Bucket hats. Low-rise jeans. Track suits. As you might’ve noticed, Y2K fashion is in right now. People say that fashion moves in 20-year cycles, and it turns out…it does! At least according to math.
Host Flora Lichtman sits down with mathematician Emma Zajdela to figure out how she analyzed over 35,000 images of women's clothing dating all the way back to the 1860s to confirm this theory.
Guest:
Dr. Emma Zajdela is a Franco-American mathematician and science diplomacy activist.
Other episodes you may enjoy:
The Many, Many Ways Tuberculosis Shaped Human Life
Functional Fashion From An Artist And A Caterpillar
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Science Friday
Big cats used to roam the entire United States. You might know them as mountain lions, pumas, cougars, or catamounts. Though they go by many names, they're actually all the same species.
Their curren...
When Blue Origin’s New Glenn spacecraft exploded in an enormous fireball during a ground test a couple weeks ago, it sent shockwaves not only through the air, but through NASA’s timeline for the upcom...
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The 2026 World Cup will be the largest one yet, and FIFA is trying to make it the most high-tech, too. The federation has partnered with tech giant Lenovo to launch Football AI Pro, which is designed...
Elite athletes spend a lot of time training their bodies for strength, endurance, coordination, and precision. But what about their brains? Can psychology help athletes achieve peak performance?
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A few weeks ago, we talked to two sonic branding experts who compose music for household appliances. And we played for them a song “sung” by a washing machine that they didn’t really appreciate. But m...
The current Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and neighboring Uganda is caused by the Bundibugyo virus. There’s no specific treatment or vaccine for this strain, unlike the more c...
If you look up where medicine originated, or the earliest medical interventions, you’ll probably find yourself reading about ancient Greece or Egypt or Mesopotamia. But what about before that? How did...
A group of researchers and private investors are planning a series of privately funded missions to Venus, hoping to find signs of life. That may seem like a startling possibility. Although Venus is a...
Many of the forces driving species to extinction—habitat destruction, pollution, climate change—also fuel the spread of disease. Plants and animals around the globe are facing their own little pandemi...
The benefits of getting a shingles vaccine seem relatively straightforward: It will prevent you from getting shingles, a painful rash caused by the same virus that causes chickenpox. But researchers h...
Two disease outbreaks are dominating the news: Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and hantavirus, which started spreading on a cruise ship.
The U.S. has a one-of-a-kind medical facility th...
When Lewis and Clark crossed the United States in the early 1800s, they recorded their wildlife observations along the way. Now, more than 200 years later, an expedition is following the same route an...
On Monday, Pope Leo XIV presented his encyclical, an open letter from the church, on AI. The 42,000-word document covers a lot of terrain—from screen time to resource extraction to job loss—but the co...
Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have observed clouds on a hot gas giant exoplanet called WASP-94A b, some 700 light-years away. But these clouds aren’t your usual wisps of water vapor...
It’s common knowledge that many diseases and conditions have some kind of genetic link. But that wasn't always the case. In 1990, long before the Human Genome Project tied so many health issues to dif...
Old creepy houses are a horror cliche, but why? Why do they freak us out? According to new research, it might have something to do with infrasound: a sound that’s below the range of human hearing, pot...
We recently got a call from a SciFri listener in Florida who has autoimmune arthritis. He told us that over the years he’d taken 10 drugs, and each out eventually stopped working. He then tried to enr...
The herbicide paraquat is so toxic it’s banned in over 70 countries. But its use in the U.S. is growing, despite known links to Parkinson’s disease. In southeastern Mississippi, an industrial plant is...
Bucket hats. Low-rise jeans. Track suits. As you might’ve noticed, Y2K fashion is in right now. People say that fashion moves in 20-year cycles, and it turns out…it does! At least according to math.
H...
A recent study simulated the extreme temperatures and pressure of the Earth’s interior by squeezing a sample between diamonds and heating it with a laser. In those simulations, researchers found that...
Just about every animal with a backbone yawns (maybe even dinosaurs), but why we do it is still something of a mystery. A SciFri listener from Texas recently spotted some research that suggests yawnin...
An upcoming resupply mission will carry tumor samples to the International Space Station for research. Experiments in microgravity have yielded shocking results: Some tumors triple in size in just 10...
Have you noticed that your newer appliances are serenading you? Many new washing machines, dishwashers, dryers, and vacuums have sonic signatures. But why? And who are the composers making music for t...
Scientists studying climate models say there’s a high chance this will be an El Niño year—and that we could be in for a “super” El Niño. The difference is indicated by sea surface temperatures in part...
In April, the crew of Artemis II got an unprecedented tour of the far side of the moon, and they brought back a proverbial shoebox full of pictures. Lunar scientist Kelsey Young stayed on Earth, and h...
When Kemi Doll was in medical school, she learned that Black women are twice as likely to die from uterine cancer as white women, and also suffer disproportionately from other uterine-related conditio...
Cameras and sensors are just about everywhere, recording your face, how you walk, where you go, your heart rate. And AI is making it easy to amass and analyze that data about all of us.
Privacy attor...
Breaking news out of eastern Oklahoma! A hole in the sky has opened. Through it, an unidentified turtle-shaped craft has descended. Alerts say that this is first contact.
So it goes in the sci-fi thr...