The normals | Episode 3
The final of a three-part limited Science Podcast series that looks at the history of normal human subjects in research In episode two, we heard what happened to the normals program after church volu...
21 Apr 33min
How to keep quantum computers cool, whether prediction markets harm public health, and podcasting on podcasting
First up on the podcast, quantum computers require extremely low temperatures—less than 1°C away from absolute zero. But getting down to those temperatures has usually required dilution fridges using ...
16 Apr 50min
The Normals | Episode 2
Last time on The Normals, we learned that in the 1950s, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) wanted to recruit many healthy volunteers for basic research. Two peace churches, the Mennonites and the...
14 Apr 27min
A chimpanzee ‘civil war,’ and NASA plans for nuclear propulsion
First up on the podcast, freelance science journalist Hannah Richter joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss NASA’s plans to send a nuclear-powered spacecraft to Mars in less than 3 years. Having not launc...
9 Apr 42min
The Normals | Episode 1
How do we know what's normal in a person? In the early 1950s, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) set out to do something unprecedented. It wanted to start studying normal humans on a grand scale....
7 Apr 23min
Resolving the dispute over the speed of the expanding universe, and seeking new drug targets for cognitive dysfunction
First up on the podcast, a new path to calculating the Hubble constant. This value for the universe’s speed of expansion is typically determined in one of two ways, one favored by cosmologists, the ot...
2 Apr 33min
Resurrection plants, Project Hail Mary, and the trouble with sycophantic AI
First up on the podcast, Deputy News Editor Martin Enserink talks about so-called resurrection plants. These specialized plants can survive up to 95% water loss, whereas most plants struggle when thei...
26 Mar 36min
Rethinking the peopling of the Americas, and the best ways to get groundwater back
First up on the podcast, we discuss a finding that’s likely to reignite debate over how humans first spread through the Americas. In the late 1990s, a site in southern Chile called Monte Verde forced ...
19 Mar 33min
