362 | Luis Bettencourt on the Universal Properties of Self-Organizing Cities
People who live in large cities produce more patents per person than those who live in small towns. They also walk faster down the street, and use less infrastructure per person. Indeed, the relations...
27 Jul 1h 20min
361 | Bonnie Bassler on How Bacteria Talk and Work Together
One of the characteristics of life is that living organisms gather information and put it to use. Even one of the simplest lifeforms, bacteria, are able to sense features of their surroundings and alt...
20 Jul 1h 15min
Mindscape Ask Me Anything, Sean Carroll | July 2026
Welcome to the July 2026 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Patreo...
13 Jul 4h 3min
360 | Marc Berman on the Science of Touching Grass
Modern life has, in many ways, removed us from the environments in which our ancestors lived and adapted. Not only do we spend time looking at screens, but we spend time indoors, or outdoors but in ur...
6 Jul 1h 29min
359 | Solo: Theories of Dark Energy
The cosmological constant, as discussed last episode, provides a perfectly good (thus far) explanation for why we observe the universe to be accelerating. But it might not be the right explanation, an...
29 Jun 1h 56min
358 | Solo: Vacuum Energy and the Cosmological Constant
The most surprising discovery in fundamental physics during my career as a scientist was undoubtedly the acceleration of the universe, announced in 1998. The most straightforward explanation for these...
22 Jun 1h 59min
357 | Jeff Coller on mRNA, Vaccines, and Bespoke Therapeutics
Messenger RNA (mRNA) plays a literally central role in the functioning of life as we know it, shuttling information back and forth between the DNA where it is stored to the ribosome where it is used t...
15 Jun 1h 19min
356 | Andrea Wulf on Enlightenment, Nature, Romanticism, and Modernity
All ideas have a history, no matter how inevitable and well-entrenched they may seem to us today. The later Enlightenment was a heady time when people were exploring new conceptions of nature, humanit...
8 Jun 1h 17min
