Science Friday

From down here on Earth, life on the International Space Station seems magnificent: floating through the day, enjoying stunning views out your window, having an experience only a handful of other people will ever get.

But what’s it really like to live up there? How does experiencing 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets every day change your perception of time? How do you cope with being so far from the people you love?

Those are some of the questions explored in the novel Orbital, which won the Booker Prize late last year. In the book, author Samantha Harvey imagines the inner life of astronauts aboard the ISS.

Host Flora Lichtman is joined by Samantha Harvey, along with astronaut Dr. Cady Coleman, who spent almost six months on the Space Station, and is an author herself. They talk about the unexpected mundanities of living in space, how Harvey was inspired to write the book during lockdown, and how astronauts make sense of their new reality when separated from the rest of humanity.

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

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Since January 7, wildfires have been devastating the Los Angeles area. In the span of 10 days, several different fires, including the Palisades and Eaton fires, have burned more than 40,000 acres and destroyed more than 12,000 structures. At least 25 people have died.

The threat of fire is growing, especially in zones known as the wildland-urban interface, or WUI. That’s where unoccupied wildland and human developments meet and mingle. Think of a city sprawling around a forest, for example. In the US, around one in three homes is in this type of high-risk zone.

So what’s the science behind urban fires? And how do we protect ourselves in the face of them?

Ira Flatow talks with Dr. Kimiko Barrett, senior wildfire researcher and policy analyst at the research group Headwaters Economics in Bozeman, Montana; and Dr. Alexandra Syphard, senior research scientist at the Conservation Biology Institute in San Diego, California.

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

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The SpaceX rocket carries lunar landers from companies based in Texas and Japan. They could arrive at the moon in the coming months. HPV can cause a variety of cancers, including cervical. New mortality data for women under 25 point to the success of the HPV vaccine.

On Wednesday, a SpaceX rocket launched carrying payloads from two separate private companies hoping to achieve lunar landings. The pair of landers—one from Japanese company ispace, and one from Texas-based Firefly Aerospace—will take months to reach the moon. Firefly’s lander is scheduled to arrive first, in March, with ispace’s lander planned for a touchdown in late May or early June.

Another SpaceX launch on Thursday, a test flight of the company’s Starship system, had mixed results. The booster returned to earth and was successfully “caught,” but the spacecraft exploded over the Caribbean shortly after launch. That explosion is under investigation.

Jason Dinh, climate editor at Atmos in Washington, D.C., joins Ira to talk about the Wednesday launch and plans for private lunar exploration. They also discuss other stories from the week in science, including the ban of Red Dye #3 an AI approach to snake antivenom, and a study predicting a rise in US dementia cases by 2060.

In 2006, a vaccine for the human papillomavirus (HPV) became widely available to adolescents. HPV is the most common sexually transmitted infection, and it can cause cancers of the mouth, throat, and sexual organs. It’s also the cause of nearly every case of cervical cancer.

Now, almost 20 years after the HPV vaccine was introduced, a study published in JAMA noted a 62% drop in deaths due to cervical cancer in women under 25 in the US: from 50 or 60 deaths per year to 13. This follows earlier research that noted a decrease in cervical precancer and cancer since the introduction of the vaccine.

With HPV vaccine uptake at about 60% for adolescents aged 13-15, a higher uptake could virtually eliminate cervical cancer, experts say. However, childhood vaccination rates have dwindled since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, sparking concerns about the spread of preventable disease.

Joining Flora Lichtman to talk about this latest study is lead author Dr. Ashish Deshmukh, professor of public health sciences and co-leader of the Cancer Prevention and Control Program at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, South Carolina.

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

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For years, artificial intelligence companies have heralded the coming of artificial general intelligence, or AGI. OpenAI, which makes the chatbot ChatGPT, has said that their founding goal was to build AGI that “benefits all of humanity” and “gives everyone incredible new capabilities.”

Google DeepMind cofounder Dr. Demis Hassabis has described AGI as a system that “should be able to do pretty much any cognitive task that humans can do.” Last year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said AGI will arrive sooner than expected, but that it would matter much less than people think. And earlier this week, Altman said in a blog post that the company knows how to build AGI as we’ve “traditionally understood it.”

But what is artificial general intelligence supposed to be, anyway?

Ira Flatow is joined by Dr. Melanie Mitchell, a professor at Santa Fe University who studies cognition in artificial intelligence and machine systems. They talk about the history of AGI, how biologists study animal intelligence, and what could come next in the field.

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

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Scientists investigated how the shape of the human body makes hula hooping possible—and what hips and a waist have to do with it. And, the decision for how to proceed with NASA's Mars Sample Return Mission will fall to the incoming administration.

Hula hooping might appear to be a simple physical activity. But there’s some complex math and physics at play as the hoop goes around your body, and scientists haven’t had a clear understanding of those hidden forces—until now. A team of mathematicians at New York University recently published research into the science of hula hooping in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Flora Lichtman is joined by Olivia Pomerenk, a PhD candidate in mathematics at New York University, and a coauthor of that paper. She talks with Flora about why the motion of hula hooping prevents the hoop from falling down and which body types make for the best hooper.

NASA’s Mars Sample Return mission is an ambitious project that aims to use the Perseverance rover to collect Martian rocks, sand, and even gulps of Martian air. Then, through a complicated handoff between different spacecraft, it would ferry those samples to Earth.

A 2023 assessment found that the original plan to retrieve the samples would be much more expensive, and take much longer, than initially expected.

This week, NASA announced two options for how to cut costs and bring the samples to Earth by the late 2030s. But the agency did not solidify a plan, leaving it to the next administration to sort out around 18 months from now. Is the project on the rocks?

To get up to speed on the mission, Flora Lichtman talks with Dr. Jim Bell, professor of earth and space exploration at Arizona State University, and distinguished visiting scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

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

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Alcohol poses many risks to our health, including liver damage and driving under the influence.

Now, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy has highlighted another risk of drinking alcohol: cancer. In his latest advisory, Murthy detailed the growing body of research showing that drinking alcohol can increase the risk of at least seven types of cancers, those of the mouth, throat, voice box, esophagus, breast, liver, and colon.

He’s also recommended adding a warning to alcohol outlining the connection between alcohol use and cancer.

Ira talks with Dr. Murthy about the science that informed his latest advisory and his parting message for the nation as he ends his term as Surgeon General.

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

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On January 6, the U.S. reported its first human death from the bird flu. According to the CDC, more than 60 people were diagnosed with bird flu in the US last year, up from just one case in 2022.

If you look at global cases over the last two decades, of the nearly 900 reported cases in people, roughly half the patients died.

H5N1 avian influenza has been circulating in birds—and even some mammals—for years. But in the spring of 2024, the virus turned up in dairy cattle. Since then, over 900 herds have been affected, according to the CDC.

This might bring back memories from early in the COVID-19 pandemic—but is that the right way to think about this? Should we be concerned? And what steps should we be taking?

To unpack this, host Flora Lichtman talks with Dr. Seema Lakdawala, co-director for the Center for Transmission of Airborne Pathogens and associate professor studying influenza viruses at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia; and Dr. Richard Webby, director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Studies on the Ecology of Influenza in Animals and Birds and virologist at St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee.

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

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After her SciFri internship 20 years ago, Flora went on to become a beloved science journalist, video producer, and podcaster. Now she’s back! Also, several different fires are causing extreme damage in the Los Angeles area. Strong Santa Ana winds are one factor behind their rapid spread.

Big news! Science Friday now has two hosts—Ira Flatow, the program’s founder, and veteran science journalist Flora Lichtman. Going forward, you’ll hear both of them regularly on the air and on our podcast. 

Flora joins Ira to introduce herself and talk about her background, from her start as an intern at Science Friday 20 years ago to her role as a video producer, then a writer for Bill Nye, and as creator of the podcast “Every Little Thing.”

This week, the Los Angeles area has been battered by at least five separate wildfires. Tens of thousands of acres have burned, and thousands of people have been forced to flee their homes. Fire experts had warned on January 2 that conditions were ideal for wildfires in parts of Southern California. One factor that has helped these fires spread rapidly? Unusually strong Santa Ana winds.

On the other side of the country, Winter Storm Blair has caused freezing temperatures and up to a foot of snow across the Midwest and up into the East Coast, putting more than 60 million people under weather alerts.

Joining Ira Flatow to discuss these and other top stories of the week is Umair Irfan, science correspondent at Vox, based in Washington, D.C.

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

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Last October, Ira Flatow took a trip to the World Forestry Center in Portland, Oregon, for a daylong exploration of lichen—the fuzzy growths often found on trees, roofs, and gravestones. Ira sat down in front of a sold-out room with Dr. Hannah Prather, postdoctoral researcher and visiting assistant professor of biology at Reed College, and Dr. Jesse Miller, lead botanist for the Washington Natural Heritage Program. From their crucial role in ecosystems as indicators of air quality to their striking colors and forms, we’ve really taken a lichen to these amazing organisms.

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

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You’re probably familiar with the concept of handedness—a glove made for your left hand looks basically like the one for your right hand, but won’t fit—it’s a mirror image. Many of life’s important molecules, including proteins and DNA, are chiral, meaning they can exist in either a left-handed or a right-handed form. But on Earth, nature only uses one version or the other in living organisms. Your proteins, for example, are all the left-handed version, while your DNA is all right-handed.

With advances in synthetic biology, it could be possible to build an artificial organism that flips that shape, having right-handed proteins and left-handed DNA. Writing in the journal Science, an international group of researchers recently cautioned against anyone trying to create that sort of so-called mirror life, saying that it poses the threat of “unprecedented and irreversible harm” to human health and global ecosystems.

Dr. Drew Endy, a synthetic biology researcher at Stanford University and one of the authors of that warning, joins Ira to discuss the concept of mirror life and why a group of researchers felt compelled to call for a halt to mirror life experiments.

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

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