Sci-fi thriller combines aliens, robots, and Cherokee culture
Breaking news out of eastern Oklahoma! A hole in the sky has opened. Through it, an unidentified turtle-shaped craft has descended. Alerts say that this is first contact. So it goes in the sci-fi thr...
6 Maj 17min
Beavers could be humans' biggest ally, if we let them
Beavers are having a moment, thanks to the new Pixar movie “Hoppers.” Amid some body-swapping shenanigans, the film is about humans coexisting with wildlife—particularly oversized rodents capable of r...
5 Maj 20min
Searching for dark matter, deep in the Earth
Deep in an active nickel mine near Sudbury, Ontario, researchers are installing and calibrating a set of sensitive detectors. They hope that the location roughly 6,800 feet underground will screen out...
4 Maj 14min
The decades-long movement to kill FEMA
Hurricane season officially begins in June. And in the event of a big storm, local and state governments often rely on help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency or FEMA. But, President Trump h...
2 Maj 12min
What cats and dogs hear + A 'smell map' of the nose
Animal neuroaudiologist Pete Scheifele joins us to answer some burning questions from SciFri listener Paul: Why can dogs and cats hear a wider range of frequencies than we do? Is it in their ears, the...
1 Maj 17min
How do you study microplastics in a plastic-filled lab?
The news we hear about plastic is often alarming: We have a spoon’s worth of plastics in our brains, and there are microplastics in our hearts, lymph nodes, and bloodstreams. Plastics are ubiquitous, ...
30 Apr 10min
What is ibogaine, and why is it in the news?
In mid-April, President Trump issued an executive order to set aside funding and loosen the bureaucratic process at the FDA to fast-track psychedelic therapy research. One obscure psychedelic got a pa...
29 Apr 19min
The long history of birds, from velociraptors to pigeons
Comparing a backyard sparrow to a fearsome velociraptor seems odd, but modern birds are indeed living dinosaurs. Scientists are finding more and more connections between the past physiology of dinos a...
28 Apr 21min
