilizations and all our human quirks and foibles, come to be? Much of what we know about those questions traces back to important fossil finds in Ethiopia. Paleoanthropologist Yohannes Haile-Selassie has been key in that hunt for...
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Did the fire at the Library of Alexandria set humanity back?
In 48 B.C.E., a massive fire ripped through the Library of Alexandria in Egypt, one of the largest and most significant ancient libraries. An estimated 100,000 works of literature were lost. Throughout history, there are lots of examples of things being “lost”: cities, like Pompeii, graves of...
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Black bears are moving into the neighborhood. How do we coexist?
Living with black bears is complicated. They’re huge, hungry, and they really don’t care about your hostas. After a long period of being overhunted, black bears are on the rebound. And as they begin returning to parts of their native ranges, they’re finding humans there, too. Reporter Cassandra...
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Is a shorter course of antibiotics OK? + Genetic risk of fibromyalgia
You’ve probably been warned that if you don’t finish that course of antibiotics, you could wind up battling antibiotic-resistant bacteria. But a growing body of research suggests that the opposite might be true. What does this mean for you and your next sinus infection? Flora talks with...
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Why cannabis’s health effects are so hard to study
When states began legalizing recreational cannabis a couple decades ago, 25 million Americans said they used the drug. That number nearly tripled to 70 million by 2023. There are a lot of open questions about how it affects us. Why do some people find more pain relief from THC than traditional...
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Did scientists just find a dark matter particle? Maybe
There’s a flashy new find in the hunt for dark matter—the stuff that makes up 85% of all matter in the universe, but we have no clue what it is. A mile under Lead, South Dakota, is a giant cauldron filled with 7 tons of liquid xenon, encased in water and surrounded by super-sensitive...
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Why physics and philosophy need each other
Once upon a time, much of what we call “science” was performed by people called “natural philosophers,” delving into mysteries of nature, physics, chemistry, and more. Physicist and author Carlo Rovelli argues that there’s still a great need for philosophy, and that the two fields can and should...
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Recall rodeo: A food safety update + Why cars are catching fire
Between E. coli in blueberries, glass in popsicles, and that dreaded cyclospora, this summer was all about keeping a wary eye on the groceries in the fridge. But how does the recall data stack up against previous years? And are federal cuts to food safety agencies to blame? Flora talks to food...
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Is there science behind the ‘nervous system reset’?
On social media, the vagus nerve often gets billed as the gateway to nervous system nirvana: It’s your ticket to better rest, relaxation, and health if you “stimulate” it correctly. Where did this idea come from, and what does the research say? In March, Host Flora Lichtman talked with…
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For Jennifer Chayes, math is a 'native tongue'
Much of the code that describes the inner workings of social networks, helps apps predict your musical interests, and underlies innovations in AI traces back to advances in mathematical theory and data science that fundamentally describe how massive networks behave. Jennifer Chayes helped create...
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What an mRNA melanoma vaccine may mean for cancer treatment
A new mRNA vaccine for melanoma is making headlines. Moderna and Merck recently announced results from their clinical trial suggesting that this new vaccine, in combination with the cancer drug Keytruda, reduced recurrence rates in patients. The companies have not yet released full data from the...
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Why it's so hard to tell the age of a fungus
When you see a mushroom popping up from the forest floor, that mushroom is just the tip of the fungal iceberg for a vast world beneath the surface. But the nature of fungal life makes it hard to answer some basic questions. What exactly does it mean to be one individual organism? And how do you...
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The power of the stories we tell about the ocean
There’s been wave after wave of bad news about the ocean: warming temperatures, overfishing, acidification, coral bleaching. But in the last few years, there have also been some big wins for the big blue—as well as a narrative shift, in which the ocean itself has almost become its own...
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What should astronauts do first when they reach Mars?
When humans finally land on Mars, what should they do? A report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine lays out the science objectives for a crewed Mars mission. In January, planetary scientist Lindy Elkins-Tanton, who co-chaired the report committee, joined Host Flora...
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AI is everywhere in healthcare now. Doctors are conflicted
AI is popping up in many corners of society, but how are doctors using it in their practice? We asked our physician listeners to call in, and many of you did. What we heard mirrored broad trends: that more and more doctors are using AI tools for diagnosis, paperwork, and getting up to speed on...
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How much worse was that storm because of climate change?
We’ve been hearing for years that climate change makes weather more extreme, and extreme weather more frequent. But what’s been more difficult to measure is exactly how climate change influences a particular weather event. For example, how much more intense was Hurricane Lala because of climate...
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How GPS shaped our world
GPS is such an essential part of our lives that it’s easy to forget there was once a world without it. But, like many tech advancements of the 20th century, GPS was originally created by the U.S. military. So how did it become a part of daily civilian life? And how vulnerable is it to…
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The ancient Roman doctrine guiding modern environmental fights
A controversial pipeline project in Michigan has been stuck in legal limbo for years. But this month, the Michigan Supreme Court sided with environmentalists and leaned on an ancient legal framework: the public trust doctrine. This doctrine, which dates back to the Roman Empire, says that natural...
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What are the mysterious ‘little red dots’ in images of space?
When the James Webb Space Telescope started sending back images in 2022, something mysterious appeared: little red dots, speckled across the sky. They didn’t look like any known celestial objects, and astronomers began racing to figure out what they were. There was a lot of hot debate, but...
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Could we live in a dinosaur world?
In the new movie “The End Of Oak Street,” bits of a suburban Michigan neighborhood get sucked back through time to a prehistoric world of dinosaurs. It made us wonder, aside from the danger of getting snacked on by an allosaurus, what other challenges would modern humans face in that ancient…
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Do microplastics in the body affect pregnancy?
Microplastics have been documented throughout the human body, including the reproductive system. But the field of microplastics research is very new, and it’s not yet clear if, or how, these tiny particles affect our health. Producer Kathleen Davis has been reporting on the handful of scientists...
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Making a case for physicists to join climate research
When you think of physics, your mind might go to forces—like gravity, friction, and magnetism—or to astrophysics, like galaxies and exoplanets. But many of the same principles used to understand how the universe works can also be used to study Earth’s climate systems. At its core, climate change…
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Creating 'world models' for robots + An AI math shakeup
When you ask an LLM like ChatGPT or Claude a question, the model goes through its massive amount of training data and guesses the answer by mathematically predicting the word most likely to appear next in a sentence. This model, experts say, will not work well for technology designed to navigate...
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What can moments of lucidity teach us about Alzheimer’s?
Watching a loved one with Alzheimer's or dementia slowly lose their cognitive abilities can be heartbreaking. While the person you once knew seems to be slipping away, sometimes people with Alzheimer's briefly seem like their old selves again. They may remember a long-forgotten name or suddenly...
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Science Friday have?
Science Friday currently has 1000 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Science Friday about?
Covering the outer reaches of space to the tiniest microbes in our bodies, Science Friday is the source for entertaining and educational stories about science, technology, and other cool stuff.
How often does Science Friday release new episodes?
Science Friday releases new episodes frequently with a large back catalog of 1000 episodes. Check the episode list for recent publication dates.
Where can I listen to Science Friday?
You can listen to Science Friday on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Science Friday?
Science Friday is created and hosted by Science Friday and WNYC Studios.
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