Night Science
Where do ideas come from? In each episode, scientists Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher explore science's creative side with a leading colleague. New episodes come out every second Monday.
- Update frequency
- every 15 days
- Average duration
- 37 minutes
- Episodes
- 77
- Years Active
- 2021 - 2025
76 | Can Google’s Co-scientist project give scientists superpowers?
To answer this question, we speak with Dr. Alan Karthikesalingam and Vivek Natarajan from Google DeepMind about their groundbreaking AI co-scientist project. Beyond their work at Google, Alan is an h…
75 | Eve Marder and how Recipe Science ruins creativity
Professor Eve Marder is a pioneering neuroscientist at Brandeis University. Drawing on decades of work with a small neural circuit in lobsters, she describes how discovery often emerges from intuitio…
74 | Martin Schwartz and the importance of stupidity in science
Martin Schwartz, a professor at Yale, is known for his work on integrins and his influential essay “The importance of stupidity in scientific research”. He emphasizes that while learning science make…
73 | Ethan Mollick and a million Einsteins in a server
With Ethan Mollick, professor at Wharton and author of the bestselling “Co-Intelligence”, we explore how generative AI tools like ChatGPT can enhance scientific creativity. Ethan emphasizes that AI e…
72 | David Baker and the lab's communal brain
David Baker, who was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for designing novel proteins with AI, is a professor at the University of Washington. In this episode, he explains how he socially engin…
71 | Victor Ambros and the unique ways we perceive wonder
Victor Ambros, newly awarded the Nobel Prize for his discovery of microRNA, is a developmental biologist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. In this episode, we explore improvisational…
70 | Meghan O’Rourke on being the artist and their caretaker
Meghan O'Rourke, acclaimed author of The Invisible Kingdom, poet, and Yale professor, joins us to explore the parallels between creative writing and scientific discovery. She describes how deep immer…
69 | Keith Yamamoto and the freedom to fail
Keith Yamamoto, professor and science policy leader at UCSF, discusses with us how modern science became trapped in a system that discourages creative risk-taking. Keith contrasts academia's fear of …
68 | Peter Godfrey-Smith and middle class science
Peter Godfrey-Smith, a Professor of the Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney, explores with us the differences between creativity in science and philosophy. While philosophers speculate …
67 | A hypothesis is a liability
In this episode, Itai and Martin delve into the interplay between hypothesis-driven and exploratory research, drawing on insights from past guests of the Night Science Podcast. They discuss how being…
66 | Michael Fischbach and the scientific decision tree
In this episode, Stanford professor Michael Fischbach discusses insights from his course on how to choose meaningful research problems. Highlights include:
- Invest time in problem selection: Spend mo…
65 | James Kaufman and the art of creativity maintenance
James Kaufman, Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Connecticut, discusses the psychological underpinnings of creative thinking with Itai & Martin. Together, we delve into the com…
64 | Robert Weinberg and the perils of being a Fachidiot
MIT's Bob Weinberg is perhaps the world's most prominent cancer researcher. In this episode, Bob emphasizes that true innovation often comes from blending ideas from different fields – a synthesis th…
63 | Manu Prakash and how the discovery changes you
Manu Prakash is a professor of bioengineering at Stanford University, asking biological questions with insights from physics. His most widely known contribution is the FoldScope, a $1-microscope made…
62 | Dianne Newman and the visceral and intentional sides of science
Dianne Newman – a molecular microbiologist at CalTech – is a professor both in Biology and Geology. In this episode, she encourages young scientists to pursue questions to which they have a visceral …
61 | Tina Seelig on what to do with a really bad idea
Tina Seelig is Executive Director of the Knight-Hennessy-Scholars at Stanford University. She is widely known for teaching creativity courses and workshops with an entrepreneurial focus. In this epis…
60 | Venki Ramakrishnan and the secrets of doing science over tea
Venki Ramakrishnan shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for uncovering the structure of the ribosome. He runs a lab at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England. In this episo…
59 | Jennifer Oyler-Yaniv and the point of creative frustration
Jennifer Oyler-Yaniv is a professor working on the immune system at Harvard’s Medical School. In this episode, we discuss with her how she teaches creativity in her course for PhD students. We explor…
58 | Guy Yanai on Pentimenti
Guy Yanai is a painter whose work is displayed in many public and private collections across the US, Europe, and Asia, including, for example, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. His distinctive painting sty…
57 | George Church and shooting for the stars
George Church, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, leads a large research group at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. A pioneer in the fields of personalized genom…