Science Friday Folgen

Why Contraceptive Failure Rates Matter In A Post-Roe America Birth control options have improved over the decades. Oral contraceptives are now safer, with fewer side effects. Intrauterine devices can prevent pregnancy 99.6% of the time. But no prescription drug or medical device works flawlessly, and people’s use of contraception is inexact. “No one walks into my office and says, ‘I plan on missing a pill,’” said obstetrician-gynecologist Dr. Mitchell Creinin. “There is no such thing as perfect use, we are all real-life users,” said Creinin, a professor at the University of California-Davis who wrote a widely used textbook that details contraceptive failure rates. Even when the odds of contraception failure are small, the number of incidents can add up quickly. More than 47 million women of reproductive age in the United States use contraception and, depending on the birth control method, hundreds of thousands of unplanned pregnancies can occur each year. With most abortions outlawed in at least 13 states and legal battles underway in others, contraceptive failures now carry bigger stakes for tens of millions of Americans. Read the rest at sciencefriday.com. The Quest For New COVID-19 Solutions As we head towards our third pandemic winter, the nation still is facing about 2,500 weekly deaths from COVID, and over 3,000 people a day entering the hospital due to the virus. Dr. William Haseltine is chair and president of ACCESS Health International, a former professor at Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health, and the founder of several biotechnology companies, including Human Genome Sciences. “This thing knows everything about our immune systems,” Haseltine says. “We have to find new drugs that it has never seen before, and new combinations of those. That’s what’s worked for HIV. That’s what we have to do now—and we’re doing a very poor job of that.” Haseltine joins Ira to help explore the viral landscape, and where he sees viral research headed—from new vaccines to antiviral drugs and antibody cocktails.   Can Animals Evolve To Survive The Anthropocene? When you think of evolution, you might imagine a slow process that takes millions of years. Take Tiktaalik, for example: The ancient fish, an important human ancestor, took 375 million years from climbing out of water to get to the humans you see now.Now that we’re here, we’re changing the world at an unprecedented rate. Threats like climate change, deforestation, and pollution are wiping out entire animal species in just one generation. Can evolution punch back? Or are some species fighting a losing battle? Dr. Shane Campbell-Staton joins Ira to discuss rapid evolution in the anthropocene, and whether that’s enough to keep these species afloat.   Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.   Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Using Family Photos Of Fall Foliage To Track Climate Change Leaf-peeping, or tourism based on observing the colors of fall foliage, is a big industry in parts of the Northeast. So as leaves continue to change across the northern United States with the turning of the seasons, researchers are working to better understand how climate change may be affecting fall colors—changes that may affect the bottom line for those tourism-rich areas. But to tease out the factors involved with the timing of peak leaf color, the researchers need data on when leaves started to change color, when they arrive at their peak color, and when the leaf-peeping season ends. Unfortunately, satellite imagery showing leaf color is only available dating back to the year 2000—and so Stephanie Spera of the University of Richmond is trying to get data in some unconventional ways. Spera and colleagues are engaging in a massive citizen-science project, asking for tourist snapshots of Acadia National Park that show the colors of fall. While they’ll accept your cellphone selfies, they’re especially interested in older, pre-digital images—the sort of vacation pictures that might be in your family albums, or in shoe boxes in an elderly relative’s attic. Adding those images to their data set, she says, will both help them to validate the satellite data and to extend the boundaries of their data set outwards. Heather Goldstone, host and executive producer of Living Lab Radio on WCAI, joins Ira to talk about the project and how listeners can participate.   The ‘Grandfather’ Of The Voyager Mission Retires 45 years ago, the Voyagers 1 and 2 spacecraft were launched into the cosmos from Cape Canaveral in Florida. Since then, they’ve traveled over 14 billion miles from Earth, on a grand tour of our solar system, and beyond. The mission is still running, making Voyager 1 the farthest human-built artifact from Earth. Even before launch, scientists and engineers were hard at work planning and designing the mission. Last week, NASA announced the retirement of Dr. Ed Stone, who some called the ‘grandfather’ of the mission. Dr. Stone shepherded the Voyager program as its project scientist for 50 full years. In this conversation from 2013, just after Voyager 1 had entered interstellar space, Ira spoke with Dr. Stone for a status update on the mission.   A Flaw in Human Judgment: How Making Decisions Isn’t As Objective As You Think If two people are presented with the same set of facts, they will often draw different conclusions. For example, judges often dole out different sentences for the same case, which can lead to an unjust system. This unwanted variability in judgments in which we expect uniformity is what psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls “noise.” The importance of thoughtful decision-making has come in stark relief during the pandemic and in the events leading up to the January 6th insurrection. Ira talks with Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman about the role of ‘noise’ in human judgment, his long career studying cognitive biases, and how systematic decision-making can result in fewer errors. Kahneman is the co-author of “Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment,” along with Oliver Sibony and Cass R. Sunstein, now available in paperback.   Frenemies, Lovers, And The Fate Of The Cosmos: Our Galaxy Tells All Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is 13.6 billion years old, all-knowing, and a little sassy. It has a rich social life of friends, frenemies, and even love interests—all other galaxies in the local group, including the stunning Andromeda. And the Milky Way is a little disappointed that we’ve stopped telling as many stories about it. Or at least, that’s how folklorist and astronomer Dr. Moiya McTier imagines the galaxy’s personality when writing her new book, The Milky Way: An Autobiography of Our Galaxy. The book stretches from the beginning of the universe to the birth of our planet, and then on to the eventual theoretical end of the cosmos. Along the way, we learn both the science of how stars form and galaxies collide, and the many stories and myths humans have told about these bodies throughout our relatively brief lives. McTier joins Ira to tell all (on behalf of the Milky Way), and explain the importance of story in scientific knowledge and discovery.   Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.   Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Why Do Cats Purr? An Investigation Into A Purr-fect Mystery Science Friday recently received a voicemail from a listener named Violet from Maui, Hawai’i, who wanted to know: Why do cats purr? We wanted to see what other cat lovers knew about cat purring. So we sent our talented SciFri colleagues Diana Montano and Kyle Marian Viterbo to the Meow Parlor, a cat cafe in New York City to find out. Guest host Katherine Wu, who recently wrote about why cats purr for The Atlantic, also talks with Robert Eklund, professor of language, culture, and phonetics at Linköping University in Linköping, Sweden. He explains what we do and don’t know about how and why cats purr.   How To Digitally Recreate Darth Vader’s Voice From A War Zone James Earl Jones played Darth Vader for 45 years. But this September, he officially stepped down from the role. Fear not, Star Wars fans—the villain isn’t gone for good. Instead, the filmmakers have teamed up with the Ukrainian AI company Respeecher to recreate his voice. Respeecher can convert one person’s speech into the voice of another. The company’s work has appeared in the Star Wars canon already, as Young Luke Skywalker in “The Mandalorian” and “The Book of Boba Fett.” And just last month, they debuted their Darth Vader mimic in the T.V. show “Obi-Wan Kenobi.” They always knew that it would be challenging to recreate Vader’s iconic voice. But their job got a whole lot harder when Russian troops invaded their nation. Respeecher chief technology officer Dmytro Bielievtsov and sound engineer Bogdan Belyaev join guest host Kathleen Davis to talk about their work.   Toxic Death Cap Mushrooms Take Root In The Mountain West Toxic mushrooms are not unusual in the Mountain West. “This is probably a lepiota,” said Susan Stacy, looking at a mushroom on a recent afternoon in a Boise, Idaho, neighborhood not far from downtown. “See that little dark nub in the middle and little flecks around here?” Stacy turned to her mushroom identification book. “Edibility: to be avoided. Perhaps poisonous,” she said. While this little mushroom could be problematic for a curious dog or child, it doesn’t compare to one of the world’s deadliest mushrooms – which Stacy discovered in Boise last September. She remembers that it was a hot day, and she decided to take a detour from her normal route to check out a busier area where many lawns were “generously” watered. “And here I come upon this mushroom, and I knew it was an Amanita because I had seen them before. And an Amanita, to my mind, is a gorgeous, statuesque, elegant creation. They’re just stately,” she said. The genus Amanita includes, incidentally, the species on which the red and white mushroom emoji is likely based, which also happens to be poisonous. Read the rest of this story on sciencefriday.com   Will A Hotter World Make Jellyfish Haute Cuisine? The ocean is filled with delicious ingredients, but our favorite seafood items might not stick around on menus forever … thanks to climate change taking its toll on fisheries. As a result, scientists are thinking more and more about what the future of food is going to look like—what ingredients we should eat more, and what we should eat less. That could mean we’ll eat more items like kelp, oysters, and mussels, which are a great source of nutrients, since they can be sustainably harvested. But there’s another seafood that’s being encouraged as a food of the future. But it’s a little more unfamiliar—and maybe surprising—to most of the world. It’s jellyfish. Although it’s a fairly common ingredient in several countries, like China and Vietnam, it hasn’t quite broken into the international market yet. Guest host Katherine Wu talks with Agostino Petroni, a journalist based in Rome who reported on the topic for Hakai Magazine, and Dr. Antonella Leone, a researcher at the Italian National Research Council’s Institute of Sciences of Food Production, based in Lecce, Italy. They talk about the benefits of jellyfishing, what it’s going to take to catapult jellyfish into the international seafood market, and their favorite jellyfish recipes.   Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.   Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.