Science Friday

A new analysis of ancient footprints in New Mexico adds to the debate about when humans arrived in North America. Plus, astronomer Dean Regas offers tips for safe viewing of Saturday’s eclipse.   New Data Support Human Arrival In North America 22,000 Years Ago In 2021, scientists uncovered ancient human footprints in White Sands, New Mexico. Dating of the footprints suggested that people arrived i...

A Saltwater Wedge Is Moving Up The Mississippi River As the Mississippi River drops to one of its lowest levels in recent history, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said salt water from the Gulf of Mexico could threaten drinking water as far north as New Orleans’ French Quarter if no action is taken. On Friday, the Corps announced plans to avoid that scenario by building upon an existing underwater...

How Artists And Scientists Collaborated To Make Art About HIV This past July, the 12th International Conference on HIV Science was held in Brisbane, Australia. But this wasn’t your typical scientific conference. Yes, findings were presented on the latest in HIV research, but it culminated in a museum exhibition. 12 HIV-positive artists were paired with 12 scientists, and each pair collaborated on...

The latest trend in celebrity health care is full-body MRI scans , with influencers like Kim Kardashian endorsing them. These scans aren’t covered by health insurance, and run over $2,000 out of pocket.  Typically, a new diagnostic tool is marketed to doctors and radiologists. But companies like Prenuvo are now marketing directly to consumers. They claim that their scans will catch early signs of...

A news story was circulating a few months ago—a woman in Australia came into the hospital with abdominal pain. She was increasingly forgetful and struggling with depression. Her doctors were stumped for over a year. What was causing her symptoms? Turns out she had a three-inch parasitic worm living in her brain. They took it out, and she recovered. How do doctors crack cases like this? How do you...

An mRNA Advance Wins A Nobel Prize This week, a handful of scientists scattered around the world got surprise telephone calls announcing that they will be receiving Nobel Prizes. On Monday, the prize in medicine or physiology was announced. It went to Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman, scientists who developed the modifications to mRNA that made the biomolecule a viable strategy for creating vaccin...

The Science Behind The Placebo Effect Earlier this month, a Food and Drug Administration panel concluded that a common decongestant ingredient used in drugs like Sudafed and NyQuil doesn’t work . The panel agreed that while the ingredient, called phenylephrine, isn’t dangerous, it doesn’t work any better than a placebo. That made us wonder: How well do placebos work? And why do they work even when...

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 un...

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....

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...

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 othe...

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 earlie...

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...

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. ...

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 kno...

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...

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...

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, lar...

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 se...

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 gen...

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...

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 Ejiof...

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...

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 disco...

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 tryin...