Night Science

Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for Economics – as a psychologist. His fundamental work in behavioral economics revealed our cognitive biases, such as loss aversion – the fact that we react much more strongly to losses than to gains. Danny’s popular science book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” is a highly influential bestseller; Itai and Martin consider it the operating manual for the human brain. In this conversation, Danny tells us how his creative process is driven by a lack of content with what has already been achieved. Other topics we talk about include the suspension of critical weapons, why anthropomorphisms are valuable, how to give the mind something to work on while asleep, and Danny’s innovation of the ‘adversarial collaboration’.

For more information on Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .

In this special, we talk about podcasting with the two hosts of the Big Biology Podcast (https://www.bigbiology.org), Marty Martin – professor of disease ecology at the University of South Florida – and Art Woods – professor of physiological ecology at the University of Montana. We had a great time discussing our respective podcast experiences, trading tips and reflecting on our passion for science communication and the ways that it has impacted our own research. In their podcast, Marty and Art tell the stories of scientists tackling some of the biggest unanswered questions in biology. While both of our podcasts focus on the people doing science, Big Biology discusses the results, while Night Science explores the creative process of science.

For more information on Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .

Agnel Sfeir is a leading scientist in the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, who studies fundamental aspects of the biology of the cell. Agnel revels in asking seemingly simple questions that get to the heart of the unknown in biology. In this conversation, she told us how she immerses herself in the project together with her team, and learns how to mentor each person depending on how they like to think. She discusses the trick of ‘thinking selfishly’ for generating ideas: when reading or listening to something, you should constantly think about how it might be related to your project. She generates new insights by obsessing about a particular problem in her research, blurring the line between day and night. In the last minutes of our conversation, she revealed to us how it is almost always during the last five minutes of a meeting when the most important insights emerge.

For more information on Night Science, visit www.night-science.org .

Christina Curtis is a Professor of Medicine and the Director of Artificial Intelligence and Cancer Genomics at Stanford University’s Cancer Institute. Among her many achievements is the conception of the “Big Bang Theory” of tumor biology. In this episode, she tells us how not being biased by assumptions of what we know has been very helpful in her research. We talk about how her background in statistical genetics has shaped her cancer research. We also discuss how the despair of not understanding is a phase that occurs in almost any research project, and we discuss the use of generative AI in the creative scientific process.
For more information on Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .

Meghan O'Rourke, acclaimed author of The Invisible Kingdom, poet, and Yale professor, joins us to explore the parallels between creative writing and scientific discovery. She describes how deep immersion in a project attracts unexpected insights, and she introduces Night Poetry and Day Poetry, inspired by our concepts of Night Science and Day Science—where night represents raw creation and day embodies refinement. We discuss how scientists and writers face similar challenges: questioning assumptions, balancing structure with spontaneity, and finding meaning in unexpected connections. Through Meghan's insights, we discover how creativity manifests similarly across disciplines, and how being an outsider can often lead to fresh perspectives.

For more information about Night Science, visit https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/night-science .