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What happened when a pair of musicians decided to make a concept album about Moths?

It sounded really weird to me, but the more I looked at these incredible creatures, I just was blown away.

It's Tuesday October 22nd and you're listening to Science Friday.

I'm Scifry producer Deep Peter Schmidt. You might not have thought about it before, but humans, in a sense, go through a lot of the same stages of life that moths do. Migration, emergence, emulation.

Well, a pair of musicians discovered these connections during lockdown in

2020 and created the Moth Project, a concept album and stage show that combines songs of a whole

ecosystem of genres, including 80s pop, funk, and classical.

And they learned that we have a lot more in common with moths than you might think.

We'll have that story a bit later, but first hear Science Fridays Kathleen Davis and John Dankowski talking about how

metaphors can help and hurt understanding of science.

Here at Scifry, we're big fans of metaphors.

They can help make complicated science concepts easier to

understand both for the public and for scientists themselves. Take for

example the Big Bang that helps us visualize the beginning of the universe. Or we can understand

amino acids as the building blocks of proteins. But as our next guests have shown, these scientific metaphors can also have a dark side,

and they can even set research back. Sam Harnet and Chris Hoff are the hosts of the podcast series,

The World According to Sound, and they're here to tell

us about their new project an in exact science. It's a special two-hour

episode that explores to Science Friday. Good to have you guys here. Thanks for having us. Yeah, nice to be here.

Okay, so first of all, why did you want to do a series about language in science history? I mean, what gave you this idea?

Yeah, I think it's, what appealed to me is that a metaphor seems on its surface like the most unscientific thing, right?

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