Night Science

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 .