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Science Friday is your trusted source for news and entertaining stories about science.
Animal Pests Are All About Perception
Bethany Brookshire’s new book explores what separates a pest from the rest.
Read ‘Beaverland’ By Leila Philip With The SciFri Book Club
This book gives space to all walks of life touched by beavers—with a lot of science tucked into every page.
Honoring The Deep Weirdness That Is The Beaver
How smart are beavers? Why did they start building dams? We may never know, but Leila Philip’s new book ‘Beaverland’ starts the conversation.
A Middle School Celebrates STEAM
Science Friday and Richmond Hill Middle School have partnered to bring you a series of middle school STEAM lessons designed to slide into any subject
The Best Of Science Friday, 2022
In a year of unpredictable news, science or otherwise, these are the stories that moved, inspired & fascinated Science Friday’s staff.
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Celebrating The Human Side Of Sea Creatures
Sabrina Imbler’s book traces their life through the stories of ten sea creatures.
Read ‘The Milky Way’ By Moiya McTier With The SciFri Book Club
McTier’s new tell-all on behalf of our galaxy explains the importance of story in scientific discovery. Read it with us this December.
Read ‘The Sounds Of Life’ With The SciFri Book Club
‘The Sounds Of Life’ uncovers the world of little-known sounds that make up life on Earth. Read it with us this November.
Decoding The Hidden World Of Nonhuman Sound, With New Biotech
Can humans better listen to the natural world? Karen Bakker thinks yes, with the help of biotechnologies—and a new world perspective.
How You’re Getting Played By Gamification
A video game designer takes a hard look at how gamification has spread from video games to many aspects of our daily lives.
‘Bengal Water Machine’ Data Offers Potential For Increasing Food Security
A “win-win” side effect of Bangladeshi farmers pumping groundwater to irrigate crops is that the technique can store monsoon water for the dry season.
How Science Friday Used A/B Testing To Guide Audience Engagement
When the pandemic began, we had to rethink how we engaged with audiences interested in science. Here’s what we learned.
Read ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ With The SciFri Book Club
‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ combines Potawatomi knowledge and scientific inquiry in a deep, reverent essay series. Read it with us this October.
Robin Wall Kimmerer Wants To Extend The Grammar Of Animacy
How our scientific perspective of a bay changes when language frames it as a verb—to be a bay—instead of a noun.
Sean Carroll Wants You To Talk About Physics Like A Baseball Game
The renowned cosmologist wants to make the ideas of modern physics accessible to anyone who’s willing to do a bit of extra thinking.
Advances In Understanding Depression Offer Potential New Treatments
While more than one in ten Americans take antidepressants, some scientists think popular depression treatments don’t fully address the leading causes of depression.
Icky Or Essential? Why Wasps Are Actually Important
These occasional picnic plagues are more than what they seem: they’re also nature’s pest control agents and important pollinators.
Read ‘Vagina Obscura’ With The SciFri Book Club
‘Vagina Obscura’ tells readers the history of neglected research into the vagina and its companion organs. Read it with us this September.
What It Means To Examine Illness As A Quantum State
Microbiologist Joseph Osmundson takes a deeper look at what it means to be ill—and what it means to live with illness.