Science Friday

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, o...

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 w...

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...

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 do...

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 pri...

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 aver...

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 workin...

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 be...

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 astrophysic...

All the pups we love—from chihuahuas to great danes—are descendants of the mighty gray wolf. But how did we end up with so many breeds? The story that's often told is that dog diversity really took of...