Science Friday

When Kemi Doll was in medical school, she learned that Black women are twice as likely to die from uterine cancer as white women, and also suffer disproportionately from other uterine-related conditions. What wasn’t explained was why. Now a gynecologic oncologist, Doll has made it her mission to change these trends and improve care for Black women. 

She joins Flora to discuss her new book, “A Terrible Strength: The Hidden Crisis of the Black Womb and Your Survival Guide to Healing.” They explore the way systemic racism and the normalization of Black women’s pain lead to later diagnoses of uterine cancer and poorer health outcomes for a range of gynecologic conditions including fibroids, endometriosis, and heavy periods. And Doll explains the problem with using reproductive health as a synonym for uterine health. 

Guest: 

Dr. Kemi Doll is a gynecologic oncologist and professor at the University of Washington Schools of Medicine and Public Health. 

Other episodes you may enjoy:

Endometriosis Is Common. Why Is Getting Diagnosed So Hard?

A Black Physician’s Analysis Of The Legacy Of Racism In Medicine

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Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

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Cameras and sensors are just about everywhere, recording your face, how you walk, where you go, your heart rate. And AI is making it easy to amass and analyze that data about all of us. 

Privacy attorney Anne Toomey McKenna joins Host Flora Lichtman to talk about the ubiquity of biometric surveillance and how data brokers are gathering and selling our information, including to law enforcement. 

Guest: 

Anne Toomey McKenna is an attorney specializing in privacy and biometric surveillance. She’s on the Advisory Board for AI Policy at the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers - USA. 

Other episodes you may enjoy:

Why Worry About My Data If I Have Nothing To Hide?

New Products Collect Data From Your Brain. Where Does It Go?

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

Want SciFri gear? Check out our new shop!

Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that’s keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-4-SCIFRI

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 thriller “Hole in the Sky.” In the book, author Daniel H. Wilson imagines this moment where we meet alien life for the first time. It’s set in the heart of Cherokee Nation and follows characters including a military man, a NASA scientist, and a Cherokee father named Jim who is just trying to survive the alien entity.

Wilson joins Flora for a conversation about the book and how he integrated elements of Cherokee culture with science fiction. They get into the ways we project our own fears—like genocide and slavery—onto aliens, and how science fiction helps us imagine the unimaginable. 

The SciFri Book Club is reading “Hole in the Sky” during May and June. Join us to read along! 

Read an excerpt from “Hole in the Sky.”

Guest: 

Dr. Daniel H. Wilson is a Cherokee citizen and bestselling author of “Robopocalypse,” “Hole in the Sky,” and several other books. He holds advanced degrees in machine learning and robotics and lives in Portland, Oregon.

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

Want SciFri gear? Check out our new shop!

Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that’s keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-4-SCIFRI

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 reworking landscapes in profound ways. 

The beaver science consultant on “Hoppers,” Emily Fairfax, joins Flora to talk about beavers’ brilliant, chaotic landscape engineering, and how the creatures show up in the movie. Then, reporter Zac Ziegler walks Flora through a successful beaver-centric engineering project in Oregon. 

Guests: 

Emily Fairfax is an assistant professor of geography at the University of Minnesota. She was a science consultant for the Pixar movie “Hoppers.”

Zac Ziegler is a reporter at KLCC in Eugene, Oregon.

Other episodes you may enjoy:

How The Humble Beaver Shaped A Continent

Beavers Build Ecosystems Of Resilience

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

Want SciFri gear? Check out our new shop!

Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that’s keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-4-SCIFRI

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 much of the ordinary radiation and cosmic rays felt on the surface, and allow their detectors to sense tiny disturbances caused by a dark matter particle passing close to the nucleus of one of the germanium atoms in a target material.

If successful, the SuperCDMS SNOLAB experiment may shed some light on the nature of dark matter, an unseen something that is thought to make up around 85% of the matter in the universe.

Priscilla Cushman, a physicist who has been working on the project for over 20 years, joins Host Flora Lichtman to describe the hunt, the timeline of the experiment, and the big unknowns facing the SuperCDMS team. 

Guest: 

Dr. Priscilla Cushman is spokesperson for the SuperCDMS SNOLAB experiment, and a professor in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Minnesota.

Other episodes you may enjoy:

Listening for the cosmic ‘dark ages,’ from the lunar far side

Most Powerful Neutrino Ever Is Detected In the Mediterranean

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at sciencefriday.com.

Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that’s keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-4-SCIFRI