Shows / Night Science
Night Science
Where do ideas come from? In each episode, scientists Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher explore science's creative side with a leading colleague. New episodes come out every second Monday.
Episodes
Night Science90 | Night Science at the DOE – Katy Huff
Prof. Kathryn Huff from the University of Wisconsin-Madison recently spent three years as the Senate-confirmed Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy at the US…
Night Science89 | Woods Hole Night Science!
What if an intensive science course wasn't primarily about learning techniques or producing results, but about learning how to think like a scientist? To…
Night Science88 | How AI dreams up new science – Jure Leskovec
What happens when AI starts doing science? We talk with Stanford computer scientist Jure Leskovec about AI agents that find patterns in large datasets, come up…
- Night Science
87 | On the joys of being a young scientist
What can early-career scientists teach us about creativity? For this special episode, we talked to PhD students and postdocs about their creative processes…
Night Science86 | From punchlines to discovery – Sarah Adelman
What can comedy teach us about scientific discovery? With stand-up comedian and former research scientist Sarah Adelman, we discuss the surprising parallels…
Night Science85 | How laziness invites discovery – Robert Root-Bernstein
Professor Robert Root-Bernstein has not only made many scientific discoveries, but has also written extensively about the creative process, including in Sparks…
Night Science84 | Every scientist is an artist – Lois Hetland
Professor Lois Hetland, the former chair of art education at the Massachusetts College of Art, joins us to ask: what do artists and scientists truly share? We…
Night Science83 | How science is secretly driven by analogy – Melanie Mitchell
Melanie Mitchell is a professor at the Santa Fe Institute and a leading thinker on artificial intelligence, analogy, and abstraction. She reflects on how…
Night Science82 | On being alone together – Amy Shyer & Alan Rodrigues
Amy Shyer & Alan Rodrigues co-direct the Laboratory of Morphogenesis at Rockefeller University. They are also married. Together, we reflect on what it means to…
Night Science81 | How to find your way by getting lost – Marina Dubova
It’s surprising that for centuries, scientists have left the study of how to do science largely to non-scientists. Not anymore – thanks to the young field of…
Night Science80 | Why greatness cannot be planned with Kenneth Stanley
Ken Stanley is a highly regarded researcher in machine learning and artificial intelligence. After leaving his professorship at the University of Central…
Night Science79 | Maria Leptin and creativity in grant writing
Maria Leptin is the President of the ERC, the European Research Council, and Professor of genetics at the University of Cologne. In this episode, Maria…
Night Science78 | Stephen Nachmanovitch on free play and chivalry
Stephen Nachmanovitch is a musician celebrated for his free improvisations, and an educator whose books Free Play and The Art of Is have become classics on the…
Night Science77 | Akiko Iwasaki and the art of creativity maintenance
Akiko Iwasaki, a Yale professor and Howard Hughes Investigator, was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2024. Together, we reflect on…
Night Science76 | Can Google’s Co-scientist project give scientists superpowers?
To answer this question, we speak with Dr. Alan Karthikesalingam and Vivek Natarajan from Google DeepMind about their groundbreaking AI co-scientist project…
Night Science75 | Eve Marder and how Recipe Science ruins creativity
Professor Eve Marder is a pioneering neuroscientist at Brandeis University. Drawing on decades of work with a small neural circuit in lobsters, she describes…
Night Science74 | Martin Schwartz and the importance of stupidity in science
Martin Schwartz, a professor at Yale, is known for his work on integrins and his influential essay “The importance of stupidity in scientific research”. He…
Night Science73 | Ethan Mollick and a million Einsteins in a server
With Ethan Mollick, professor at Wharton and author of the bestselling “Co-Intelligence”, we explore how generative AI tools like ChatGPT can enhance…
Night Science72 | David Baker and the lab's communal brain
David Baker, who was awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for designing novel proteins with AI, is a professor at the University of Washington. In this…
Night Science71 | Victor Ambros and the unique ways we perceive wonder
Victor Ambros, newly awarded the Nobel Prize for his discovery of microRNA, is a developmental biologist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. In…
Night Science70 | Meghan O’Rourke on being the artist and their caretaker
Meghan O'Rourke, acclaimed author of The Invisible Kingdom, poet, and Yale professor, joins us to explore the parallels between creative writing and scientific…
Night Science69 | Keith Yamamoto and the freedom to fail
Keith Yamamoto, professor and science policy leader at UCSF, discusses with us how modern science became trapped in a system that discourages creative…
Night Science68 | Peter Godfrey-Smith and middle class science
Peter Godfrey-Smith, a Professor of the Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney, explores with us the differences between creativity in science and…
Night Science67 | A hypothesis is a liability
In this episode, Itai and Martin delve into the interplay between hypothesis-driven and exploratory research, drawing on insights from past guests of the Night…
Night Science66 | Michael Fischbach and the scientific decision tree
In this episode, Stanford professor Michael Fischbach discusses insights from his course on how to choose meaningful research problems. Highlights include: -…
Night Science65 | James Kaufman and the art of creativity maintenance
James Kaufman, Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Connecticut, discusses the psychological underpinnings of creative thinking with Itai &…
Night Science64 | Robert Weinberg and the perils of being a Fachidiot
MIT's Bob Weinberg is perhaps the world's most prominent cancer researcher. In this episode, Bob emphasizes that true innovation often comes from blending…
Night Science63 | Manu Prakash and how the discovery changes you
Manu Prakash is a professor of bioengineering at Stanford University, asking biological questions with insights from physics. His most widely known…
Night Science62 | Dianne Newman and the visceral and intentional sides of science
Dianne Newman – a molecular microbiologist at CalTech – is a professor both in Biology and Geology. In this episode, she encourages young scientists to pursue…
Night Science61 | Tina Seelig on what to do with a really bad idea
Tina Seelig is Executive Director of the Knight-Hennessy-Scholars at Stanford University. She is widely known for teaching creativity courses and workshops…
Night Science60 | Venki Ramakrishnan and the secrets of doing science over tea
Venki Ramakrishnan shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for uncovering the structure of the ribosome. He runs a lab at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular…
Night Science59 | Jennifer Oyler-Yaniv and the point of creative frustration
Jennifer Oyler-Yaniv is a professor working on the immune system at Harvard’s Medical School. In this episode, we discuss with her how she teaches creativity…
Night Science58 | Guy Yanai on Pentimenti
Guy Yanai is a painter whose work is displayed in many public and private collections across the US, Europe, and Asia, including, for example, the Tel Aviv…
Night Science57 | George Church and shooting for the stars
George Church, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, leads a large research group at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. A…
Night Science56 | Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz lights a candle for science
Prof. Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz directs research labs at both CalTech in the US and the University of Cambridge in England. Magdalena is one of the world’s…
Night Science55 | Isaac Newton and a new kind of science
Night Science – coming up with novel ways to interpret the physical world – is as old as philosophy. In contrast, Day Science – empirical evidence as the sole…
Night Science54 | Bo Xia and a tale of tails
Bo Xia is a Junior Fellow at Harvard and a Principal Investigator at the Broad Institute. During his PhD with Itai, he suffered a painful tailbone injury that…
Night Science53 | Todd Golub and bottom-up creativity
Prof. Todd Golub, the Director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, has made important contributions to cancer research. In this episode, he argues that…
Night Science52 | Sean B. Carroll – he told some good stories
Sean Carroll is a world-renowned scientist, author, educator, and an Oscar-nominated film producer. Sean sees storytelling as the key to all he does. Similar…
Night Science51 | Nigel Goldenfeld and the jazz of impossible problems
Nigel Goldenfeld is the Chancellor's Distinguished Professor in Physics at the University of California at San Diego. In this episode, he talks with us about…
Night Science50 | It takes two to think
Despite the variety of creative approaches practiced by different scientists, one tried-and-true though often overlooked — trick for generating new ideas…
Night Science49 | Rich White on living on the edge cases
Rich White studies cancer as a professor at Oxford University. Rich is not only a brilliant physician-scientist but also a great friend of Itai Yanai, one of…
Night Science48 | Carolyn Bertozzi and a long game called science
Carolyn Bertozzi is a Professor at Stanford University. In 2022, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In this episode we talk about how the process of…
Night Science47 | Stephen Quake and the Creative Network
Stephen Quake is a Stanford University professor and the Head of Science at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI). Among his many inventions are DNA sequencing…
Night Science46 | John Mattick and doing what your mother taught you
John Mattick is Professor of RNA Biology at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. For decades, he has been on a mission to show that the…
Night Science45 | Peter Ratcliffe on being the Master of Daydreams
Peter J. Ratcliffe shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on oxygen sensing in animal cells. He directs research institutes in…
Night Science44 | Christina Curtis and keeping the faith in the process
Christina Curtis is a Professor of Medicine and the Director of Artificial Intelligence and Cancer Genomics at Stanford University’s Cancer Institute. Among…
Night Science43 | Daniel Dennett’s intuition pumps
Daniel Dennett, Professor at Tufts University, may be the most important living philosopher, tackling the biggest questions around: what is consciousness, do…
Night Science42 | Howard Stone on how to tilt your head for discovery
Howard Stone is a Professor of Engineering at Princeton. His research explores how fluid dynamics can help to understand diverse systems, from bacterial…
Night Science41 | Prisca Liberali and the junkies of discovery
Prisca Liberali is a senior group leader at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Switzerland. In this episode, Prisca tells us how her…
Night Science40 | Tom Mullaney & Chris Rea on giving thanks to bias
Tom Mullaney is a Professor of History at Stanford University and the Kluge Chair in Technology and Society at the Library of Congress, and Chris Rea is a…
Night Science39 | Bonnie Bassler and living on the edge in a nerdy kind of way
Bonnie Bassler is the Chair of the Molecular Biology Department at Princeton. In this episode, Bonnie talks about her passion for scientific inquiry…
Night Science38 | Yukiko Yamashita, the queen of analogies
Yukiko Yamashita is a biology professor at MIT and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Yukiko’s research is amazingly broad, perhaps…
Night Science37 | Stephen Wolfram is the Worldly Scientist
Can you think of another big company CEO that does basic science? Stephen Wolfram is the CEO of Wolfram Research – the company that developed Mathematica and…
Night Science36 | Laurence Hurst and the slime mold model of discovery
Laurence Hurst is a professor of Evolutionary Genetics and the founding Director of the Milner Centre for Evolution at The University of Bath. Martin actually…
Night Science35 | Edith Heard and the feeling for the system
Edith Heard is a Professor at the Collège de France and the Director General of Europe’s “CERN for biologists”, the European Molecular Biology Lab (EMBL). In…
Night Science34 | Ewan Birney and the battle scars of discovery
Ewan Birney is the deputy director general of the European Molecular Biology Lab (EMBL) and co-director of the European Bioinformatics Institute. In his…
Night Science33 | Paola Arlotta and science as a walk in the dark woods
Paola Arlotta is a developmental neurobiologist and a professor at Harvard. She studies how the most complex organ in the human body (in the world? in the…
Night Science32 | Marty Martin and Art Woods on science podcasting
In this special, we talk about podcasting with the two hosts of the Big Biology Podcast (https://www.bigbiology.org), Marty Martin – professor of disease…
Night Science31 | Alfred Russel Wallace and night science by candlelight
What was the creative process of Alfred Russel Wallace? In this séance, we channel the legendary self-taught evolutionary biologist, founder of the field of…