Advertise on podcast: 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 pursue questions they genuinely care about – “Let’s just do it, we’ll get to the rigor later!” The real outcome of the course isn't a publication or a new technique. It's a new way of thinking about science – one that gives Night Science its rightful place. Could this be a model for how we should train scientists everywhere? Thank you to Amaranta Kahn, John Spear, Scott Dawson, Leslie Day, Dallas Mould, Jason Baer and Ioana Stanca for speaking with Itai at Woods Hole. The Night Science Podcast is produced by the Night Science Institute. For more information on Night Science, visit night-science.org .

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 of ways to get lost and found. Worth a look: 50×50: Science Across America – 50 creators, 50 scientists, 50 states, 50 videos over ten weeks in 2026, from the Independent Media Initiative. It goes where science actually happens, with the people who actually do it – which is the part we're always most curious about. https://www.5050science.com/ The Night Science Podcast is produced by the Night Science Institute. For more information on Night Science, visit night-science.org .

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, visual thinking, talking, and incubation. This episode is also a reminder of something that is easy to forget amid the frustrations of academic life: science gives us the extraordinary freedom to think without bounds, ask questions, and spend our lives solving puzzles. The Night Science Podcast is produced by the Night Science Institute. For more information on Night Science, visit night-science.org .

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 Science Institute. For more information on Night Science, visit night-science.org .

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 finding and how artistic practices can sharpen observation and generate powerful analogies. The Night Science Podcast is produced by the Night Science Institute. For more information on Night Science, visit night-science.org .

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 frustration and insecurity are inherent in the creative process wherever it unfolds. And Lois argues that we can cultivate creativity through the right environment, one that embraces experimentation, mistakes, and sustained engagement – the same topics that many of our scientist guests have brought up. The Night Science Podcast is produced by the Night Science Institute. For more information on Night Science, visit night-science.org .

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 large language models truly grasp abstraction. The conversation ranges from the role of analogies in Einstein’s thought process to evolutionary “landscapes” and the balance between generative night science and critical day science. The Night Science Podcast is produced by the Night Science Institute. For more information on Night Science, visit night-science.org .

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 each other by diving deeper into the ambiguity and loneliness of research. Join our Train-the-Trainer Event to learn how to teach Night Science, April 24th at the New York Academy of Sciences! https://night-science.org/train-the-trainer-workshop/ The Night Science Podcast is produced by the Night Science Institute. For more information on Night Science, visit night-science.org .

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 cognitive epistemology. In this episode, we discuss the exciting – and surprising – science of doing science with Marina Dubova, a postdoc at the Santa Fe Institute and soon a professor at UC Berkeley. Marina found, for example, that to get the most powerful theories, you should not plan the collection of data with a view to falsify or validate existing hypotheses; instead, try to get as diverse a dataset as possible. It adds a new angle to an idea that we discussed in many previous episodes: that discoveries often arise from exploratory data collection. Based on Marina’s research and her own process, we also discuss how science thrives on diversity at all levels – data, ideas, questions, scientists – and on the use of analogies and metaphors.  The Night Science Podcast is produced by the Night Science Institute. For more information on Night Science, visit night-science.org .

Ken Stanley is a highly regarded researcher in machine learning and artificial intelligence. After leaving his professorship at the University of Central Florida, he cofounded Geometric Intelligence (now Uber AI Labs), and he is now Senior Vice President of Open-Endedness at LilaSciences. In this episode, Ken explains why ambitious objectives often backfire: the real stepping stones to breakthrough discoveries rarely look like progress toward the goal, so a direct pursuit can blind us to the opportunities that matter most. Together, we connect these ideas to night science, scientific intuition, and the pressure to justify research with hypotheses and deliverables, and we argue for a healthier system that funds exploration, curiosity, and the creation of new “playgrounds” for discovery. The Night Science Podcast is produced by the Night Science Institute. For more information on Night Science, visit night-science.org .

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 describes her own path as one driven by observation and curiosity rather than long-term planning, and discusses why small, intellectually vibrant institutes often outperform large labs. We discuss how funding agencies can better support bold ideas, and we explore how to evaluate creativity in grant proposals and why a focus on feasibility can stifle innovation. We also consider the role of grant writing in shaping ideas, the differences between academia and industry, and the importance of stable yet non-complacent careers. The Night Science Podcast is produced by the Night Science Institute. For more information on Night Science, visit night-science.org .®

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 creative process. With his training as an ecologist and his PhD in the history of consciousness, Stephen brings a unique philosophical view on art, science, and life to the podcast. In our discussion, Stephen reflects on how creativity is not a thing but a living process: the art of IS. He draws connections between artistic and scientific practice, emphasizing how both depend on careful attention to the world, openness to mistakes, and dialogue across perspectives. We discuss how fear of error inhibits creativity, and how improvisation can free us from perfectionism. We also touch upon the importance of chivalry in dialogue, the art of advancing each other’s ideas rather than blocking them. The Night Science Podcast is produced by the Night Science Institute. For more information on Night Science, visit night-science.org .

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 how diverse backgrounds enrich research, allowing people to discover different things in the same data. Akiko explains how leading large collaborations requires managing expectations, not micromanaging the research. She compares her work of studying complex conditions to solving multilayered puzzles: each new piece of evidence must be placed in the right layer for the bigger picture to emerge. And she jokes about her own “terrible hairball analogy” and how, at the center of that mess, she searches for hidden gems. The Night Science Podcast is produced by the Night Science Institute. For more information on Night Science, visit night-science.org .

To answer this question, we speak with Dr. Alan Karthikesalingam and Vivek Natarajan from Google DeepMind about their groundbreaking AI co-scientist project. Beyond their work at Google, Alan is an honorary lecturer in vascular surgery at Imperial College London, and Vivek teaches at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Together, we discuss how their system has evolved to mirror parts of human hypothesis generation while also diverging in fascinating ways. We talk about its internal “tournaments” of ideas, its ability to be prompted to “think out of the box,” and whether it becomes too constrained by the need to align with every published “fact”. And we discuss how we still seem far away from a time when AI can not only answer our questions, but can ask new and exciting research questions itself. The Night Science Podcast is produced by the Night Science Institute – for more information on Night Science, visit night-science.org .

Professor Eve Marder is a pioneering neuroscientist at Brandeis University. Drawing on decades of work with a small neural circuit in lobsters, she describes how discovery often emerges from intuition, puzzlement, and the courage to follow unexpected observations. Eve highlights the central role of personal tolerance for ambiguity in shaping a scientist’s questions and methods. She discusses the fine line between idiosyncrasies and general principles, and how deep familiarity with the literature shaped her scientific intuition – something hard to replicate in today’s information-saturated world. We also discuss how reading is a prerequisite for clear writing, and how rigid publishing norms led to “recipe science”, suppressing creativity. ​​For more information on Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .