Science Talk
555 episodes - English - Latest episode: 10 days ago - ★★★★ - 579 ratingsScience Talk is a podcast of longer-form audio experiments from Scientific American--from immersive sonic journeys into nature to deep dives into research with leading experts.
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Episodes
Episode 2: Think Seeing is Believing? Think Again
April 10, 2024 09:45 - 33 minutesIn this episode, we’ll talk with two researchers whose work probes the uncertainty surrounding how we perceive the world around us. It turns out that what we see may not always be a perfect reflection of reality.
Episode 1: Uncertainty is Science's Super Power. Make It Yours, Too
April 03, 2024 09:45 - 25 minutesWelcome to Uncertain, a five-part podcast miniseries from Scientific American. Here we will dive head first into the possibilities of the unknowing. Over the next five episodes, I’ll be talking with people like her: explorers who work in the realm of uncertainty. Through them, we’ll discover the ways that uncertainty can spark curiosity and scientific breakthroughs. But we’ll also find out how uncertainty can bite us in the butt and make science really hard. We’ll see how neglecting uncertain...
Coming Soon: 'Uncertain' - A New Short Series on the Thrill of Not Knowing
March 27, 2024 13:46 - 4 minutesDoes the word "uncertainty" make you nervous? Does it rule your life? Would you say it kinda describes the state of the world these days? Enter Uncertain, a new limited podcast series from Scientific American. In this series, host Christie Aschwanden will help to demystify uncertainty. She's going to take away its scariness–or, rather, a cast of scientific dreamers that she talked to, will. As you’ll see, uncertainty drives scientific discovery. Throughout scientific history, uncertainty ha...
Racism in Health: The Roots of the U.S. Black Maternal Mortality Crisis
August 10, 2023 06:00 - 46 minutesWhat is behind the Black maternal mortality crisis, and what needs to change? In this podcast from Nature and Scientific American, leading academics unpack the racism at the heart of the system.
Love Computers? Love History? Listen to This Podcast
April 26, 2022 18:00 - 5 minutesIn the newest season of Lost Women of Science, we enter a world of secrecy, computers and nuclear weapons—and see how Klára Dán von Neumann was a part of all of it.
Top 10 Emerging Tech of 2021
December 14, 2021 13:00 - 41 minutesThe World Economic Forum and Scientific American team up to highlight technological advances that could change the world—including self-fertilizing crops, on-demand drug manufacturing, breath-sensing diagnostics and 3-D-printed houses.
Listen to This New Podcast: The Lost Women of Science
November 08, 2021 10:00 - 6 minutesA new podcast is on a mission to retrieve unsung female scientists from oblivion.
An Unblinking History of the Conservation Movement
October 21, 2021 10:00 - 21 minutesIn her new book Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction, science journalist Michelle Nijhuis looks into the past of the wildlife conservation field, warts and all, to try to chart its future.
Inside the Nail-biting Quest to Find the 'Loneliest Whale'
September 28, 2021 17:00 - 18 minutesIt’s a tale of sound; the song of a solitary whale that vocalizes at a unique frequency, 52 Hertz, that no other whale—as the story goes—can seemingly understand. It’s also a tale about science, and ocean life, laced with fantasy, mystery and mostly shrouded in darkness. The whale, of unknown species and nicknamed ‘52’, was originally discovered in 1989 and has been intermittently tracked by scientists ever since. Its solitary nature baffled marine researchers. And its very existence capt...
Inside the Nail-Biting Quest to Find the 'Loneliest Whale'
September 28, 2021 12:00 - 19 minutesIt is a tale of sound: the song of a solitary whale that vocalizes at a unique frequency of 52 hertz, which no other whale—as the story goes—can seemingly understand. It is also a tale about science and ocean life, laced with fantasy and mystery and mostly shrouded in darkness. The whale, who is of unknown species and nicknamed “52,” was originally discovered in 1989 and has been intermittently tracked by scientists ever since. Its solitary nature baffled marine researchers. And its very ex...
Listen to This: 'Hope Lies in Dreams,' a New Podcast From Nature Biotechnology
September 08, 2021 16:00 - 3 minutesThis is a story of desperation, anger, poverty—and triumph over long odds to crack the code of a degenerative disease that had been stealing the lives of children since it was first discovered more than a century ago.
Listen to This: 'Hope Lies in Dreams,' a New Podcast from Nature Biotechnology
September 08, 2021 11:00 - 4 minutesThis is a story of desperation, anger, poverty—and triumph over long odds to crack the code of a degenerative disease that had been stealing the lives of children since it was first discovered more than a century ago.
Summer of Science Reading, Episode 4: Navigating Loss and Hope with Nature
September 03, 2021 11:00 - 22 minutesIn Science Book Talk, a new four-part podcast miniseries, host Deboki Chakravarti acts as literary guide to two science books that share a beautiful and sometimes deeply resonant entanglement. In this week’s show: World of Wonders, by Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and Vesper Flights, by Helen Macdonald.
Summer of Science Reading, Episode 3: Abandoned and Underground but Not Lost
August 27, 2021 11:00 - 27 minutesIn Science Book Talk, a new four-part podcast miniseries, host Deboki Chakravarti acts as literary guide to two science books that share a beautiful and sometimes deeply resonant entanglement. In this week’s show: Underland, by Robert MacFarlane, and Islands of Abandonment, by Cal Flyn.
Summer of Science Reading, Episode 2: Life beneath Our Feet
August 13, 2021 10:00 - 22 minutesIn Science Book Talk, a new four-part podcast miniseries, host Deboki Chakravarti acts as literary guide to two science books that share a beautiful and sometimes deeply resonant entanglement. In this week’s show: Entangled Life, by Merlin Sheldrake, and Gathering Moss, by Robin Wall Kimmerer.
Summer of Science Reading, Episode 1: The Many Mysteries of Fish
August 06, 2021 10:00 - 22 minutesIn Science Book Talk, a new four-part podcast miniseries, host Deboki Chakravarti acts as literary guide to two science books that share a beautiful and sometimes deeply resonant entanglement. In this week’s show: Why Fish Don’t Exist, by Lulu Miller, and The Book of Eels, by Patrik Svensson.
National Park Nature Walks, Episode 10: The Otherworldly Sounds of an Elk Rut
July 30, 2021 10:00 - 34 minutesHere is our next installment of a new pop-up podcast miniseries that takes your ears into the deep sound of nature. Host Jacob Job, an ecologist and audiophile, brings you inches away from a multitude of creatures, great and small, amid the sonic grandeur of nature. You may not be easily able to access these places amid the pandemic, but after you take this acoustic journey, you will be longing to get back outside. Strap on some headphones, find a quiet place and prepare to experience a the ...
National Park Nature Walks, Episode 9: Inside a Migratory Bird Sanctuary
July 16, 2021 10:00 - 28 minutesHere is our next installment of a new pop-up podcast miniseries that takes your ears into the deep sound of nature. Host Jacob Job, an ecologist and audiophile, brings you inches away from a multitude of creatures, great and small, amid the sonic grandeur of nature. You may not be easily able to access these places amid the pandemic, but after you take this acoustic journey, you will be longing to get back outside. Strap on some headphones, find a quiet place and prepare to experience a humi...
National Park Nature Walks, Episode 8: The Blue Oaks of Sequoia
July 02, 2021 10:00 - 30 minutesHere is our next installment of a new pop-up podcast miniseries that takes your ears into the deep sound of nature. Host Jacob Job, an ecologist and audiophile, brings you inches away from a multitude of creatures, great and small, amid the sonic grandeur of nature. You may not be easily able to access these places amid the pandemic, but after you take this acoustic journey, you will be longing to get back outside. Strap on some headphones, find a quiet place and prepare to experience an eva...
National Park Nature Walks, Episode 7: Into the Wilderness by Canoe
June 18, 2021 10:00 - 30 minutesHere is our next installment of a new pop-up podcast miniseries that takes your ears into the deep sound of nature. Host Jacob Job, an ecologist and audiophile, brings you inches away from a multitude of creatures, great and small, amid the sonic grandeur of nature. You may not be easily able to access these places amid the pandemic, but after you take this acoustic journey, you will be longing to get back outside. Strap on some headphones, find a quiet place and prepare to experience a thun...
National Park Nature Walks, Episode 6: Yellowstone Bison and Marsh Birds
June 04, 2021 10:00 - 36 minutesHere is our next installment of a new pop-up podcast miniseries that takes your ears into the deep sound of nature. Host Jacob Job, an ecologist and audiophile, brings you inches away from a multitude of creatures, great and small, amid the sonic grandeur of nature. You may not be easily able to access these places amid the pandemic, but after you take this acoustic journey, you will be longing to get back outside. Strap on some headphones, find a quiet place, and prepare to experience sunri...
The Deepest Dive to Find the Secrets of the Whales
April 22, 2021 10:00 - 27 minutesOn Earth Day, Scientific American sits down with National Geographic underwater photographer Brian Skerry to talk about free diving with whales and filming the giant mammals within five meters or less. “We have to get within a few meters of our subject to get good pictures,” Skerry says. “I can't use a 1,000-millimeter lens underwater. Also, the sun has to be out because I can’t light a whale underwater; they're too big.” Skerry has been tracking whales, their hidden lives, their feeding ri...
National Park Nature Walks, Episode 5: A Northwoods Voyage
April 16, 2021 10:00 - 36 minutesHere is our next installment of a new pop-up podcast miniseries that takes your ears into the deep sound of nature. Host Jacob Job, an ecologist and audiophile, brings you inches away from a multitude of creatures, great and small, amid the sonic grandeur of nature. You may not be easily able to access these places amid the pandemic, but after you take this acoustic journey, you will be longing to get back outside. Strap on some headphones, find a quiet place, and prepare to experience true ...
First in Space: New Yuri Gagarin Biography Shares Hidden Side of Cosmonaut
April 12, 2021 19:00 - 24 minutesIt’s been 60 years, to the day, since Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was the first human to travel to space in a tiny capsule attached to an R-7 ballistic missile, a powerful rocket originally designed to carry a three- to five-megaton nuclear warhead. In this new episode marking the 60th anniversary of this historic space flight—the first of its kind—Scientific American talks to Stephen Walker, an award-winning filmmaker, director and book author, about the daring launch that changed the cour...
National Park Nature Walks, Episode 4: Beautiful Swamp
April 09, 2021 08:00 - 37 minutesHere is our next installment of a new pop-up podcast miniseries that takes your ears into the deep sound of nature. Host Jacob Job, an ecologist and audiophile, brings you inches away from a multitude of creatures, great and small, amid the sonic grandeur of nature. You may not be easily able to access these places amid the pandemic, but after you take this acoustic journey, you will be longing to get back outside. Strap on some headphones, find a quiet place and prepare to experience a riot...
National Park Nature Walks, Episode 3: Where Lewis and Clark Trod
April 02, 2021 08:00 - 25 minutesHere is our next installment of a new pop-up podcast miniseries that takes your ears into the deep sound of nature. Host Jacob Job, an ecologist and audiophile, brings you inches away from a multitude of creatures, great and small, amid the sonic grandeur of nature. You may not be easily able to access these places amid the pandemic, but after you take this acoustic journey, you will be longing to get back outside. Strap on some headphones, find a quiet place and prepare to experience the tr...
National Park Nature Walks, Episode 2: Sequoia Heights
March 26, 2021 08:00 - 34 minutesHere is our next installment of a new pop-up podcast miniseries that takes your ears into the deep sound of nature. Host Jacob Job, an ecologist and audiophile, brings you inches away from a multitude of creatures, great and small, amid the sonic grandeur of nature. You may not be easily able to access these places amid the pandemic, but after you take this acoustic journey, you will be longing to get back outside. Strap on some headphones, find a quiet place and prepare to experience the wh...
National Park Nature Walks, Episode 1: Rocky Mountains
March 19, 2021 08:00 - 36 minutesToday we launch a new pop-up podcast miniseries that takes your ears into the deep sound of nature. Host Jacob Job, an ecologist and audiophile, brings you inches away from a multitude of creatures, great and small, amid the sonic grandeur of nature. You may not be easily able to access these places amid the pandemic, but after you take this acoustic journey, you will be longing to get back outside. Strap on some headphones, find a quiet place and prepare to experience the west side of Rocky...
AI Can Now Debate with Humans and Sometimes Convince Them, Too
March 17, 2021 13:45 - 15 minutesToday on the Science Talk podcast, Noam Slonim of IBM Research speaks to Scientific American about an impressive feat of computer engineering: an AI-powered autonomous system that can engage in complex debate with humans over issues ranging from subsidizing preschool and the merit of space exploration to the pros and cons of genetic engineering. In a new Nature paper, Slonim and his colleagues show that across 80 debate topics, Project Debater’s computational argument technology has perform...
Climate Change Could Shred Guitars Known for Shredding
February 12, 2021 08:00 - 14 minutesIt is the wood that the rock greats have sworn by—swamp ash, in the form of their Fender Telecaster and Stratocaster guitars—for more than 70 years. If you have ever listened to rock, you have probably heard a solid-body swamp ash guitar. But now climate change is threatening the wood that helped build rock and roll. In today’s podcast, veteran guitarist Jim Campilongo takes us through the finer points of swamp ash and what it would mean to lose it. Bonus material: Here’s Campilongo showin...
On Finding Yourself in a Butterfly's Wings
February 04, 2021 10:00 - 16 minutesToday on the Science Talk podcast, Alexis Gambis, a New York University biologist and independent filmmaker, speaks about making Son of Monarchs, which won the 2021 Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. The film is about a Mexican scientist who studies the evolution of monarch butterfly wings. It is a cultural piece about the politics of immigration, spirituality and shifting identities. Gambis talks about science beyond the lab bench, bringing CRISPR technology ...
A Breakdown of Beavers
December 30, 2020 16:00 - 41 minutesEnvironmental journalist Ben Goldfarb talks about his book Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter.
America on Dialysis
December 14, 2020 10:30 - 41 minutesKidney disease affects millions of Americans, but corporate capture of dialysis, along with disparities in treatment and transplant access, mean that not everyone's journey is the same. On this Science Talk podcast, we speak with Carrie Arnold, lead reporter in an ambitious, year-long reporting project into the current state of chronic kidney disease treatment in the U.S., from diagnosis to dialysis, and from maintenance treatment to transplant (for those who are lucky). You can read the fi...
What Science Has Learned About the Coronavirus One Year On
December 11, 2020 13:00 - 29 minutesLast year at this time, SARS-CoV-2 (though it wasn't called that yet) was just beginning to emerge in a cluster of cases inside China . We know what has happened since then, but it bears repeating: 69 million global cases and over 1.5 million dead , as of December 10, 2020, according to Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resources Center. And as the virus raced around the world, science has also raced to understand how it actually works, biologically. Today on the Science Talk podcast, a virologist w...
What Science Has Learned about the Coronavirus One Year On
December 11, 2020 08:00 - 30 minutesAbout a year ago, SARS-CoV-2 (which wasn’t called that yet) was just beginning to emerge in a cluster of cases inside China. We know what has happened since then, but it bears repeating: there have been 69 million cases and more than 1.5 million deaths globally as of December 10, 2020, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. And as the virus raced around the world, science has also raced to understand how it actually works, biologically. Today on the Science Talk podcast,...
2020's Top Ten Tech Innovations
December 09, 2020 14:00 - 46 minutesScientific American and the World Economic Forum sifted through more than 75 nominations for the most innovative, most potentially game-changing technologies in 2020. The final top ten span the fields of medicine, engineering, environmental sciences and chemistry. And to win the nod, the technologies must have the potential to spur progress in societies and economies by outperforming established ways of doing things. They also need to be novel (that is, not currently in wide use) yet likely ...
2020's Top 10 Tech Innovations
December 09, 2020 09:00 - 47 minutesScientific American and the World Economic Forum sifted through more than 75 nominations for the most innovative and potentially game-changing technologies in 2020. The final top 10 span the fields of medicine, engineering, environmental sciences and chemistry. And to win the nod, the technologies must have the potential to spur progress in societies and economies by outperforming established ways of doing things. They also need to be novel (that is, not currently in wide use) yet likely to h...
Inventing Us: How Inventions Shaped Humanity
December 03, 2020 12:07 - 25 minutesMaterials scientist and science writer Ainissa Ramirez talks about her latest book The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another.
175 Years of Scientific American: The Good, the Bad and the Debunking
August 29, 2020 17:30 - 32 minutesWe look back at some highlights, midlights and lowlights of the history of Scientific American, featuring former editor in chief John Rennie. Astrophysicist Alan Guth also appears in a sponsored segment.
Bread Science: A Yeasty Conversation
August 24, 2020 14:55 - 46 minutes“Baking is applied microbiology,” according to the book Modernist Bread. During pandemic lockdowns, many people started baking their own bread. Scientific American contributing editor W. Wayt Gibbs talks about Modernist Bread, for which he was a writer and editor.
The Coming or Possibly Nearly Here Storm
August 13, 2020 19:30 - 28 minutesFormer Scientific American editor Mark Alpert talks about his latest sci-fi thriller The Coming Storm, which warns about the consequences of unethical scientific research and of ignoring the scientific findings you don’t like.
COVID-19 Vaccine Ethics: Who Gets It First and Other Issues
August 06, 2020 20:15 - 25 minutesContributing editor W. Wayt Gibbs spoke with Arthur Caplan, head of the NYU Grossman School of Medicine’s division of medical ethics, about some of the ethical issues that researchers have to consider in testing and distributing vaccines against COVID-19.
How Your Homes and Buildings Affect You
July 30, 2020 17:36 - 35 minutesJournalist and author Emily Anthes talks about her book The Great Indoors: The Surprising Science of How Buildings Shape Our Behavior, Health, and Happiness.
African-Americans, Nature and Environmental Justice
July 21, 2020 18:52 - 30 minutesJournalist Bob Hirshon reports from the Taking Nature Black conference, reporter Shahla Farzan talks about tracking copperhead snakes, and nanoscientist Ondrej Krivanek discusses microscopes with subangstrom resolution.
How Nature Helps Body and Soul
June 27, 2020 19:00 - 31 minutesJournalist and author Florence Williams talks about her book The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier and More Creative.
The Messenger Is the Message
June 25, 2020 21:51 - 37 minutesBehavioral scientist Stephen Martin and psychologist Joseph Marks talk about their book Messengers: Who We Listen To, Who We Don’t, and Why.
Air, Sea and Space: Ocean Health, Atmosphere Insights and Black Holes
June 20, 2020 20:04 - 25 minutesBiological oceanography expert Miriam Goldstein talks about issues facing the oceans. Reporter Adam Levy discusses air pollution info available because of the pandemic. And astrophysicist Andrew Fabian chats about black holes.
Science on the Hill: Calculating Climate
June 18, 2020 11:35 - 1 hourFor the fourth Science on the Hill event, Future Climate: What We Know, What We Don’t, experts talked with Scientific American senior editor Mark Fischetti about what goes into modeling our climate—and how such models are used in addition to long-term climate prediction.
Your Brain, Free Will and the Law
May 29, 2020 15:16 - 43 minutesStanford University neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky talks about human behavior, the penal system and the question of free will.
No, No Nobel: How to Lose the Prize
May 19, 2020 17:20 - 44 minutesPhysicist Brian Keating talks about his book Losing the Nobel Prize: A Story of Cosmology, Ambition, and the Perils of Science’s Highest Honor.