Science Friday

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 any known celestial objects, and astronomers began racing to figure out what they were.

There was a lot of hot debate, but researchers are making progress—the dots appear to be black holes, but black holes like we’ve never seen them before. In a recent study, astrophysicist Rohan Naidu and his team looked into one little red dot with the catchy name of MoM-BH*-1 and concluded it was a new cosmic category called a black hole star.

Guest:

Dr. Rohan Naidu is an assistant professor at the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaiʻi.

Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

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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, aside from the danger of getting snacked on by an allosaurus, what other challenges would modern humans face in that ancient world?

Flora talks with paleontologist Steve Brusatte about the conditions of the late Cretaceous era.

Guest:

Dr. Steve Brusatte is a paleontologist and author of “The Story of Birds: A New History from their Dinosaur Origins to the Present.”

Transcript will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

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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 clear if, or how, these tiny particles affect our health.

Producer Kathleen Davis has been reporting on the handful of scientists trying to uncover what microplastics mean for pregnancy and fetal development. She joins Host Flora Lichtman to debrief what she’s learned.

Read the full story here.

This story was produced with the assistance of the Journalism & Women Symposium (JAWS) Health Journalism Fellowship, supported by The Commonwealth Fund.

Guests:

Kathleen Davis is an audio producer for Science Friday based in New York.

Dr. Phoebe Stapleton is a toxicologist and microplastics researcher at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

Transcript will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that’s keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-472-4374

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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 principles used to understand how the universe works can also be used to study Earth’s climate systems. At its core, climate change is a physics problem. But traditionally, research institutions have kept climate science and physics separate.

Morgan O’Neill has spent her career with one foot in the classical physics world and the other in climate change research. Now she’s on a mission to invite more traditional physicists into the field of climate science. She speaks with Ira about the overlaps between the two fields and why more physicists should join in on climate research.

Guest:

Dr. Morgan O’Neill is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto and chair of the American Physical Society’s group on the physics of climate.

Transcript will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that’s keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-472-4374

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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 word most likely to appear next in a sentence.

This model, experts say, will not work well for technology designed to navigate the physical world. Something like a robot that works in a warehouse will instead require a “world model” that can understand spatial surroundings, like the stuff we walk by or bang into.

But what is a world model, exactly? And how do you train AI to recognize what the real world looks like? Host Ira Flatow checks in with tech journalist Joanna Stern, who’s seen the early days of these models up close, even in her own home.

Then, we check in on the math world, where frontier AI models have made meaningful progress on decades-old problems. Mathematician Emily Riehl gives us the big picture on how significant these results actually are.

Guests:

Joanna Stern is a tech journalist who writes newsletters and creates videos for New Things Media.

Dr. Emily Riehl is a professor of mathematics at Johns Hopkins University.

Transcript will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

 

Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that’s keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-472-4374

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