147 | Rachel Laudan on Cuisine, Culture, and Empire

As a semi-outsider, it's fun for me to watch as a new era dawns in biology: one that adds ideas from physics, big data, computer science, and information theory to the usual biological toolkit. One of...

1 Helmi 20211h 21min

The possible existence of technologically advanced extraterrestrial civilizations — not just alien microbes, but cultures as advanced (or much more) than our own — is one of the most provocative quest...

25 Tammi 20211h 40min

What is the world made of? How does it behave? These questions, aimed at the most basic level of reality, are the subject of fundamental physics. What counts as fundamental is somewhat contestable, bu...

18 Tammi 20211h 16min

The first full week of 2021 has been action-packed for those of us in the United States of America, for reasons you're probably aware of, including a riotous mob storming the US Capitol. The situation...

11 Tammi 20211h 43min

We all know stereotypes about people from different countries; but we also recognize that there really are broad cultural differences between people who grow up in different societies. This raises a c...

4 Tammi 20211h 27min

Welcome to the third annual Mindscape Holiday Message! Just a chance for me to be a little more chatty and informal than usual, although as it turned out this isn't all that different from a conventio...

21 Joulu 20201h 31min

Many characteristics go into making human beings special — brain size, opposable thumbs, etc. Surely one of the most important is language, and in particular the ability to learn new sounds and use th...

14 Joulu 20201h 15min

Getting into the swing of things here with monthly Ask Me Anything episodes. If you missed the explanation last month, there is a Patreon page for people who wish to support Mindscape with a small don...

9 Joulu 20203h 24min