A Selection Strategy
If you were somehow in control of repopulating and regenerating an area that had essentially been wiped clean of life, how would you do it? With limited resources at your disposal would you decide to...
20 Sep 20219min
A Bit of Astrobiology
How do we find life in a galaxy, or galaxies, far far away while sitting here on Earth? It's not just by looking through telescopes or sending probes. Those will tell us a few things, but not everyth...
6 Sep 202112min
Carrion My Wayward Plant
A friend of mine recently posed a question on his podcast about carrion plants. If you don't know what one is, the carrion plant emits an odor that is very similar to rotting flesh.This odor attracts...
23 Aug 20218min
Artificial Selection
We don't know why dogs became man's best friend, but we have some ideas. And those ideas take us back anywhere from 10,000 to 40,000 years ago.They are perhaps the perfect visual example when it come...
30 Mar 202112min
Meet LUCA
In this episode I want to introduce you to someone. Actually, this someone is a thing, and this thing wiggled its way through life between two to four billion years ago. Listener, meet LUCA. Your Las...
9 Mar 202111min
Cro-Magnon
As a kid I was fascinated by the idea of cavemen. Of course, all I had to go on were a few poorly produced movies that depicted cavemen battling dinosaurs, which of course never happened. I even own...
2 Feb 202113min
The Cosmic Calendar
Many years ago, in 1977, astronomer and author Carl Sagan offered us the concept of a "Cosmic Calendar" in his book The Dragons of Eden. It's a fun thought experiment in which you take the entire his...
5 Jan 202111min
Dating Fossils Again
It's time to look at fossil dating again! The last episode mentioned two dating methods used to estimate how old the Homo Naledi bones found the Rising Star cave system might be. To do so, researcher...
22 Des 202012min
