Transistor
62 episodes - English - Latest episode: over 6 years ago - ★★★★★ - 44 ratingsTransistor is podcast of scientific curiosities and current events, featuring guest hosts, scientists, and story-driven reporters. Presented by radio and podcast powerhouse PRX, with support from the Sloan Foundation.
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Episodes
Totally Cerebral: What’s That Smell?
April 16, 2015 21:09 - 37.1 MBScents and tastes are powerfully evocative — one whiff of perfume or cooking aromas can transport you back to a particular moment, a particular place, a particular person. Because the things we smell reach two brain structures called the hippocampus and amygdala in just one synapse, scents can almost immediately stimulate the key brain areas for memory, emotion, and location. In this episode of Totally Cerebral, Dr. Wendy Suzuki speaks with neuroscientist Howard Eichenbaum, an expe...
The Skinny on Your Skin
April 09, 2015 21:33 - 20 MBArt by Noa Kaplan. Photo by Jed Kim Your skin is your largest organ and is also is a thriving ecosystem, covered in bacteria. While many of us consider regular showers key to keeping our skin healthy, a group of scientists — and artists — are starting to ask: Could the future of skin care not be soap, but bacteria? Inside the Episode Biologist Christina Agapakis visits AOBiome in Cambridge, Mass. to talk with the team there that has developed a bacterial mist you spritz on your skin seve...
The Ultimate Wayback Machine
April 02, 2015 16:09 - 11.7 MBLooking through a telescope is like being inside a time machine — you are seeing light from the past. And some space telescopes allow astronomers to see light that is billions of years old and existed before there was an Earth or sun. Astrophysicist Michelle Thaller introduces us to scientists who started two of the most powerful telescopes, the Hubble, which launched 25 years ago, and the James Webb Space Telescope, being built right now. Inside the Episode: Dr. Michelle Thaller ...
The Poison Squad: A Chemist’s Quest for Pure Food
March 26, 2015 17:37 - 11.4 MBIn the fall of 1902, twelve young men in suits regularly gathered for dinners in the basement of a government building in Washington, D.C. The men ate what they were served, even though they knew that their food was spiked with poison. The mastermind behind these experiments was Harvey Washington Wiley. Before you condemn him, though, you’d be surprised to know that you probably owe him a debt of gratitude. Incidentally, Wiley is the founding father of the Food and Drug Administrati...
Totally Cerebral: Think Pop Culture Gets Amnesia Right? Forgetaboutit!
March 19, 2015 11:39 - 42 MBMany depictions of amnesia in TV, movies, and cartoons are just plain wrong — some laughably so. Futurama Host Dr.Wendy Suzuki talks with Prof. Neal Cohen, a Neuroscientist from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. For 20 years, Neal has used bad examples of amnesia that abound in pop culture as well as the rare accurate depictions as a powerful tool in his wildly popular undergraduate course about amnesia in pop culture. Neal entertains and educates his students with exam...
A Rainbow of Noise
March 13, 2015 14:36 - 12.1 MBEverybody knows about white noise — that sound that comes out of your TV when it’s not working quite right. But there are many other colors of noise, too: pink, brown, blue, and purple. Marnie Chesterton brings us this story on the colorful science of sound. Play with your own noisy rainbow — and learn more about each color — by clicking here: Inside the Episode: We meet Shelley, who uses pink noise to drown out the constant ringing in her head (tinnitus); Professor Trevor Cox at...
The Straight Poop
March 05, 2015 21:21 - 22.2 MBA freezer full of donated poop at OpenBiome For one disease, poop — yes, human poop — is nothing short a miracle cure. Microbiologist Christina Agapakis takes a look at Fecal Microbiota Transplants or FMT and what happens when you take the really complex gut microbiome from a healthy person and transplant it into the gut of a really sick person. For patients suffering from a one of the most common and deadly hospital acquired infections, Clostridium Difficile, or C Diff, one poop transplan...
Venus and Us: Two Stories of Climate Change
February 24, 2015 18:17 - 10 MBVenus | © NASA Space scientists are acutely aware of what can happen when climates change in other parts of our solar system. Take Venus, where it rains sulfuric acid and is 900°F on the surface, but it wasn’t always that way. Astrophysicist Michelle Thaller talks with a NASA expert on Venus about how it became a hellscape. And she talks with the Library of Congress’ inaugural chair of astrobiology about how to grasp this new geologic era where humans cause rapid change. Inside the Episod...
Totally Cerebral: The Man Without a Memory
February 09, 2015 22:33 - 43.2 MB(This is part 2 of a series on memory. Please listen to Episode 3 first!) Henry Moliason (Patient HM) in the lab Imagine that every time you met someone new, the moment they left the room you forgot you had ever spoken to them, and when they returned it was as if you had never seen them before. Imagine remembering your childhood, your parents, the history you learned in school, but never being able to form a new long term memory after the age of 27. Welcome to the life of the fam...
Totally Cerebral: Untangling the Mystery of Memory
February 09, 2015 22:12 - 34.9 MBHow has our understanding of the mysterious tissue between our ears changed in the past 50 years? In her Totally Cerebral episodes on Transistor, neuroscientist Wendy Suzuki introduces us to scientists who have uncovered some of the deepest secrets about how our brains make us who we are. Brenda Milner in 2011 | Photo by Eva Blue Wendy begins by talking with groundbreaking experimental psychologist Brenda Milner , who in the 1950s, completely changed our understanding of the parts...
Food, Meet Fungus
February 02, 2015 20:28 - 40.8 MBYour host Christina in a tempeh kitchen, for science! In her episodes of Transistor, biologist Christina Agapakis is exploring the microbiome: the trillions of bacteria, fungi, and viruses that live in and on our body. The microbiome is hot right now and in these episodes Christina will explore what we do know in the face of so much hope and hype. She starts with food. Bacteria-rich foods such as tempeh, cheese, pickles and yogurt have long been praised for their probiotic effect. But c...
We Are Stardust
February 02, 2015 18:36 - 9.35 MBWe’re closer than ever before to discovering if we’re not alone in the universe. The host for this episode of Transistor, astrophysicist Michelle Thaller, visits the NASA lab that discovered that meteorites contain some of the very same chemical elements that we contain. Then, Michelle talks to a Vatican planetary scientist about how science and religion can meet on the topic of life beyond Earth. Inside the Episode: Astrobiologist Danny Glavin works at the NASA Goddard Center for...