Big Brains

Billions of years ago, Mars may have looked less like the barren red desert we know today and more like Earth—with a blue sky, flowing rivers, and even seas. What happened to turn a once-habitable wor...

19 Sep 202530min

We’re living in an attention economy—and most of us are broke. But what if the secret to restoring your focus, improving your mental health, and even reducing crime rates wasn’t found in an app or a p...

4 Sep 202532min

We’ve long marveled at how efficiently plants convert sunlight into energy—but no one guessed they were using quantum mechanics to do it.In this episode, we speak with Greg Engel, a pioneering biophys...

21 Aug 202525min

You’ve heard of plastic polluting oceans. But what if it’s polluting you—your brain, your reproductive system, even your unborn children?In this eye-opening episode, we speak with Prof. Matthew Campen...

7 Aug 202528min

Hello listeners…we're re-releasing one of our favorite Big Brains episodes—an incredibly insightful conversation with psychologist Adam Alter. If you've ever felt stuck in your life or career, this ep...

24 Juli 202534min

One of the benefits of producing this podcast at the University of Chicago is that there are often events on campus that bring in not just one Big Brain, but many in order to find answers to the some ...

10 Juli 202547min

For a more than a century, the Food and Drug Administration has worked to protect public health. In his research, Harvard University physician-researcher Jerry Avorn has examined how the FDA’s once-ri...

26 Juni 202536min

Prof. James Evans, a University of Chicago sociologist and data scientist, believes we’re training AI to think too much like humans—and it’s holding science back.In this episode, Evans shares how our ...

12 Juni 202531min