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
7 | Yascha Mounk on Threats to Liberal Democracy
Both words in the phrase "liberal democracy" carry meaning, and both concepts are under attack around the world. "Democracy" means that they people rule, while "liberal" (in this sense) means that the...
30 Juli 20181h 5min
6 | Liv Boeree on Poker, Aliens, and Thinking in Probabilities
Poker, like life, is a game of incomplete information. To do well in such a game, we have to think in terms of probabilities, unpredictable strategies, and Bayesian inference. These are ideas that pla...
23 Juli 20181h 10min
5 | Geoffrey West on Networks, Scaling, and the Pace of Life
If you scale up an animal to twice its height, keeping everything else proportionate, its volume and weight become eight times as much. Such a scaling relation was used by J.B.S. Haldane in his famous...
16 Juli 20181h 23min
4 | Anthony Pinn on Humanism, Theology, and the Black Community
According to atheism, God does not exist. But religions have traditionally done much more than simply proclaim God's existence: they have provided communities, promoted the arts, handed down moral gui...
12 Juli 20181h
