Science Friday

Grant funding by the National Science Foundation has been cut by more than half this year, bringing the foundation’s science funding to its lowest level in decades. Katrina Miller, who covers science…

At the end of April, air traffic control radar surveillance and radio communication systems at Newark Liberty International Airport went dark for over a minute. A week and half later, radar went down…

At the beginning of May, the National Institutes of Health, part of the Department of Health and Human Services, announced a plan to develop a universal vaccine platform. Think: a single shot for flu…

Betül Kaçar started her scientific career as a biochemist, working on an enzyme found in zebrafish. But then she found her calling: investigating some of the hardest questions in evolutionary biology…

The “Mission: Impossible” franchise is known for its big stunts, and the newest film is no exception. Producer Kathleen Davis talks to the film’s stunt coordinator, Wade Eastwood, about the science b…

Climate scientist Jagadish Shukla grew up in a small village in rural India, where people starved if the monsoon season didn’t bring rain. To help his village, he set out to become a scientist and di…

In recent years, digital touchscreens have replaced many of the buttons and knobs that control various functions in cars. But when Host Ira Flatow went shopping for a new car, he noticed that physica…

Tomatoes come in all kinds of colors, sizes, and flavors. But what’s going on at the genetic level? What makes a tomato red or yellow? Tiny or giant?

Researchers are mapping the genomes of 22 varietie…

As a teenager living in St. Vincent, Richie Robertson saw first-hand what a volcanic eruption did to life on the island. Forty years later, he was the scientist the community turned to when the same …

The lesser prairie chicken was granted endangered species status in 2023. Now the Department of the Interior is moving to revoke those protections. What can this bird known for its flamboyant courtsh…

Firefighting is a career with an inherent cancer risk, but a full understanding of what those risks are has been elusive. An important registry designed to help understand the link between firefighte…

What does it take to create and maintain one of the largest repositories of botanical information in the world? For starters, it can mean helicopter-ing into remote nooks of the Amazon, hiking throug…

Medical sculptor Damon Coyle walks around with a Mary Poppins bag of body parts. Fake ones, that is. At the University of Missouri, his lab creates hyperrealistic body parts designed to help medical …

Biochemist Kati Karikó spent decades experimenting with mRNA, convinced that she could solve the problems that had kept it from being used as a therapeutic. Her tireless, methodical work was dismisse…

Proposed budget cuts for NASA would jeopardize space research. And an executive order could change the political tides for deep sea mining.

On May 2, the Trump Administration proposed a 24% budget cut…

Bacteria have been around for billions of years. Could they have come up with complex behaviors that we just don’t understand yet? Could they have their own language? Their own culture? Their own com…

A passion for fashion among the “bone collector caterpillar,” who wears a coat of body parts, and an artist who makes fabrics that remember.

We inch into the world of extreme outerwear with the newly-…

Millions of years ago, iguanas somehow got from North America to Fiji. Scientists think they made the trip on a raft of fallen vegetation. Also, the marine reptile’s fossilized fetus is cluing paleon…

In “Into the Unknown,” an astronomer explores the mysteries of the cosmos and the limits of what science can test.

What is time? If the universe is expanding, what is it expanding into? What happened …

Scientists bring us a lab-grown chicken nugget and texturally accurate, plant-based calamari. We’ll bite.

There’s a movement in the world of science to find alternatives to meat and dairy products tha…