96 | Lina Necib on What and Where the Dark Matter Is
The past few centuries of scientific progress have displaced humanity from the center of it all: the Earth is not at the middle of the Solar System, the Sun is but one star in a large galaxy, there ar...
11 Maj 20201h 21min
95 | Liam Kofi Bright on Knowledge, Truth, and Science
Everybody talks about the truth, but nobody does anything about it. And to be honest, how we talk about truth — what it is, and how to get there — can be a little sloppy at times. Philosophy to the re...
4 Maj 20201h 35min
94 | Stuart Russell on Making Artificial Intelligence Compatible with Humans
Artificial intelligence has made great strides of late, in areas as diverse as playing Go and recognizing pictures of dogs. We still seem to be a ways away from AI that is "intelligent" in the human s...
27 Apr 20201h 27min
93 | Rae Wynn-Grant on Bears, Humans, and Other Predators
Human beings have a strange fascination with dangerous, predatory animals — bears, lions, wolves, sharks, and more. The top of the food chain is an interesting and precarious place to live; while you ...
20 Apr 20201h 2min
92 | Kevin Hand on Life Elsewhere in the Solar System
It's hard doing science when you only have one data point, especially when that data point is subject to an enormous selection bias. That's the situation faced by people studying the nature and preval...
13 Apr 20201h 56min
91 | Scott Barry Kaufman on the Psychology of Transcendence
If one of the ambitious goals of philosophy is to determine the meaning of life, one of the ambitious goals of psychology is to tell us how to achieve it. An influential work in this direction was Abr...
6 Apr 20201h 19min
90 | David Kaiser on Science, Money, and Power
Science costs money. And for a brief, glorious period between the start of the Manhattan Project in 1939 and the cancellation of the Superconducting Super Collider in 1993, physics was awash in it, la...
30 Mars 20201h 34min
89 | Lera Boroditsky on Language, Thought, Space, and Time
What direction does time point in? None, really, although some people might subconsciously put the past on the left and the future on the right, or the past behind themselves and the future in front, ...
23 Mars 20201h 28min
