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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 Friday

This has been a busy year in science, from government budget cuts and policy changes affecting research, to the record rise of renewables, to the surge in AI, and everything in between.

Science journalists Sophie Bushwick and Maggie Koerth join Host Ira Flatow to unpack some of the year’s top stories, and some you might have missed.

Guests:
Sophie Bushwick is a freelance science journalist and editor based in New York.
Maggie Koerth is climate and weather editor for CNN, based in Minneapolis.

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

A Look Back At 2025 In Science, From Federal Cuts To Space Junk

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 also train their voices to hit that unique guttural register. And those iconic screams are not as easy to master as they might seem.

Vocal scientists at the University of Utah are now bringing death metal singers into the lab to try to understand how they make their extreme vocalizations. What they’re finding is not only insightful for metalheads, but might also help improve treatment for people with some types of vocal injuries.

In a conversation from April, Host Flora Lichtman talks with speech pathologist Amanda Stark, and Mark Garrett, vocal coach and lead singer of the band Kardashev.

Read the whole story at sciencefriday.com.

Guests: 
Dr. Amanda Stark is a speech pathologist and vocology researcher at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Mark Garett is a vocal coach and the lead singer of Kardashev. He’s based in Phoenix, Arizona.

Transcript available at sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

How Death Metal Singers Make Their Extreme Vocalizations

Gen Alpha slang can seem unintelligible to adults, but linguist and TikToker Adam Aleksic argues language development in the internet age is worth legitimate study. In a conversation from July, Adam talks to Host Flora Lichtman about how algorithms and social media are changing the way we speak, and discusses his new book, Algospeak: How Social Media is Transforming the Future of Language.

Guest: Adam Aleksic is a linguist and content creator posting educational videos as the “Etymology Nerd” to an audience of more than three million. He is the author of Algospeak: How Social Media is Transforming the Future of Language.

Transcript is available on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

What The Sigma Is Algospeak?

What have we learned in recent years about black holes? Can entangled quantum particles really communicate faster than light? What’s the story behind Schrödinger’s Cat? And, in this weird liminal space between the holidays, what even IS time, really? 

Physicist Sean Carroll and Host Ira Flatow tackled those big questions and more at a recent event at WNYC’s Greene Space in New York City. Carroll’s book The Biggest Ideas in the Universe: Space, Time, and Motion is the SciFri Book Club pick for December. 

Guest: Dr. Sean Carroll is the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Tangling With Entanglement And Other Big Ideas In Physics

Health psychologist Dr. Kari Leibowitz traveled to some of the coldest, darkest places on earth to learn how people there don’t just survive, but thrive in winter. She says that one of the key ingredients is adopting a positive wintertime mindset by focusing on and celebrating the good parts of winter.

In a conversation from January, Flora Lichtman talks with Dr. Kari Leibowitz, author of How to Winter: Harness Your Mindset to Thrive on Cold, Dark, or Difficult Days, about saunas, cold plunges, candles, and other small ways to make winter a season to look forward to rather than dread. Plus, she responds to some of our audience’s own tips to make the season enjoyable.

Guest: Dr. Kari Leibowitz is a health psychologist and author of How to Winter: Harness Your Mindset to Thrive on Cold, Dark, or Difficult Days. She’s based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Transcript is available at sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

The Science Of Thriving In Winter—By Embracing It

Imagine sitting at home and then all of a sudden you hear a men’s choir belting out “The Star Spangled Banner.” You check your phone, computer, radio. Nothing’s playing. You look outside, no one’s there. That’s what happened to neurologist Bruce Dobkin after he received a cochlear implant. He set out to learn everything he could about the condition, called musical hallucinosis.

In a story from August, Host Ira Flatow talks with Dobkin about his decision to publish his account in a medical journal and why the condition is more common than he realized.

Guest: Dr. Bruce Dobkin is a neurologist at UCLA Health.

Transcript is available at sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

A Neurologist Investigates His Own Musical Hallucinations

Koalas with the bodies of lions. Elephants the size of your dog. Gigantic, 8-foot-tall sloths. These aren’t creatures found in science fiction: They walked our planet a million years ago, during the Ice Age.

That’s the focus of the third season of the Apple TV series “Prehistoric Planet,” which uses the latest paleontology research and photorealistic CGI to reimagine the lives of ancient creatures. So far, the series has focused on dinosaurs, but now it’s taking that same approach to the huge and strange-looking animals that roamed the tundras and deserts of the Ice Age.

Joining Host Ira Flatow to thaw out the new research featured in the show are two of its scientific consultants, paleontologist Darren Naish and La Brea Tar Pits curator Emily Lindsey.

Guests: Dr. Darren Naish is a paleozoologist and author based in Southampton, U.K.

Dr. Emily Lindsey is a paleoecologist, curator, and excavation site director at the La Brea Tar Pits and Museum in Los Angeles, California. 

Transcript available at sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

‘Prehistoric Planet’ Defrosts Strange Animals Of The Ice Age

Since 1955, when Congress passed the Polio Vaccination Assistance Act, the federal government has been in the business of expanding access to vaccines. That is, until this year.

2025 has been filled with almost daily news stories about federal agencies, under the direction of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., casting doubts about vaccine safety, including unsubstantiated claims about links to autism. These agencies have also been taking steps that could roll back access to vaccines, including for hepatitis B and COVID-19.

But we’ve found it very hard to sort out what these talking points and recommendations mean in practice. KFF Health News journalists Jackie Fortiér and Arthur Allen join Host Flora Lichtman to discuss, one year in, what this administration’s stance on vaccines has meant practically—for vaccine access, and vaccine uptake.

Guests: Arthur Allen is senior correspondent at KFF Health News and author of Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine's Greatest Lifesaver.

Jackie Fortiér is a Peggy Girshman fellow covering health policy at KFF Health News.

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

How Did Vaccine Policies Actually Change In 2025?

This year, comet 3I/Atlas broke into our solar system, but also the zeitgeist. This dirty snowball is a visitor from another solar system, and it’s only the third interstellar object we’ve ever spotted. And today, it's closer to us than ever before—just 170 million miles away.

Astronomy experts Stefanie Milam and Hakeem Oluseyi join Host Flora Lichtman to dish about 3I/ATLAS and how it captured the spotlight in a way that maybe no other big hunk of rock ever has.

Plus, the sun is setting on the ISS, and the plan is to eventually crash it into the ocean. But wouldn’t it be cooler to send it into deep space instead? A listener pleads his case.

Guests: Dr. Stefanie Milam is an astrochemist at NASA and a project scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope. She studies comets and interstellar objects.

Dr. Hakeem Oluseyi is an astrophysicist and CEO of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

 

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Why Astronomers Are Excited About Comet 3I/ATLAS’ Close Approach

While on a sampling trip in California’s Lassen Volcanic National Park, researchers stopped to sample a rather boring stream on their hike to Boiling Springs Lake. But when they incubated that water sample back in the lab, they discovered an amoeba that could still move and divide at 145 F, a new record for a eukaryotic cell. Microbiologist Angela Oliverio joins Host Flora Lichtman to describe the “fire amoeba,” Incendiamoeba cascadensis.

Plus, planetary scientist Johanna Teske takes us to exoplanet TOI-561b, a far-off “wet lava ball” which was recently observed by the James Webb Space Telescope. Researchers believe that the planet has the strongest evidence yet of an atmosphere on a rocky planet outside our solar system.

Guests:
Dr. Angela Oliverio is an assistant professor in the department of biology at Syracuse University. 
Dr. Johanna Teske is a staff scientist at Carnegie Science Earth and Planets Laboratory in Washington, D.C.

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

‘Fire Amoeba’ Likes It Hot, And A Faraway Lava Planet

AI is everywhere these days, and though there’s debate about how useful it is, one area where experts think it could be game-changing is scientific research. It promised to be particularly useful for speeding up drug discovery, an expensive and time-consuming process that can take decades. But so far, it hasn’t panned out.

The few AI-designed drugs that have made it to clinical trials haven’t been approved, venture capital investment in these efforts has cratered in the last few years, and many startups have shut their doors. So why has it been so hard to make AI-designed drugs? What are the fundamental issues, and what does the future of this research look like?

Joining Host Ira Flatow with some answers is Peter Coveney, who studies how chemistry discoveries can be sped up with algorithms and computers.

Guest: Dr. Peter Coveney is a professor and director of the Centre for Computational Science at University College London.

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

AI Was Supposed To Discover New Drugs. Where Are They?

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