AI safety has dominated the news cycle for weeks, precipitated in part by an AI attack where a bunch of OpenAI’s agents teamed up and hacked another AI platform, Hugging Face, without humans knowing. Since then, multiple AI researchers have come forward to say they’re worried this tech is unsafe.

It seems every day there’s a new development: another warning from an AI researcher, an admission from a top lab that their AI systems breached another company, reassurances from CEOs. AI safety is even on the agenda for the UN General Assembly meeting this week. So how do we make sense of what’s happening in AI research right now?

Flora sits down with two researchers focusing on the engineering of AI safety: Andrea Lincoln, who studies how to mathematically understand the internal processes of AI models; and cryptographer Vinod Vaikuntanathan, who researches trust and security concerns in AI models.

GUESTS:

Dr. Vinod Vaikuntanathan is a cryptographer at MIT and a founding member of the Institute for Responsible Superintelligence.

Dr. Andrea Lincoln is a professor of computer science at Boston University and an advisory board member for The Alignment Project at the AI Security Institute.

Image credit: Deborah Lupton / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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During the last ice age, America’s coastlines and waterways looked much different than they do today. When glaciers melted, coasts and shorelines were inundated, burying early human settlements underwater. This is where underwater archeology comes in. Donning scuba gear and trowels, researchers are finding remarkably well-preserved artifacts that tell us more about what life was like in the early Americas.

Joining Flora to talk about this is reporter Reid Frazier, who accompanied an underwater archeology team on an excursion in Lake Erie. Then, underwater archeologist Jessi Halligan talks about her discoveries at a key site in Florida.

GUESTS:

Reid Frazier is an energy reporter for The Allegheny Front in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Dr. Jessi Halligan is an underwater archeologist and associate professor at Texas A&M in College Station, Texas.

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

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The Hawaiian Islands tend to be insulated from the worst effects of hurricanes, but this summer has been different. In mid-August, Hurricane Lala pummeled the Big Island, damaging homes and roads and causing flooding and power outages. Then a few weeks later, Hurricane Lowell hit the islands of Ni‘ihau and Kaua‘i.

What do scientists make of this hurricane season? And how is climate change playing out along Hawaiʻi’s coasts? Flora talks with Haunani Kane, who studies how climate change impacts the islands, about resilience, the importance of reefs, and combining different types of knowledge.

Guest:

Dr. Haunani Kane is an assistant professor at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa studying how climate change impacts islands and island people.

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

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A lot of things in life are squishy, including your skin, your organs, and all the goo inside you. But technology tends to be rigid and hard. Figuring out how to get those two worlds to work together can be challenging. How do you connect an electronic sensor to a soft, beating heart?

As an inventor of biocompatible electronic devices, John A. Rogers has designed things like flexible probes, a pacemaker smaller than a grain of rice, and wireless sensors that stick to skin like a temporary tattoo. He joins Host Flora Lichtman to talk about the challenges of meshing the natural and artificial worlds, and his approach to science and technology development.

Guest:

Dr. John A. Rogers is a professor and director of the Querrey-Simpson Institute of Bioelectronics at Northwestern University.

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

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There’s a new wellness trend focused on an obscure capillary system that moves fluid around the body. Things like lymphatic walking, vibration plates, and compression boots have been touted as ways to stimulate the lymphatic system to combat bloating, flush away toxins, and generally promote health.

So what is the lymphatic system, and what does it do? And is there anything to these claims? Flora gets some answers with the help of two experts: Timothy Padera, a researcher who has dedicated his career to better understanding how the lymphatic system works; and physical therapist Marc Miller, who treats cancer patients with manual lymphatic drainage.

Guests:

Dr. Timothy Padera is an investigator at Mass General Research Institute and a professor of radiation oncology at Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Marc Miller is a certified lymphedema specialist and senior physical therapist at UT MD Anderson Cancer Center.

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: 877-472-4374

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Perimenopause affects more than 4 billion people, but has historically been neglected by medicine. It’s the time before menopause when hormones start fluctuating wildly, leaving women with brain fog, hot flashes, dropping bone density, and mood changes. Thanks in part to social media, it’s more prominent in public discourse than it used to be.

But it’s not just awareness that’s blown up: It’s also the promise that you don’t have to suffer like those before you, thanks to hormone therapy. After decades of controversy over prescribing estradiol and progesterone due to concerns of increased breast cancer and heart disease risk, new research has many providers reconsidering their approach.

Joining Flora to sort out the science are reproductive endocrinologists Nanette Santoro and Genevieve Neal-Perry, who are both running some of the biggest long-term studies on perimenopause and the effects of hormone therapy.

Guests:

Dr. Nanette Santoro is a reproductive endocrinologist at the University of Colorado Anschutz and is the president of the Endocrine Society.

Dr. Genevieve Neal-Perry is a reproductive endocrinologist and the OB-GYN department chair at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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: 877-472-4374

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Where did we come from? How did humanity, with our complicated civilizations and all our human quirks and foibles, come to be? Much of what we know about those questions traces back to important fossil finds in Ethiopia.

Paleoanthropologist Yohannes Haile-Selassie has been key in that hunt for answers. A skilled fossil-finder, he’s helped discover some of the most important known hominid fossils, including the bones used to describe the 2.5-million-year-old Australopithecus garhi, the first pieces of a 4.4-million-year-old partial skeleton of Ardipithecus ramidus, and fossils of the 5.8-million-year-old Ardipithecus kadabba, to name a few.

He joins Host Flora Lichtman to talk about what fieldwork is really like, big questions in human origins, and making the field of paleoanthropology more equitable.

Guest:

Dr. Yohannes Haile-Selassie is the director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University, and a professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change.

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

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In 48 B.C.E., a massive fire ripped through the Library of Alexandria in Egypt, one of the largest and most significant ancient libraries. An estimated 100,000 works of literature were lost. Throughout history, there are lots of examples of things being “lost”: cities, like Pompeii, graves of figures like Genghis Khan, and works of art from masters like Leonardo da Vinci.

Author Sam Kean explores these historical losses in his new book, “The Museum of Lost Things.” He joins Host Ira Flatow to discuss what we can learn from them.

Read an excerpt from “The Museum of Lost Things: True Tales of Fabled Treasures, Legendary Cities, and Mythical Creatures That Vanished From History”

Guest:

Sam Kean is the author of eight books, including “The Museum of Lost Things." He is based in Washington, D.C.

Transcript will be available after the show airs on 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: 877-472-4374

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