Science Friday

Research suggests that better understanding the psychological and neurological components of chronic pain may lead to better treatments. Chronic pain is remarkably common: Roughly 20% of adults in the US live with it. And people with chronic pain are more likely to have depression, anxiety, and substance abuse disorders. But this relationship between physical and mental health is not as straightfo...

Researchers isolated one kind of cone in the eye and aimed lasers at it to allow subjects to see a super vibrant teal shade they call “olo.” Think about the colors of the world around you—the blue of a cloudless sky, the green of a new leaf, the blazing red of a tulip’s petals. We see these colors because of the way our eyes work. But what if we could change how our eyes respond to light, and pres...

How will market uncertainty and a lack of federal support for climate efforts affect the future of clean energy in the United States? Plus, many wetlands are disappearing, but Louisiana’s “accidental” Wax Lake Delta is growing—and informing coastal restoration techniques. $8 Billion Of Climate Tech Projects Were Canceled In 3 Months In the first three months of the Trump administration, officials...

With the help of cat owners, a new project investigates cats’ biology and aims to link some of their behaviors to their genes. Calling all cat people: This one’s for you. Despite humans’ long history of welcoming felines into their homes and delis, research on cats lags far behind research on dogs. Now, scientists behind the project Darwin’s Ark are working to close the cat gap by enlisting cat ca...

An evolving technology is changing the lives of people with paralysis: brain-computer interfaces (BCI). These are devices that are implanted in the brain and record neural activity, then translate those signals into commands for a computer. This allows people to type, play computer games, and talk with others just by thinking, allowing more freedom to communicate. For decades, this technology has...

In Connecting Dots: A Blind Life , inventor Josh Miele recounts his life story and path to becoming an accessibility designer. When inventor and scientist Josh Miele was 4 years old, a neighbor poured sulfuric acid on his head, burning and permanently blinding him. In his new book Connecting Dots: A Blind Life , Miele chronicles what happened afterwards, growing up as a blind kid, and how he built...

Are traffic engineering decisions based on evidence-based research? Not as much as you might think. If you’ve seen a car crash on the side of the road, you might look at it and think that the person at fault is the driver. But how much blame should be shared by the people who designed those roads in the first place? Well, some traffic engineers are calling for the field to accept more blame for th...

The Webb Space Telescope picked up traces of dimethyl sulfide on planet K2-18b. On Earth, the molecule comes from microbes and phytoplankton. Also, researchers captured the first confirmed video of a colossal squid swimming in its natural habitat—almost 2,000 feet deep. Possible Signature Of Life Detected On Exoplanet—Maybe In major galactic news, scientists may have detected possible signs of lif...

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 skelet...

Bringing back Southwest peach orchards won’t be easy, but researchers are on the lookout for remaining trees—and they need help. And, the newly discovered Lokiceratops is challenging paleontologists’ understanding of how horned dinosaurs evolved and existed together.  How A Navajo Plant Researcher Is Reviving A Desert Peach When you think of states known for their peaches, Utah might not be at the...

We are rounding up your questions about roads. What confounds you about traffic, or how interstates are laid out? Are there certain road design elements that ignite your road rage? Tell us about it: we’ve got a traffic engineer in the passenger seat this week, ready to answer your questions. Call us at (877) 4-SCIFRI or 877-472-4374. In this episode, utterances like “um,” “wow,” and “mm-hmm” aren’...

On Wednesday, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation heard testimony from Jared Isaacman, President Trump’s nominee to lead NASA. During the confirmation hearing, Isaacman indicated a priority of sending humans to Mars—while maintaining the agency’s plans to return people to the lunar surface. In response to a question from Senator Ted Cruz, Isaacman said “I don’t think we ha...

We go inside the scientifically accurate ER world created for the TV show with one of its medical consultants. 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...

NASA is planning to decommission the International Space Station by the end of 2030. The ISS, which began operations in 2000, is reaching the end of its lifespan and has become costly to maintain. NASA selected SpaceX to construct a vehicle that would “de-orbit” the football field-sized station, pushing it down into the atmosphere where it’ll burn up safely over the Pacific ocean. So what comes ne...

What happens when AI moves beyond convincing chatbots and custom image generators to something that matches—or outperforms—humans? Each week, tech companies trumpet yet another advance in artificial intelligence, from better chat services to image and video generators that spend less time in the uncanny valley. But the holy grail for AI companies is known as AGI, or artificial general intelligence...

In many parts of the United States, spring has sprung. There’s nothing quite like those first few beautiful days of spring. They’re delightful—until the sneezing starts. According to the CDC, a quarter of US adults deal with seasonal allergies . And if you think they’re getting worse, it’s not just in your head. Previous research has shown that climate change is making pollen seasons start earlier...

Over the past two decades, rates of peanut allergies in children have more than tripled. A variety of theories has been proposed to explain this, from a rise in industrialization keeping kids away from the germs that develop the immune system, to the previous pediatric guidelines that urged parents to restrict access to peanuts early in life. Whatever the cause, higher rates of peanut allergies me...

The cuts hit multiple agencies, affecting work on HIV, gun violence prevention, vaccines, minority health research, and more. On April 1, thousands of federal health workers woke up to find that they had been laid off . Scientists and civil servants at the Food and Drug Administration, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and National Institutes of Health were let go as part of Robert F. Ke...

Emergency response experts say that funding and staff cuts at the National Weather Service could mean less reliable weather forecast. And, babies like music, but they generally have preferences. A music therapist reveals the best kinds of music to soothe a baby. Forecasting Cuts Leave Some Worried For Hurricane Season Many in Georgia are still recovering from the devastation of Hurricane Helene la...

In January, an iceberg the size of Chicago splintered off from the Antarctic Peninsula and drifted away in the Bellingshausen Sea. As luck would have it, a team of scientists was nearby on a research vessel, and they seized the chance to see what was lurking on the seafloor beneath that iceberg—a place that had long been covered, and nearly impossible to get to. They found a stunning array of life...

Mental health information on social media can be both revelatory and misleading. How do clinicians and their patients make sense of it? 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 p...

Engineers take an in-depth look at why the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore collapsed and how to prevent future tragedies. In the early morning of March 26, 2024, the container ship Dali struck the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore. Within 30 seconds, the bridge collapsed into the river below. Six construction workers lost their lives. On the one-year anniversary of the accident, we talk...

The company has genetic data of 15 million people, which could be shared with a future buyer. Here’s how to delete it. Plus, an experimental coating could make golf balls roll more reliably on greens with different conditions. After 23andMe Bankruptcy, Customers Urged To Delete Their Data If you’re one of roughly 15 million people who used 23andMe to unlock information from their DNA, consumer adv...

Certain words are overrepresented in text written by AI language models. A study investigates why such patterns develop. Also, the ends of chromosomes, called telomeres, typically shorten as an organism ages. But when some fat-tail dwarf lemurs hibernate, they lengthen. ‘Delving’ Into The ‘Realm’ Of AI Word Choice Several years ago, some eagle-eyed readers of scientific papers noticed an unusual t...

TB kills more than a million people each year. Dr. Mireille Kamariza has spent her career developing better detection and treatment tools. As the United States retreats from global health leadership—withdrawing from the World Health Organization, dismantling USAID—public health experts warn that there will be implications for the spread of certain diseases around the globe. One such disease is tub...