The harms of smoking cigarettes are pretty clear. Smoking causes cancer as well as heart and lung diseases, and it’s the leading cause of preventable death in the United States.
When it comes to vaping, or electronic cigarettes, the risks are a bit more tricky to parse, especially if you read media reports about them. The outbreak of Vaping Use-Associated Lung Injury, also known as EVALI, in 2019 and 2020 made things even more confusing.
The founders of Juul, the company that mainstreamed vaping in the early aughts, said they wanted to help people kick their smoking habits. But can vapes really help people quit? And how bad are they for you, really? And if you’re addicted to vaping, what’s the best way to stop?
To answer those questions and more, Host Ira Flatow talks with one of the top researchers in the field, Dr. Jamie Hartmann-Boyce, assistant professor of health policy and management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.
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Science Friday
At the beginning of May, the National Institutes of Health, part of the Department of Health and Human Services, announced a plan to develop a universal vaccine platform. Think: a single shot for flu...
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Medical sculptor Damon Coyle walks around with a Mary Poppins bag of body parts. Fake ones, that is. At the University of Missouri, his lab creates hyperrealistic body parts designed to help medical p...
Biochemist Kati Karikó spent decades experimenting with mRNA, convinced that she could solve the problems that had kept it from being used as a therapeutic. Her tireless, methodical work was dismissed...
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Bacteria have been around for billions of years. Could they have come up with complex behaviors that we just don’t understand yet? Could they have their own language? Their own culture? Their own comp...
A passion for fashion among the “bone collector caterpillar,” who wears a coat of body parts, and an artist who makes fabrics that remember.We inch into the world of extreme outerwear with the newly-d...
Millions of years ago, iguanas somehow got from North America to Fiji. Scientists think they made the trip on a raft of fallen vegetation. Also, the marine reptile’s fossilized fetus is cluing paleont...
In “Into the Unknown,” an astronomer explores the mysteries of the cosmos and the limits of what science can test.What is time? If the universe is expanding, what is it expanding into? What happened j...
Scientists bring us a lab-grown chicken nugget and texturally accurate, plant-based calamari. We’ll bite.There’s a movement in the world of science to find alternatives to meat and dairy products that...
Being able to belt out a tune like Adele or Pavarotti is not just about raw talent. The best singers in the world have to work on their technique—like how to control their breath and develop the stami...
It’s zombie season! At least if you’re watching the new season of the fungal thriller “The Last of Us,” airing right now on Max, which chronicles what happens after a fungus turns most of humanity int...
Research suggests that better understanding the psychological and neurological components of chronic pain may lead to better treatments.Chronic pain is remarkably common: Roughly 20% of adults in the...
Researchers isolated one kind of cone in the eye and aimed lasers at it to allow subjects to see a super vibrant teal shade they call “olo.”Think about the colors of the world around you—the blue of a...
How will market uncertainty and a lack of federal support for climate efforts affect the future of clean energy in the United States? Plus, many wetlands are disappearing, but Louisiana’s “accidental”...
With the help of cat owners, a new project investigates cats’ biology and aims to link some of their behaviors to their genes.Calling all cat people: This one’s for you. Despite humans’ long history o...
An evolving technology is changing the lives of people with paralysis: brain-computer interfaces (BCI). These are devices that are implanted in the brain and record neural activity, then translate tho...
In Connecting Dots: A Blind Life, inventor Josh Miele recounts his life story and path to becoming an accessibility designer.When inventor and scientist Josh Miele was 4 years old, a neighbor poured s...
Are traffic engineering decisions based on evidence-based research? Not as much as you might think.If you’ve seen a car crash on the side of the road, you might look at it and think that the person at...
The Webb Space Telescope picked up traces of dimethyl sulfide on planet K2-18b. On Earth, the molecule comes from microbes and phytoplankton. Also, researchers captured the first confirmed video of a...
Imagine you’re diving into a cell. You’re paddling around in the cytoplasm, you’re climbing up a mitochondria. If you’re having a hard time picturing this, that’s okay! There are professionals who do...
Bringing back Southwest peach orchards won’t be easy, but researchers are on the lookout for remaining trees—and they need help. And, the newly discovered Lokiceratops is challenging paleontologists’...