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Night Science: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Itai Yanai & Martin Lercher
Where do ideas come from? In each episode, scientists Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher explore science's creative side with a leading colleague.
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The most recent episodes — sign up to get AI-powered summaries of each one.
- 1 weeks ago43 min
89 | 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 explore that question, Itai visited the legendary Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, to meet the instructors and students of its annual six-week course on microbial diversity. He discovered an extraordinary environment where students are encouraged to venture outside their comfort zones, follow their curiosity, and pu...
- Aug 10, 202636 min
88 | How AI dreams up new science – with 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 with hypotheses and try to kill them with more data, enduring the tedious work human scientists would rather avoid. What are we human scientists still uniquely good for? Taste, judgment, intuition, emotion, procrastination? And we discuss whether AI might be opening up a whole new continent of discoveries, a terra incognita with plenty...
- Jul 13, 202638 min
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. They told us about finding scientific ideas in art museums, sketching on whiteboards, borrowing concepts from other disciplines, going to unrelated seminars, swimming, hiking, talking in pubs, and deliberately letting ideas lie fallow like in a crop rotation system. Through this diversity, a few themes kept coming back: openness, play, vi...
- Jun 22, 202648 min
86 | 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 between jokes and discoveries. Sarah shares her path from public health research to comedy, and we explore how the willingness to bomb on stage, searching for punchlines, and creating a playful “writer’s room” atmosphere have close analogies in the creative scientific process. The Night Science Podcast is produced by the Night Scien...
- Jun 8, 202640 min
85 | How lazyness 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 of Genius (with Michele Root-Bernstein) and in his latest book, The Arts of Eminent Scientists. Bob found that successful scientists do not treat their “lazy” creative pursuits, such as painting, music, or writing, as distractions from science, but integrate them into one coherent life. Among other things, we also explore problem...
- Apr 13, 202640 min
84 | 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 explore the striking parallels between artistic practice and scientific discovery – between Night Science, the messy and playful mental state where ideas are formed, and her “Studio Habits of Mind”, such as observing closely, envisioning possibilities, and exploring at the edge of the unknown. We converge on a central point: how frustra...
- Feb 16, 202633 min
83 | 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 analogy quietly drives creativity and scientific discovery even in the most rigorous fields. Analogies often emerge during moments of mental rest and don’t need to be accurate to nudge you into new avenues of thinking. We discuss how many core scientific concepts began as metaphors, how analogies can both illuminate and mislead, and whether ...
- Feb 2, 202636 min
82 | 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 think creatively in biology. Amy and Alan discuss the importance of challenging established frameworks, cultivating a “feeling for the organism,” and balancing conceptual imagination with close attention to observable phenomena. They are true science buddies, with their complementarity and partnership allowing them to challenge eac...
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About 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.
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