The Night Science Podcast

If you only listen to one episode of the Night Science Podcast, this one is it! Imagine taking a course that changes the way you think. We found it at the mythical MBL Woods Hole! Episode 89: Woods Hole Night Science Apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/n... Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/3Sy1...

🔥 Have you heard about the MBL summer courses at Woods Hole? In our new episode of the Night Science Podcast we visit the mythical Microbial Diversity course there and talk with the students & instructors. What we found really amazed me!

Science at its best is organized chaos. We teach young scientists how to be organized and robust, but not the night science creativity that’s needed for discovery. Come train with us in how to teach the tools of the creative scientific process in our EMBO train the trainer event.

How would you let the LLM dream? [...] In a sense, to replay things, organize them, think about them so that tomorrow when we wake up, our thoughts are more organized than just input-output-input-output. –Jure Leskovec, Stanford Professor

There is where I disagree with Professor Bill Martin: "If you follow the data, then you've completely lost control... you're putting the data where your mind should be. For me, the scientific process is one of questions.. But if you go into data driven science... seek and you shall find."

I actually don't mind being wrong.. we said this is what's happening on the Millennium Bridge.. what we proposed doesn't work. But it was interesting. We really did stick our neck out and unfortunately got our head chopped off. –Steven Strogatz, Cornell Professor @stevenstrogatz.com

I said to my PI, I want to go do my postdoc, will you write a letter for me. And he wrote in my letter that I wasn't very creative .. I finally met with Magda and she told me she saw straight through the letter. –Samantha Morris, Harvard Professor

Creativity is ultimately rooted in the individual –Ruth Lehmann, Director of the Whitehead Institute, MIT

Science would be more trustworthy in the public eye if scientists were more open about the creative process behind scientific discovery. – Tom McLeish, on the Night Science Podcast, episode 10

Going from a creative idea [..you ask..] what's the fastest way we could find out that it's completely wrong? .. that doesn't come naturally to a lot of people because they become attached to their ideas... you have to be able to have many ideas & most of them could be wrong. –@benlehner.bsky.social

I'm excited to be featured on one of my favorite podcasts!! I binged @nightsciencepod.bsky.social during my PhD. Listen to this episode to hear about how the crop rotation system can be applied to the scientific creative process. And learn about our beloved Stentor in Every School program!

Day science is trying to design tests that would disprove a hypothesis – and night science is finding something that wasn't initially thought of. So basically wandering into the forest of the data and trying to figure out what's up. – Yana Bromberg, on the Night Science Podcast, Ep. 8

Sometimes the dark alleys are in fact dark alleys that we shouldn't have gone down. But sometimes the dark alleys are really the path to enlightenment. And we don't really know, ahead of time, which one is going to go, unfortunately. –@harmitmalik.bsky.social on the Night Science Podcast, episode 6

Often people have something that makes them their skin tingle. I'm a believer in that skin tingling. –Sarah Teichmann, on choosing a project (from the Night Science Podcast, episode 5) @teichlab.bsky.social

The PhD is the best point in time to try very dangerous ideas or to try things that don't work. – @odedrechavi.bsky.social, on the Night Science Podcast

Maybe creativity is just how big a bag of tricks you have; how many different tricks you've seen, applied in different contexts. And perhaps some people have a little bit more skill remembering all those tricks or applying them in different situations. - Arjun Raj, @arjunraj.bsky.social

Even in the darkest of times, I feel so grateful to be a researcher! I had a great conversation with the Night Science Podcast host, and can’t wait to hear the stories of other young scientists :)

‘Inhabiting the data’ is how CalTech Professor Ellen Rothenberg describes her process for coming up with a new idea, in the very first episode of the Night Science Podcast. (@nightsciencepod.bsky.social)

grateful for the opportunity to feature in an episode of one of my favorite podcasts!

Tzachi Pilpel introduces two tools for generating ideas in the second episode of the Night Science Podcast: 1. imaginary conversations with scientists and 2. walking while thinking to anchor thoughts spatially. @nightsciencepod.bsky.social

🔥 New Night Science Podcast episode! 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! open.spotify.com/episode/0zG2... podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/n...

Where do ideas come from? We founded the Night Science Institute with the mission of training in the creative scientific process every early-career scientist in the world. Help us to spread the word with this clip! www.youtube.com/watch?v=0c1V... @nightsciencepod.bsky.social

There's a Night Science workshop on the creative process in EPFL in Lausanne! But this time, it's led by a trainer that was trained by our institute! If you would like to also be trained come to our event in September in Heidelberg! actu.epfl.ch/news/night-s... night-science.org/train-the-tr...

Great lunch break listen: Music is absolutely helpful to distract the brain to be able to re-focus and I wouldn’t be able to organize my thoughts without it.

Scientists on moving past being stuck: "Basically I'm just a lazy son of a bi*ch" – they would play music or paint and at some point that would free their mind up enough that they'd get past their block and then come back to the problem. – Root-Bernstein on the Night Science Podcast

🔥New Night Science Podcast episode! The great Robert Root-Bernstein argues 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 creative life. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/n...

Night science welcomes beautiful ideas Day science welcomes ugly facts The Night Science Podcast is the story of needing both @nightsciencepod.bsky.social

AI is amazing but the game is still the same: we need to make a discovery and AI won't do that for you.. So NYC Postdocs, join us Thursday for this month's Postdoc Night Science event! We're meeting at a bar near Union Square for some science buddy "speed dating". RSVP: tinyurl.com/3t5us6hp!

After leading workshops on ‘the creative scientific process’ worldwide for 5 years, last week we led our first ‘train-the-trainer’ event to empower faculty to teach it at their universities. Our goal is for all 9 million scientists exposed to the Night Science creativity tools!

What do you do when you get stuck? You need to pop out into the world of night science, into the world of ideas, where you use abstract thinking. You're going to use every trick you got to find the way forward. From Nature's new podcast on cultivating creativity in science!

It's amazing that our CEO Oliver Bogler is representing the Night Science Institute at AACR. And can you see which issue of Nature he got a hold of?! www.nature.com/articles/s41... @oliverbogler.bsky.social @night-science-inst.bsky.social

The new episode of the Night Science Podcast is a must-listen! Art professor Lois Hetland wrote a classic book about the “studio habits of mind” – observe, reflect, envision, express engage & persist, stretch & explore, craft & connect – and we explore how these relate to scientific process!

Data is not transparent! And that's why looking without bias is hard to do. We asked undergrads what correlation they expected between wealth & happiness, before showing them a fictitious dataset. Faced with an identical graph, those expecting a positive correlation were much more likely to see one!

There's a strange myth about science: that theory comes first, and that data cannot show anything new. But anyone who's ever done science knows the truth that there's a long conversation between data & hypotheses. Back & forth.. until the discovery. And if you think about it, it has to be this way!

Do you think you would have discovered a gorilla hiding in plain sight in your data? We found that you are 3 times less likely to do so if you have a specific hypothesis in mind. *A hypothesis is a liability* (Night Science recap, Day 5) genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....

Doing science requires us to speak 2 different languages: (1) Day science language is a highly precise language for designing & executing experiments; while (2) Night science language uses analogies & anthropomorphizes to give us intuitions about the unknowns we explore. (Night Science recap, Day 4)

Expert's Dilemma: the more specialized you become, the less open you are to creative solutions from other fields. But the more you explore other fields, the more you risk losing credibility in your home field. (Night Science recap, Day 3)