Hi, Ira here. A lot of you have said, hey Ira, we like the podcast, but sometimes we just want to listen to one story at a time, and we hear you.

So we're going to try something new. A topic or two a day, spread out through Monday through Science Friday. Have a listen.

It's been a highly charged debate for around 40 years. Does Venus have lightning?

This is really going against what we really thought these whistle waves were telling us. So it is a bit of a surprise to everyone involved, I think.

It's Friday, October 6th and today is Science Friday.

I'm Sci-Fi producer Charles Bergwist. The planet Venus has blazing hot temperatures, bone crushing pressures and sulfuric acid clouds.

The longest any spacecraft has survived on the surface is thought to be around two hours. But if you went to that dangerous place, would you have to worry about lightning?

New research takes on that question and we'll talk about it. But first we check in on some of the week science news with Flora Lickman.

This week one of the rituals of science, an early morning wake up call for scientists scattered around the world.

Biomedical folks on Monday, physicists on Tuesday, chemists on Wednesday, it's Nobel Prize week. Joining me to talk about the winners and some other stories from the week in science is Umar Irfan.

Staff writer at Box. He's based in Washington, DC. Welcome back, Umar.

Hi, Flora. How's it going? Good. Okay. So let's dive into the prizes and let's start with medicine. Who won?

The winners this year were Catalan Carico and Drew Weissman. These were the scientists that developed the modifications to make mRNA into a viable strategy for vaccines.

I think at this point, most of us are familiar with the impact of this work. So it stands to make a lot of sense that they were awarded for this research.

This was the key to the COVID vaccines. That's right. So compared to conventional vaccines, those are vaccines that typically use fragments of vaccines.

They use fragments of viruses that are introduced to the body. The mRNA vaccine rather uses instructions for making a part of the virus. That makes it a lot more versatile and faster in terms of development.

The challenge with mRNA though is that it's a very fragile molecule that a lot of our bodies defenses destroy it very easily. It degrades very rapidly.

And so the challenge is try to making sure that it can actually be delivered intact and then be disposed of after it's done its job.

It took some convincing to get people on board with this technology. Like that they had been working on this for a very long time.

That's right. You know, this is obviously a long running process, decades of research. The challenge though is that with vaccines, because they're administered to so many people around the world, the standard for performance is actually very, very high.

And a lot of people really did not want to upset the conventional techniques that basically in order to do something different, the new technique had to be a lot better and prove itself to meet the same standards or exceed them.

Yeah, it's hard to break the mold. I mean, I love this prize because it's very personal to me. It's inside of me. I feel like it's less abstract than sometimes the Nobel prizes can be.

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