325 | Alvy Ray Smith on Pixar, Pixels, and the Great Digital Convergence

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 0s

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

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome to the June 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...

1 Jun 3h 57min