Scientific American Podcast: Science Talk
Science Talk is a podcast of longer-form audio experiments from Scientific American--from immersive sonic journeys into nature to deep dives into research with leading experts.
Episodes
August 8, 2025 • 17 mins
Representative Eric Sorensen of Illinois brings his background as a meteorologist to the halls of Congress, advocating for science-based policy amid intensifying climate threats. In this episode, he shares how personal experiences with extreme weather shaped his career and why protecting agencies like the National Weather Service is more urgent than ever. Sorensen also discusses the political challenges of defending climate science...
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August 6, 2025 • 16 mins
The White House has proposed sharp cuts to NASA’s science budget, potentially reducing it to historic lows not seen since the early Apollo era. Beyond space exploration, NASA’s work influences daily life—from accurate weather forecasting to essential climate data for agriculture. Concerned by the effects of these cuts, all living former NASA science chiefs have united in warning of dire consequences for U.S. leadership in science. ...
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August 4, 2025 • 11 mins
Host Rachel Feltman talks with Andrea Thompson, Scientific American’s senior sustainability editor, to discuss the massive Russian earthquake and the reason it produced such relatively minor tsunami waves. Plus, we discuss the lowdown on the Environmental Protection Agency’s move to repeal of the “endangerment finding,” the advantages of a brisk stroll and an ancient linkup that led to a farmer’s market favorite.
Recommended readi...
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August 1, 2025 • 22 mins
Host Rachel Feltman talks with Deni Ellis Béchard, Scientific American’s senior tech reporter, about his recent exchange with Claude 4, an artificial intelligence chatbot that seemed to suggest it might be conscious. They unpack what that moment reveals about the state of AI, why it matters and how technology is shifting.
Recommended reading:
Can a Chatbot be Conscious? Inside Anthropic’s Interpretability Research on Claude 4
...
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July 30, 2025 • 9 mins
The summer of 2025 has been a doozy in the U.S., with extreme weather across the country. Flash flooding caused destruction and death in Texas. Corn sweat made a heat wave in the eastern half of the U.S. worse in the Midwest. Senior editor for sustainability Andrea Thompson takes us through these extreme weather events.
Recommended reading:
Why Did Waters Rise So Quickly in the Texas Flash Floods? https://www.scientificamerican...
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July 28, 2025 • 8 mins
If last Tuesday seemed to fly by, you can blame the rotation of Earth. Try to look up this week to see the Southern Delta Aquariids and the Alpha Capricornids meteor showers. Plus, we discuss FEMA cuts and ancient arthropods.
Recommended reading:
Texas Failed to Spend Millions in Federal Aid for Flood Protection https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/texas-failed-to-spend-federal-aid-for-flood-disaster-protection/
Leap Se...
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July 25, 2025 • 22 mins
Chief multimedia editor Jeffery DelViscio ventured to Greenland for a month to learn from the scientists studying the country’s ice sheet. He speaks with host Rachel Feltman about his time in the field and his takeaways from conversations with climate scientists.
This story was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center. This story was made possible through the assistance of the U.S. National Science Foundation Office of Polar ...
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July 23, 2025 • 10 mins
Scientific American has been reading, reviewing and recommending books for more than 100 years. These days Brianne Kane, our resident reader, is in charge of organizing our book recommendation lists to help science-minded people find the perfect read, including novels. She joins fellow book nerd Rachel Feltman to talk about the nonfiction and fiction books she’s recommending this summer—and gives a preview of our end-of-year lists....
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July 21, 2025 • 8 mins
Time travel to an introduction to tide pools, the start of commercial air travel and an intercontinental aviation museum dispute. Host Rachel Feltman is taking a look at a 1925 issue of Scientific American for this archival episode. If you don’t find the past to be a blast, don’t worry! We’ll be back to our regular schedule of science news, deep dives and editor picks next week. In the meantime, read some recent coverage of marine ...
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July 18, 2025 • 21 mins
Brennan Lee Mulligan is a professional dungeon master, playing Dungeons and Dragons (D&D), a popular tabletop role-playing game, for audiences online and in person. In January his D&D show on Dropout.tv, Dimension 20, played a live game at Madison Square Garden in New York City. The show—and the game—experienced a resurgence during the COVID pandemic. Now researchers are diving into D&D science, showing how the game and the togethe...
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July 16, 2025 • 17 mins
Come with Science Quickly on a field trip to the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Host Rachel Feltman is joined by Matthew Evans, MIT’s MathWorks professor of physics, to talk about the last 10 years of gravitational-wave research. Gravitational waves were discovered in 2015 by the LIGO team. Since then, innovations from the LIGO Lab have changed our unders...
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July 14, 2025 • 15 mins
Each year more than half a million people undergo bariatric surgery, a procedure geared toward weight loss. But research shows that stigma around weight can continue to affect people’s lives even during recovery from the procedure.
Larissa McGarrity is a clinical associate professor at the Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine at the University of Utah and lead psychologist at the school’s comprehensive Weight Management Program....
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July 11, 2025 • 24 mins
Last year Science Quickly looked across disciplines to piece apart the science of singing. To understand why humans sing, musicologists collaborated on an international study of folk music. To understand how we sing, neuroscientists differentiated how our brain processes speech and singing. Music enthusiast and associate mind and brain editor Allison Parshall takes us through some hallmark 2024 studies that, taken together, piece t...
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July 9, 2025 • 16 mins
Sick coral reefs are visually striking—bleached and lifeless, far from the vibrancy we’ve come to expect. But what does an unhealthy coral system sound like? In this rerun, conservation bioacoustics researcher Isla Keesje Davidson tells Science Quickly all about the changing soundscape of the seas.
Recommended reading:
84 Percent of Corals Impacted in Mass Bleaching Event https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/worst-coral-...
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July 7, 2025 • 17 mins
Ten months ago Science Quickly made space history by conducting the first-ever live interview from the cupola of the International Space Station (ISS). Astronaut Matthew Dominick spoke with Rachel Feltman about his work on the ISS and the stunning space photography that first caught our attention.
Watch a video of the interview
See more stunning space photographs from Matthew Dominick
E-mail us at sciencequickly@sciam.com if...
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July 2, 2025 • 16 mins
Drone shows are replacing fireworks for summer celebrations. They’re safer and more environmentally friendly but complicated to program and run. A recent preprint paper proposes an algorithmic solution that can take some technical challenges out of drone operators’ hands and give engineers more creative control. Host Rachel Feltman speaks with researchers Mac Schwager, an associate professor at the aeronautics and astronautics depa...
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June 30, 2025 • 13 mins
Protests around the construction of the now complete Dakota Access Pipeline brought national attention to Energy Transfer, the company that built and owns the pipeline and funded private security against the protestors. Energy Transfer sued the nonprofit Greenpeace for hundreds of millions of dollars. The company claimed that the Standing Rock movement was not Indigenous-led environmental activism but a conspiratorial effort by Gre...
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June 27, 2025 • 32 mins
Creating a bird flu vaccine requires several layers of bioprotective clothing and typically a whole lot of eggs. H5N1 avian influenza infections have gone from flocks of chickens to herds of cattle and humans. Scientists at the Texas Biomedical Research Institute are taking their best guess at the strains of the virus that could spread and are creating critical vaccine candidates.
Multimedia journalist and Scientific American mult...
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June 25, 2025 • 22 mins
Dairy cattle have become an intermediary between avian influenza found in wild birds and the handful of recorded H5N1 bird flu cases in humans. Senior news reporter Meghan Bartels took a trip upstate to Cornell University’s Teaching Dairy Barn. Early last year Texas dairy farmers noticed lethargic cows producing off-color milk. One of them sent Cornell researchers a sample, which genetic sequencing determined to contain a strain of...
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June 23, 2025 • 31 mins
Bird flu outbreaks in poultry and cattle have caused concern for public health officials. There have been few reported cases of human transmission, but the growing risks of H5N1 avian influenza have virologists on alert.
Researchers at the St. Jude Center of Excellence for Influenza Research and Response take an annual visit to Delaware Bay to collect samples of bird poop for analysis. These samples give the researchers a look a...
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