Science Friday Podcast — Jim Lovell Interview

NASA astronaut Jim Lovell, photographed in 1969. Image credit: NASA, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The late Jim Lovell, commander of the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission talks with Ira Flatow of SF in an interview from 1995.
Apollo 13 was the seventh crewed mission and would have been the third operation to land humans on the Moon. However an explosion in an oxygen tank caused loss of electrical power and cut short the mission. The crew had to slingshot the spacecraft around the Moon to gain enough momentum to get back to Earth. In the interview, Jim explained the details of the event, we hear recordings of radio comms between flight control and the the spacecraft and Commander Lovell answers questions from callers. 

Science Friday Podcast — Latest Episode

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The latest episode features stories about high energy neutrinos from distant supernovae, the FDA approving a new, non-opioid painkiller, what happens to your body when you're grieving and deep oceans on Uranus.

Science Friday Podcast — AI Is Coming Up With Brand New Molecules, Fuelling Drug Discovery

Flora Lichtman talks with two biotechnology experts in the latest podcast about how AI is being used for drug discovery such as new antibiotics: Dr. César de la Fuente, bioengineer and presidential associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and Nobel laureate Dr. David Baker, director of the Institute for Protein Design and professor at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Science Friday Podcast — Oliver Sacks Interview

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In an interview from 2007, presenter Ira Flatow talks about the brain with the late Oliver Sacks, neurologist and author of Migraine and The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat. The latter is a fascinating anthology of case studies of people with various neurological conditions, worth reading. The book is presented as a collection of 24 essays, dealing with loss of brain function and heightened abilities or skills in patients with autism or having prior exposure to drugs.

Science Friday Podcast — Prime Numbers

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If you remember back to studying maths at school, you might recall that prime numbers are numbers that only be divided equally by themselves and the number one. So 2, 3, 5, 7 and 11 are primes. 4 isn't because it can be divided by the factors 1, 2 and 4. Prime numbers are important for cryptography and security of data and discovering new ones is challenge. Finding increasingly large primes takes time, even for computers, because a number has to be checked with numbers smaller than it to make sure they don't divide in evenly, making the number non-prime. In this podcast, Ira talks with Jack Murtagh, math writer and columnist for Scientific American, about why prime numbers are so cool, and the quest to find the largest one.

Science Friday — The Positives of AI

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Using AI to read diagnostic images, develop new drugs, predict diseases by examining the retina and more. Science Friday presenters Ira Flatlow and Sophie Bushwick talk with cardiologist and professor of Molecular Medicine Eric Topol, founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in La Jolla, California.

Science Friday — How Close Are We to Answers About Aliens?

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The next generation of space telescopes will directly image exoplanets (planets outside our solar system) and possibly detect biosignatures of alien life on these planets. This involves looking at the spectrum of light emitted by a planet and detecting characteristic lines which indicate the presence of oxygen, methane and other compounds produced by living organisms. Currently, we can only detect planets indirectly by observing the tiny dip in light output of a star as a planet passes in front of it. Another method is to detect the wobble in a star's position as a planet orbits around it. In this Science Friday podcast, Dr. Adam Frank, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester joins hosts Ira Flatow and Kathleen Davis to talk about the evidence for life elsewhere in the universe.