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Science Friday

Science Friday and WNYC Studios

Covering the outer reaches of space to the tiniest microbes in our bodies, Science Friday is the source for entertaining and educational stories about science, technology, and other cool stuff.

science life sciences

All Episodes

00:47:20

13,000-Year-Old Footprints, Climate Court, Native...

Science Friday ·

2018/03/30

Planting tomatoes in the garden this year? Better hope you have bumblebees too, because tomato flowers need a good shaking to get the pollen out. “What the bumblebee does is grab a tomato flower, curve its abdomen around the bottom of the tomato flower, and then shiver its wing muscles at a specific frequency, shaking pollen out of the holes like a salt shaker,” says Paige Embry, author of Our Native Bees: North America’s Endangered Pollinators and the Fight to Save Them. This week, a panel of peer

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00:47:22

Climate Risks, Power Grid Security, Necrobiome. March...

Science Friday ·

2018/03/23

A report issued last week by the Department of Homeland Security said that throughout 2016 and 2017, Russian hackers had worked to gain access to control systems at unidentified power plants and were in a position to shut them down. Their actions have finally given Washington the political will to address vulnerabilities in the U.S. power grid. A new bill sponsored by Senator Angus King of Maine will establish a two year pilot program to develop techniques and technologies to better secure the grid

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00:47:01

Dung Microbes, Gun Research, Airplane Germs, Kepler...

Science Friday ·

2018/03/23

Guns kill more people in the United States than alcohol—from homicides and suicides, to mass shootings like the one that left dead 17 high school students in Parkland, Florida last month. But public health researchers will tell you that studying alcohol-related deaths is much easier. Gun research is so fraught politically that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention doesn’t fund it (though the National Institutes of Health did for three years during the Obama presidency), and a pair of

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00:47:37

Stephen Hawking, Women In Blockchain, Dinosaurs....

Science Friday ·

2018/03/16

Theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking died this week at the age of 76. Hawking challenged and inspired a generation of physicists, and we remember his life and legacy. Plus, blockchain is the technology that makes possible every transaction made with Bitcoin—or any digital currency, for that matter. And when Bitcoin skyrocketed on the stock market last year, it turned average Joes into millionaires. Why just Joes? Most surveys show that 95 percent of blockchain enthusiasts and

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00:46:18

Ancient Tools, Life On Mars, An Aurora Named Steve....

Science Friday ·

2018/03/16

Scientists have been trying for a long time to piece together a question: When did traits of modern humans—like complex thinking and behaviors—first develop? Anthropologists have uncovered tools in Kenya that date to 280,000 years ago that contained non-local materials, indicating that early humans developed social networks and advanced technology tens of thousands of years earlier than previously thought. What would daily life be like on the Red Planet? We called a couple experts from NASA, MIT,

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00:47:05

‘Broad Band’ Computing History, Science Talent...

Science Friday ·

2018/03/09

In the history of male-dominated computer science, there are a few women who have gotten attention and credit for their contributions. Famously, Ada Lovelace wrote the first algorithm designed for a computer, and foresaw that such machines could do much more than math alone. Grace Hopper, after programming Harvard’s Mark 1 computer during World War II, went on to develop the first program compiler and helped make software programming accessible to more people. But as Claire Evans writes in her new

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00:47:17

BRCA Gene Test, Bacteriophages, Synesthesia. March 9,...

Science Friday ·

2018/03/09

Overuse of antibiotics has lead to bacteria becoming resistant to the drugs. In the United States, at least two million people become infected with antibiotic resistant bacteria each year, according to the Center for Disease Control. While some researchers are looking for new sources of antibiotics, other scientists are looking for new strategies to treat bacterial infections. One strategy is the use of bacteriophages—viruses that infect and kill bacteria. In 2013, the Food and Drug Administration

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00:47:23

Chip Fraud, Space Station Future, Neutron Star. Mar...

Science Friday ·

2018/03/02

Currently, the International Space Station is the only destination for astronauts traveling into lower-earth orbit. It’s also the only way for scientists to conduct experiments in microgravity. After two decades, it’s still proving to be incredibly useful to researchers. But time is running out. President Trump has indicated he wants to defund the station as scheduled by 2025, it’s nearing the end of its expected lifetime, and private companies have indicated that they, too, want to invest in the

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00:47:12

P-Hacking, Quackery, Growing Greater Grains. Mar 2,...

Science Friday ·

2018/03/02

If you like to read about the psychology around food and eating, you’ve probably come across stories based on research from Cornell’s Food and Brand Lab, directed by Brian Wansink. In an article published this week by Buzzfeed News, science reporter Stephanie Lee reports on a history of shoddy research practices in the lab, and a chain of emails that indicates a practice of “p-hacking”—a statistical wrangling of data aimed at making a borderline result appear to be statistically significant. Lee

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