Science Friday

There’s a new trend in the world of weight loss: microdosing GLP-1 drugs. Online health clinics are promising big results with microdoses drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy, and Zepbound. Many source their drugs from compounding pharmacies, which can get complicated because compounding pharmacies are able to create different doses and formulations that haven’t gone through the FDA approval process. 

So, what do we know about the safety and efficacy of microdosing GLP-1s? And is there research to back up this approach? Flora talks with two experts to help sort through what we do and don’t know...

In a matter of months, AI has transformed the field of mathematics. In September, OpenAI claimed that an AI model solved the million-dollar Navier-Stokes equation. Then, a few weeks later, OpenAI shared results for more than 350 previously unsolved math problems. The news has prompted an existential conversation among mathematicians: In an age of AI, what’s the role of the human mathematician? 

It’s a question that Terence Tao, largely considered one of the greatest mathematicians of this generation, is reckoning with right now. He speaks with Flora about how AI has upended the mathematics world, what the r...

While Tyrannasaurus rex has reached celebrity status in pop culture thanks to movies like “Jurassic Park” and famous fossils, it can be difficult to imagine what everyday life was like for this charismatic prehistoric predator. 

Producer Kathleen Davis speaks to science writer Riley Black, who has investigated and reimagined life of the T. rex in her new book, “Tyrant Lizard Queen.” Prepare to get a grounding new perspective on this larger-than-life monster.

Read an excerpt from “Tyrant Lizard Queen: The Love, Life, and Terror of Earth’s Greatest Carnivore”

Guest:

Riley Black is a scie...

Pass the cocktail napkins and refill your glass because we’re having a dinner party. You’ll be between Isabella Rossellini, the Italian model, movie star, and director; and ecologist Carl Safina, author of many books, including “Beyond Words: What Animals Think And Feel."

This might seem like an unusual pairing, but it turns out they have a surprising amount in common. Both have a deep interest in animal cognition and our place in the natural world, but bring distinctly different lenses to their exploration of this corner of science. They join Host Flora Lichtman in the studio...

The time we see on our phones and clocks is based on the Earth’s rotation. But that rotation speed varies, so if it speeds up or slows down, our time measurements get thrown off. To solve this problem, timekeeping scientists have been deploying leap seconds to keep our clocks aligned with our planet. That is, until last week. After decades of debate, a global committee of timekeepers voted to kill the leap second. 

Host Flora Lichtman speaks to journalist Emma Gometz, who reported on the change for Scientific American, and physicist Judah Levine, to understand why thi...

The movie “Klara and the Sun,” in theaters now, is based on the 2021 novel of the same name by Kazuo Ishiguro. The story is set in the future and is narrated by Klara, a robotic “Artificial Friend,” whose job is to be a companion to a sick teenage girl.

In the 5 years since the release of the novel, the AI landscape has changed profoundly. Flora talks to novelist Kazuo Ishiguro about the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence, the intersection of art and science, and his hopes—and fears—for the future of this tech.

Guest:

Kazuo I...

Have you ever wondered what it means for something to be bear resistant? How do manufacturers know that the cooler you take camping or the compost bin in your backyard will keep hungry bears out? 

Wonder no more! Journalist Alex Davies’ new book “Kobuk the Destroyer: And Other Tales from the Wild, Unseen World of Test Engineering” takes you inside the workplace of the grizzly bears whose job it is to tear apart consumer goods. Davies joins Ira to discuss how bears do it, and other creative experiments to test the safety of jet engines, pill bottles and mor...

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 has changed the game in biological research. 

Doudna talks with Ira Flatow about the path that led to the development of CRISPR, her own route into research, and her thoughts on the attributes needed for success in science. 

Guest:

Dr. Jennifer Doudna is a professor of b...

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?

Flora talks with Jason Glenn, an astronomer who led the initial concept study for PRIMA, about the challenges ahead and the process of getting a massive space project off the ground.

Guest:

Dr. Jason Glenn led the concept study for the PRIMA space telescope, and is now...

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, she founded a think tank focused on coastal cities, she’s started two podcasts about climate solutions, and she’s published a couple books, most recently “What If We Get It Right?”

Flora sat down with Johnson on stage at a show produced by Grist to discuss...

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 in real life? Joining Flora to weigh in are sperm whale biologist Shane Gero, and “Whalefall” director Brian Duffield. 

Wondering how you’d fare inside a sperm whale’s stomach? Read more here.

Guests:

Brian Duffield is the director of “Wha...

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 register? How has politician speak changed over time? Does the way someone pronounces their As signal something about their values? Sociolinguist Valerie Fridland joins Flora to decode politician speak.

Guest:

Dr. Valerie Fridland is a professor of linguistics at University of Neva...

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 what is fueling the sargassum superbloom? And is there anything to do about it? Flora chats with satellite oceanographer Brian Barnes about sargassum biology, why the blooms are so hard to deal with, and what we could do about it.

Guest:

Dr. Brian Barnes is an oceanog...

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 played key roles in the development of computing. Then, Stacy Horn joins the conversation to describe her creation, EchoNYC, an early bulletin board service.

Guests:

Claire L. Evans is the author of “Broad Band: The Women Who Made The Internet.” 

Stacy Horn is the found...

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. Avoidant attachment is when you flee when someone tries to get close. Fearful-avoidant, also called disorganized, is some combination of the two. And secure attachment is a more regulated approach to relationship stress. 

But where does your attachment style come from? Do you have more than one...

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 circulating.  

Is that what happened this year? How are the side effects? And how has dysfunction at the health agencies impacted rollout? Flora discusses these questions and more with vaccine researcher Anna Durbin.

Guest:

Dr. Anna Durbin is a va...

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 coastline. While it might raise sea levels up to 12 inches, it stays below the surface instead of crashing on the shore.

Host Flora Lichtman speaks to oceanographer Andrew Leising to get the lowdown on what exactly a Kelvin wave is, and how wary West Coasters should be.<...

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 Wang for a conversation about the weirdest parts of being a cephalopod, and to answer some listener questions. 

Find more Cephalopod Week fun on our site!

Guests:

Dr. Heather Judkins is a Professor in the Department of Integrative Biology at the Un...

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 ice, and looks for high-energy neutrinos coming from deep space. 

In 2013, Ira spoke with physicist Francis Halzen about the decision to build the IceCube at the South Pole and the challenges of constructing a map of the cosmos with neutrinos.

Guest:

Dr. Francis Halzen is a professor of phys...

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 reawakened.

Why this happens is the subject of the new book, “Sleeping Beauties: Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up,” by David Bryne, artist, musician, and lead singer for Talking Heads. He joins Flora to explain.

Read an...

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 tangents. Following the idiosyncratic format of Wilson’s hit HBO show “How To,” he tells the stories of a struggling musician, a man who preserves tattoos, and a group of runners looping the same block for two months.

Ira talks with documentarian John Wilson about the documentary and their shared appreciat...

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 story behind its discovery. 

Flora chats with Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz, the biologist who worked for nearly 10 years to describe this flashy feline. They also discuss how Paola met the tilcayo, why it was so hard to classify, and what the reaction has been in Bolivia.<...

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 dinosaurs? 

Jason Cryan, from the Natural History Museum of Utah, and Barbara Thiers, formerly of the New York Botanical Garden, join Host Flora Lichtman to discuss the challenges of running a natural history museum.

Guests:

Dr. Jason Cryan is The Sarah B...

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. 

After, Sofia Sheikh describes different approaches to hunting for intelligent alien life through ‘technosignatures’. These are technological traces that could only be produced by intelligent life, like radio transmissions, industrial pollution, or city lights at night. Researchers from the SETI Institute have proposed sifting through lunar dust to look for tiny trace...

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 it? Joining host Flora Lichtman to dig into the research are child development experts Anna Johnson and Stephanie Jones. 

Guests:

Dr. Anna Johnson, Professor of Psychology at Georgetown University in Washington D.C.

Dr. Stephanie Jones, Professor of Early Childhood Development at the Harvard Graduate School of...

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 Americans get concussions each year, but the exact number is hard to pin down because many people don’t seek treatment. 

So what are we learning about how concussions affect the brain? And how are the best practices for treatment changing? To answer those questions and more Flora sits down with Teena She...

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 patients soon? 

Celiac expert Maureen Leonard joins Host Ira Flatow for a look at the latest in treating celiac disease. 

Guest:

Dr. Maureen Leonard is the clinical director of the Center For Celiac Research And Treatment at Mass General Hospital for Children. She’s also...

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. 

It seems every day there’s a new development: another warning from an AI researcher, an admission from a top lab that their AI systems breached another company, reassurances from CEOs. AI safety is even on the agenda for the UN General Assembly meeting this week. S...

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 are finding remarkably well-preserved artifacts that tell us more about what life was like in the early Americas.

Joining Flora to talk about this is reporter Reid Frazier, who accompanied an underwater archeology team on an excursion in Lake Erie. Then, underwater archeologist Jessi Halligan talks about her discoveries at a key site in Fl...

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 Ni‘ihau and Kaua‘i. 

What do scientists make of this hurricane season? And how is climate change playing out along Hawaiʻi’s coasts? Flora talks with Haunani Kane, who studies how climate change impacts the islands, about resilience, the importance of reefs, and combining different types of knowledg...

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 inventor of biocompatible electronic devices, John A. Rogers has designed things like flexible probes, a pacemaker smaller than a grain of rice, and wireless sensors that stick to skin like a temporary tattoo. He joins Host Flora Lichtman to talk about the c...

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 health. 

So what is the lymphatic system, and what does it do? And is there anything to these claims? Flora gets some answers with the help of two experts: Timothy Padera, a researcher who has dedicated his career to better understanding how the lymphatic system works; and physical therapist Marc Miller, who...

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 prominent in public discourse than it used to be.

But it’s not just awareness that’s blown up: It’s also the promise that you don’t have to suffer like those before you, thanks to hormone therapy. After decades of controversy over prescribing estradiol and progesterone due to concerns of increased...

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 answers. A skilled fossil-finder, he’s helped discover some of the most important known hominid fossils, including the bones used to describe the 2.5-million-year-old Australopithecus garhi, the first pieces of a 4.4-million-year-old partial skeleton of Ardipithecus ramidus, and fossils of the 5.8-million-year-old Ardipithecus kadabba, to name a few.

He...

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 figures like Genghis Khan, and works of art from masters like Leonardo di Vinci.

Author Sam Kean explores these historical losses in his new book, “The Museum of Lost Things.” He joins Host Ira Flatow to discuss what we can learn from them.

Read an excerpt from “The Museum of...

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 Stephenson joins Flora to talk about how these interactions are playing out in southeastern states. Then, carnivore ecologist Nyeema Harris joins to discuss best practices for coexistence.

Guests:

Cassandra Stephenson covers issues impacting rural West Tennessee as a Report for America corps member...

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 antimicrobial resistance expert Amy Mathers to find out.

Plus, the driver of fibromyalgia, a condition that can cause debilitating chronic pain and brain fog, has been something of a mystery. Patients’ imaging and blood work often turn up normal, and many have felt dismissed by doctors.

A rece...

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 painkillers? Is it really better for sleep? What are the effects of long-term use?

Host Flora Lichtman is joined by two scientists taking on these kinds of questions: Experimental psychologist Ryan Vandrey, who’s studied the health effects of cannabis for 26 years, and neuropsychologist Natasha Wade, who st...

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 photodetectors. Known as the LZ detector, its job is to look for flashes of light that come from particles bumping into xenon atoms. And during its observations, the researchers saw a very weird flash—a bump that doesn’t look like it came from any...

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 learn from each other in investigating reality.  

Rovelli joins Host Ira Flatow to talk about big ideas in physics, and his new book, “On The Equality of All Things: Lessons on Physics and Philosophy.”

Read an excerpt from “On The Equality of All Things.”

Guest:

Dr. Ca...