Science Friday

For Jennifer Chayes, math is a 'native tongue'

Much of the code that describes the inner workings of social networks, helps apps predict your musical interests, and underlies innovations in AI traces back to advances

What an mRNA melanoma vaccine may mean for cancer treatment

A new mRNA vaccine for melanoma is making headlines. Moderna and Merck recently announced results from their clinical trial suggesting that this new vaccine, in combinati

Why it's so hard to tell the age of a fungus

When you see a mushroom popping up from the forest floor, that mushroom is just the tip of the fungal iceberg for a vast world beneath the surface. But the nature of fung

The power of the stories we tell about the ocean

There’s been wave after wave of bad news about the ocean: warming temperatures, overfishing, acidification, coral bleaching. But in the last few years, there have also be

What should astronauts do first when they reach Mars?

When humans finally land on Mars, what should they do? A report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine lays out the science objectives for a c

AI is everywhere in healthcare now. Doctors are conflicted

AI is popping up in many corners of society, but how are doctors using it in their practice? We asked our physician listeners to call in, and many of you did. What we hea

How much worse was that storm because of climate change?

We’ve been hearing for years that climate change makes weather more extreme, and extreme weather more frequent. But what’s been more difficult to measure is exactly how c

How GPS shaped our world

GPS is such an essential part of our lives that it’s easy to forget there was once a world without it. But, like many tech advancements of the 20th century, GPS was origi

The ancient Roman doctrine guiding modern environmental fights

A controversial pipeline project in Michigan has been stuck in legal limbo for years. But this month, the Michigan Supreme Court sided with environmentalists and leaned o

What are the mysterious ‘little red dots’ in images of space?

When the James Webb Space Telescope started sending back images in 2022, something mysterious appeared: little red dots, speckled across the sky. They didn’t look like an

Could we live in a dinosaur world?

In the new movie “The End Of Oak Street,” bits of a suburban Michigan neighborhood get sucked back through time to a prehistoric world of dinosaurs. It made us wonder, as

Do microplastics in the body affect pregnancy?

Microplastics have been documented throughout the human body, including the reproductive system. But the field of microplastics research is very new, and it’s not yet cle

Making a case for physicists to join climate research

When you think of physics, your mind might go to forces—like gravity, friction, and magnetism—or to astrophysics, like galaxies and exoplanets. But many of the same princ

Creating 'world models' for robots + An AI math shakeup

When you ask an LLM like ChatGPT or Claude a question, the model goes through its massive amount of training data and guesses the answer by mathematically predicting the

What can moments of lucidity teach us about Alzheimer’s?

Watching a loved one with Alzheimer's or dementia slowly lose their cognitive abilities can be heartbreaking. While the person you once knew seems to be slipping away, so

Colorado’s snow drought deals a major blow to recreation

Winter in Colorado looked very different this year. Many parts of the state experienced record-high temperatures and record-low snowpack, which had downstream effects on

How do you find a ‘lost’ species?

The earth is facing a biodiversity crisis, and there’s a lot of attention on species that are threatened, or at risk of dying out completely. But, there’s another critter

What we get wrong about vaccine hesitancy

President Trump has signed an executive order calling for a change to the childhood vaccination schedule. Specifically, he wants to separate the MMR vaccine, which protec

Why this lab studies the speed of bug pee and other curiosities

In a lab in the Rocky Mountains, a group of scientists is hard at work trying to find answers across biology, physics, and engineering: They’re looking into things like t

Some primates undergo even more extreme childbirth than humans

Human childbirth is often difficult and incredibly painful—just ask anyone who’s been through it. And for a long time, childbirth seemed to be uniquely difficult for huma