Coronapod: A whistle-blower’s quest to take politics out of coronavirus surveillance
Rick Bright exposed former president Trump's political meddling in the US COVID response. Now he is championing a new privately funded initiative to track viral spread and combat new variants. We disc...
9 Huhti 202121min
Audio long-read: Rise of the robo-writers
In 2020, the artificial intelligence (AI) GPT-3 wowed the world with its ability to write fluent streams of text. Trained on billions of words from books, articles and websites, GPT-3 was the latest i...
6 Huhti 202123min
Coronapod: How to define rare COVID vaccine side effects
From a sore arm to anaphylaxis, a wide range of adverse events have been reported after people have received a COVID-19 vaccine. And yet it is unclear how many of these events are actually caused by t...
2 Huhti 202112min
Antimatter cooled with lasers for the first time
Laser-cooled antimatter opens up new physics experiments, and the staggering economic cost of invasive species.In this episode:00:44 Cooling antimatter with a laser focusAntimatter is annihilated whe...
31 Maalis 202128min
Coronapod: the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID vaccine - what you need to know
Since the beginning of the pandemic the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine has been plagued by confusion and controversy. The vaccine has been authorised in over 100 countries, tens of millions of doses have ...
26 Maalis 202119min
Network of world's most accurate clocks paves way to redefine time
A web of three optical atomic clocks show incredibly accurate measurements of time, and the trailblazing astronomer who found hints of dark matter.In this episode:00:44 Optical clock networkOptical at...
24 Maalis 202128min
Coronapod: Why COVID antibody treatments may not be the answer
In the early days of the pandemic, researchers raced to identify the most potent antibodies produced by the immune system in response to SAR-COV-2 infection and produce them in bulk. The resulting ‘mo...
19 Maalis 202114min
The AI that argues back
A computer that can participate in live debates against human opponents.In this episode:00:43 AI DebaterAfter thousands of years of human practise, it’s still not clear what makes a good argument. De...
17 Maalis 202122min
