Our ability to imagine is part of what makes us who we are—not just as individuals, but also as humans. It turns out, though, that we may not be the only species capable of playing pretend. In a string of experiments, scientists sat down, set the table, and hosted pretend tea parties with a bonobo named Kanzi to see if he’d play along—and he did.

Producer Kathleen Davis chats with study author Amalia Bastos about Kanzi, what it means to imagine, and how our definition of “humanness” keeps changing.

Guest: Dr. Amalia Bastos is a cognitive scientist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

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Screens are ubiquitous in today’s world, and concerns about how they affect kids are mounting. Last month, Australia banned social media use for kids under 16, with some European countries poised to follow. But what’s the science on how neverending YouTube videos or TikToks affect kids’ brains and bodies? 

Joining Host Flora Lichtman to discuss are neuroscientist John Foxe and behavioral developmental pediatrician Jenny Radesky.

Guests:
Dr. John Foxe is Director of The Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience at the University of Rochester in New York.
Dr. Jenny Radesky is a developmental behavioral pediatrician at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She’s also co-Medical Director of the American Academy of Pediatrics Center of Excellence on Social Media and Youth Mental Health.

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

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Wandering through a museum, you can get a glimpse of what life in ancient societies looked like. But what did it smell like? And is it even possible to get a whiff of, say, a freshly embalmed mummy, or a 5,000-year-old Saudi Arabian incense burner? That’s exactly what some chemists and olfactory designers are trying to do.

Producer Kathleen Davis talks with archeo-chemist Barbara Huber and perfumer Carole Calvez about how they scientifically recreated the scent of ancient Egyptian mummies and brought that smell to museums on special cards.

Guests:
Dr. Barbara Huber is an archeo-chemist at the University of Tübingen in Germany.
Carole Calvez is a perfumer and olfactory designer and a cofounder of  Iris & Morphée in Paris, France. 

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

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Cyanobacteria may be the ultimate lesson in resilience. These 3.5 billion-year-old organisms have lived through hell-on-earth conditions, and found creative ways to persevere. While the state of the world feels out of control, Host Flora Lichtman talks to molecular microbiologist Devaki Bhaya about the planet’s ultimate survivalists.

Guest: Dr. Devaki Bhaya is a molecular microbiologist at Carnegie Science in Stanford, California.  

The transcript for this episode is available at sciencefriday.com.

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The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), the largest particle collider in the United States, collided its last particles in early February. RHIC is a massive accelerator ring and set of instruments based at New York’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, and was designed to accelerate gold ions to near-light speed before collision. It was the second most powerful accelerator on the planet, second only to CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. Since RHIC began running in 2000, scientists have used it to study the tiniest subatomic particles, which give insight into some of the universe’s biggest questions. 

Brookhaven nuclear physicist Gene Van Buren joins Host Flora Lichtman to look back on the history of RHIC, what physicists have learned from the collider, and what lies ahead for particle physics.

Guest: Dr. Gene Van Buren is a nuclear physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York.

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

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This year’s Winter Olympics feature a new event called “skimo,” or ski mountaineering. The racing event involves periods of skiing uphill using “skins” for traction, sprinting uphill on foot, and a downhill ski slalom to the finish. Mountaineering historian Peter Hansen joins Host Flora Lichtman for an introduction to skimo, and the scientific connections of early modern mountaineers. 

Then, wildlife ecologist Kevin White describes the amazing capabilities of the mountain goat, what’s known about the physical features that contribute to their climbing ability, and risks to mountain goat populations.

Guests:

Dr. Peter Hansen is a professor of history at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and author of the book The Summits of Modern Man: Mountaineering after the Enlightenment.
Dr. Kevin White is a wildlife ecologist based at the University of Alaska Southeast.

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

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As ICE cracks down in Minneapolis and across the country, reporters and privacy advocates have drawn attention to how the agency is using technology: scanning people’s faces without consent, using private health records to make arrests, tracking people’s location in real time with phone data.

So how does all this work? How does the United States’ data ecosystem make it possible for not just ICE, but any number of government agencies and businesses to buy our private data? And what actually happens after we send that DM or open up Instagram at a protest to post a picture?

To learn more, Host Flora Lichtman sits down with law professor and tech policy expert Laura Moy. She’s testified in Congress about privacy laws and how data brokers profit off of personal data.

Guest: Laura Moy is an associate professor of law at Georgetown Law, based in Washington, D.C.

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

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The new dietary guidelines from the USDA call for Americans to “eat real food” and consume less “highly processed” food. But how? By some estimates, ultraprocessed foods make up nearly 60% of the average American adult diet, and they’re all over school lunch menus.

Health policy expert Laura Schmidt and nutrition policy researcher Alyssa Moran join Host Flora Lichtman to talk about ultraprocessed foods and our food supply. What might they be doing to our health, and what steps could policymakers take to help Americans eat less of them? 

Guests:
Dr. Laura Schmidt is a professor at the Institute for Health Policy Studies at the University of California, San Francisco.
Dr. Alyssa Moran is deputy director of the Center for Food and Nutrition Policy at the University of Pennsylvania

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

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In an effort to make their farms more environmentally and economically sustainable, some farmers are experimenting with agrivoltaics: growing crops underneath solar panels. This dual harvest is working for some, but what will it take for agrivoltaics to work on a larger, more industrial scale? 

Joining Host Ira Flatow are journalist Jana Rose Schleis and environmental economics expert Madhu Khanna.

Guests:
Jana Rose Schleis is a news producer at KBIA in Columbia, Missouri. Her podcast series, “The Next Harvest,” is available on podcast platforms.
Dr. Madhu Khanna is a professor of environmental economics and director of the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

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Point systems are everywhere. Ready for movie night? Consult Rotten Tomatoes. Vetting a new pediatrician? See how many stars they have. At work, it can be even more pervasive: There’s KPIs and ROIs because success has to be measurable.  

But what happens when we boil something down to one nice number? What do we lose? Philosopher C. Thi Nguyen, author of the new book The Score, joins Host Flora Lichtman to explore how metrics can be soul-crushing in work and in life, yet keeping score is freeing in the world of games. 

Read an excerpt from The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game.

Guest:
Dr. C. Thi Nguyen is a philosophy professor at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. He’s the author of The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game.

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

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We’re bringing you a special bonus episode from our friends at the live call-in show “The Middle with Jeremy Hobson.” Jeremy is joined by Science Friday Host Flora Lichtman and theoretical astrophysicist Priya Natarajan to talk about how trust in science can be restored. It took a hit with the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Trump Administration has now elevated science skeptics to positions of power and proposed giant cuts in scientific research.

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