Radiolab

The Sweetest Thing

What is the sweetest thing in the world? A simple mystery that will make you question what sweetness even is, how our tongues (and other body parts you wouldn't expect) determine what we like, and how far you would go to taste something sweeter than anyone has ever experienced.

TED

This Is What the Birth of the Universe Sounded Like | Mark Whittle | TED

The sound waves have turned to stone, so to speak, and become fossilized in the patterns of galaxies.

TED Radio Hour

Big mysteries explained through your senses

The musical instrument, if you like, of the universe is beginning to wake up and it wakes up in sequence, starting with the smallest organ pipes and ending with the largest.

The Origins Podcast

Physics for Everyone, #4. The Beating Heart of Modern Physics: The Dog Who Didn't Bark in the Night.

The most beautifully symmetric object in physics is not the intricate snowflake or something like that of Mcsher but rather once again coming back to my cow as a sphere a sphere. There's nothing more beautiful than a sphere because there's nothing more symmetric than a sphere.

TBPN

Greg Brockman on Astra and the Future of OpenAI

I think the problem itself is important right this is new knowledge for humanity that the proof itself is actually very elegant and beautiful and I think that there's a lot to learn from it

Book of the Day

'How We Disappear' is a Stanford historian's take on our personal archives

The universe has been falling apart billions of years longer than life, you know, started and began its its ultimately doomed but elegant rebellion against that. The the universe is allergic really to things being in formation.

TED Radio Hour

The day the dinosaurs died

So the dinosaurs that have dominated Earth's terrestrial ecosystems for 165 million years, I think are functionally extinct within an hour after that impact.

TBPN

WE'RE BACK: Meta Addiction, Jalapeño, Tim Cook's Last Day, Flocked

If it crosses species barriers, I'm much more likely to agree that something could be addictive.

Physics for Everyone

Physics for Everyone, #4. The Beating Heart of Modern Physics: The Dog Who Didn't Bark in the Night.

The fact that symmetry restricts things in physics is central to our modern understanding of nature as we'll get to. But there's another feature of symmetry that's important that symmetry restricts how you can describe the object.

The Prof G Pod

Why the Climate-Doom Story Is Wrong — Hannah Ritchie

The climate impacts scale with the the the temperature rise we experience, which kind of means there's no point at which we should just give up, right? Because the hazards at 1.7 are better than they are at two. And if we go past two, then it's worth trying to stay below 2.3 rather than 2.5.

TED Radio Hour

The day the dinosaurs died

So the dinosaurs that have dominated Earth's terrestrial ecosystems for 165 million years, I think, are functionally extinct within an hour after that impact.

Decoder with Nilay Patel

Welcome to the AI crisis in math

It's funny that AI systems are all still pretty bad at elementary school arithmetic, but getting increasingly good at very high-end abstract math. That raises some big questions for the field of advanced math.

The Origins Podcast

Physics for Everyone, #4. The Beating Heart of Modern Physics: The Dog Who Didn't Bark in the Night.

Sometimes nothing is very important. Obviously, nothing's been very important to me. I've written books about it, but in this case, nothing happening is the central feature of symmetry.

TED Radio Hour

Trusting medicine in an age of doubt

What I appreciated was that in your talk, you showed a little bit of regret that you were so focused, so intent on creating this vaccine to deal with the coronavirus in record time that maybe you forgot some of these things because you were a little bit in the scientific bubble. I am currently in the scientific bubble because that's how I've been trained. I've been trained since I was 19 to think about science strictly for the purpose of science.

TED Radio Hour

Trusting medicine in an age of doubt

What I appreciated was that in your talk, you showed a little bit of regret that you were so focused, so intent on creating this vaccine to deal with the coronavirus in record time that maybe you forgot some of these things because you were a little bit in the scientific bubble? I am currently in the scientific bubble because that's how I've been trained. I've been trained since I was 19 to think about science strictly for the purpose of science.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Sam Altman - How to Make an Abundant Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.484]

I think we're at an extraordinary moment in history where the tools to solve problems that have been stuck for 100 years, or maybe never been solvable, are becoming available to us. And I think in the next few decades, we will make more scientific progress than in all of human history combined.

TED Radio Hour

Trusting medicine in an age of doubt

We were too busy publishing our data in world-renowned journals, kind of talking to ourselves.

The Origins Podcast

Physics for Everyone 5: The Unification that Changed the World

I want to lead you up to what is perhaps the most important calculation that was done in the 19th century and maybe ever that changed the world.

Diet TBPN

Hank Green Faces AI Backlash, OpenAI Math Advances, Million-Dollar Solo Firms | Diet TBPN

It's a real challenge to simultaneously say, I'm going to cover math. I'm going to cover science, but I'm not going to touch AI. That AI stuff's bad.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Sam Altman - How to Make an Abundant Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.484]

The last 100 years of scientific and technological progress have been incredible, but I think the next 20 years will be the most transformative in human history. I believe we are on the verge of creating AI systems that will compress decades of scientific progress into just a few years, potentially solving diseases that have plagued humanity for millennia, defeating mental health crises, and creating economic growth in a way that could lift billions out of poverty.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Sam Altman - How to Make an Abundant Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.484]

I think we're at an early moment in what will eventually be seen as a clear inflection point in history — the moment when AI started to do real scientific research autonomously and the pace of scientific progress started to change in a way that will just seem unimaginable to us now.

Radiolab

Return of Alpha Gal

It turned out Amy was not alone. And the answer to her mysterious allergy involved maps, a dancing lone star tick, and a very particular sugar called Alpha Gal.

Radiolab

The Holy Shiver

Why does she get them in so many different situations? What's happening in her body and what does it mean? We take that question and run with it — we face chilly winds, sudden frights, and moments when the world seem to shift under your feet to figure out what the little bumps on our skin might be trying to tell us.

Radiolab

The Holy Shiver

We face chilly winds, sudden frights, and moments when the world seem to shift under your feet to figure out what the little bumps on our skin might be trying to tell us.

TED

Origami, the Ancient Art Form Solving Modern Problems | Miles Wu | TED

The strongest pattern held almost 200 pounds, and another lighter version held more than 10,000 times its own weight. I found that the stronger patterns were more compact, and they also created truss-like structures that were able to distribute pressure evenly. It's amazing that something can be so strong and yet so lightweight at the same time.

Book of the Day

In 'The Jellyfish Problem,' an introverted scientist is called in to help an island

What I loved about jellyfish is they kind of resist all efforts to see ourselves in them. You look at a jellyfish and have to ask yourself, "Where is its mouth? Where are its eyes?" And I think that makes something a very good candidate for a monster, because what is a monster if something that we can't relate to and can't see ourselves in at all.

TED

The Human Cell Is Wildly Complex. Can AI Decode It? | Silvana Konermann | TED

Human language is generated by humans, right? So we understand it, right? We came up with it. RNA language, or the biological language, has evolved -- it was not generated by humans. So it's basically impenetrable for us.

Radiolab

Bonus: Wild Animal Dads from Terrestrials

In the animal world, fathers have long been painted as aggressive or absent. At best providers and protectors, but certainly not caregivers. And yet for every tale of a lion or chimp dad eating its own young (yikes!), there's another creature who tells a sweeter story.

Radiolab

Bonus: Wild Animal Dads from Terrestrials

Along the way, we learn that nature doesn't offer just one model of fatherhood. Alongside Mother Nature... there just might be a Father Nature, too.

Radiolab

Your Friendly Neighborhood Hookworms

For most of human history, people were infected with intestinal worms as a matter of course. It's only in the past century, in wealthy countries, that mass deworming campaigns and improved sanitation removed them from virtually the entire population. Now some researchers think that eliminating these ancient passengers may have contributed to a sharp rise in autoimmune and allergic diseases.

Radiolab

Your Friendly Neighborhood Hookworms

For most of human history, people were infected with a variety of intestinal worms. The idea, called the 'old friends' hypothesis, is that our immune systems evolved to expect these parasites — and without them, the immune system becomes dysregulated, attacking the body itself or overreacting to harmless substances like pollen or peanuts.

Radiolab

Your Friendly Neighborhood Hookworms

For most of human history, people were infected with helminths — parasitic worms — as a matter of course. It's only in the past century or so, in wealthy industrialized nations, that we've largely eliminated them. And it's in those same places that allergies, asthma, and autoimmune diseases have skyrocketed.

Radiolab

Your Friendly Neighborhood Hookworms

For most of human history, hookworms and other parasitic worms were ubiquitous companions of Homo sapiens, and our immune systems co-evolved with them over millions of years. The idea is that without these old friends, our immune systems become unbalanced — overly aggressive, prone to attacking the body itself or harmless substances like pollen.

TED

A Whale’s-Eye-View of the Ocean | Eric Stackpole | TED

The footage we had seen was not just data. This was an experience of life. It was reminding me why exploration really matters. It's not just about understanding the world with our logical minds. I believe exploration has huge potential to allow us to experience things with emotion and feel the context of why we're here on Earth.

Radiolab

Your Friendly Neighborhood Hookworms

For most of human history, hookworms and other parasitic worms were ubiquitous companions — so much so that the human immune system may have evolved to expect their presence. Without them, the theory goes, our immune systems can become overactive, mistakenly attacking the body itself or reacting to harmless substances like pollen or peanuts.

Radiolab

Your Friendly Neighborhood Hookworms

For most of human history, people were infected with intestinal worms. The worms, in turn, evolved to modulate their hosts' immune responses — keeping inflammation in check so the host could survive and the worms could keep living inside them. The modern, wormy-free immune system, the hypothesis goes, never got that memo and remains primed to overreact.

Radiolab

Your Friendly Neighborhood Hookworms

For most of human history, hookworms and other parasitic worms were ubiquitous companions to our species, and our immune systems evolved in their presence. The idea, known as the hygiene hypothesis or 'old friends' hypothesis, is that the absence of these organisms in the modern developed world has left our immune systems without the regulatory signals they evolved to expect — potentially contributing to the rise of allergies, autoimmune diseases, and inflammatory conditions.

Radiolab

Your Friendly Neighborhood Hookworms

For most of human history, intestinal worms were ubiquitous companions. Only in the twentieth century did sanitation campaigns and deworming programs scrub them from the bodies of people in wealthy nations. But some researchers now suspect that in eliminating these parasites, we may have also dismantled part of our immune system's essential operating instructions.

Origins Podcast

Origins Podcast: Moral Economics with Nobel Laureate Alvin Roth: From Prostitution to Kidney Markets

If only we allowed it to. But what generally gets in the way is something called repugnance, which we'll get to. And um and that we that we should overcome our a priori ideas when they're wrong, which is what science is all about.

The Origins Podcast

Motion, from Galileo to Dark Mysteries. Lecture 3 in the Origins Podcast Series on Physics

The fact that it took Galileo to redefine our thinking about motion and intelligent people from Aristotle and onward had thought about how things moved in the world and gotten it totally wrong suggests that motion is not so simple.

The Origins Podcast

What's New in Science, Sabine Hossenfelder & Lawrence Krauss:

I think there's a lot of confusion about you know just you know quantum what what can quantum actually do and so I thought it would it's a good example to explain just what's reality and what's fiction.

Radiolab

Forests on Forests

It didn't take long for them to realize not only was the forest canopy not empty, it was absolutely filled to the brim with life.

Radiolab

The Resistance of a Cow

What could cause a previously thriving herd of majestic dairy cattle to stop drinking water and start drinking … urine?

Radiolab

Antibiotic Apocalypse

searching for answers to an alarming threat to humanity's existence as we know it: antibiotic resistance in bacteria

Radiolab

Staph Retreat

The antibiotics we once wielded like miraculous flaming swords seem more like lukewarm butter knives.

How to Do Everything

Crickets and Clowns

Crickets, like all insects, are what are called exothermic, which is a more correct term than cold-blooded, which means that they get their heat from the temperature outside.

Radiolab

Snail Sex Tape

There is persuasion and subterfuge, spaghetti penises and co-copulation. And this very surprising habit—erm kink—of making tiny arrows (actually!) and stabbing each other with them.