9 | Solo -- Why Is There Something Rather than Nothing?
It's fun to be in the exciting, chaotic, youthful days of the podcast, when anything goes and experimentation is the order of the day. So today's show is something different: a solo effort, featuring ...
13 Aug 20181h 21min
8 | Carl Zimmer on Heredity, DNA, and Editing Genes
Our understanding of heredity and genetics is improving at blinding speed. It was only in the year 2000 that scientists obtained the first rough map of the human genome: 3 billion base pairs of DNA wi...
6 Aug 20181h 31min
7 | Yascha Mounk on Threats to Liberal Democracy
Both words in the phrase "liberal democracy" carry meaning, and both concepts are under attack around the world. "Democracy" means that they people rule, while "liberal" (in this sense) means that the...
30 Jul 20181h 5min
6 | Liv Boeree on Poker, Aliens, and Thinking in Probabilities
Poker, like life, is a game of incomplete information. To do well in such a game, we have to think in terms of probabilities, unpredictable strategies, and Bayesian inference. These are ideas that pla...
23 Jul 20181h 10min
5 | Geoffrey West on Networks, Scaling, and the Pace of Life
If you scale up an animal to twice its height, keeping everything else proportionate, its volume and weight become eight times as much. Such a scaling relation was used by J.B.S. Haldane in his famous...
16 Jul 20181h 23min
4 | Anthony Pinn on Humanism, Theology, and the Black Community
According to atheism, God does not exist. But religions have traditionally done much more than simply proclaim God's existence: they have provided communities, promoted the arts, handed down moral gui...
12 Jul 20181h
3 | Alice Dreger on Sexuality, Truth, and Justice
The human mind loves nothing more than to build mental boxes -- categories -- and put things into them, then refuse to accept it when something doesn't fit. Nowhere is this more clear than in the idea...
11 Jul 20181h 20min
2 | Carlo Rovelli on Quantum Mechanics, Spacetime, and Reality
Quantum mechanics and general relativity are the two great triumphs of twentieth-century theoretical physics. Unfortunately, they don't play well together -- despite years of effort, we currently lack...
10 Jul 20181h 12min
