Science Friday

A video shown on Capitol Hill on September 9 reportedly shows an American hellfire missile attacking and simply bouncing off a UAP (the military term for a UFO). When videos like this come out, speculation about aliens often follows. But our obsession with aliens isn’t new—and it didn’t begin with 1950s alien invasion movies like “The Day The Earth Stood Still,” or even with Orson Welles’ “War of...

It all started harmlessly enough: People bought kits to grow mushrooms at home. But then, scientists in the upper Midwest noticed something strange. The golden oyster mushroom , which is not native to the United States, was thriving in local forests. Those homegrown mushrooms escaped our basements into the wild. Fungal ecologist Aishwarya Veerabahu joins Host Ira Flatow to discuss what impact thes...

If you’ve flipped through an issue o f National Geographic or scrolled through their social media, and caught a stunningly detailed photo of a tiny creature—like one where you can make out the hairs on a honeybee’s eyeballs, or the exact contours of a hummingbird’s forked tongue—you have probably seen the work of Anand Varma. He’s an award-winning science photographer, a National Geographic Explor...

Dietary supplements are big business, with one recent estimate showing the industry is worth almost $64 billion in the United States alone. Take a casual scroll through your social media and you’ll find influencers hawking all kinds of supplements. But how effective are they? How are they regulated? And why are these “natural” remedies so appealing to millions of Americans?  To size up the science...

Put on your party hat and wet suit because it is Cephalopod Week, Science Friday’s annual celebration of all things, octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish. To kick things off, we’re bringing you an ode to the octopus arm. You may have heard that octopuses can use their arms to “taste” their surroundings, which they use for finding food. Now, researchers have unlocked a key mechanism in the octopus sens...

On August 27, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the White House fired CDC director Susan Monarez after only a month on the job. Right after she was ousted, other senior leaders resigned from the agency, including Demetre Daskalakis , an infectious disease physician and former director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the CDC. Dr. Daskalakis speaks with H...

Earlier this summer, astronomers discovered something strange whizzing past Jupiter: an interstellar object. Scientists named it 3I/ATLAS. It’s only the third interstellar object ever observed , and it’s due to leave the solar system by the end of the year, so the race is on to learn as much as we can about it. Host Flora Lichtman talks with astrochemist Stefanie Milam about what this object could...

You have probably given some thought to outdoor air pollution, whether it’s wildfire smoke or smog from traffic. You may even check AQI measurements on your phone. But what about the air inside your home ? Host Flora Lichtman talks to civil and environmental engineer Nusrat Jung, who studies indoor air pollution, about how we create toxic air without even knowing it, and what we can do to avoid it...

In some places, sand dunes protect shorelines from the onslaught of ocean waves. In other places, the dunes themselves are on the move, and threaten human structures. Host Flora Lichtman talks with mechanical engineer Nathalie Vriend, who studies the structure of sand dunes, about what makes a heap of sand a dune, and what scientists still hope to learn about sand . Guest: Dr. Nathalie Vriend is a...

Summer may be winding down, but we’re not quite ready to let go of beach days, backyard cookouts, or ice cream cones. We love ice cream here at SciFri, so we’re pulling a few of our favorite ice cream science stories out of the freezer this week. Back in 2015, ice cream expert Maya Warren sat down with Host Ira Flatow to help us understand a science mystery of “unmeltable” ice cream that made the...

Twenty years ago, Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Louisiana, and the levees designed to protect New Orleans failed. Huge swaths of the city flooded, and 1,600 people were trapped inside Charity Hospital. Physician Erica Fisher was working in Charity’s emergency room at the time, and she and her colleagues fought for days to keep their patients alive. Host Flora Lichtman speaks with Dr. Fisher,...

Researchers recently used near-infrared photography to get a detailed look at ancient artwork showing scenes of wild animals tangled in a fight. But these weren’t paintings on a cave wall. They were tattoos on the arms of a Siberian woman who lived 2,300 years ago. What can ancient ink tell us about our ancestors?  Sticking and poking their way into this with Host Flora Lichtman are archaeologist...

You might think of a star as a mass of incandescent gas, a gigantic nuclear furnace where hydrogen is turned into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees. But researchers recently reported that they’d observed some of what lies beneath all that hydrogen and helium, at least inside one unusual supernova . The star, named supernova 2021yfj, had its outer layers stripped away, leaving behind a...

Gray wolves are native to the Rocky Mountains, but decades of hunting nearly eradicated them from the western United States by the 1940s. In 1995, wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park, and it’s been a conservation success story, but not a straight path out of the woods. Host Flora Lichtman digs into the last 30 years of wolves in the West with Heath Druzin, creator of the podcast...

What do Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, lime Jell-O, and Kraft Creamy French Salad dressing have in common? They've all gotten a glow-up from artificial food dyes. Petroleum-based food dyes have become a target of RFK Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda—but what does science say about their effects on health?  Joining Host Flora Lichtman to discuss is Asa Bradman, an expert in the health effects of foo...

This month, the Department of Health and Human Services terminated almost $500 million in mRNA vaccine development grants and contracts. While HHS has said that these cuts won't affect mRNA cancer research , some researchers have expressed concern about the impact on their ongoing work. In light of these developments, we’re revisiting a conversation from February. A team at Memorial Sloan Ketterin...

Since President Trump returned to office, his administration has been aggressive in rolling back clean energy initiatives. But that isn’t the whole story. Texas, California, and other states are bringing so much solar and battery power online that in March, fossil fuels generated less than half the electricity in the US for the first time ever. And internationally, solar has gotten so cheap to bui...

Fireflies’ magical blinking lights are tiny beacons in the warm dark night. Who can resist catching one? Not scientists. Because their light comes from bodily chemicals, fireflies’ power of illumination has long been used as a tool in medical research . And that has driven scientists to investigate the inner workings of the blinking beetle itself. Researchers have recently discovered that fireflie...

Throughout history, humans have been on a search for truth. From the ancient Greeks and their belief in a universal truth, to our Founding Fathers writing, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” In a world of disinformation, conspiracy theories, and the rising influence of artificial intelligence, where does truth fit in? Mathematician Adam Kucharski, author of...

Did you know that murder mystery writer Agatha Christie had a background in chemistry? In about half of her stories, the murder is committed using poison—something she was very, very familiar with. She had even trained in apothecaries to mix prescriptions by hand before she became a novelist. Chemist-turned-author Kathryn Harkup wrote about them in her new book , V is for Venom: Agatha Christie’s...

On August 5, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that the Department of Health and Human Services would terminate almost $500 million in mRNA vaccine development grants and contracts, affecting 22 projects. Biologist and mRNA researcher Jeff Coller joins Host Ira Flatow to talk about what this move means for future mRNA research in the US beyond these immediate projects. Plus, reporte...

If you’ve found yourself scrolling through the breastfeeding world online, you know that people have a lot of strong opinions about breast milk. But what exactly do we know about the biology of it? Does breast milk really adapt to a baby’s needs? Does it confer immunity ? How does making breast milk impact the breastfeeder? Joining Host Flora Lichtman to spin through the science of this sophistica...

Science journalist Tom Zeller Jr. has suffered from debilitating cluster headaches for three decades. Like other cluster headache sufferers, his episodes would leave him unable to function, and the fear of the next one happening was constant. In a quest to better understand his own condition, Zeller learned that headaches remain a great neurological mystery , with basic mechanisms behind why they...

Last week, astronaut James Lovell died at the age of 97. In April of 1970, he was the commander of the Apollo 13 mission , which launched with three astronauts en route to the moon. While in space, however, the craft encountered a serious problem: an explosion in one of its fuel tanks that severely damaged the craft and disabled its electrical system, prompting the famous phrase, “Houston, we’ve h...

Fungal networks in the soil are arguably the basis of much of life on Earth, but they’re understudied and underappreciated in the conservation world. Scientists at the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN) are trying to fix that. They just unveiled a global map of mycorrhizal fungal networks, which highlights how widespread they are and how little protection they have. Host Flo...