Science Friday Folgen

Have you ever wondered how the language you speak shapes your understanding of the world around you? And if you speak two or more languages, how might that change the way you process information? Is your brain always thinking in multiple languages or are you toggling back and forth?In many parts of the world, multilingualism is the norm. And in the United States, the number of people who speak a language other than English has doubled in the past two decades, from just about 11% to about 22%.Dr. Viorica Marian has spent her career studying multilingual and bilingual people to better understand how their brains process information differently than their monolingual counterparts.Ira talks with Dr. Viorica Marian, professor of communication sciences and disorders and psychology at Northwestern University, and author of the book The Power of Language: How the Codes We Use to Think, Speak, and Live Transform our Minds in front of a live audience at the Studebaker Theater in Chicago, Illinois, presented with WBEZ and Mindworks. To stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters. Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

As people age, health often becomes a larger focus in their lives—their joints become a little more achy, or their vision less sharp. Some might even be dealing with a new diagnosis.To handle these ailments, doctors might prescribe medications, or diet and lifestyle changes. But there’s often one big factor missing from these conversations: a patient’s social well-being.Sociology researcher Dr. Linda Waite has been tracking the social health of thousands of research participants ranging in age from 50 to over 100, for 15 years. The study is ongoing, and so far she’s found that the social aspects of our lives play a big role in our long-term physical and mental health and well-being as we age.Ira talks with Dr. Linda Waite, a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago and head of the National Social Life, Health & Aging Project in front of a live audience at the Studebaker Theater in Chicago, Illinois, presented with WBEZ and Mindworks.  To stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters. Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

There’s a long-standing narrative about hunter-gatherers in ancient times: Men ventured out for meat, while women largely stayed closer to home, foraging for plants and tending to children.As with most things, it almost certainly wasn’t that black and white. Recent analyses of physiological and archaeological evidence, published in American Anthropologist, suggest that females hunted just as much as males did during the Paleolithic era. In fact, they were well-suited to long-distance hunting, largely thanks to the benefits of estrogen. Additionally, Neanderthal remains show a sex-equal distribution of bone injuries consistent with hunting. Both males and females were buried with similar items and weapons, suggesting that there was not such a stark division of labor.Ira is joined by Dr. Cara Ocobock, assistant professor in the department of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, and Dr. Sarah Lacy, biological anthropologist at the University of Delaware, to discuss the details of their findings and why the myth of “Man the Hunter” has persisted for so long.Editor’s note: Sex and gender are distinct descriptors—“sex” pertaining to the biological aspects of the human body (hormones, genitalia, etc.) and “gender” relating more to an individual’s identity within a society. As Dr. Ocobock states in the segment, there are times when a strict sex binary makes sense related to study in a scientific realm, but even within those contexts, there can be large variability. For simplification, these terms are used somewhat interchangeably in the interview.To stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday’s newsletters. Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.