15 | David Poeppel on Thought, Language, and How to Understand the Brain
Language comes naturally to us, but is also deeply mysterious. On the one hand, it manifests as a collection of sounds or marks on paper. On the other hand, it also conveys meaning – words and sentenc...
8 Sep 20181h 24min
14 | Alta Charo on Bioethics and the Law
To paraphrase Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park, scientists tend to focus on whether they can do something, not whether they should. Questions of what we should do tend to wander away from the pristine bea...
8 Sep 20181h 8min
13 | Neha Narula on Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, and the Future of the Internet
For something of such obvious importance, money is kind of mysterious. It can, as Homer Simpson once memorably noted, be exchanged for goods and services. But who decides exactly how many goods/servic...
8 Sep 20181h 6min
12 | Wynton Marsalis on Jazz, Time, and America
Jazz occupies a special place in the American cultural landscape. It's played in elegant concert halls and run-down bars, and can feature esoteric harmonic experimentation or good old-fashioned foot-s...
4 Sep 20181h 1min
11 | Mike Brown on Killing Pluto and Replacing It with Planet 9
Few events in recent astronomical history have had the worldwide emotional resonance as the 2006 announcement that Pluto was no longer considered a planet, at least as far as the International Astrono...
27 Aug 20181h 17min
10 | Megan Rosenbloom on the Death Positive Movement
We're all going to die. But while we are alive, it's up to us how we understand and deal with that fact. In the United States especially, there is a tendency to not face up to the reality of death, an...
20 Aug 20181h 9min
9 | Solo -- Why Is There Something Rather than Nothing?
It's fun to be in the exciting, chaotic, youthful days of the podcast, when anything goes and experimentation is the order of the day. So today's show is something different: a solo effort, featuring ...
13 Aug 20181h 21min
8 | Carl Zimmer on Heredity, DNA, and Editing Genes
Our understanding of heredity and genetics is improving at blinding speed. It was only in the year 2000 that scientists obtained the first rough map of the human genome: 3 billion base pairs of DNA wi...
6 Aug 20181h 31min
