Latest David pogue Podcast Episodes
Grand Finale: A Pop Song is Born
Unsung Science - December 08, 2023 08:01 - 48 minutes ★★★★★ - 1.1K ratingsIn the days of old, creating a song required a composer, a lyricist, an arranger, a recording engineer, a band or orchestra. Today, in the pop world, a single person often handles those jobs in a single studio. In this extraordinary episode, you’ll hear two-time Grammy winner Oak Felder...
Electric Planes Take Off
Unsung Science - November 24, 2023 08:01 - 36 minutes ★★★★★ - 1.1K ratingsPlanes contribute 9% of the world’s carbon pollution, but electrifying them has always seemed impossible; batteries have never been powerful or light enough to carry themselves. But in 2023, batteries reached a tipping point in power and weight. Beta Technologies, based in Vermont, is f...
Genetics, Votes, and Colin Firth
Unsung Science - November 10, 2023 08:01 - 37 minutes ★★★★★ - 1.1K ratingsThe U.S. has fallen into polarized, partisan, political bickering. Online, liberals and conservatives seem to despise each other. But nobody seems to stop to ask: How did we get our liberal and conservative views in the first place? We formed our opinions by carefully weighing the issue...
How Does Google Maps Do It?
Unsung Science - October 26, 2023 07:01 - 29 minutes ★★★★★ - 1.1K ratingsEvery month, over a billion people open their phones and fire up Google Maps. Its original function—offering driving directions, with real-time traffic tracking—was disruptive enough in 2008, when most people had to pay $10 a month for traffic data. But since that time, it’s become a gl...
How Cool Tech is Saving the Whales
Unsung Science - October 13, 2023 07:01 - 36 minutes ★★★★★ - 1.1K ratingsFor the most part, we don’t hunt whales anymore, but we’re still killing them—mostly by driving ships into them. One species, the North Atlantic right whale, is now extinct in most parts of the world; only 340 are left. But it may not be too late. An extraordinary coalition of nonprofit...
How the Webb Telescope Sees Back in Time
Unsung Science - September 29, 2023 07:01 - 39 minutes ★★★★★ - 1.1K ratingsOn Christmas Day, 2021, NASA launched the James Webb Space Telescope into orbit a million miles from Earth—a huge and insanely ambitious machine, billions of dollars over budget and 14 years past deadline. Now, as the telescope completes its first year of capturing astonishing images of...
Inside Elon Musk's Brain
Unsung Science - September 16, 2023 07:01 - 35 minutes ★★★★★ - 1.1K ratingsPeople use all kinds of words to describe Elon Musk, from “genius” to “megalomaniac,” from “visionary” to “erratic”—but now there’s less reason to call him “enigmatic,” thanks to Walter Isaacson’s new 688-page biography. Isaacson hung out with Musk for two years, attending meetings, wit...
Screaming Babies, Noise Canceling, and You
Unsung Science - September 01, 2023 07:00 - 38 minutes ★★★★★ - 1.1K ratingsIn April 1978, MIT professor Amar Bose was flying home to Boston from Switzerland. But when he tried to listen to music through the airline’s headphones, he couldn’t hear a darned thing. He spent the rest of the flight doing acoustical math—and sketching out an idea for headphones that ...
The Pulse-Pounding Origin Story of USB-C
Unsung Science - August 18, 2023 07:01 - 40 minutes ★★★★★ - 1.1K ratingsThere’s a new kind of jack in town—well, new as of 2014—called USB-C. This single, tiny connector can carry power, video, audio, and data between electronic gadgets—simultaneously. It can replace a laptop’s power cord, USB jacks, video output jack, and headphone jack. The connector is s...
CeCe Moore Cracks Cold Cases with Genealogy
Unsung Science - August 04, 2023 14:24 - 40 minutes ★★★★★ - 1.1K ratingsGenealogy has been around a while. So has DNA evidence. But what if you combined the two? What if you could use DNA from a crime scene, compare the unknown killer’s genetics with public databases of other people’s DNA, figure out who his relatives are, and thereby determine his identity...
What if Placebos ARE the Medicine?
Unsung Science - July 21, 2023 07:01 - 30 minutes ★★★★★ - 1.1K ratingsWe’ve known about the placebo effects for over 200 years. That’s where doctors give you a pill containing no actual medicine, but you still get better. Recent studies have uncovered a broader range of benefits from the including alleviated pain, nausea, heart rate, hay fever, allergies,...
The Man Who Invented QR Codes
Unsung Science - July 07, 2023 07:01 - 33 minutes ★★★★★ - 1.1K ratingsIn 1994, Masahiro Hara got tired of having to scan six or seven barcodes on every box of Toyota car-parts that zoomed past him on the assembly line. He wondered why the standard barcode from the 70s was still used...Why couldn’t someone invent a barcode that used two dimensions instead ...
Inside the Lost Titanic Sub: An Update
Unsung Science - June 23, 2023 07:01 - 44 minutes ★★★★★ - 1.1K ratingsThe lost OceanGate submersible has captured the world’s attention. In the summer of 2022, “CBS News Sunday Morning” correspondent and "Unsung Science" host David Pogue was invited to join an expedition to visit the Titanic wreck with OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, as well as Titanic dive ...
How Doug Lindsay Invented His Own Surgery
Unsung Science - June 09, 2023 07:01 - 37 minutes ★★★★★ - 1.1K ratingsIn his senior year of college, a monstrous ailment fell upon Doug Lindsay. His skin felt flayed. His heart raced. The room spun. He was so weak, he couldn’t sit up in bed, let alone walk. Worst of all, doctors had no idea what was wrong with him. Only one person on earth had the time a...
The Power of an Empty Metal Box
Unsung Science - May 26, 2023 07:01 - 36 minutes ★★★★★ - 1.1K ratingsWe’ve been shipping stuff across oceans for centuries. But until 1956, we loaded our ships in the dumbest way possible: one at a time. Then Malcolm McClean came along. He envisioned lifting the big metal box part off a truck and setting it directly down onto a ship. Every one of these b...
From Klingon to Dothraki: Constructed Languages for Hollywood
Unsung Science - May 12, 2023 07:01 - 35 minutes ★★★★★ - 1.1K ratingsThe first time you heard “Star Trek” characters speak Klingon, or the “Game of Thrones” characters speaking Dothraki and High Valyrian, you might have assumed that the actors were just speaking a few words of gibberish, created by some screenwriter to sound authentic. But these are comp...
The Million-Dollar Toothpaste Tube
Unsung Science - April 28, 2023 07:01 - 37 minutes ★★★★★ - 1.1K ratingsWe’re overrun with plastic. It’s in our oceans, our water, our food. Something has to be done—preferably by corporations, which churn out millions of tons of plastic every year. Enter: the toothpaste tube. It might seem like a minor player in the plastic problem, but we throw 20 billio...
Happiness 2.0: The Reset Button from Hidden Brain
Unsung Science - April 14, 2023 07:01 - 56 minutes ★★★★★ - 1.1K ratingsUnderstandably, there is a lot going on in our lives, and we feel pulled in every direction. But trying to get everything done can distract from the joy that surrounds us. Host Shankar Vedantam and psychologist Dacher Keltner discuss what it means to savor the beauty of the people, mome...
The Rewilded Farm
Unsung Science - March 31, 2023 07:01 - 34 minutes ★★★★★ - 1.1K ratingsAfter 17 years of trying to prop up their failing farm outside of London, Charlie Burrell and Isabella Tree were stressed, exhausted, and $1.7 million in debt. They decided to stop farming—no more plowing, planting, irrigating, chemicals. They gave away the farm—to nature. 20 years la...
NASA Redirects an Asteroid
Unsung Science - March 17, 2023 07:01 - 31 minutes ★★★★★ - 1.1K ratings65 million years ago an asteroid struck the earth. In the ensuing planetary darkness, the dinosaurs went extinct. But the dinosaurs didn’t have a space program! Now we can spot incoming asteroids with steadily improving confidence. If we see one on a collision course with the Earth, we ...
How They Found the Shipwreck Endurance
Unsung Science - March 03, 2023 08:01 - 40 minutes ★★★★★ - 1.1K ratingsIn 1915, British explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton’s historic expedition to Antarctica stalled when floating ice trapped, crushed, and finally sank his ship, Endurance. Shackleton’s men survived 21 months on the ice, alone and freezing, and became one of the most incredible adventure stori...
Deepfakes: Big Tech Fights Back
Unsung Science - February 17, 2023 08:01 - 28 minutes ★★★★★ - 1.1K ratingsDeepfakes, those computer-generated videos of well-known people saying things they never actually said, strike a lot of experts as terrifying. If we can’t even trust videos we see online, how does democracy stand a chance? As photo- and video-manipulation apps get cheaper and better, t...
The Mars Helicopter That Would Not Die
Unsung Science - February 03, 2023 08:01 - 46 minutes ★★★★★ - 1.1K ratingsThe star attraction of NASA’s Mars 2020 mission is the Perseverance rover. But bolted to its underside was a stowaway: A tiny, 19-inch helicopter called Ingenuity. She was intended to fly five times on Mars, as a wild experiment to see if anything could fly in Mars’s incredibly thin atm...
ChatGPT and the End of Writing
Unsung Science - January 20, 2023 08:01 - 31 minutes ★★★★★ - 1.1K ratingsIn early 2023 ChatGPT blew up the internet. It’s an AI app that can create any piece of writing you ask for. Poems, homework, lyrics, essays, outlines, recipes, interview questions, and even code. All are indistinguishable from something written by a person, all instantaneous and free. ...
Introducing: Season 2 of Unsung Science with David Pogue
Unsung Science - January 13, 2023 08:01 - 2 minutes ★★★★★ - 1.1K ratingsFrom NASA helicopters in space to robot bouys at sea, “CBS Sunday Morning” correspondent David Pogue is covering all the latest innovations across tech and science on season 2 of Unsung Science. Hear interviews with industry leaders who take you behind the scenes of the world’s greatest...
Back to Titanic Part 2
Unsung Science - December 19, 2022 08:01 - 34 minutes ★★★★★ - 1.1K ratingsIn “Back to Titanic” Part 1, David Pogue told of his invitation to join an expedition to visit the wreck of the Titanic in a custom submersible. The company, OceanGate, ordinarily charges $250,000 per person, as part of a new wave in adventure travel. Bad weather immediately canceled...
Back to Titanic Part 1
Unsung Science - November 27, 2022 11:01 - 36 minutes ★★★★★ - 1.1K ratingsThe wreck of the Titanic lies about 2.4 miles below sea level. Only five submersibles in the world can carry people to that depth—and four of them have been retired or reassigned. The one remaining sub is something special. First, it holds five people comfortably (instead of two or thre...
The Secret of Baby Carrots
Unsung Science - November 20, 2022 08:01 - 26 minutes ★★★★★ - 1.1K ratingsIf you type the word “carrot” into Google Images, you get thousands of photos of the classic root vegetable. They’re all full-length, orange, straight, and pointy. Which is a little odd, because 70% of all the carrots we buy are, in fact, baby carrots. Or at least we think they’re baby...
From Revisionist History: The Triplicate Program and Opioid Epidemic
Unsung Science - July 28, 2022 10:00 - 12 minutes ★★★★★ - 1.1K ratingsI'm sharing a bonus episode from my friends at Revisionist History, Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast about things misunderstood and overlooked. This season, Malcolm’s obsessed with experiments – natural experiments, scientific experiments, thought experiments. In this preview, we learn about ...
Conversation with a Computer from What’s Your Problem
Unsung Science - April 07, 2022 07:01 - 11 minutes ★★★★★ - 1.1K ratingsI'm sharing a special preview of the new podcast, What’s Your Problem from Pushkin Industries. What’s Your Problem explains the problems really smart people are trying to solve right now, from creating a drone delivery service to building a car that can truly drive itself. Jacob Goldste...
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