Night Science

88 | How AI dreams up new science – with Jure Leskovec

What happens when AI starts doing science? We talk with Stanford computer scientist Jure Leskovec about AI agents that find patterns in large datasets, come up with hypot

87 | On the joys of being a young scientist

What can early-career scientists teach us about creativity? For this special episode, we talked to PhD students and postdocs about their creative processes. They told us

86 | From punchlines to discovery – Sarah Adelman

What can comedy teach us about scientific discovery? With stand-up comedian and former research scientist Sarah Adelman, we discuss the surprising parallels between jokes

85 | How laziness invites discovery – Robert Root-Bernstein

Professor Robert Root-Bernstein has not only made many scientific discoveries,  but has also written extensively about the creative process, including in Sparks of Genius

84 | Every scientist is an artist – Lois Hetland

Professor Lois Hetland, the former chair of art education at the Massachusetts College of Art, joins us to ask: what do artists and scientists truly share? We explore the

83 | How science is secretly driven by analogy – Melanie Mitchell

Melanie Mitchell is a professor at the Santa Fe Institute and a leading thinker on artificial intelligence, analogy, and abstraction. She reflects on how analogy quietly

82 | On being alone together – Amy Shyer & Alan Rodrigues

Amy Shyer & Alan Rodrigues co-direct the Laboratory of Morphogenesis at Rockefeller University. They are also married. Together, we reflect on what it means to think crea

81 | How to find your way by getting lost – Marina Dubova

It’s surprising that for centuries, scientists have left the study of how to do science largely to non-scientists. Not anymore – thanks to the young field of cognitive ep

80 | Why greatness cannot be planned with Kenneth Stanley

Ken Stanley is a highly regarded researcher in machine learning and artificial intelligence. After leaving his professorship at the University of Central Florida, he cofo

79 | Maria Leptin and creativity in grant writing

Maria Leptin is the President of the ERC, the European Research Council, and Professor of genetics at the University of Cologne. In this episode, Maria describes her own

78 | Stephen Nachmanovitch on free play and chivalry

Stephen Nachmanovitch is a musician celebrated for his free improvisations, and an educator whose books Free Play and The Art of Is have become classics on the creative p

77 | Akiko Iwasaki and the art of creativity maintenance

Akiko Iwasaki, a Yale professor and Howard Hughes Investigator, was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2024. Together, we reflect on how diverse

76 | Can Google’s Co-scientist project give scientists superpowers?

To answer this question, we speak with Dr. Alan Karthikesalingam and Vivek Natarajan from Google DeepMind about their groundbreaking AI co-scientist project. Beyond their

75 | Eve Marder and how Recipe Science ruins creativity

Professor Eve Marder is a pioneering neuroscientist at Brandeis University. Drawing on decades of work with a small neural circuit in lobsters, she describes how discover

74 | Martin Schwartz and the importance of stupidity in science

Martin Schwartz, a professor at Yale, is known for his work on integrins and his influential essay “The importance of stupidity in scientific research”. He emphasizes tha

73 | Ethan Mollick and a million Einsteins in a server

With Ethan Mollick, professor at Wharton and author of the bestselling “Co-Intelligence”, we explore how generative AI tools like ChatGPT can enhance scientific creativit

72 | David Baker and the lab's communal brain

David Baker, who was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for designing novel proteins with AI, is a professor at the University of Washington. In this episode, he e

71 | Victor Ambros and the unique ways we perceive wonder

Victor Ambros, newly awarded the Nobel Prize for his discovery of microRNA, is a developmental biologist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. In this episod

70 | Meghan O’Rourke on being the artist and their caretaker

Meghan O'Rourke, acclaimed author of The Invisible Kingdom, poet, and Yale professor, joins us to explore the parallels between creative writing and scientific disco

69 | Keith Yamamoto and the freedom to fail

Keith Yamamoto, professor and science policy leader at UCSF, discusses with us how modern science became trapped in a system that discourages creative risk-taking. Keith