Inquiring Minds
464 episodes - English - Latest episode: 7 days ago - ★★★★ - 821 ratingsEach week we bring you a new, in-depth exploration of the space where science and society collide. We’re committed to the idea that making an effort to understand the world around you though science and critical thinking can benefit everyone—and lead to better decisions. We want to find out what’s true, what’s left to discover, and why it all matters.
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Episodes
64 Sharman Apt Russell - Chasing Tiger Beetles as a Citizen Scientist
December 12, 2014 07:30 - 57 minutes - 53.1 MBOn the show this week we talk to nature and science writer Sharman Apt Russell about citizen science—real scientific research done by people who are not professional scientists. We talk about her latest book, Diary of a Citizen Scientist: Chasing Tiger Beetles and Other New Ways of Engaging the World. Today’s co-host is microbiological assay development and validation scientist Charles Rzadkowolski. You can follow him on Twitter @CharlieRzadko. http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/article...
63 Donald Johanson - Lucy's Legacy, 40 Years Later
December 05, 2014 12:56 - 42 minutes - 38.8 MBOn the show this week guest host Cynthia Graber talks to paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson, most well known for discovering the fossil of a female hominid australopithecine, or "Lucy.” iTunes: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/inquiring-minds/id711675943 RSS: feeds.feedburner.com/inquiring-minds Stitcher: stitcher.com/podcast/inquiring-minds Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/inquiringminds
62 Christine Kenneally - How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures
November 28, 2014 05:53 - 55 minutes - 50.6 MBOn the show this week we talk to journalist and science writer Christine Kenneally about her latest book, The Invisible History of the Human Race: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures. And we’re joined again by guest host Cynthia Graber, science reporter and co-host of Gastropod. iTunes: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/inquiring-minds/id711675943 RSS: feeds.feedburner.com/inquiring-minds Stitcher: stitcher.com/podcast/inquiring-minds Support the show: https://www.patreon.com...
61 George Church - Hacking Mosquitoes to Fight Malaria
November 21, 2014 01:41 - 48 minutes - 44.9 MBOn the show this week guest host Cynthia Graber talks to George Church—a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and the author of Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves. Church explains how, using cutting-edge genetic manipulation techniques, we may be able to help eradicate some of the world's worst diseases. Cynthia and Church also talk about everything from HIV/AIDS research to efforts to engineer an animal that will closely resemble the long-extinct ...
60 Paul Bloom - Babies and the Origins of Good and Evil
November 14, 2014 07:02 - 1 hour - 55.7 MBOn the show this week we talk to cognitive scientist Paul Bloom about the morality of babies. Most of us think of babies as selfish, impulsive, and for the most part out of control. We tend to think of their morality as shaped by experience—by society, by their parents, by early childhood events. But Bloom and his collaborators at Yale have some pretty compelling evidence that at least some parts of our moral compass are innate—that is that babies are born with the capacity to tell good fro...
59 David Grinspoon - The Science of Interstellar
November 07, 2014 06:48 - 53 minutes - 49.1 MBOn the show this week we welcome guest host David Corn, political journalist and Washington bureau chief for Mother Jones. Corn interviews astrobiologist David Grinspoon about the science behind Christopher Nolan’s new movie, Interstellar—what it gets right, and what it gets wrong. Corn also talks to Indre about what the recent elections mean for those of us who value science. Spoiler: it’s not looking great. iTunes: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/inquiring-minds/id711675943 RSS: feeds.feedburn...
58 Adam Savage - Live on Stage in San Francisco
October 31, 2014 06:40 - 36 minutes - 33.4 MBOn the show this week Indre talks to Adam Savage about the future of science communication (and why it’s terrifying TV networks), why he’s worried Elon Musk might become a Marvel supervillain, and why it’s so important to him that women be better represented in his field. Indre also talks to host of The Story Collider, Ben Lillie, about the Antares Rocket explosion, flavonols, and Ben explains why he's fascinated by institutional review boards. This episode was recorded live on stage in Sa...
57 William Gibson - The Future Will View Us as a Joke
October 24, 2014 02:57 - 57 minutes - 52.9 MBOn the show this week we talk to author William Gibson about time travel, cronuts, and his new 22nd century novel. We also talk to infectious disease doctor and co-founder of Wellbody Alliance, Dan Kelly, who is currently in Sierra Leone fighting the Ebola outbreak. Kelly explains what the situation looks like from the ground, what work he’s doing there, and what we can do to help. iTunes: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/inquiring-minds/id711675943 RSS: feeds.feedburner.com/inquiring-minds Stitc...
56 Steven Johnson - Innovations That Made the Modern World
October 17, 2014 01:14 - 52 minutes - 47.8 MBOn the show this week we talk to Steven Johnson, author of the new book How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World. In it, Johnson argues that seemingly mundane scientific breakthroughs have changed our world in profound ways—impacting everything from life expectancy to women's fashion. We also welcome guest host Cynthia Graber who talks about a recent article she wrote for Nova on the “Diseaseome”; and Indre wonders if you are, in fact, smarter than a kindergartner. iTune...
55 Daniel Levitin - The Organized Mind
October 10, 2014 06:19 - 1 hour - 63.6 MBOn the show this week we talk to cognitive psychologist, neuroscientist, musician, and writer Daniel Levitin about his new book The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload. We also talk to microbiologist Siouxsie Wiles about the Ebola virus—what the risks really are, and why many people might be overreacting. Also, Chris has a huge announcement. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/inquiringminds
54 Steven Pinker - The Science Behind Writing Well
October 02, 2014 23:14 - 48 minutes - 44.9 MBSan Francisco! Come see us interview Adam Savage live on Oct. 28! http://www.bayareascience.org/event/im-story-collider/ On the show this week we talk to celebrated Harvard cognitive scientist and psycholinguist Steven Pinker about his new book The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. Pinker explains how to write in clear, "classic" prose that shares valuable information with clarity (but never condescension). He also tells us why so many of the tut-tut...
53 Naomi Klein - Climate Changes Everything
September 26, 2014 03:14 - 1 hour - 57 MBCome see us interview Adam Savage live in San Francisco on Oct. 28! http://www.bayareascience.org/event/im-story-collider/ On the show this week we talk to author and social activist Naomi Klein about her new book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. In it, Klein argues that we are past the time when incremental change can get us to where we need to be to properly address the challenge of climate change—we’re in a situation, she says, where no non-radical choices are left. Th...
52 Al Gore - The Politics of Climate Change
September 17, 2014 22:05 - 34 minutes - 31.2 MBOn the show this week we talk to former Vice President Al Gore. He shares his thoughts on President Obama's global warming record, the upcoming United Nations climate meeting, the impact of fracking, and China's plans for a massive carbon market. This episode also features a discussion inspired by an article written by Cailin O’Connor at Slate on the often overlooked influence of random noise on our cells—and its influence on genetics. http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science...
51 Brendan Nyhan - Will Facts Matter in the 2014 Election?
September 12, 2014 02:33 - 58 minutes - 53.7 MBOn the show this week we talk to Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan, who has focused much of his research on employing the tools of social science to study fact-checking—why it so often fails, and what can be done to make it work better. The cynical view on fact-checking is "too negative," argues Nyhan. "I think you have to think about what politics might look like without those fact-checkers, and I think it would look worse." This episode is guest co-hosted by Rebecca Watson of ske...
50 William Poundstone - Understanding Randomness
September 05, 2014 04:57 - 52 minutes - 48.6 MBOn the show this week we talk about randomness with science writer William Poundstone, author of the new book Rock Breaks Scissors. Poundstone explains why we’re so terrible at trying to come up with random sequences ourselves—and how understanding these pitfalls can actually help you predict, with accuracy above chance, what someone else is going to do even when he or she is trying, purposefully, to act randomly. These predictions are at the core of Poundstone's book, which offers a practic...
49 Arie Kruglanski - The Science of What Makes a Terrorist
August 29, 2014 00:42 - 47 minutes - 43.9 MB"Its Islam over everything." So read the Twitter bio of Douglas McAuthur McCain—or, as he reportedly called himself, "Duale Khalid"—the San Diego man who is apparently the first American to be killed while fighting for ISIS. According to NBC News, McCain grew up in Minnesota, was a basketball player, and wanted to be a rapper. Friends describe him as a high school "goofball" and "a really nice guy." So what could have made him want to join the ranks of other Americans drawn towards militant ...
48 K Clancy, R Nelson, J Rutherford, & K Hinde - The Epidemic of Harassment in Scientific Field Work
August 22, 2014 04:31 - 1 hour - 56.4 MBOne of the most difficult parts of getting a Ph.D. is finishing your dissertation. Beyond the mountain of work a dissertation requires, graduate students also have to face feelings of inadequacy, disappointment, and anxiety about the looming job search. Sometimes, they need a gentle, supportive push to quit stressing about every last comma and—after years of blood, sweat, and tears— finally turn it in. So when Kate Clancy, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, ...
47 Anthony Ingraffea - The Science of Fracking
August 15, 2014 02:13 - 59 minutes - 54.7 MBOn the political right, it's pretty popular these days to claim that the left exaggerates scientific worries about hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking." In a recent National Review article, for instance, a Hoover Institution researcher complains that 53 percent of Democrats in California support a fracking ban "despite the existence of little if any credible scientific evidence of fracking's feared harms and overwhelming scientific evidence of its environmental benefits, including substantial...
46 David Casarett - The Science of Death
August 08, 2014 05:08 - 56 minutes - 51.8 MBOn the show this week we talk to University of Pennsylvania professor of medicine David Casarett about his book Shocked: Adventures in Bringing Back the Recently Dead. Casarett explains the science of resuscitation—and what exactly it means to be “dead.” We talk about cryonics, the idea that you might be able to preserve your brain—or your whole body—by freezing it immediately after you die, and then bring it back to life in the future once science figures out how to do that. We also talk to...
45 Barb Oakley - The Science of Learning
July 31, 2014 05:18 - 54 minutes - 49.8 MBCharles Dickens, perhaps the greatest of the Victorian novelists, was a man of strict routine. Every day, notes his biographer Claire Tomalin, Dickens would write from 9:00 am to 2:00 pm. After that, he would put his work away and go out for a long walk. Sometimes he walked as far as 30 miles; sometimes, he walked into the night. "If I couldn't walk fast and far, I should just explode and perish," Dickens wrote. According to engineering professor Barbara Oakley, author of the new book A Mind...
44 David Epstein - The Science Behind the World's Greatest Athletes
July 25, 2014 03:16 - 1 hour - 63.5 MBWhat makes a great athlete? Talent? Training? Or is mostly genetic? On the show this week we get some answers from sports writer David Epstein while discussing his new book The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance. Epstein explains a lot—from why growing up in a small town increases your likelihood of becoming a professional athlete to how softball pitcher Jennie Finch made striking out so many Major League Baseball batters during the 2004 Pepsi All-Star Soft...
43 Naomi Oreskes - The Collapse of Western Civilization
July 18, 2014 01:44 - 54 minutes - 50.3 MBYou don't know it yet. There's no way that you could. But 400 years from now, a historian will write that the time in which you're now living is the "Penumbral Age" of human history—meaning, the period when a dark shadow began to fall over us all. You're living at the start of a new dark age, a new counter-Enlightenment. Why? Because too many of us living today, in the years just after the turn of the millennium, deny the science of climate change. Such is the premise of a thought-provoking ...
42 Arthur I. Miller - How Science Is Revolutionizing Art
July 11, 2014 01:25 - 1 hour - 55.6 MBOn the show this week we welcome Arthur I. Miller—physics Ph.D., science historian, philosopher—and an art aficionado to boot. We talked to Miller about his new book, Colliding Worlds: How Cutting-Edge Science is Redefining Contemporary Art, in which he makes the case for the existence of a "third culture" that, today, is mashing together art, science, and technology into one big domain. "There are still people who think science is science, and art is art," says Miller. "But that is very far...
41 Amy Stewart - The Science Behind the World's Alcohol
July 04, 2014 00:56 - 48 minutes - 44.5 MBIt's the 4th of July, and you love your country. Your likely next step: Fire off some small scale explosives, and drink a lot of beer. But that last word ought to trouble you a little. Beer? Is that really the best you can do? Isn't it a little, er, uncreative? Amy Stewart, our guest this week, has some better ideas for you. Author of the New York Times bestselling book The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create The World's Great Drinks, she's a master of the wild diversity of ways in whic...
40 Zach Weinersmith - Baby Catapulting and Other Great Terrible Hypotheses
June 27, 2014 00:00 - 57 minutes - 52.4 MBThere's nothing quite as satisfying as a really good joke. Someone has made a clever new connection between two mundane things that we've all encountered—and suddenly we have a lovely "aha" moment. We find it funny. That sense of revelation accompanying a good joke or comic is very similar to what many scientists experience when they finally figure out a great explanation for some kind of previously unknown phenomenon. But don't take it from us. Take it from the scientifically-trained author...
39 Jordan Ellenberg - Why Math Is The Ultimate BS Detector
June 20, 2014 00:53 - 48 minutes - 44.8 MBChances are that when you think about math—which, for most of us, happens pretty infrequently—you don't think of it in anything like the way that Jordan Ellenberg does. Ellenberg is a rare scholar who is both a math professor (at the University of Wisconsin-Madison) and a novelist. And in his fascinating new book, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking, he deploys analyses of poetry, politics, and even religion in a bold recasting of what math is in the first place. For Elle...
38 Sam Kean - These Brains Changed Neuroscience Forever
June 13, 2014 00:40 - 57 minutes - 52.8 MBWe've all been mesmerized by them—those beautiful brain scan images that make us feel like we're on the cutting edge of scientifically decoding how we think. But as soon as one neuroscience study purports to show which brain region lights up when we are enjoying Coca-Cola, or looking at cute puppies, or thinking we have souls, some other expert claims "it's just a correlation," and you wonder whether researchers will ever get it right. But there's another approach to understanding how our mi...
37 Raychelle Burks - Zombie Repellent and Other Awesome Uses for Chemistry
June 05, 2014 23:08 - 1 hour - 55.4 MBRemember those stick-figures of chemical compounds you were forced to memorize in high school? Remember how useless it seemed at the time? Can you still articulate the difference between a covalent bond and an ionic one (without checking Wikipedia)? If not, pay attention: You might be caught flat-footed during the zombie apocalypse. The CDC suggests (half-seriously) having a zombie-preparedness kit (after all, it would also be useful in case of pandemics and hurricanes). But chemist and blog...
36 Harry Collins - Why Googling Doesn't Make You a Scientific Expert
May 30, 2014 00:54 - 54 minutes - 50.2 MBRemember "Climategate"? It was the 2009 non-scandal scandal in which a trove of climate scientists' emails, pilfered from the University of East Anglia in the UK, were used to call all of modern climate research into question. Why? Largely because a cursory reading of those emails—showing climate scientists frankly discussing how to respond to burdensome data requests and attacks on their work, among other content—showed a side of researchers that most people aren't really used to seeing. Su...
35 Richard Alley - West Antarctica Is Melting and We Can't Stop It
May 22, 2014 22:09 - 55 minutes - 50.7 MBIf you want to truly grasp the scale of the Earth's polar ice sheets, you need some help from Isaac Newton. Newton taught us the universal law of gravitation, which states that all objects are attracted to one another in proportion to their masses (and the distance between them). The ice sheets covering Antarctica and Greenland are incredibly massive—Antarctica's ice is more than two miles thick in places and 5.4 million square miles in extent. These ice sheets are so large, in fact, that gr...
34 John Oliver - This World Will Be a Ball of Fire Before It Stops Being Funny
May 15, 2014 23:47 - 46 minutes - 42.4 MBIn late April, former Daily Show correspondent John Oliver kicked off his HBO news-satire program, Last Week Tonight. Oliver, who spent nearly eight years at The Daily Show and has a solid background in political satire, is off to a good start. His weekly series—which offers biting commentary on the past week's biggest news stories, both national and international—is barely into its inaugural season, and it seems to be hitting the right notes. The premiere episode, for example, featured an e...
33 David Amodio - The Science of Prejudice
May 09, 2014 02:26 - 1 hour - 55.9 MBWhen the audio of LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling telling his girlfriend not to "bring black people" to his team's games hit the Internet, the condemnations were immediate. It was clear to all that Sterling was a racist, and the punishment was swift: the NBA banned him for life. It was, you might say, a pretty straightforward case. When you take a look at the emerging science of what motivates people to behave in a racist or prejudiced way, though, matters quickly grow complicated. In fact...
32 Katharine Hayhoe - Climate Science and Christianity
May 02, 2014 02:31 - 49 minutes - 45.7 MBClimate scientist Katharine Hayhoe, an evangelical Christian, has had quite the run lately. A few weeks back, she was featured in the first episode of the Showtime series The Years of Living Dangerously, meeting with actor Don Cheadle in her home state of Texas to explain to him why faith and a warming planet aren't in conflict. Then, Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people of 2014; Cheadle wrote the entry. Why is Hayhoe in the spotlight? Simply put, 25 to 30 percent o...
31 Mary Roach - The Science of Your Guts
April 25, 2014 01:52 - 48 minutes - 44.7 MBMary Roach has been called "America's funniest science writer." Master of the monosyllabically titled bestseller, she has explored sex in Bonk, corpses in Stiff, and the afterlife in Spook. Her latest book, now out in paperback, is Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal. It's, you know, completely gross. But in a way that you can't put down. What kind of things might you learn in a Mary Roach book about the alimentary canal, that convoluted pipeline that runs from where you food goes in al...
30 Jared Diamond - The Third Chimpanzee
April 18, 2014 01:04 - 51 minutes - 47.7 MBJared Diamond, author of a suite of massive, bestselling books about the precarious state of our civilization (including the Pulitzer-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel), calls himself "cautiously optimistic" about the future of humanity. What does that mean? "My estimate of our chances that we will master our problems and have a happy future, I would say the chances are 51 percent," Diamond explains on this week’s episode. "And the chances of a bad ending are only 49 percent," he adds. Diamond ...
29 Neil Shubin - Your Inner Fish
April 10, 2014 22:04 - 43 minutes - 39.6 MBWe all know the Darwin fish, the clever car-bumper parody of the Christian "ichthys" symbol, or Jesus fish. Unlike the Christian symbol, the Darwin fish has, you know, legs. Har har. But the Darwin fish isn't merely a clever joke; in effect, it contains a testable scientific prediction. If evolution is true, and if life on Earth originated in the oceans, then there must have once been fish species possessing primitive limbs, which enabled them to spend some part of their lives on land. And t...
28 John Hibbing - The Biology of Ideology
April 04, 2014 00:55 - 45 minutes - 41.8 MBThomas Jefferson was a smart dude. And in one of his letters to John Adams, dated June 27, 1813, Jefferson made an observation about the nature of politics that science is only now, two centuries later, beginning to confirm. "The same political parties which now agitate the United States, have existed through all time," wrote Jefferson. "The terms of Whig and Tory belong to natural, as well as to civil history," he later added. "They denote the temper and constitution of mind of different in...
27 Ethan Perlstein - Scenes from the Postdocalypse
March 28, 2014 00:06 - 54 minutes - 49.6 MBHow do you become a scientist? Ask anyone in the profession and you'll probably hear some version of the following: get a Bachelor's of Science degree, work in a lab, get into a PhD program, publish some papers, get a good post-doctoral position, publish some more papers and then apply for a tenure-track job at a large university. It's a long road—and you get to spend those 10 to 15 years as a poor graduate student or underpaid postdoc, while you watch your peers launch careers, start famili...
26 Phil Plait - Just After the Big Bang
March 21, 2014 01:55 - 51 minutes - 47.2 MBWe all heard the cosmos-stretching news this week. On Monday, a team of researchers working with a special telescope at the South Pole confirmed that they had observed evidence of "inflation," the sudden and rapid expansion of the universe that occurred in an unimaginably small slice of time just after the Big Bang, the beginning of space and time some 13.8 billion years ago. The researchers achieved this feat by examining what is known as the cosmic microwave background or CMB, which has be...
25 Neil deGrasse Tyson - Finally, Science Is Cool
March 14, 2014 00:05 - 45 minutes - 41.4 MBLast week, Fox's and National Geographic's new Cosmos series set a new milestone in television history. According to National Geographic, it was the largest global rollout of a TV series ever, appearing on 220 channels in 181 countries, and 45 languages. And, yes, this is a science show we're talking about. You will have to actively resist the force of gravity in order to lift up your dropped jaw, and restore a sense of calm to your stunned face. At the center of the show is the "heir appar...
24 Jennifer Ouellette - Is The Self an Illusion, or Is There Really a “You” In There?
March 07, 2014 02:12 - 47 minutes - 43.6 MBWho are you? The question may seem effortless to answer: You are the citizen of a country, the resident of a city, the child of particular parents, the sibling (or not) of brothers and sisters, the parent (or not) of children, and so on. And you might further answer the question by invoking a personality, an identity: You're outgoing. You're politically liberal. You're Catholic. Going further still, you might invoke your history, your memories: You came from a place, where events happened to...
23 Edward Frenkel - What Your Teachers Never Told You About Math
February 28, 2014 02:25 - 57 minutes - 52.8 MBAs Edward Frenkel sees it, the way we teach math in schools today is about as exciting as watching paint dry. So it's not surprising that when he brings up the fact that he's a mathematician at dinner parties, the eyes quickly glaze over. "Most people, unfortunately, have a very bad experience with mathematics," Frenkel says. And no wonder: the math we learn in school is as far from what Frenkel believes is the soul of mathematics as a painted fence is from The Starry Night by Van Gogh, Fren...
22 Jennifer Francis and Kevin Trenberth - Is Global Warming Driving Crazy Winters?
February 21, 2014 00:54 - 53 minutes - 49.4 MBJust when weather weary Americans thought they'd found a reprieve, the latest forecasts suggest that the polar vortex will, again, descent into the heart of the country next week, bringing with it staggering cold. If so, it will be just the latest weather extreme in a winter that has seen so many of them. California has been extremely dry, while the flood-afflicted UK has been extremely wet. Alaska has been extremely hot (as has Sochi), while the snow-pummeled US East Coast has been extremel...
21 Steven Novella - No, GMOs Won't Harm Your Health
February 14, 2014 02:59 - 51 minutes - 47.1 MBWith historic drought battering California's produce and climate change expected to jeopardize the global food supply, there are few questions more important than what our agriculture system should look like in the future. And few agricultural issues are more politically charged than the debate over genetically modified organisms. Even as companies like Monsanto are genetically engineering plants to use less water and resist crop-destroying pests, activists are challenging the safety and sus...
20 Maria Konnikova - How to Make Your Brain Work Better
February 07, 2014 04:13 - 54 minutes - 50.2 MBYou're a busy person. Keeping up with your job, plus your life, is the very definition of multitasking. It doesn't help that when working, you're distracted not only by your mobile devices, but also by your computer. You average 10 tabs open in your browser at any one time, which you compulsively click amongst. One's your email, which never stops flowing in. At the end of the day, you sleep less than you know you probably should, but as you tell yourself, there's just never enough time. If t...
19 Kari Byron - How to Safely Blow Stuff Up When You're Pregnant
January 31, 2014 01:20 - 42 minutes - 39.3 MBMost expecting women ask their doctors whether it's okay to eat blue cheese, or have the odd glass of wine, while they're pregnant. Or maybe whether to stay away from fish, because of the mercury. When she was pregnant with her daughter several years ago, though, MythBusters' Kari Byron took her maternal Q & A to a whole different level. "I'd be going to my doctor saying, 'All right, so, when do I have to stop shooting guns because she has ears?'" recalls Byron on this week’s episode. "And t...
18 Eugenie Scott & Ann Reid - The Assault on Science Education
January 24, 2014 01:27 - 49 minutes - 45.2 MBIn recent decades, there have been countless infringements, and attempted infringements, upon accurate science education across the country. The "war on science" in national politics has nothing on the war playing out every day in public schools, even if the latter is usually less visible. The attacks are diverse and ever-changing, showing an array of tactics and strategies that almost rivals biological life itself. "If nothing else evolves," explains evolution defender Eugenie Scott on this...
17 Michael Pollan - The Science of Eating Well (And Not Falling For Diet Fads)
January 16, 2014 22:46 - 57 minutes - 52.9 MBThe Paleo diet is hot. Those who follow it are attempting, they say, to mimic our ancient ancestors—minus the animal-skin fashions and the total lack of technology, of course. The adherents eschew what they believe comes from modern agriculture (wheat, dairy, legumes, for instance) and rely instead on meals full of meat, nuts, and vegetables—foods they claim are closer to what hunter-gatherers ate. The trouble with that view, however, is that what they’re eating is probably nothing like the ...
16 Deborah Blum - The Science of Poisoning
January 10, 2014 03:05 - 44 minutes - 40.7 MBAs a writer, Deborah Blum says she has a "love of evil chemistry." It seems that audiences do too: Her latest book, The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York, was not only a bestseller, but was just turned into a film by PBS. The book tells the story of Charles Norris, New York City's first medical examiner, and Alexander Gettler, his toxicologist and forensic chemist. They were a scientific and medical duo who brought real evidence and reliable ...
15 Mark Ruffalo - Our 100 Percent Clean Energy Future
January 03, 2014 02:13 - 56 minutes - 51.5 MBFor Mark Ruffalo, environmental activism started out with something to oppose, to be against: Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. It all began when the actor, perhaps best known for his role as Bruce Banner (The Hulk) in Marvel's The Avengers, was raising three small children in the town of Callicoon, in upstate New York. At that time the Marcellus shale fracking boom was coming on strong, even as the area also saw a series of staggering floods, each one seemingly more unprecedented than the ...