Science Friday

As a young plant scientist, Joanne Chory shook up the research establishment with her unconventional approach to figuring out how plants work. Her methods and success changed the field, and led her to her biggest project yet—tackling climate change, with the help of millions of plants. Colleagues Steve Kay, Detlef Weigel, and Jennifer Nemhauser describe what made Joanne outstanding in the field of...

Grant funding by the National Science Foundation has been cut by more than half this year, bringing the foundation’s science funding to its lowest level in decades. Katrina Miller, who covers science for the New York Times , joins Host Flora Lichtman to unpack the cutbacks and discuss where the funding changes might lead. And, the FDA has cleared a blood test to help diagnose Alzheimer’s disease....

At the end of April, air traffic control radar surveillance and radio communication systems at Newark Liberty International Airport went dark for over a minute. A week and half later, radar went down again briefly. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has since cut down the number of flights in and out of Newark. But, how does our air traffic control system work? How do air traffic controller...

At the beginning of May, the National Institutes of Health, part of the Department of Health and Human Services, announced a plan to develop a universal vaccine platform. Think: a single shot for flu or COVID-19 that would last years, maybe a lifetime. The plan—called Generation Gold Standard—has a reported budget of $500 million, and a tight deadline. But will it work? And where does the science...

Betül Kaçar started her scientific career as a biochemist, working on an enzyme found in zebrafish. But then she found her calling: investigating some of the hardest questions in evolutionary biology by resurrecting ancient life forms. NASA administrator Melissa Kirven-Brooks recalls the fellowship application that put Betül on her radar. And evolutionary biologist and geneticist Harmit Malik weig...

The “Mission: Impossible” franchise is known for its big stunts, and the newest film is no exception. Producer Kathleen Davis talks to the film’s stunt coordinator, Wade Eastwood, about the science behind one big underwater scene . Plus, psychologist Kenneth Carter joins Host Flora Lichtman to talk about what makes high-adrenaline adventurers tick. Take this questionnaire to see where you fall on...

Climate scientist Jagadish Shukla grew up in a small village in rural India, where people starved if the monsoon season didn’t bring rain. To help his village, he set out to become a scientist and discover a way to predict the seasons—an unthinkable idea at the time, in the 1960s and ‘70s. Shukla became a pioneer in modern weather forecasting , and he tells his unlikely story in his new memoir, A...

In recent years, digital touchscreens have replaced many of the buttons and knobs that control various functions in cars. But when Host Ira Flatow went shopping for a new car, he noticed that physical controls seemed to be making a comeback. But will the rise of technologies like voice recognition and automation make cars more button-centric, or less? Ira talks with car ergonomics engineer James F...

Tomatoes come in all kinds of colors, sizes, and flavors. But what’s going on at the genetic level? What makes a tomato red or yellow? Tiny or giant? Researchers are mapping the genomes of 22 varieties of nightshades—the family of plants that includes tomatoes, potatoes, and eggplants. They located the genes that control the size of tomatoes and eggplants and then used CRISPR gene editing to grow...

As a teenager living in St. Vincent, Richie Robertson saw first-hand what a volcanic eruption did to life on the island. Forty years later, he was the scientist the community turned to when the same volcano roared back to life. Richie’s colleague, Stacey Edwards of the UWI Seismic Research Centre, explains how Richie earned the trust of the community, and why it was important to have a Vincentian...

The lesser prairie chicken was granted endangered species status in 2023. Now the Department of the Interior is moving to revoke those protections . What can this bird known for its flamboyant courtship rituals tell us about the Trump administration’s approach to environmental policy and protections for endangered species?  Host Flora Lichtman is joined by Producer Shoshannah Buxbaum and Vox envir...

Firefighting is a career with an inherent cancer risk, but a full understanding of what those risks are has been elusive. An important registry designed to help understand the link between firefighters and cancer was taken offline on April 1 because of federal cuts, then restored six weeks later. Host Flora Lichtman discusses this with firefighter health researcher Sara Jahnke and reporter Murphy...

What does it take to create and maintain one of the largest repositories of botanical information in the world? For starters, it can mean helicopter-ing into remote nooks of the Amazon, hiking through rough terrain, looking for strange fruits and flowers, and climbing trees to pluck specimens from the branches. Then there’s all the science required to identify, classify, and codify those species. ...

Medical sculptor Damon Coyle walks around with a Mary Poppins bag of body parts. Fake ones, that is. At the University of Missouri, his lab creates hyperrealistic body parts designed to help medical providers practice for real-world surgeries and procedures. They make things like lifelike arms for practicing blood draws or a set of eyeballs for ocular trauma training. On stage in Columbia, Missour...

Biochemist Kati Karikó spent decades experimenting with mRNA, convinced that she could solve the problems that had kept it from being used as a therapeutic. Her tireless, methodical work was dismissed and she was ridiculed. But that work laid the foundation for the rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines that saved millions of lives, and was recognized by a Nobel Prize in 2023. Kati shares her secr...

Proposed budget cuts for NASA would jeopardize space research. And an executive order could change the political tides for deep sea mining. On May 2, the Trump Administration proposed a 24% budget cut for NASA. It would slash funding for science while setting billions aside for initiatives to send humans to the moon and Mars. New Scientist editor Sophie Bushwick joins us to talk about this, as wel...

Bacteria have been around for billions of years. Could they have come up with complex behaviors that we just don’t understand yet? Could they have their own language? Their own culture? Their own complex societies playing out right under, and in, our noses?  Microbiologist Bonnie Bassler has been studying these questions for more than 30 years. She talks with Host Flora Lichtman about the wild wor...

A passion for fashion among the “bone collector caterpillar,” who wears a coat of body parts, and an artist who makes fabrics that remember. We inch into the world of extreme outerwear with the newly-discovered “bone collector caterpillar,” which wears a coat of many co… llected body parts . Why, Hanipillar Lecter? Entomologist Dan Rubinoff, who along with his team found the species on a mountains...

Millions of years ago, iguanas somehow got from North America to Fiji. Scientists think they made the trip on a raft of fallen vegetation. Also, the marine reptile’s fossilized fetus is cluing paleontologists into the lives of ancient sea creatures. Ancient Iguanas Floated 5,000 Miles Across The Pacific If you picture iguanas, you might imagine them sunbathing on hot sand in the Caribbean or skitt...

In “Into the Unknown,” an astronomer explores the mysteries of the cosmos and the limits of what science can test. What is time? If the universe is expanding, what is it expanding into? What happened just before the Big Bang? Some of the most head-scratching ideas in physics strain the limits of what science can test. In her book Into the Unknown: The Quest to Understand the Mysteries of the Cosmo...

Scientists bring us a lab-grown chicken nugget and texturally accurate, plant-based calamari. We’ll bite. There’s a movement in the world of science to find alternatives to meat and dairy products that don’t involve killing animals. Two avenues for this are by using animal cells in a lab, or going plant-based. Two breakthroughs in this field of food science were published in journals recently: the...

Being able to belt out a tune like Adele or Pavarotti is not just about raw talent. The best singers in the world have to work on their technique—like how to control their breath and develop the stamina to hit note after note for a two-hour concert. But pop stars and opera singers aren’t the only vocalists who have figured out how to harness their voices for maximum impact. Death metal vocalists a...

It’s zombie season! At least if you’re watching the new season of the fungal thriller “The Last of Us,” airing right now on Max, which chronicles what happens after a fungus turns most of humanity into zombies. It’s fiction for us, but for some organisms on the planet, it’s more like a documentary. The fungus that zombifies humanity in the show is based on Ophiocordyceps , a real fungal group that...

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...