Are We Alone? - Science Radio for Thinking Species

When the Chinese developer of DeepSeek released its model R1, a rift opened up in Silicon Valley. The company, a relatively unknown player, appeared to have created a better and cheaper model than its American competitors. Some big voices in the tech world called it a “Sputnik moment.” Others worried that the open-source model would allow malicious actors to harness the power of this AI technology. But did the arrival of DeepSeek significantly change how artificial intelligence will unfold? We explore that question and ask whether one particular sci-fi franchise got it right when portraying our anxiety about runaway AI.

Guests:

Alex Kantrowitz – Tech journalist and founder of the podcast and newsletter Big Technology

Kristian Hammond – Professor of computer science at Northwestern University and Director of the Center for Advancing Safety of Machine Intelligence

Dorian Lynskey – podcaster and author of “Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World”

Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake

Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact advertising@airwavemedia.com to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.

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Everyone knows that a big rock wiped out the dinosaurs. But the danger from an asteroid hitting Earth is not limited to ancient history. To deal with this threat, scientists recently ran an experiment to deflect a potential “city killer.” We’ll hear the results of that experiment, and about a visit to another asteroid. In the dusty material NASA brought back from the asteroid Bennu, scientists found the chemical building blocks of life, including many of the amino acids that are found in our cells. Could an asteroid have brought the ingredients for life to ancient Earth? In this episode, we look at our paradoxical relationship with the space rocks that taketh way – and may help giveth - life.

Guests:

Scott Sandford - Astrophysicist and Research Scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center

Robin George Andrews - Science journalist, volcanologist, and author of "How to Kill an Asteroid: The Real Science of Planetary Defense"

Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake

Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact advertising@airwavemedia.com to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.

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Animals experience the world differently. There are insects that can see ultraviolet light, while some snakes can hunt in the dark thanks to their ability to sense infrared. Such differences are not restricted to vision: Elephants can hear subsonic sounds, birds navigate by magnetism, and your dog lives in a world marked by odors. In this episode, we speak to science journalist Ed Yong about how other creatures sense the world. Could we ever understand what it’s like to have the hearing of a bat or the sight of a hawk?

Guest:

Ed Yong – Science writer for The Atlantic whose coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic earned him a Pulitzer Prize in explanatory journalism. He is the author of, “An Immense World: How
Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us.”

Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake

Originally aired September 5, 2022

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We have an update to our recent episode, Skeptic Check: Drone Panic. If you remember, our guest astronomer Andrew Franknoi recalled the story of Jimmy Carter having seen something mysterious in the sky when he was governor of Georgia in 1969. Astronomers at the time suggested it was likely Venus, as has been the case with other sightings, and for decades that was a widely accepted understanding of what he saw. But there is more to the story, as was brought to our attention by multiple BPS listeners. So, we invited Andrew back to discuss the revised account, and its more satisfying scientific resolution.

Guest:

Andrew Fraknoi - Professor of Astronomy at the Fromm Institute of the University of San
Francisco

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When several mysterious objects were spotted flying over New Jersey, their unknown identity led to frightening rumors, and triggered frustration and alarm among some residents of the Garden State. What were these objects, and if they were drones, as some appeared to be, were they friendly or foe? Many of the objects have now been identified. We talk about what happened when calmer heads prevailed and consider what the Great Drone Panic might have
in common with other episodes involving objects cruising the skies. Also, why one expert thinks the event gave birth to a new UFO subculture.

Guests:

Andrew Fraknoi - Professor of Astronomy at the Fromm Institute of the University of San Francisco

Mick West - Investigator of conspiracy theories and UFO sightings

Greg Eghigian - Professor of history and bioethics at Penn State and author of “After the Flying Saucers Came: A Global History of the UFO Phenomenon”

Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake

Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact advertising@airwavemedia.com to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.

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While humans were leaving the Stone Age and entering the Bronze, some Bristlecone pine trees grew from seeds to sprouts. They’ve been growing ever since. These 5,000-year-old pines are among the oldest organisms on Earth. Superlatives are also appropriate for the towering redwoods. Trees are amazing in many ways. They provide us with timber and cool us with shade, they sequester carbon and release oxygen, and are home to countless species. But they are also marvels of evolutionary adaptation. We consider the beauty and diversity of trees, and learn why their future is intertwined with ours.

Guests:

Kevin Dixon - Naturalist at The East Bay Regional Park District, Oakland, California

Daniel Lewis - Environmental historian and senior curator for the History of Science and Technology at the Huntington Library, art museum and botanical gardens in Pasadena, California, professor of the natural sciences and the environment at Caltech, and author of “Twelve Trees: The Deep Roots of our Future”

Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake

Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact advertising@airwavemedia.com to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.

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After helping to sequence the human genome more than twenty years ago, biochemist Craig Venter seemed to recede from the public eye. But he hadn’t retired. He had gone to sea and taken his revolutionary sequencing tools with him. We chatted with him about his multi-year voyage aboard the research vessel Sorcerer II, its parallels to Darwin’s voyage, and the surprising discoveries his team made about the sheer number and diversity of marine microbes and their roles in ocean ecosystems.

Guests:

Craig Venter - Genomicist, biochemist, founder of the J. Craig Venter Institute, and co-author of “The Voyage of Sorcerer II: The Expedition that Unlocked the Secrets of the Ocean’s Microbiome.”

Jeff Hoffman - Lab manager at the J. Craig Venter Institute and expedition scientist on the Sorcerer II expedition.

Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake

Originally aired December 18, 2023

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Owls are both the most
accessible and elusive of birds. Every child can recognize one, but you’ll be
lucky to spot an owl in a tree, even if you’re looking straight at
it. Besides their camouflage and silent flight, these mostly nocturnal
birds, with their amazing vision and hearing, are most at home in the dead of
night, a time humans find alien and scary. Ecologist Carl Safina got to
know an injured baby screech owl well. Their relationship saved the owl’s life
and gave Safina insider’s wisdom about these aerial hunters of the night.
Guests:
Carl Safina – ecologist at
Stony Brook University, head of the non-profit Safina Center, and author of “Alfie
& Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe”
Tom Damiami – natural resources
interpreter, singer on Long Island, NY and leader of the Shelter Island Owl Prowl
Gordy Slack – science writer, former senior editor
of California Wild, the science and natural history magazine published by the
California Academy of Sciences
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
Originally aired November
6, 2023
Big Picture Science is
part of the Airwave Media podcast
network. Please contact advertising@airwavemedia.com to inquire about
advertising on Big Picture Science.
You
can get early access to ad-free versions of every episode by joining us
on Patreon. Thanks for your
support!
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Our information age is increasingly the disinformation age. The spread of lies and conspiracy theories has created competing experiences of reality. Facts are often useless for changing minds or even making compelling arguments. In this episode, author Naomi Klein and science philosopher Lee McIntyre discuss why the goal – not simply the byproduct - of spreading disinformation is to polarize society. They also offer ideas about how we might find our way back to a shared objective truth.
Guests:
Naomi Klein - Associate professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia and a co-director at the Center for Climate Justice. Author of Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World
Lee McIntyre - Philosopher of science and a research fellow at the Center for Philosophy and the History of Science at Boston University, and author of Post-Truth and On Disinformation.
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
Originally aired December 11, 2023
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“To live is to count and to count is to calculate.” But before we plugged in the computer to express this ethos, we pulled out the pocket calculator. It became a monarch of mathematics that sparked a computing revolution. But it’s not the only deceptively modest innovation that changed how we work and live. Find out how sewing a scrap of fabric into clothing helped define private life and how adding lines to paper helped build an Empire. Plus, does every invention entail irrevocable cultural loss?
Guests:
Keith Houston – author of “Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator.”
Hannah Carlson – teaches dress history and material culture at the Rhode Island School of Design, author of “Pockets: An Intimate History of How We Keep Things Close.”
Dominic Riley – bookbinder in the U.K.
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
*Originally aired October 30, 2023
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The SETI Institute’s search for alien biosignatures and technosignatures depends on radio telescopes. You may have seen the stunning photos of massive telescope arrays in the desert, but what types of alien signals might help researchers actually detect with those giant dishes?
In this fourth episode, Brian Edwards talks with physicist Chenoa Tremblay, a COSMIC Project Scientist who is based at the Very Large Array in New Mexico. They dig into the important role radio telescopes play in SETI, how powerful computers have supercharged the search for life off Earth, and imagine what kinds of biosignatures and technosignatures of alien life we are most likely to find.
Music by Jun Miyake
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This year has been a spectacular one for celestial phenomena. The northern lights delighted in unexpected ways while a total solar eclipse cast a shadow across North America. Those events were enough to make it a memorable year, but 2024 also shook up our understanding of the universe. A new reading of Voyager 2 data may explain Uranus’s weird magnetic field. And the impressive James Webb Space Telescope has detected an early and incredibly distant galaxy. Join us in our look back at some of the top space news from 2024.
Guests:
Andrew Fraknoi – Professor of Astronomy at the Fromm Institute at the University of San Francisco and SETI board member
Jamie Jasinski - space plasma physicist for the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and author of a recent paper re-examining data from the Voyager 2 mission, published in Nature.
Phil Plait - astronomer, author, science communicator and frequent contributor at Scientific American.
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact advertising@airwavemedia.com to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.
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Just because something is invisible doesn’t mean it isn’t there. We can’t see gases in our atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide, oxygen, and nitrogen, but we benefit from their presence with every breath we take. From the bubbles that effervesce in soda to the vapors that turn engines, gases are part of our lives. They fill our lungs, give birth to stars, and… well, how would we spot a good diner without glowing neon? In this episode, a materials scientist shares the history of some gaseous substances that we don’t usually see, but that make up our world.
Guest:
Mark Miodownik – Professor of materials and society at the University College London and the author of “It’s a Gas: The Sublime and Elusive Elements That Expand Our World.”
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact advertising@airwavemedia.com to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.
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Imagine life without animals, trees, and fungi. The world would look very different. But while the first life was surely single-celled, we don’t know just how it evolved to multicellular organisms. Two long-term experiments hope to find out, and one has been running for more than 35 years. Hear about the moment scientists watched evolution take off in the lab, and how directed evolution was used to create a multicellular organism. Also, how single embryonic cells become humans, and what all of this says about the possibility of life on other worlds.
Guests:
Jeff Barrick – molecular scientist at the University of Texas at Austin where his lab oversees the Long-Term Evolution Experiment that’s been running since 1988.
Will Ratcliff – an evolutionary biologist at Georgia Institute of Technology
Ben Stanger – cancer researcher, professor of medicine and developmental biology at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “From One Cell: A Journey into Life’s Origins and the Future of Medicine.”
Joseph L. Graves – evolutionary biologist and geneticist at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University and author of “A Voice in the Wilderness: A Pioneering Biologist Explains How Evolution Can Help Us Solve Our Biggest Problems.”
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
Originally aired October 9, 2023
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Near death experiences can be profound and even life changing. People describe seeing bright lights, staring into the abyss, or meeting dead relatives. Many believe these experiences to be proof of an afterlife.
But now, scientists are studying these strange events and gaining insights into the brain and consciousness itself. Will we uncover the scientific underpinning of these near-death events?
Guests:
Steve Paulson - executive producer of To the Best of Our Knowledge for Wisconsin Public Radio
Sebastian Junger - journalist, filmmaker and author of “The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea”
Christoph Koch - neuroscientist at the Allen Institute in Seattle and chief scientist of the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation in Santa Monica California
Daniel Kondziella - neuroscientist in the Department of Clinical Medicine at the University of Copenhagen
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
Originally aired September 25, 2023
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How do we know where to look for life on other planets? SETI scientists use analog sites on Earth, not only to study how life has evolved here, but the geological conditions that made it possible. Devon Island in Canada is one such analog. It's been called Mars on Earth.
In this third episode, Gary Niederhoff talks with planetary scientist Pascal Lee, co-founder of The Mars Institute, and principal investigator of the Haughton-Mars Project at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. They discuss how a remote arctic island offers clues about how liquid water once flowed on Mars, why the moons of the Red Planet are so mysterious, and Pascal’s discovery of a heretofore unrecognized Martian volcano in 2024.
Music by Jun Miyake
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You interact with about two-thirds of the elements of the periodic table every day. Some, like carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen, make up our bodies and the air we breathe. Yet there is also a class of elements so unstable they can only be made in a lab. These superheavy elements are the purview of a small group stretching the boundaries of chemistry. Can they extend the periodic table beyond the 118 in it now? Find out scientists are using particle accelerators to create element 120 and why they’ve skipped over element 119. Plus, if an element exists for only a fraction of a second in the lab, can we still say that counts as existing?
Guests:
Mark Miodownik – professor of materials and society at the University of College London and the author of “It’s a Gas: The Sublime and Elusive Elements That Expand Our World.”
Kit Chapman – Science historian at Falmouth University, author of “Superheavy; Making and Breaking the Periodic Table.”
Jennifer Pore – Research Scientist of Heavy Elements at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact advertising@airwavemedia.com to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.
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The Amazon is often described as an ecosystem under dire threat due to climate change and deliberate deforestation. Yet there is still considerable hope that these threats can be mitigated. In the face of these threats, indigenous conservationists are attempting to strike a balance between tradition and preserving Amazonia. Meanwhile, two river journeys more than 100 years apart – one by a contemporary National Geographic reporter and another by “The Lewis and Clark of Brazil”— draw attention to the beauty and diversity of one of the world’s most important ecosystems.
Guests:
Cynthia Gorney – Contributing writer at the National Geographic Society, former bureau chief for South America at The Washington Post
Larry Rohter – Reporter and correspondent in Rio de Janeiro for fourteen years for Newsweek and as The New York Times bureau chief. Author of Into the Amazon: The Life of Cândido Rondon, Trailblazing Explorer, Scientist, Statesman, and Conservationist
João Campos-Silva – Brazilian researcher and conservationist, and cofounder of Instituto Jura, a conservation organization. His work, along with that of other conservationists, is featured in the National Geographic issue devoted to the Amazon.
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact advertising@airwavemedia.com to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.
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A thousand years ago, most people didn’t own a single book. The only way to access knowledge was to consult their memory.
But technology – from paper to hard drives – has permitted us to free our brains from remembering countless facts. Alphabetization and the simple filing cabinet have helped to systematize and save information we might need someday.
But now that we can Google just about any subject, have we lost the ability to memorize information? Does this make our brains better or worse?
Guests:
Judith Flanders – Historian and author, most recently of A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order
Craig Robertson – Professor of Media Studies, Northeastern University and author of The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information
David Eagleman – Neuroscientist and author, Stanford University
Originally aired October 11, 2021
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact advertising@airwavemedia.com to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.
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Extreme heat is taking its toll on the natural world. We use words like “heat domes” and “freakish” to describe our everyday existence. These high temperatures aren’t only uncomfortable - they are lethal to humans, animals, and crops. In search of an answer to our episode’s question, we discuss the dilemma of an ever-hotter world with an author who has covered climate change for more than twenty years.
Guest:
Jeff Goodell – author of “The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet.”
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
*Originally aired October 2, 2023
Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact advertising@airwavemedia.com to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.
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They look like a cross between a beaver and a duck, and they all live Down Under. The platypus may lay eggs, but is actually a distant mammalian cousin, one that we last saw, in an evolutionary sense, about 166 million years ago.
Genetic sequencing is being used to trace that history, while scientists intensify their investigation of the habits and habitats of these appealing Frankencreatures; beginning by taking a census to see just how many are out there, and if their survival is under threat.
Guests:
Josh Griffiths – Senior Wildlife Ecologist at Cesaar Australia.
Jane Fenelon – Research fellow, University of Melbourne
Paula Anich – Professor of Natural Resources, Northland College
Wes Warren – Professor of Genomics, University of Missouri
Phoebe Meagher – Conservation Officer, Taronga Conservation Society, Australia
Originally aired August 2, 2021
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact advertising@airwavemedia.com to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.
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What is life? Even as the search for life in the universe evolves, surprisingly, there is no consensus on what life is. We must consider hunting for life not as we know it.
The existence of extremophiles on Earth has broadened the types of environments in which we might look for life elsewhere in our solar system. And recent missions to dwarf planets has shown that our solar system is replete with the geology that might harbor biology.
In this second episode, Shannon Geary talks with astrobiologist Nathalie Cabrol, the director of the Carl Sagan Center for Research at the SETI Institute about her early interest in astrobiology, meeting Carl Sagan, and the evolving definition of life.
Music by Jun Miyake
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The idea that the universe is made of tiny vibrating strings was once the science theory du jour. String theory promised to unite the disparate theories describing particles and gravity, and many people, not just scientists, were optimistic that a theory of everything might be within our grasp. But here we are, many years later, and string theory doesn’t seem to have delivered on its initial promise. What happened? We consider the science around string theory in this episode of Skeptic Check.
Guest:
Brian Greene – Physicist and mathematician at Columbia University, and author of The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory.
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
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Imagine tapeworms longer than the height of an adult human. Or microbes that turn their hosts into zombies. If the revulsion they induce doesn’t do it, the sheer number of parasites force us to pay attention. They are the most abundant form of animal life on Earth. Parasites can cause untold human suffering, like those that cause African River Blindness or Lyme disease, but their presence is also a sign of a health ecosystem. A parasitologist whose lab contains the largest parasite collection in the world gives us the ultimate inside story about these organisms.
Guest:
Scott Gardner - curator of parasites in the H.W. Manter Laboratory of Parasitology at the University of Nebraska State Museum, one of the largest collections of parasites in the world, and professor of biological sciences at University of Nebraska. Co-author of Parasites: The Inside Story.
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
Originally aired July 31, 2023
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Whether in miles or pounds, meters or kilograms, we take daily measure out our lives. But how did these units ever come to be, and why do we want to change them? From light-years to leap seconds, we look at the history of efforts to quantify our lives and why there’s always room for greater precision. Plus, we debate the virtues of staying imperial measurements vs. going metric.
Guest:
James Vincent - Author of Beyond Measure, the Hidden History of Measurement
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
Originally aired March 24, 2023
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As middle and high schools across the country implement new cell phone bans, we consider what drove this bold step and what science says about how digital devices affect our attention and focus. An assistant principal describes how his school implemented the ban, despite protest from students and parents, and what happened next.
Guests:
Alison - 14 year old high school student
Raymond Dolphin - eighth grade assistant principal at Illing Middle School in Manchester, Connecticut
Alan - 17 year old high school student
Gloria Mark - Psychologist, professor in the Department of Informatics at University of California, Irvine, author of book “Attention Span.”
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact sales@advertisecast.com to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.
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Air conditioning and refrigeration may beat the heat, but they also present a dilemma. The more we use them, the more greenhouse gases we emit, the hotter the planet becomes, and the more we require artificial cooling. Can we escape this feedback loop? We look at the origins of these chilling technologies, tour the extensive chain of cold that keeps food from perishing, and consider how a desert city like Phoenix could not exist without AC.
Guests:
Nicola Twilley – co-host of the Gastropod podcast, a contributing writer at The New Yorker, and the author of “Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves”
Erik Morrison – Chief cooling engineer at Transaera, Somerville, Massachusetts
Stan Cox – Lead scientist at the Land Institute, author of “Losing Our Cool: The Uncomfortable Truths about our Air-Conditioned World”
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact sales@advertisecast.com to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.
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Are we alone? The search for life in the universe is on!
For 40 years, the SETI Institute has been a leader in the search for life and intelligence beyond Earth. Recent discoveries, such as exoplanets, have brought us closer than ever to answering the question of whether we are alone in the universe. To honor the Institute’s pioneering past as we look ahead to its future, Big Picture Science presents a new monthly podcast series highlighting the groundbreaking research of the SETI Institute.
In this first episode, Molly talks with Bill Diamond, SETI Institute President and CEO, about the founding of the SETI Institute, radio telescope arrays, and the New Copernican Revolution.
Music by Jun Miyake
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Shipwrecks are scenes of tragedy, but they are also bits of history frozen in time that can provide insights into events and ideas from long ago. That is, if we can find them. From an 11th century Viking sailing ship to a WW II era British cargo ship with a mailbag of letters onboard amazingly preserved, an underwater archeologist takes us on a deep dive into history.
Guest:
David Gibbins - underwater archeologist, novelist, and the author of nonfiction, including his latest book, “The History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks”.
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact sales@advertisecast.com to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.
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Are we alone in the universe? Is there other intelligence out there? COSMIC, the most ambitious SETI search yet, hopes to answer that. We hear updates on this novel signal detection project being conducted on the Very Large Array in the desert of New Mexico.
Also, we chat with award-winning science fiction writer Ted Chiang about how he envisions making contact with aliens in his stories, including the one that was the basis for the movie Arrival. And find out why some scientists don’t want only to listen for signals, they want to deliberately transmit messages to aliens. Is that wise and, if we did it, what would we say?
Guests:
Chenoa Tremblay – Postdoc researcher in radio astronomy for the SETI Institute and member of COSMIC science team
Ted Chiang – Nebula and Hugo award-winning science fiction writer, best known for his collections, Stories of Your Life and Others and Exhalation
Douglas Vakoch – Founder and president of METI International, a nonprofit research and educational organization devoted to transmitting intentional signals to extraterrestrial civilizations
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
*Originally aired April 3, 2023
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Spewing lava and belching noxious fumes, volcanoes seem hostile to biology. But the search for life off-Earth includes the hunt for these hotheads on other moons and planets, and we tour some of the most imposing volcanoes in the Solar System.
Plus, a look at how tectonic forces reshape bodies from the moon to Venus to Earth. And a journey to the center of our planet reveals a surprising layer of material at the core-mantle boundary. Find out where this layer was at the time of the dinosaurs and what powerful forces drove it deep below.
Guests:
Samantha Hansen – Geologist at the University of Alabama
Paul Byrne – Associate professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis
Robin George Andrews – Science journalist and author of “Super Volcanoes: What They Reveal about Earth and the Worlds Beyond”
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
Originally aired May 29, 2023
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We have too much “bad fire.” Not only destructive wildfires, but the combustion that powers our automobiles and provides our electricity has generated a worrying rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide. And that is driving climate change which is adding to the frequency of megafires. Now we’re seeing those effects in “fire-clouds,” pyrocumulonimbus events.
But there’s such a thing as “good fire.” Indigenous peoples managed the land with controlled fires, reaped the benefits of doing so, and they’re bringing them back.
So after millions of years of controlling fire, is it time for us to revisit our attitudes and policies, not just with regard to combustion, but how we manage our wildfires?
Guests:
David Peterson - Meteorologist, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory
Stephen Pyne - Emeritus professor at Arizona State University, fire historian, urban farmer, author of “The Pyrocene: How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next”
Richard Wrangham - Ruth B. Moore Research Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University and author of "Catching Fire: How Coooking Made Us Human"
Margo Robbins - Co-founder and president of the Cultural Fire Management Council (CFMC), organizer of the Cultural Burn Training Exchange (TREX) that takes place on the Yurok Reservation twice a year, and an enrolled member of the Yurok Tribe
Originally aired May 9, 2022
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
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We’re hurtling towards a post-antibiotic world, as the overuse of antibiotics has given rise to dangerous drug-resistant bacteria. Can we fight back using viruses as weapons? An obscure medical therapy uses certain viruses called bacteriophages to treat infection. For a century attempts to turn phage-therapy into a life-saving treatment have faltered, but today there’s renewed interest in this approach. Can we use phages to forestall the antibiotic crisis?
Guests:
Claas Kirchhelle – Medical historian at the University College, Dublin
Tom Ireland – Journalist, editor of The Biologist and author of “The Good Virus: The Amazing Story and Forgotten Promise of the Phage”
Steffanie Strathdee – Associate Dean of Global Health Sciences at the University of California San Diego
Tom Patterson – Professor of psychiatry at the University of California San Diego
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
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Social media use among teens has risen alongside rates of anxiety and depression. Addressing what he calls a mental health crisis, the Surgeon General has called for warning labels on social media platforms akin to those on tobacco and alcohol. But this comes before scientific consensus has been reached that social media causes harm. We consider the evidence that social media may be eroding the mental health of Gen Z and a challenge to the claim that presents an alternative explanation for why young people are struggling.
Guests:
Alison – High schooler who wrote a column describing the positive and negative effects of social media
Zach Rausch – Associate Research Scientist at NYU-Stern School of Business and lead researcher to Social Psychologist Jonathan Haidt for his book, “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness”
Sarah Coyne – psychologist and Sarah Coyne Associate Director of the School of Family Life at Brigham Young University
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
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Have scientists discovered an alphabet in whale calls? As researchers try to decipher the series of clicks made by sperm whales, we ask whether these cetaceans might have language, and if it follows that whales are thinking animals too. Could we one day get a peek into the thoughts of a humpback whale? Meanwhile, somewhere along the long path of evolution, one species emerged with an impressive gift for gab. Are speech and language unique human superpowers?
Guests:
Carl Zimmer – Columnist, The New York Times, including the article, “Scientists Find an ‘Alphabet’ in Whale Songs”. (gift article)
Ev Fedorenko – Cognitive neuroscientist, director of the EV Lab, MIT
Tecumseh Fitch – Evolutionary biologist at the University of Vienna
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
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Runny nose. Itchy, watery eyes. Sneezing. If you don’t have allergies, you probably know someone who does. The number of people with allergies, including food allergies and eczema, is increasing. What is going on?
A medical anthropologist describes how our hygiene habits, our diets, and our polluted environment are irritating our bodies. Also, the case for skipping your shower. Is skin healthier when we stop lathering?
Guests:
James Hamblin – Preventive medicine physician and a lecturer in public health at Yale and author of Clean: the New Science of Skin
Theresa MacPhail – medical anthropologist, professor of science and technology studies at Stevens Institute of Technology and author of Allergic: Our Irritated Bodies in a Changing World.
*Originally aired July 3, 2023
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
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The powerful gene editing tool CRISPR is already being tested on animal and plant cells. It has even been used on humans. How might this revolutionary tool change our lives? On the one hand, it could cure inherited diseases and rid the world of malaria-spreading mosquitoes. On the other hand, scientists using it are accelerating evolution and introducing novel genetic combinations that could transform our biological landscape in unforeseen ways. We explore the ramifications of this revolutionary technology.
Guests:
Nathan Rose – Molecular biologist and head of malaria programs at U.K. based biotech company, Oxitec.
Hank Greely – Law professor and director of the Center for Law in the Biosciences at Stanford University and author of “CRISPR People: The Science and Ethics of Editing Humans.”
Antonio Regalado – Senior Editor for Biomedicine, MIT Technology Review.
*Originally aired April 17, 2023
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
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A canopy of stars in the night sky is more than breathtaking. Starlight is also an important tool that astronomers use to study our universe. But the growth of artificial light and light pollution are creating dramatic changes to the nighttime environment. Let your eyes adjust to the dark as we travel to a dark sky reserve to gaze upon an increasingly rare view of the Milky Way and explore what we lose when darkness disappears.
Guests:
Kim Arcand – Visualization scientist & emerging tech lead, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and author of “Light: The Visible Spectrum and Beyond".
Don Jolley – Teacher of Math and Sciences at the Bolinas School in Marin, California who has been leading dark sky tours for three decades.
Christopher Kyba – Interdisciplinary Geographic Information Sciences Research Fellow at Ruhr University Bochum.
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
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We are closer than ever to finding aliens according to astrophysicist Adam Frank. He isn’t alone in his optimism. Over the last two decades, the tools used to search for extraterrestrials have been advancing mightily. Where we were once only monitoring with radio telescopes, we are now actively looking for bio and technosignatures on exoplanets. Find out why scientists think new technology may be a game changer in the hunt for life off Earth.
Guest:
Adam Frank – Astrophysicist and author of a new book “The Little Book of Aliens”
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
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Electricity plays an important role in our everyday lives, including allowing our bodies to communicate internally. But some research claims electricity may be used to diagnose and treat disease? Could electric pulses one day replace medications?
We speak with experts about the growing field of bioelectric medicine and the evidence for electricity’s healing abilities. Their comments may shock you.
Guests:
Sally Adee – Science journalist, author of “We Are Electric: Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body’s Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds"
Samantha Payne – Assistant Professor of Biomedical Sciences at University of Guelph
Kevin Tracey – Neurosurgeon and President of the Feinstein Institute at Northwell Health
*Originally aired June 5, 2023
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
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Before everything could come up roses, there had to be a primordial flower – the mother, and father, of all flowers. Now scientists are on the hunt for it. The eFlower project aims to explain the sudden appearance of flowering plants in the fossil record, what Darwin called an “abominable mystery.”
Meanwhile, ancient flowers encased in amber or preserved in tar are providing clues about how ecosystems might respond to changing climates. And, although it was honed by evolution for billions of years, can we make photosynthesis more efficient and help forestall a global food crisis?
Guests:
Eva-Maria Sadowski - Post doctoral paleobotanist at the Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin
Regan Dunn - Paleobotanist and assistant Curator at the La Brea Tar Pits and Museum
Royal Krieger - Rosarian and volunteer at the Morcom Rose Garden, Oakland, California
Ruby Stephens - Plant ecology PhD candidate at Macquarie University in Australia, and member of the eFlower Project
Stephen Long - Professor of Plant Science, University of Illinois
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
*Originally aired March 13, 2023
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They’re cute and cuddly. But they can also be obnoxious.
Science writer Mary Roach has numerous tales about how our animal friends don’t always bow to their human overlords and behave the way we’d want. The resulting encounters, such as when gulls disrupt the Vatican’s Easter mass, make for amusing stories. But others, such as wolves threatening farmers’ livestock, can be tragic.
We hear what happens at the messy crossroads of human and wildlife encounters.
Guest:
Mary Roach – Author of bestselling nonfiction books, most recently “Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law.”
*Originally aired September 13, 2021
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
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Before you check your social media feeds today. And post. And post again. And get into an argument on Twitter, lose track of time and wonder where the morning went, consider that social media was never a natural way to socialize.
A cultural anthropologist weighs in on the evolutionary reasons humans can’t thrive on social media. And we hear about the signs that social media is on its way out. If that’s the case, what’s next?
Guests:
Max Fisher – Reporter for The New York Times, author of “The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World”
Douglas Rushkoff – Professor of media theory and digital economics at City University of New York, and author of “Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires”
Ian Bogost – Professor of Media Studies and computer science at Washington University in St. Louis and a contributing writer at The Atlantic.
Alex Mesoudi – Professor of Cultural Evolution at the University of Exeter, U.K.
*Originally aired February 20, 2023
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
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It’s not just facts that inform our decisions. They’re also guided by how those facts feel. From deciding whether to buckle our seat belts to addressing climate change, how we regard risk is subjective. In this extended conversation with an expert on the psychology of risk, find out about our exaggerated fears, as well as risks we don’t take seriously enough. Meanwhile, while experts warn society about the dangers of self-aware AI – are those warnings being heeded?
Guest:
David Ropeik – Professor emeritus Harvard University, and expert on the psychology of risk
*Originally aired April 10, 2023
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
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Ever heard of a beauty quark? How about a glueball? Physics is full of weird particles that leave many of us scratching our heads. But these tiny particles make up everything in the quantum world and in us and are the basis of the fundamental scientific theory called The Standard Model. But it doesn’t explain everything. It can’t account for dark matter or dark energy, for example. We find out whether new physics experiments might force us to rewrite the Standard Model. Plus, we discuss a NASA proposal to fly spacecraft close to the sun in search of new physics.
Guests:
Phil Plait – Aka the Bad Astronomer, former astronomer on Hubble, teacher, lecturer and debunker of conspiracy theories. He is also the author of a new book “Under Alien Skies: A Sightseer’s Guide to the Universe.”
Harry Cliff – Particle physicist at the University of Cambridge who works on the LHCb experiment at the largest particle physics laboratory in the world, CERN. He is the author of: “Space Oddities, The Mysterious Anomalies Challenging Our Understanding of the Universe.”
Slava Turyshev – Research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
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Has children’s play become too safe? Research suggests that efforts to prioritize safety harms children’s mental and physical development during play and contribute to anxiety. One solution: introduce risk into play. We visit an adventure playground where kids play unsupervised with anything from scraps of metal to hammers and nails. Plus, what are the evolutionary benefits of play? After all, we’re not the only species who like to roughhouse, sled, or chase balls. And, reclaiming play for those who have outgrown recess.
Guests:
David Toomey - Professor of English, University of Massachusetts. Amherst and author of “Kingdom of Play: What Ball-Bouncing Octopuses, Belly-Flopping Monkeys, and Mud-Sliding Elephants Reveal About Life Itself.”
Mariana Brussoni - Developmental psychologist who studies children's outdoor risky play, and professor at the University of British Columbia in the Faculty of Medicine
Yoni Kallai - Interim director, head playworker and co-founder of play:groundNYC
Peter Gray - Psychology researcher at Boston College and author of "Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life"
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
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How frequently do you think about fasteners like screws and bolts? Probably not very often. But some of them a storied history, dating back to Egypt in the 3rd century BC. They aren’t just ancient history. They help hold up our bridges and homes today. Join us as we dissect a handful of engineering inventions that keep our world spinning and intact.
Guests:
Roma Agrawal - structural engineer and author of "Nuts and Bolts: Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World (in a Big Way)"
Ron Gordon - watchmaker, New York City
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
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It was a radical idea a century ago, when Einstein said space and time can be bent, and gravity was really geometry. We hear how his theories inspire young minds even today.
At small scales, different rules apply: quantum mechanics and the Standard Model for particles. New experiments suggest that muons – cousins of the electron – may be telling us that the Standard Model is wrong. Also, where the physics of both the large and small apply, and why black holes have no hair.
Guests:
Hakeem Oluseyi – Astrophysicist, affiliated professor at George Mason University, and author of “A Quantum Life: My Unlikely Journey from the Street to the Stars”
Janna Levin – Professor of physics and astronomy, Barnard College at Columbia University
Mark Lancaster – Professor of particle physics, University of Manchester
*Originally aired August 16, 2021
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
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Above the Arctic Circle, much of the land is underlaid by permafrost. But climate change is causing it to thaw. This is not good news for the planet.
As the carbon rich ground warms, microbes start to feast… releasing greenhouse gases that will warm the Earth even more.
Another possible downside was envisioned by a science-fiction author. Could ancient pathogens–released from the permafrost’s icy grip–cause new pandemics? We investigate what happens when the far north defrosts.
Guests:
Jacquelyn Gill – Associate professor of paleoecology at the University of Maine.
Jim Shepard – Novelist and short story writer, and teacher of English at Williams College, and author of “Phase Six.”
Scott Saleska – Global change ecologist, professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona, and co-founder of IsoGenie.
Originally aired September 6, 2021
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
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Birds have it going on. Many of these winged dinosaurs delight us with their song and brilliant plumage. Migratory birds travel thousands of miles in a display of endurance that would make an Olympic athlete gasp.
We inquire about these daunting migrations and how birds can fly for days without rest. And what can we do to save disappearing species? Will digital tracking technology help? Plus, how 19th century bird-lovers, appalled by feathered hats, started the modern conservation movement.
Guests:
Scott Weidensaul – Ornithologist and naturalist and author of “A World on the Wing: the Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds.”
Kassandra Ford – Doctoral candidate in evolutionary biology at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
Michelle Nijhuis – Science journalist and author of “Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction.”
Originally aired May 10, 2021
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
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The zombie eco-thriller “The Last of Us” has alerted us to the threats posed by fungi. But the show is not entirely science fiction. Our vulnerability to pathogenic fungi is more real than many people imagine.
Find out what human activity drives global fungal threats, including their menace to food crops and many other species. Our high body temperature has long kept lethal fungi in check; but will climate change cause fungi to adapt to warmer temperatures and threaten our health?
Plus, a radically new way to think about these organisms, how they make all life possible, and how we might find balance again.
Guests:
Emily Monosson – Toxicologist who writes about changes in the natural world. A member of the Ronin Institute and a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, she is the author of “Blight: Fungi and the Coming Pandemic.”
Arturo Casadevall – Microbiologist, immunologist, professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
Michael Hathaway – Anthropologist, director of the Asian Studies Center at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, and author of “What a Mushroom Lives For.”
*originally aired February 13, 2023
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Drinking a cup of coffee is how billions of people wake up every morning. But climate change is threatening this popular beverage. Over 60% of the world’s coffee species are at risk of extinction. Scientists are searching for solutions, including hunting for wild, forgotten coffee species that are more resilient to our shifting climate. Find out how the chemistry of coffee can help us brew coffee alternatives, and how coffee grounds can be part of building a sustainable future.
Guests:
Christopher Hendon - Assistant Professor of Computational Materials Chemistry, University of Oregon
Shannon Kilmartin-Lynch - Associate Professor of Civil Engineering, Monash University, Australia
Aaron Davis - Senior Research Leader of Crops and Global Change, Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
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The Great North American Solar Eclipse will trace a path of shadow across Mexico and 13 U.S. States on April 8th. Phil Plait, also known as The Bad Astronomer, joins the show for an extended interview covering a wide-range of topics, such as his excitement about the eclipse, the Pentagon’s most recent UFO report, and some of the most persistent moon landing conspiracy theories.
Guest:
Phil Plait – aka the Bad Astronomer, former astronomer on Hubble, teacher, lecturer, and debunker of conspiracy theories. He is also the author of a new book “Under Alien Skies: A Sightseer’s Guide to the Universe.”
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
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Asteroids are rich in precious metals and other valuable resources. But mining them presents considerable challenges. We discuss these, and consider how these spinning, rocky resources might be the key to a space-faring future. But an economist points out the consequences of bringing material back to Earth, and a scientist raises an ethical question; do we have an obligation to keep the asteroids intact for science?
Guests:
Jim Bell - Planetary scientist in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University.
Martin Elvis - Astronomer and author of “Asteroids: How Love, Fear, and Greed Will Determine Our Future in Space.”
Ian Lange - Economist and associate professor at the Colorado School of Mines and author of a paper on the feasibility of asteroid mining.
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
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Standing on your own two feet isn’t easy. While many animals can momentarily balance on their hind legs, we’re the only critters, besides birds, for whom bipedalism is completely normal. Find out why, even though other animals are faster, we’re champions at getting around. Could it be that our upright stance made us human? Plus, why arches help stiffen feet, the argument for bare-footin’, and 12,000-year old footprints that tell a story about an Ice Age mother, her child, and a sloth.
Guests:

Daniel Lieberman – Professor of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University.

Jeremy DeSilva – Professor in the departments of anthropology and biological sciences, Dartmouth College, and author of “First Steps: How Upright Walking Made Us Human.”

Madhusudhan Venkadesan – Professor of mechanical engineering and materials science, Yale University School of Engineering.

David Bustos – Chief of Resources at White Sands, National Park, New Mexico.

Sally Reynolds – Paleontologist at Bournemouth University, U.K.

Originally aired May 24, 2021
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
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The Supreme Court’s ruling on Roe has ignited fierce debate about bodily autonomy. But it’s remarkable how little we know about female physiology. Find out what studies have been overlooked by science, and what has been recently learned. Plus, why studying women’s bodies means being able to say words like “vagina” without shame ... a researcher who is recreating a uterus in her lab to study endometriosis … and an overdue recognition of medical pioneer Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler.
Guests:
Melody T. McCloud - Obstetrician Gynecologist and Founder and Medical Director of Atlanta Women's Health Care; co-author of “Black Women's Wellness: Your ‘I've Got This!’ Guide to Health, Sex, and Phenomenal Living”
Victoria Gall - Volunteer with the Friends of the Hyde Park Library and the Hyde Park Historical Society
Rachel E. Gross - Science journalist and author of “Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage”
Linda Griffith - Professor of Biological and Mechanical Engineering at M.I.T., Director of the Center for Gynepathology Research, and author of the Boston Globe article, “‘FemTech’ and a moonshot for menstruation science”
Roshni Babal - Pediatric Asthma and Chronic Disease Program Coordinator at Boston Medical Center
Perri Klass - Professor of Journalism and Pediatrics at New York University and Author of “The Best Medicine: How Science and Public Health Gave Children a Future”
**Originally aired October 31, 2022
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
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A century ago, British archaeologist Howard Carter opened the only surviving intact tomb from ancient Egypt. Inside was the mummy of the boy king Tutankhamun, together with “wonderful things” including a solid gold mask.
Treasure from King Tut’s crypt has been viewed both in person and virtually by many people since. We ask what about Egyptian civilization so captivates us, thousands of years later. Also, how new technology from modern physics allows researchers to “X-Ray” the pyramids to find hidden chambers.
Guests:
Emma Bentley – Postgraduate student in Archeology and Ancient Worlds at the University of Edinburgh in the U.K.
Sarah Parcak – Archaeologist and Egyptologist, University of Alabama, and author of “Archaeology From Space: How the Future Shapes Our Past.”
Richard Kouzes – Physicist at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
Salima Ikram – Professor of Egyptology at The American University in Cairo and head of the Animal Mummy Project at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
*Originally aired December 12, 2022
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
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The discovery of a massive amount of lithium under the Salton Sea could make the U.S. lithium independent. The metal is key for batteries in electric vehicles and solar panels. But the area is also a delicate ecosystem. We go to southern California to hear what hangs in the balance of the ballooning lithium industry, and also how we extract other crucial substances – such as sand, copper and iron– and turn them into semiconductors, circuitry and other products upon which the modern world depends.
Guests:
Ed Conway – economics and data editor of Sky News and columnist for the Times in London. He’s the author of “Material World, The Six Raw Materials that Shape Modern Civilization“.
Frank Ruiz – Audubon California Salton Sea Program Director.
Michael McKibben – Geologist, University of California, Riverside.
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
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Whales are aliens on Earth; intelligent beings who have skills for complex problem-solving and their own language. Now in what’s being called a breakthrough, scientists have carried on an extended conversation with a humpback whale. They share the story of this remarkable encounter, their evidence that the creature understood them, and how the experiment informs our Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. After all, what good is it to make contact with ET if we can’t communicate?
Guests:
Brenda McCowan – Research behaviorist at the University of California Davis in the School of Veterinary Medicine who studies the ecological aspects of animal behavior and communication.
Fred Sharpe – whale biologist and behavioral ecologist at Simon Fraser University and member of the Templeton Whale SETI Team.
Laurance Doyle – astrophysicist and information theory researcher at the SETI Institute.
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
You can get early access to ad-free versions of every episode by joining us on Patreon. Thanks for your support!
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By one estimate the average American home has 300,000 objects. Yet our ancient ancestors had no more than what they could carry with them. How did we go from being self-sufficient primates to nonstop shoppers? We examine the evolutionary history of stuff through the lens of archeology beginning with the ancestor who first picked up a palm-sized rock and made it into a tool.
Guest:
Chip Colwell - archeologist and former Curator of Anthropology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, editor-in-chief of the digital magazine Sapiens, and author of “So Much Stuff: How Humans Discovered Tools, Invented Meaning, and Made More of Everything.”
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
You can get early access to ad-free versions of every episode by joining us on Patreon. Thanks for your support!
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You are getting sleeeepy and open to suggestion. But is that how hypnotism works? And does it really open up a portal to the unconscious mind? Hypnotism can be an effective therapeutic tool, and some scientists suggest replacing opioids with hypnosis for pain relief. And yet, the performance aspect of hypnotism often seems at odds with the idea of it being an effective treatment.
In our regular look at critical thinking, Skeptic Check, we ask what part of hypnotism is real and what is an illusion. Plus, we discuss how the swinging watch became hypnotism’s irksome trademark.
Guests:
David Spiegel – Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Stanford University School of Medicine
Devin Terhune – Reader in the Department of Psychology, Goldsmiths University of London
*Originally aired June 27, 2022
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
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With planets and moons, it’s what’s inside that counts. If we want to understand surface features, like volcanoes, or their history, such as how the planet formed or whether it’s suitable for life, we study their interiors. Astronomer Sabine Stanley takes us on a journey to the centers of Venus, Saturn’s large moon Titan, Jupiter’s moon Io, and of course Earth, to help us understand how they, and the solar system, came to be.
Guest:
Sabine Stanley - Planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University and the author of What’s Hidden Inside Planets.
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
You can get early access to ad-free versions of every episode by joining us on Patreon. Thanks for your support!
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Worried that AI will replace you? It may not seem like the Hollywood writers’ strike has anything in common with the Luddite rebellion in England in 1811, but they are surprisingly similar. Today we use the term “Luddite” dismissively to describe a technophobe, but the original Luddites – cloth workers – organized and fought Industrial Revolution automation and the factory bosses who were replacing humans with cotton spinning machines and steam powered looms. Find out what our age of AI can learn from textile workers of 200 years ago about keeping humans in the loop.
Guest:
Brian Merchant - Los Angeles Times tech columnist and author of “Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech”
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact advertising@airwavemedia.com to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.
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By one estimate we spend a fifth of our lives watching movies or TV. In fact, we consume entertainment almost as habitually as we eat or sleep, activities that receive scientific scrutiny and study. So why not consider the effects that watching movies and TV have on our minds and bodies too? When we do, we find that they are not mere escapism. A data scientist reveals why we are what we watch, and how scientists and filmmakers work, often with competing agendas, to create sci-fi entertainment.
Guest:
Walt Hickey - journalist, data scientist, and author of “You Are What You Watch: How Movies and TV Affect Everything”
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact advertising@airwavemedia.com to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.
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We present a grab bag of our favorite recent science stories – from how to stop aging to the mechanics of cooking pasta. Also, in accord with our eclectic theme – the growing problem of space junk.
Guests:

Anthony Wyss-Coray – Professor of neuroscience at Stanford University

Oliver O’Reilly – Professor of mechanical engineering, University of California Berkeley.

Moriba Jah – Professor of aerospace and engineering mechanics, University of Texas

Originally aired March 1, 2021
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
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Maybe you don’t remember the days of the earliest coal-fired stoves. They changed domestic life, and that changed society. We take you back to that era, and to millennia prior when iron was first smelt, and even earlier, when axe-handles were first fashioned from wood, as we explore how three essential materials profoundly transformed society.
We were once excited about coal’s promise to provide cheap energy, and how iron would lead to indestructible bridges, ships, and buildings. But they also caused some unintended problems: destruction of forests, greenhouse gases and corrosion. Did we foresee where the use of wood, coal, and iron would lead? What lessons do they offer for our future?
Guests:
Jonathan Waldman – Author of Rust: The Longest War.
Ruth Goodman – Historian of British social customs, presenter of a number of BBC television series, including Tudor Monastery Farm, and the author of The Domestic Revolution: How the Introduction of Coal into Victorian Homes Changed Everything.
Roland Ennos – Professor of biological sciences at the University of Hull and author of The Age of Wood: Our Most Useful Material and the Construction of Civilization.
**Originally aired February 1, 2021
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
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After helping to sequence the human genome more than twenty years ago, biochemist Craig Venter seemed to recede from the public eye. But he hadn’t retired. He had gone to sea and taken his revolutionary sequencing tools with him. We chatted with him about his multi-year voyage aboard the research vessel Sorcerer II, its parallels to Darwin’s voyage, and the surprising discoveries his team made about the sheer number and diversity of marine microbes and their roles in ocean ecosystems.
Guests:
Craig Venter - Genomicist, biochemist, founder of the J. Craig Venter Institute, and co-author of “The Voyage of Sorcerer II: The Expedition that Unlocked the Secrets of the Ocean’s Microbiome.”
Jeff Hoffman - Lab manager at the J. Craig Venter Institute and expedition scientist on the Sorcerer II expedition.
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
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Our information age is increasingly the disinformation age. The spread of lies and conspiracy theories has created competing experiences of reality. Facts are often useless for changing minds or even making compelling arguments. In this episode, author Naomi Klein and science philosopher Lee McIntyre discuss why the goal – not simply the byproduct - of spreading disinformation is to polarize society. They also offer ideas about how we might find our way back to a shared objective truth.
Guests:
Naomi Klein - Associate professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia and a co-director at the Center for Climate Justice. Author of Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World
Lee McIntyre - Philosopher of science and a research fellow at the Center for Philosophy and the History of Science at Boston University, and author of Post-Truth and On Disinformation.
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcastnetwork. Please contact advertising@airwavemedia.com to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science. You can get early access to ad-free versions of every episode by joining us on Patreon. Thanks for your support!

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Nothing lasts forever. Even the universe has several possible endings. Will there be a dramatic Big Rip or a Big Chill­–also known as the heat death of the universe–in trillions of years? Or will vacuum decay, which could theoretically happen at any moment, do us in? Perhaps the death of a tiny particle – the proton – will bring about the end.
We contemplate big picture endings in this episode, and whether one could be brought about by our own machine creations.
Guests:
Anders Sandberg – Researcher at
the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford
Katie Mack – Assistant professor of physics at North Carolina State
University, and the author of “The End of Everything, Astrophysically
Speaking.”
Brian Greene – Brian Greene, professor of physics and mathematics at
Columbia, and author of “Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our
Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe”
Originally aired May 3, 2021
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact advertising@airwavemedia.com to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.
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The world is a colorful place, and human eyes have evolved to take it in – from vermillion red to bright tangerine to cobalt blue. But when we do, are you and I seeing the same thing?
Find out why color perception is a trick of the brain, and why you and I may not see the same shade of green. Or blue. Or red. Also, platypuses and the growing club of fluorescent mammals, and the first new blue pigment in more than two centuries.
Guests:
Paula Anich – Associate Professor of Natural Resources, Northland College
Michaela Carlson – Assistant Professor of Chemistry, Northland College
Rob DeSalle – Curator at the American Museum of Natural History, and co-author of “A Natural History of Color: the Science Behind What We See and How We See It”
Mas Subramanian – Professor of Materials Science at Oregon State University
originally aired March 8, 2021
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact advertising@airwavemedia.com to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.
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T-Rex is having an identity crisis. Rocking the world of paleontology is the claim that Rex was not one species, but actually three. It’s not the first time that this particular dino has forced us to revise our understanding of the past. The discovery of the first T-Rex fossil in the 19th century taught humanity a scary lesson: species eventually go extinct. If it happened to this seemingly invincible apex predator, it could happen to us too.
Hear how the amateur fossil hunter Barnum Brown’s discovery of T-Rex changed our understanding of ourselves, and the epilogue to the dinosaur era: how our mammalian relatives survived the potential extinction bottleneck of an asteroid impact.
Guests:
Thomas Carr - Vertebrate paleontologist and Professor of Biology, Carthage College
Peter Makovicky - Vertebrate paleontologist and Professor of paleontology in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Minnesota
David Randall - Author of “The Monster’s Bones: The Discovery of T Rex and How It Shook Our World”
Steve Brusatte - Personal Chair of Paleontology and Evolution, University of Edinburgh. Author of “The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs” and, most recently, “The Rise and Reign of The Mammals”
Originally aired October 17, 2022
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
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Back off, you Neanderthal! It sounds as if you’ve just been dissed, but maybe you should take it as a compliment. Contrary to common cliches, our Pleistocene relatives were clever, curious, and technologically inventive. Find out how our assessment of Neanderthals has undergone a radical rethinking, and hear about the influence they have as they live on in our DNA. For example, some of their genes have a strong association with severe Covid 19 infection. Plus, how Neanderthal mini-brains grown in a lab will teach us about the evolution of Homo sapiens.
Guests:

Svante Pääbo – Evolutionary geneticist and Director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

Doyle Stevick – Associate professor of educational leadership and policies at the University of South Carolina.

Beverly Brown – Professor emerita of anthropology, Rockland Community College, New York.

Rebecca Wragg Sykes – Paleolithic anthropologist, author of “Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art.”

Alysson Muotri – Neuroscientist and professor of pediatrics, cellular and molecular medicine at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine

Originally aired March 22, 2021
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
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Owls are both the most accessible and elusive of birds. Every child can recognize one, but you’ll be lucky to spot an owl in a tree, even if you’re looking straight at it. Besides their camouflage and silent flight, these mostly nocturnal birds, with their amazing vision and hearing, are most at home in the dead of night, a time humans find alien and scary. Ecologist Carl Safina got to know an injured baby screech owl well. Their relationship saved the owl’s life and gave Safina insider’s wisdom about these aerial hunters of the night.
Guests:
Carl Safina – ecologist at Stony Brook University, head of the non-profit Safina Center, and author of “Alfie & Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe”
Tom Damiami – natural resources interpreter, singer on Long Island, NY and leader of the Shelter Island Owl Prowl
Gordy Slack – science writer, former senior editor of California Wild, the science and natural history magazine published by the California Academy of Sciences
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact advertising@airwavemedia.com to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.
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“To live is to count and to count is to calculate.” But before we plugged in the computer to express this ethos, we pulled out the pocket calculator. It became a monarch of mathematics that sparked a computing revolution. But it’s not the only deceptively modest innovation that changed how we work and live. Find out how sewing a scrap of fabric into clothing helped define private life and how adding lines to paper helped build an Empire. Plus, does every invention entail irrevocable cultural loss?
Guests:
Keith Houston – author of “Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator.”
Hannah Carlson – teaches dress history and material culture at the Rhode Island School of Design, author of “Pockets: An Intimate History of How We Keep Things Close.”
Dominic Riley – bookbinder in the U.K.
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact advertising@airwavemedia.com to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.
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Every second, lightning strikes 50 to 100 times somewhere. It can wreak havoc by starting wildfires and sometimes killing people. But lightning also produces a form of nitrogen that’s essential to vegetation. In this episode, we talk about the nature of these dramatic sparks. Ben Franklin established their electric origin, so what do we still not know? Also, why the frequency of lightning strikes is increasing in some parts of the world. And, what to do if you find someone hit by lightning.
Guests:
Thomas Yeadaker – Resident of Oakland, California
Chris Davis – Medical doctor and Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at Wake Forest University and Medical Director for the National Center for Outdoor Adventure Education
Jonathan Martin – Professor of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Steve Ackerman – Professor of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Peter Bieniek – Professor of Atmospheric and Space Science, University of Alaska, Fairbanks
*Originally aired September 12, 2022
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
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Poisonous snakes, lightning strikes, a rogue rock from space. There are plenty of scary things to fret about, but are we burning adrenaline on the right ones? Stepping into the bathtub is more dangerous than flying from a statistical point of view, but no one signs up for “fear of showering” classes.
Find out why we get tripped up by statistics, worry about the wrong things, and how the “intelligence trap” not only leads smart people to make dumb mistakes, but actually causes them to make more.
Guests:
Eric Chudler – Research associate professor, department of bioengineering, University of Washington, Seattle and co-author of “Worried: Science Investigates Some of Life’s Common Concerns”
Lise Johnson – Director of the Basic Science Curriculum, Rocky Vista University, and co-author of “Worried: Science Investigates Some of Life’s Common Concerns”
Willie Turner – Vice President of Operations at the Hiller Aviation Museum in San Carlos, CA
Charles Wheelan – Senior Lecturer and Policy Fellow, Dartmouth College, and author of “Naked Statistics”
David Robson – Commissioning Editor for the BBC and author of “The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Make Dumb Mistakes”
*Originally aired May 27, 2019
Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact advertising@airwavemedia.com to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.
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Imagine life without animals, trees, and fungi. The world would look very different. But while the first life was surely single-celled, we don’t know just how it evolved to multicellular organisms. Two long-term experiments hope to find out, and one has been running for more than 35 years. Hear about the moment scientists watched evolution take off in the lab, and how directed evolution was used to create a multicellular organism. Also, how single embryonic cells become humans, and what all of this says about the possibility of life on other worlds.
Guests:
Jeff Barrick – molecular scientist at the University of Texas at Austin where his lab oversees the Long-Term Evolution Experiment that’s been running since 1988.
Will Ratcliff - an evolutionary biologist at Georgia Institute of Technology
Ben Stanger - cancer researcher, professor of medicine and developmental biology at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “From One Cell: A Journey into Life’s Origins and the Future of Medicine.”
Joseph L. Graves - evolutionary biologist and geneticist at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University and author of “A Voice in the Wilderness: A Pioneering Biologist Explains How Evolution Can Help Us Solve Our Biggest Problems.”
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact advertising@airwavemedia.com to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.
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Extreme heat is taking its toll on the natural world. We use words like “heat domes” and “freakish” to describe our everyday existence. These high temperatures aren’t only uncomfortable - they are lethal to humans, animals, and crops. In search of an answer to our episode’s question, we discuss the dilemma of an ever-hotter world with an author who has covered climate change for more than twenty years.
Guest:
Jeff Goodell – author of “The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet.”
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact advertising@airwavemedia.com to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.
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Near death experiences can be profound and even life changing. People describe seeing bright lights, staring into the abyss, or meeting dead relatives. Many believe these experiences to be proof of an afterlife.
But now, scientists are studying these strange events and gaining insights into the brain and consciousness itself. Will we uncover the scientific underpinning of these near-death events?
Guests:
Steve Paulson - executive producer of To the Best of Our Knowledge for Wisconsin Public Radio
Sebastian Junger - journalist, filmmaker and author of “The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea”
Christoph Koch - neuroscientist at the Allen Institute in Seattle and chief scientist of the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation in Santa Monica California
Daniel Kondziella - neuroscientist in the Department of Clinical Medicine at the University of Copenhagen
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
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Have you ever heard worms arguing? Deep-sea scientists use hydrophones to eavesdrop on “mouth-fighting worms.” It’s one of the many ways scientists are trying to catalog the diversity of the deep oceans — estimated to be comparable to a rainforest.
But the clock is ticking. While vast expanses of the deep sea are still unexplored, mining companies are ready with dredging vehicles to strip mine the seafloor, potentially destroying rare and vulnerable ecosystems. Are we willing to eradicate an alien landscape that we haven’t yet visited?
Guests:
Craig McClain - deep-sea and evolutionary biologist and ecologist, Executive Director of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium.
Steve Haddock - senior scientist at the Monetary Bay Aquarium Research Institute, and co-author of a New York Times op-ed about the dangers of mining.
Emily Hall - marine chemist at the Mote Marine Laboratory, Sarasota, Florida
Chong Chen - deep sea biologist with the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC)
*Originally aired November 23, 2020
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Brace yourself for heatwave “Lucifer.” Dangerous deadly heatwaves may soon be so common that we give them names, just like hurricanes. This is one of the dramatic consequences of just a few degrees rise in average temperatures.
Also coming: Massive heat “blobs” that form in the oceans and damage marine life, and powerful windstorms called “derechos” pummeling the Midwest.
Plus, are fungal pathogens adapting to hotter temperatures and breaching the 98.6 F thermal barrier that keeps them from infecting us?
Guests:
Kathy Baughman McLeod – director and senior vice president of the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center at The Atlantic Council
Pippa Moore – Marine ecologist at Newcastle University in the U.K.
Ted Derouin – Michigan farmer
Jeff Dukes – Ecologist and director of Purdue Climate Change Research Center at Purdue University.
Arturo Casadevall – Molecular microbiologist and immunologist at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine
Originally aired October 19, 2020
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Ready to become a space emigre? For half a century, visionaries have been talking about our future off-Earth – a speculative scenario in which many of us live in space colonies. So why haven’t we built them? Will the plans of billionaire space entrepreneurs to build settlements on Mars, or orbiting habitats that would be only minutes away from Earth, revive our long-held spacefaring dreams? And is having millions of people living off-Earth a solution to our problems… or an escape from them?
Guests:
Marianne Dyson – Author and former NASA flight controller
Emily St. John Mandel – Author, most recently of “Sea of Tranquility”
John Adams – Deputy Director, Biosphere 2, University of Arizona
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
*Originally aired July 25, 2022
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Birds and bees do it … and so do fish. In a discovery that highlights the adaptive benefits of walking, scientists have discovered fish that can walk on land. Not fin-flap their bodies, mind you, but ambulate like reptiles.
And speaking of which, new research shows that T Rex, the biggest reptile of them all, wasn’t a sprinter, but could be an efficient hunter by outwalking its prey.
Find out the advantage of legging it, and how human bipedalism stacks up. Not only is walking good for our bodies and brains, but not walking can change your personality and adversely affect your health.
Guests:
Hans Larsson – Paleontologist and biologist, and Director of the Redpath Museum at McGill University in Montréal.
Shane O’Mara – Neuroscientist and professor of experimental brain research at Trinity College Dublin. He is the author of “In Praise of Walking.”
Brooke Flammang – Biologist at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.
Originally aired October 5, 2020
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Your daily mucus output is most impressive. Teaspoons or measuring cups can’t capture its entire volume. Find out how much your body churns out and why you can’t live without the viscous stuff. But slime in general is remarkable. Whether coating the bellies of slithery creatures, sleeking the surface of aquatic plants, or dripping from your nose, its protective qualities make it one of the great inventions of biology. Join us as we venture to the land of ooze!
Guests:
Christopher Viney - Professor of materials science and engineering at the University of California, Merced
Katharina Ribbeck - Bioengineer at MIT
Anna Rose Hopkins - Chef and partner at Hank and Bean in Los Angeles
Ruth Kassinger - author of “Slime: How Algae Created Us, Plague Us, and Just Might Save Us”
*Originally aired January 27, 2020
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“Diversity or die” could be your new health mantra. Don’t boost your immune system, cultivate it! Like a garden, your body’s defenses benefit from species diversity. Find out why multiple strains of microbes, engaged in a delicate ballet with your T-cells, join internal fungi in combatting disease. Plus, global ecosystems also depend on the diversity of its tiniest members; so what happens when the world’s insects bug out?
Guests:

Matt Richtel – Author, most recently, of “An Elegant Defense: The Extraordinary New Science of The Immune System”

Rob Dunn – Biologist and professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at North Carolina State University. Author of “Never Home Alone”

David Underhill – Professor of medicine, Cedars-Sinai Hospital, Los Angeles, California

Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson – Professor in conservation biology at the Institute for Ecology and Nature Management at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. Author of “Buzz, Sting, Bite: Why We Need Insects”

Originally aired August 12, 2019
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UFOs are back. This time they’ve landed on Capitol Hill in the form of a public, congressional hearing. We watched the hearing with great interest, but felt dissatisfied when it came to evidence. Claims that the government has alien technology are obviously tantalizing. So tantalizing, in fact, that it’s easy to overlook logical fallacies in how these claims are presented. We identify a few of the missteps. But what would convince you that the government is aware of alien visitation? Is the word of an authority figure all we need to accept that “they’re here?”
Guests:
Benjamin Radford - Research fellow with the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry
Nadia Drake - Science journalist and member of NASA’s UAP group
James McGaha - Retired military pilot and astronomer he's a longtime investigator of UFO reports and claims and he's a scientific consultant to the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry
Mick West - A skeptical investigator who looks at claims of UFOs
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
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Imagine tapeworms longer than the height of an adult human. Or microbes that turn their hosts into zombies. If the revulsion they induce doesn’t do it, the sheer number of parasites force us to pay attention. They are the most abundant form of animal life on Earth. Parasites can cause untold human suffering, like those that cause African River Blindness or Lyme disease, but their presence is also a sign of a health ecosystem. A parasitologist whose lab contains the largest parasite collection in the world gives us the ultimate inside story about these organisms.
Guest:
Scott Gardner - curator of parasites in the H.W. Manter Laboratory of Parasitology at the University of Nebraska State Museum, one of the largest collections of parasites in the world, and professor of biological sciences at University of Nebraska. Co-author of Parasites: The Inside Story.
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
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Whether in miles or pounds, meters or kilograms, we take daily measure out our lives. But how did these units ever come to be, and why do we want to change them? From light-years to leap seconds, we look at the history of efforts to quantify our lives and why there’s always room for greater precision. Plus, we debate the virtues of staying imperial measurements vs. going metric.
Guest:
James Vincent - Author of Beyond Measure, the Hidden History of Measurement
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
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Thinking small can sometimes achieve big things. A new generation of diminutive robots can enter our bodies and deal with medical problems such as intestinal blockages. But do we really want them swimming inside us, even if they’re promising to help? You might change your mind when you hear what else is cruising through our bloodstream: microplastics!
We take a trip into the human body, beginning with the story of those who first dared to open it up for medical purposes. But were the first surgeons really cavemen?
Guests:

Ira Rutkow – Surgeon and writer, and author of “Empire of the Scalpel: The History of Surgery”

Dick Vethaak – Emeritus professor of ecotoxicology, water quality and health at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (Free University, Amsterdam) in The Netherlands

Li Zhang – Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Michael LaBarbera – Professor in organismal biology, anatomy and geophysical sciences, University of Chicago

Originally aired June 20, 2022
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
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Do we have physical evidence of the last day of the dinosaurs? We consider fossilized fish in South Dakota that may chronicle the dramatic events that took place when, 66 million years ago, a large asteroid slammed into the Gulf of Mexico and caused three-quarters of all species to disappear.
Also, what new discoveries have paleontologists made about these charismatic animals, and the director of Jurassic World: Dominion talks about how his film hews to the latest science. Hint: feathers!
It’s deep history, as we look at what happened as terrestrial life experienced its worst day ever.
Guests:

Colin Trevorrow – Director of Jurassic World: Dominion

Riley Black – Science writer and author of “The Last Days of the Dinosaurs”

Anusuya Chinsamy-Turan – Paleontologist at the University of Cape Town, South Africa

*Originally aired June 13, 2022
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
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Runny nose. Itchy, watery eyes. Sneezing. If you don’t have allergies, you probably know someone who does. The number of people with allergies, including food allergies and eczema, is increasing. What is going on?
A medical anthropologist describes how our hygiene habits, our diets, and our polluted environment are irritating our bodies. Also, the case for skipping your shower. Is skin healthier when we stop lathering?
Guests:
James Hamblin – Preventive medicine physician and a lecturer in public health at Yale and author of Clean: the New Science of Skin
Theresa MacPhail – medical anthropologist, professor of science and technology studies at Stevens Institute of Technology and author of Allergic: Our Irritated Bodies in a Changing World.
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
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Do you have what it takes to survive on Mars? Beginning this month, four people will spend a year in a prototype Martian habitat meant to simulate living on the Red Planet. It’s part of NASA’s efforts to prepare us for real human missions to Mars. Find out how well we can replicate that world on Earth and what we might learn from doing so.
Also, a new robotic mission aims to be the first to bring back a piece of the Red Planet, and why Mars has enchanted us for centuries.
Guests:
Scott Smith – Lead for the nutritional biochemistry lab at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, and member of the CHAPEA team.
Matthew Shindell – Historian of science and Curator of Planetary Science and Exploration at the National Air and Space Museum. Author of For the Love of Mars; a Human History of the Red Planet.
Pascal Lee – Planetary scientist at the SETI Institute, principal investigator of the Haughton-Mars Project, and co-founder of The Mars Institute
Michela Muñoz Fernández – Program Executive for NASA’s Mars Sample Return Mission
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
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NASA is studying more than 800 sightings of unidentified objects in our sky as part of its investigation into the UFO phenomenon. We get an update on the agency’s study in a conversation with a member of the NASA UAP panel.
We also hear why the belief that aliens exist has broad consensus, but that’s not the same as saying they routinely visit Earth. Plus, a UFO investigator analyzes the startling claim that the military is hiding evidence of alien technology.

Guests:
Nadia Drake – Science journalist and member of NASA’s UAP group
Mick West – Science writer, skeptical debunker, former video game programmer. Author of “Escaping the Rabbit Hole”
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
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What’s the difference between a bird call and the sound of a pile driver? Not much, when you’re close to the loudest bird ever. Find out when it pays to be noisy and when noise can worsen your health. Just about everyone eventually suffers some hearing loss, but that’s not merely aging. It’s an ailment we inflict on ourselves. Hear how a team in New York City has put sensors throughout the city to catalog noise sources, hoping to tame the tumult.
And can underwater speakers blasting the sounds of a healthy reef bring life back to dead patches of the Great Barrier Reef?
Guests:
Mark Cartwright – Research Assistant Professor at New York University’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Charles Mydlarz – Research Assistant Professor at New York University’s Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) and the Music and Audio Research Lab (MARL)
David Owen – Staff writer at The New Yorker, and author of Volume Control: Hearing in a Deafening World
Jeff Podos – Professor in the Department of Biology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Steve Simpson – Professor of Marine Biology and Global Change, Exeter University, U.K.
Originally aired January 20, 2020
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
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Electricity plays an important role in our everyday lives, including allowing our bodies to communicate internally. But some research claims electricity may be used to diagnose and treat disease? Could electric pulses one day replace medications?
We speak with experts about the growing field of bioelectric medicine and the evidence for electricity’s healing abilities. Their comments may shock you.
Guests:
Sally Adee – Science journalist, author of “We Are Electric: Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body’s Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds"
Samantha Payne – Assistant Professor of Biomedical Sciences at University of Guelph
Kevin Tracey – Neurosurgeon and President of the Feinstein Institute at Northwell Health
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
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Spewing lava and belching noxious fumes, volcanoes seem hostile to biology. But the search for life off-Earth includes the hunt for these hotheads on other moons and planets, and we tour some of the most imposing volcanoes in the Solar System.
Plus, a look at how tectonic forces reshape bodies from the moon to Venus to Earth. And a journey to the center of our planet reveals a surprising layer of material at the core-mantle boundary. Find out where this layer was at the time of the dinosaurs and what powerful forces drove it deep below.
Guests:
Samantha Hansen – Geologist at the University of Alabama
Paul Byrne – Associate professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis
Robin George Andrews – Science journalist and author of “Super Volcanoes: What They Reveal about Earth and the Worlds Beyond”
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact sales@advertisecast.com to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.
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Crowded subway driving you crazy? Sick of the marathon-length grocery store line? Wish you had a hovercraft to float over traffic? If you are itching to hightail it to an isolated cabin in the woods, remember, we evolved to be together. Humans are not only social, we’re driven to care for one another, even those outside our immediate family.
We look at some of the reasons why this is so – from the increase in valuable communication within social groups to the power of the hormone oxytocin. Plus, how our willingness to tolerate anonymity, a condition which allows societies to grow, has a parallel in ant supercolonies.
Guests:
Adam Rutherford – Geneticist and author of “Humanimal: How Homo sapiens Became Nature’s Most Paradoxical Creature – a New Evolutionary History”
Patricia Churchland – Neurophilosopher, professor of philosophy emerita at the University of California San Diego, and author most recently of “Conscience: The Origins of Moral Intuition”
Mark Moffett – Tropical biologist, Smithsonian Institution researcher, and author of “The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive and Fall”
*Originally aired July 22, 2019
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact advertising@airwavemedia.com to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.
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Magic mushrooms – or psilocybin – may be associated with tripping hippies and Woodstock, but they are now being studied as new treatments for depression and neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s. Is this Age of Aquarius medicine or something that could really work? Plus, the centuries-long use of psychedelics by indigenous peoples, and a discovery in California’s Pinwheel Cave offers new clues about the relationship between hallucinogens and cave art.
Guests:
Merlin Sheldrake - Biologist and the author of Entangled Life: How Fungi Make our Worlds, Change our Minds and Shape our Futures.
Albert Garcia-Romeu - Assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
David Wayne Robinson - Archeologist in the School of Forensic and Applied Sciences, University of Central Lancashire, U.K.
Sandra Hernandez - Tejon Indian Tribe spokesperson
Originally aired December 7, 2020
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
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We have too much “bad fire.” Not only destructive wildfires, but the combustion that powers our automobiles and provides our electricity has generated a worrying rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide. And that is driving climate change which is adding to the frequency of megafires. Now we’re seeing those effects in “fire-clouds,” pyrocumulonimbus events.
But there’s such a thing as “good fire.” Indigenous peoples managed the land with controlled fires, reaped the benefits of doing so, and they’re bringing them back.
So after millions of years of controlling fire, is it time for us to revisit our attitudes and policies, not just with regard to combustion, but how we manage our wildfires?
Guests:
David Peterson - Meteorologist, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory
Stephen Pyne - Emeritus professor at Arizona State University, fire historian, urban farmer, author of “The Pyrocene: How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next”
Richard Wrangham - Ruth B. Moore Research Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University and author of "Catching Fire: How Coooking Made Us Human"
Margo Robbins - Co-founder and president of the Cultural Fire Management Council (CFMC), organizer of the Cultural Burn Training Exchange (TREX) that takes place on the Yurok Reservation twice a year, and an enrolled member of the Yurok Tribe
*Originally aired May 9, 2022
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
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In 1915, Endurance, the ship that took Ernest Shackleton to the Antarctic, was slowly crushed and sank. Shackleton, and the 28 men he brought with him, were camped on the ice near the ship, and watched helplessly as their transport went to a watery grave, two miles down.
But a recent expedition has found the Endurance, taking the world back to the last hurrah of the heroic age of polar expedition. How was it found, and what will be done with it?
Also, while feats of exploration inspire TV shows and magazine articles, do they have other functions in society? Is modern exploration more than just a nice thing to do?
We go to the bottom of the world on “Finding Endurance.”
Guests:
Michael Smith – Author and journalist. His book: “Shackleton: By Endurance We Conquer”
Christian Katlein – Sea ice physicist
Tim Jarvis – Adventurer and environmental scientist
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
*Originally aired April 8, 2022
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Is your windshield accumulating less bug splatter? Insects, the most numerous animals on Earth, are becoming scarcer, and that’s not good news. They’re essential, and not just for their service as pollinators. We ask what’s causing the decrease in insect populations, and how can it be reversed.
Also, the story of how California’s early citrus crops came under attack – a problem that was solved by turning Nature on itself. And how chimpanzee “doctors” use insects to treat wounds.
We investigate the small and the many on “The Latest Buzz.”
Guests:
Martin Kernan – Historian and journalist. His article, “The Bug That Saved California,” appeared in the January-February 2022 issue of the Smithsonian
Alessandra Mascaro – Evolutionary Biologist, currently working at the Ozouga Chimpanzee Project, co-author of the Current Biology paper, “Application of insects to wounds of self and others by chimpanzees in the wild”
Lara Southern – Doctoral student at the University of Osnabruck, co-author of the Current Biology paper, “Application of insects to wounds of self and others by chimpanzees in the wild”
Oliver Milman – Environment correspondent for The Guardian in the U.S. and author of “The Insect Crisis: The Fall of the Tiny Empires that Run the World”
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
*Originally aired March 28, 2022
Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact advertising@airwavemedia.com to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.
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The editing tool CRISPR is already being tested on animal and plant cells. It has even been used on humans. How might this revolutionary tool change our lives? On the one hand, it could cure inherited diseases and rid the world of malaria-spreading mosquitoes. On the other hand, scientists using it are accelerating evolution and introducing novel genetic combinations that could transform our biological landscape in unforeseen ways. We explore the ramifications of this revolutionary technology.

Guests:
Nathan Rose – Molecular biologist and head of malaria programs at U.K. based biotech company, Oxitec.

Hank Greely – Law professor and director of the Center for Law in the Biosciences at Stanford University and author of “CRISPR People: The Science and Ethics of Editing Humans.”

Antonio Regalado – Senior Editor for Biomedicine, MIT Technology Review.

Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
We've been nominated for a Webby! Our episode "Vaccine Inequity" is in the top 5 of the Technology category. Vote for Big Picture Science before April 20, 2023!
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It’s not just facts that inform our decisions. They’re also guided by how those facts feel. From deciding whether to buckle our seat belts to addressing climate change, how we regard risk is subjective. In this extended conversation with an expert on the psychology of risk, find out about our exaggerated fears, as well as risks we don’t take seriously enough. Meanwhile, while experts warn society about the dangers of self-aware AI – are those warnings being heeded?
Guest:
David Ropeik – Professor emeritus Harvard University, and expert on the psychology of risk
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
We've been nominated for a Webby! Our episode "Vaccine Inequity" is in the top 5 of the Technology category. Vote for Big Picture Science!
Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact advertising@airwavemedia.com to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.
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Are we alone in the universe? Is there other intelligence out there? COSMIC, the most ambitious SETI search yet, hopes to answer that. We hear updates on this novel signal detection project being conducted on the Very Large Array in the desert of New Mexico.
Also, we chat with award-winning science fiction writer Ted Chiang about how he envisions making contact with aliens in his stories, including the one that was the basis for the movie Arrival. And find out why some scientists don’t want only to listen for signals, they want to deliberately transmit messages to aliens. Is that wise and, if we did it, what would we say?
Guests:
Chenoa Tremblay – Postdoc researcher in radio astronomy for the SETI Institute and member of COSMIC science team
Ted Chiang – Nebula and Hugo award-winning science fiction writer, best known for his collections, Stories of Your Life and Others and Exhalation
Douglas Vakoch – Founder and president of METI International, a nonprofit research and educational organization devoted to transmitting intentional signals to extraterrestrial civilizations
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact advertising@airwavemedia.com to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.
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Long before Yuri Gagarin became the first human to go into space, Laika, a stray dog, crossed the final frontier. Find out what other surprising species were drafted into the astronaut corps.
They may be our best friends, but we still balk at giving other creatures moral standing. And why are humans so reluctant to accept the fact that we too are animals?
Guests:

Jo Wimpenny - Zoologist and writer. Author of “Aesop’s Animals”

Taylor Maggiacomo - Associate Graphic Editor at National Geographic

Alexander Stegmaier - Freelance Graphic Editor at National Geographic

Melanie Challenger - An author who writes on nature, environment and human history. Her latest book: “How to be Animal: A New History of What it Means to be Human”

Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
*Originally aired January 24, 2022
Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact advertising@airwavemedia.com to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.
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Scientists are increasingly finding their expertise questioned by non-experts who claim they’ve done their own “research.” Whether advocating Ivermectin to treat Covid, insisting that climate change is a hoax, or asserting that the Earth is flat, doubters are now dismissed by being told to “do your own research!” But is a Wiki page evidence? What about a YouTube video? What happens to our quest for truth along the way? Plus, a science historian goes to a Flat Earth convention to talk reason.
Guests:

Yvette Johnson-Walker – epidemiologist at the University of Illinois College of Veterinary Medicine, and affiliate faculty with the University of Illinois Chicago School of Public Health.

Nathan Ballantyne – Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, in New York.

David Dunning – Social psychologist and Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan.

Lee McIntyre – Research fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History at Boston University, author of “Post-Truth,” and “How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations with Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason.”

*Originally aired February 7, 2022
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact advertising@airwavemedia.com to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.
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Before everything could come up roses, there had to be a primordial flower – the mother, and father, of all flowers. Now scientists are on the hunt for it. The eFlower project aims to explain the sudden appearance of flowering plants in the fossil record, what Darwin called an “abominable mystery.”
Meanwhile, ancient flowers encased in amber or preserved in tar are providing clues about how ecosystems might respond to changing climates. And, although it was honed by evolution for billions of years, can we make photosynthesis more efficient and help forestall a global food crisis?
Guests:
Eva-Maria Sadowski - Post doctoral paleobotanist at the Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin
Regan Dunn - Paleobotanist and assistant Curator at the La Brea Tar Pits and Museum
Royal Krieger - Rosarian and volunteer at the Morcom Rose Garden, Oakland, California
Ruby Stephens - Plant ecology PhD candidate at Macquarie University in Australia, and member of the eFlower Project
Stephen Long - Professor of Plant Science, University of Illinois
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact advertising@airwavemedia.com to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.
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The Supreme Court’s ruling on Roe has ignited fierce debate about bodily autonomy. But it’s remarkable how little we know about female physiology. Find out what studies have been overlooked by science, and what has been recently learned. Plus, why studying women’s bodies means being able to say words like “vagina” without shame ... a researcher who is recreating a uterus in her lab to study endometriosis … and an overdue recognition of medical pioneer Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler.
Guests:
Melody T. McCloud - Obstetrician Gynecologist and Founder and Medical Director of Atlanta Women's Health Care; co-author of “Black Women's Wellness: Your ‘I've Got This!’ Guide to Health, Sex, and Phenomenal Living”
Victoria Gall - Volunteer with the Friends of the Hyde Park Library and the Hyde Park Historical Society
Rachel E. Gross - Science journalist and author of “Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage”
Linda Griffith - Professor of Biological and Mechanical Engineering at M.I.T., Director of the Center for Gynepathology Research, and author of the Boston Globe article, “‘FemTech’ and a moonshot for menstruation science”
Roshni Babal - Pediatric Asthma and Chronic Disease Program Coordinator at Boston Medical Center
Perri Klass - Professor of Journalism and Pediatrics at New York University and Author of “The Best Medicine: How Science and Public Health Gave Children a Future”
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
*Originally aired October 31, 2022
Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact sales@advertisecast.com to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.
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Why create more landfill? Perhaps you should resist the urge to toss those old sneakers, the broken ceiling fan, or last year’s smart phone. Instead, repurpose them! Global junk entrepreneurs are leading the way in turning trash to treasure, while right-to-repair advocates fight for legislation that would give you a decent shot at fixing your own electronic devices.
And, if you toss food scraps down the drain as you cook, are you contributing to a “fatberg” horror in the sewer?
Guests:

John Love – Synthetic biologist at the University of Exeter

Adam Minter – Author of Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale

Amanda Preske – Chemist and the owner of Circuit Breaker Labs

Nathan Proctor – National campaign director for U.S. Public Interest Research Group – (PIRGS) Right to Repair campaign

Kyle Wiens – CEO of I-Fixit, an Internet repair community

Originally aired December 16, 2019
Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact sales@advertisecast.com to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.
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Before you check your social media feeds today. And post. And post again. And get into an argument on Twitter, lose track of time and wonder where the morning went, consider that social media was never a natural way to socialize.
A cultural anthropologist weighs in on the evolutionary reasons humans can’t thrive on social media. And we hear about the signs that social media is on its way out. If that’s the case, what’s next?
Guests:
Max Fisher – Reporter for The New York Times, author of “The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World”
Douglas Rushkoff – Professor of media theory and digital economics at City University of New York, and author of “Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires”
Ian Bogost – Professor of Media Studies and computer science at Washington University in St. Louis and a contributing writer at The Atlantic.
Alex Mesoudi – Professor of Cultural Evolution at the University of Exeter, U.K.
Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake
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