197 | Catherine Brinkley on the Science of Cities

Creativity is one of those things that we all admire but struggle to define or make concrete. Music provides a useful laboratory in which to examine what creativity is all about — how do people become...

6 Jul 20201h 26min

Cooking is art, but it's also very much science — mostly chemistry, but with important contributions from physics and biology. (Almost like a well-balanced recipe…) And I can't think of anyone better ...

29 Jun 20201h 15min

The best chess and Go players in the world aren't human beings any more; they're artificially-intelligent computer programs. But the best poker players are still humans. Poker is a laboratory for unde...

22 Jun 20201h 20min

I recently saw an estimate that if you took all the novel coronaviruses in the world (the actual viruses, not patients), you could fit them into a bucket no more than a couple of liters in volume. A h...

15 Jun 20201h 14min

A podcast only hits the century mark once! And for Mindscape, this is it. There have been holiday messages and bonus episodes and the like. But this is the 100th officially-numbered episode. To celebr...

8 Jun 20201h 33min

There are some problems for which it's very hard to find the answer, but very easy to check the answer if someone gives it to you. At least, we think there are such problems; whether or not they reall...

1 Jun 20201h 52min

Each of us is different, in some way or another, from every other person. But some are more different than others — and the rest of the world never stops letting them know. Societies set up "norms" th...

25 Mai 20201h 1min

Humans build machines, in part, to relieve themselves from the burden of work on difficult, repetitive tasks. And yet, despite the fact that machines are everywhere, most of us are still working prett...

18 Mai 20201h 22min