Shows
The Silenced Women of STEMEpisode 9 - Janaki Ammal: "Woman Saves Forest with Genetics"Have you ever thought, hmm my sugar needs to be sweeter? Well, India did. They enlisted the help of Janaki Ammal, an Indian Botanist sweetened sugar, saved a forest, and traveled the world in search of knowledge. This is her story.References:https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-63445015https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/pioneering-female-botanist-who-sweetened-nation-and-saved-valley-180972765/https://www.mpg.de/19967547/janaki-ammalhttps://record.umich.edu/articles/it-happened-at-michigan-an-historic-doctorate-in-botany/2025-07-2326 min
The Silenced Women of STEMEpisode 8 - Dorothy Hodgkins: "Crystals and Chemistry"Imagine waking up every morning with joints so swollen and painful that even buttoning a shirt feels impossible, yet you still choose to spend your day hunched over delicate instruments, determined to uncover mysteries in chemistry. This was the world of Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, a woman who refused to be defined by pain or limited by the expectations of her time.References:https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/1964/hodgkin/biographical/https://www.britannica.com/biography/Dorothy-Hodgkin https://royalsociety.org/about-us/who-we-are/diversity-inclusion/case-studies/scientists-with-disabilities/dorothy-hodgkin/ https://www.biop...2025-07-1619 min
The Silenced Women of STEMEpisode 7 - Jeanne Villepreux-Power: "Alien or Octopus: What even is an Argonaut..."What do royal wedding gowns, octopuses that look like aliens, and the invention of the aquarium have in common? One woman: Jeanne Villepreux-Power. Today, we’re diving into the story of a self-taught scientist who defied the odds, turned her home into a marine lab, and changed the way we study life in the ocean.References:https://oumnh.ox.ac.uk/learn-jeannette-villepreux-powerhttps://www.themarginalian.org/2022/12/26/jeanne-villepreux-power-argonaut/https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jeanne-Villepreux-Powerhttps://scientificwomen.net/women/villepreux-jeanne-144https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PM...2025-07-0927 min
The Silenced Women of STEMEpisode 6 - Valentina Tereshkova: "Space Propaganda Barbie"It's 1963. You're 26 years old. You’ve left school at 16 to work in a textile factory. On weekends, you sneak off to jump out of airplanes, perhaps as an escape from day to day life. Suddenly, out of 400 candidates, you are chosen to become the first woman in space. You’re launched into orbit alone, riding in a spacecraft with settings so wrong, if you hadn’t caught the mistake, you would have drifted endlessly into the void. You fix it. You stay calm. You orbit the Earth 48 times. And when you land, you're told to smile for the ca...2025-07-0231 min
The Silenced Women of STEMEpisode 5 - Nettie Stevens: "Gender Reveal Party: mealworm edition"Have you heard about how Henry the VIII of England and his six wives? There’s like a whole musical about it now called SIX. Well Henry being the king that he was kept getting rid of his wives for various reasons, a large one being that his wives were not giving him male children. Well, the joke’s on Henry because we now know that sperm which is produced by men holds the key for sex determination aka it was lowkey Henry’s fault for not having sons. And you know who found out that men are the ones w...2025-06-2539 min
The Silenced Women of STEMEpisode 4 - Alice Ball: "L is for Leprosy"6 years. What can you do in just 6 years? Could you change the world in 6 years? Probably not. But you know who did. Alice Ball. From graduating high school to her death, Alice Ball invented a technique in just 6 years that would change the world.References:https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jchemed.4c00611https://www.britannica.com/topic/kava#ref90385https://lhncbc.nlm.nih.gov/LHC-publications/PDF/pub2003048.pdfhttps://www.uhfoundation.org/impact/students/woman-who-changed-worldhttps://www.unmc.edu/healthsecurity/transmission/2023/04/11/overlooked-no-more-alice-ball-chemist-who-created-a-treatment-for-leprosy/...2025-06-1820 min
The Silenced Women of STEMEpisode 3 - Frances Glessner Lee: "Grandma knows her murders"Imagine your best friend gets murdered. You call the cops, expecting a team equipped with gloves, evidence bags, testing kits, all of that. Instead, they trample through the house, accidentally ruining all the evidence that could have led them directly to your friend's killer. While this would cause outrage in today’s society, this was normal in the 1800s. Investigators were not investigating back then (they didn't even have proper training). There was this one grandma who had enough. She decided that she would contribute the rest of her life to teaching the cops how to cop. Sh...2025-06-1138 min
The Silenced Women of STEMEpisode 2 - Lucy Taylor Hobbs: "Woman who pulls teeth"Did you know that most dentists back in the day did NOT have a dental license? It makes sense now why a lot of people were scared of going to the dentist. Because back then, you didn't know if your dentist was a guy who knew what he was doing or just some rando who liked teeth. Now imagine TRYING to get your dental license, so that you are credible, but you are basically barred from getting one because you're a girl, even though you are grossly overeducated. You wouldn’t stand for that, so you basically ch...2025-06-0417 min
The Silenced Women of STEMEpisode 1 - Mary Anning: Child Paleontology ProdigyImagine that you have 9 other siblings (maybe 8), but they all die except your one older brother. Your family is also incredibly poor, but you enjoy hunting fossils with your father. Even though you have NO education, he helps you learn geology and anatomy. But then he also dies. Now you are even poorer. And even though it is frowned upon for a girl, your mother makes you continue laboring for fossils in hopes of earning a few extra pennies.Referenceshttps://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/mary-anning-unsung-hero.htmlhttps://oumnh.ox.ac.uk...2025-05-2820 min
Science VsThe Best Ever Episode of Science VsThis week – our episode that you voted as our BEST wild card episode!! You’ll have to listen to find out what it is. Find our transcript here: https://bit.ly/SVBestEverEpIn this episode talk to Brie Smith, Micah Truman, Katrina Spade and Thomas Bass. This episode was produced by Blythe Terrell and Wendy Zukerman, with help from Meryl Horn, Michelle Dang, Rose Rimler, Courtney Gilbert and Disha Bhagat. Were edited by Blythe Terrell and Caitlin Kenney. Fact checking by Eva Dasher. Mix and so...2023-08-2444 minScience VsI’ll Be Dammed: Beavers Fighting Climate ChangeToday, we give a dam about beavers. These busy rodents don’t just chill and go with the flow — it turns out their grabby paws are actually helping hands in the fight against climate change. We dive into how this works with ecologists Dr. Emily Fairfax and Dr. Ben Dittbrenner. Find our transcript here: https://bit.ly/ScienceVsBeaversIn this episode, we cover:(00:00) Intro: How beavers “beaver away”(02:22) Chapter One: How beavers can help (06:18) Chapter Two: Can we move beavers for the be...2023-05-0418 minScience VsWhen Science and Superstitions CollideThis is the THIRTEENTH season of the show! So we’re diving into stories about superstitions and luck. We’ll share the eerie tale of a 13-legged sea creature. We’ll talk about a hot new telescope that’s trying to look back 13 billion years ago to uncover the secrets of the universe. And we’ll talk about a squeaky superstition that involves a rat — as the tooth fairy. We speak to marine biologist Dr. Julian Evans, astrophysicist Dr. Jeyhan Kartaltepe, and biologist Dr. Philip Cox. UPDATE 12/16/22: A previous version of this episode incorrectly conflated the...2022-12-0240 minScience VsShould We Compost Human Bodies?What's the greenest way to die? Some nerds are saying that our bodies should go the way of our veggie scraps — and become compost. But will people get on board with spreading Grandpa in the garden? To find out, we talk to Brie Smith, Micah Truman, Katrina Spade and Thomas Bass.Link to our transcript: https://bit.ly/svhumancomposting This episode was produced by Blythe Terrell and Wendy Zukerman, with help from Meryl Horn, Michelle Dang, Rose Rimler, Courtney Gilbert and Disha Bhagat. Were edited by Blythe Terrell and Cai...2022-10-0644 minScience VsThe Fight to Fix a Racist Medical GadgetThe EEG is an incredibly important medical tool — and it’s been failing Black patients for decades. So today we’ll hear from two young, Black scientists who teamed up with hairdressers to do something about it. We speak to neurologist Dr. Jessie Baity, engineer Arnelle Etienne, biomedical scientist Lietsel Jones, and hairstylist Nina Woodley. Link to our transcript: https://bit.ly/sciencevsEEG This episode was produced by Taylor White, Meryl Horn and Wendy Zukerman, with help from Rose Rimler, Michelle Dang, Ekedi Fausther-Keeys, Courtney Gilbert, and Disha Bhagat. We’re ed...2022-09-2236 min