The sparkling deep
It's tempting to see bioluminescence as an oddity, one of those rare eccentricities of life on earth. And, on land, maybe that's true. But our planet is mostly water, and out in the open ocean biolumi...
20 Juni 1h 20min
Is Man the Hunter just a myth?
There's a story about of our past that you know well. It goes like this: At some point earlier in human evolution, we started to hunt. Men in particular—perhaps channeling some deep-seated aggressive ...
5 Juni 1h 32min
Babies, dogs, and the riddles of word learning
It's kind of astonishing, really, that kids ever learn words. Each one poses a little riddle. Does this sound string refer to a person? A category of things? Or maybe some other feature of the bloomin...
22 Maj 1h 18min
The inner life of the hand
Newton saw in the human hand proof of the divine; Darwin saw a key to our species' success. Many others, too, have described the hand in hyperbolic terms, as a paragon of design, a cornerstone of huma...
7 Maj 1h 10min
From the archive: The cuttlefish and its coat of many colors
Hi friends! We're skipping a beat to take care of some spring housekeeping tasks. We will be back in May! In the meanwhile, enjoy this listener favorite from our archives! ----- [originally aired Apri...
22 Apr 1h 33min
Illuminating cave art
Deep in our past, in the dark depths of caves, our ancestors did something strange and beautiful. Working by firelight, some doodled little designs. Others made hand stencils. Some saw a bulge of rock...
9 Apr 1h 25min
What can AI teach us about the mind?
Everyone is talking about AI these days. Often these conversations are about how AI might upend education, or work, or social life, or maybe civilization itself. But among cognitive scientists and psy...
26 Mars 1h 21min
Mutualisms all the way down
No one is an island. We all depend on each other in critical, often tangled ways. And when I say "we" and "each other" I don't just mean humans. Yes, we humans rely on other humans. But we also rely o...
11 Mars 1h 8min
