Science Friday Folgen

What’s the difference between being fatigued and sleepy? Do melatonin and other sleeping aids work? And what can you do if you just can’t sleep?Neurologist and sleep specialist W. Chris Winter, author of the book The Sleep Solution: Why Your Sleep is Broken and How to Fix It, talks about how the brain and body regulate sleep. He also gives ideas for controlling your behavior to improve your “sleep hygiene.”  Science museums can be a fun and educational way to spend a day—but what if you don’t have a day? What if there’s no museum near you? Or what if you don’t think you like science enough to spend money on an entry fee? All of these are reasons one nonprofit is working to shrink the museum, and bring it to you—starting with the Smallest Mollusk Museum. It’s a vending machine-sized exhibit on the slimy tricks, strange brains, and ecological importance of snails, squids, octopuses, and their chitinous cousins. Amanda Schochet, co-founder of the project and a former computational biologist, explains what goes into making a small museum that can still share big ideas. In recent years, medical providers have largely moved away from scrawled paper charts to electronic health records. But a team of researchers argues that the transformation of medical records hasn’t gone far enough. While there has been widespread adoption of electronic health records, most are just static, flat translations of the format of the old fashioned paper file. If we can subscribe to specific categories of news online, the researchers say, why shouldn’t medical specialists be able to subscribe to a given patient’s medical records to get updates and alerts of specific interest to them? Why shouldn’t medical teams be able to get notifications and share information when patients needing special care plans arrive at the hospital? Plus, a satellite launched this week would aid in planned Chinese lunar exploration.   Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

In his latest book, How to Change Your Mind, Michael Pollan writes of his own consciousness-expanding experiments with psychedelic drugs like LSD and psilocybin, and he makes the case for why shaking up the brain’s old habits could be therapeutic for people facing addiction, depression, or death. Pollan and psychedelics researcher Robin Carhart-Harris discuss the neuroscience of consciousness, and how psychedelic drugs may alter the algorithms and habits our brains use to make sense of the world.  This week, science students gathered in Pittsburgh for the finals of the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, a competition founded by the Society for Science and the Public. Nearly 2,000 students from 75 countries came to present their projects. Two of the finalists share their projects: Everett Kroll discusses how he created and tested an affordable 3D-printed prosthetic foot, while Alyssa Rawinski explains how she studied the feasibility of using mealworms to recycle plastics.  Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

In HBO’s series Westworld, human-like robots populate a theme park where human guests can have violent, gory adventures in the Wild West without the repercussions. The robots are so lifelike that they fool the visitors and themselves. They bleed, die, grieve, and love—thinking themselves human. But as Westworld’s robots grow increasingly independent of their repetitive, programmed loops, the show incites viewers to question whether AI can truly be autonomous or conscious—and who in this story deserves empathy. Roboticist Robin Murphy and neuroscientist Steve Ramirez discuss the show’s science and social commentary.   The jury is still out on whether graphene—the carbon-based substance people have called "wonder material"—will be part of every gadget in the future, but scientists are finding it to be an extremely powerful tool in the biomedical laboratory. In a study out this week in the journal Science Advances, scientists used graphene’s electrical properties to stimulate lab grown heart cells that could be used in patients after they’ve had a heart attack. Plus, a Pittsburgh cyclist designed a crowdsourcing navigation app to help other city bikers find the safest roads to travel. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.