UnDisciplined

John Vucitech suggests that it’s not just the science that matters when we’re talking about our longstanding views on wolves–it’s also a matter of compassion, and of understanding.

Coral reefs are some of the oldest, most diverse ecosystems on Earth. But they’re also among the most vulnerable. So, what do we do? Mary Hagedorn has an idea: Let’s collect as many as possible and freeze them.

Rafi Kohan’s latest book tells the story of trash talk, and explains why the practice of leveling vicious insults at our rivals might not be all that bad.

Bill Weir once felt as though he was watching the American story change in staggering ways. But now he wakes up each morning with more wonder than worry.

Brittany Gowan says that no matter where you are, and no matter how far you might feel from the world as it once existed, you can still connect to nature.

If you have a gnawing sense that this is end of the world as we know it, then know this: You’re not alone. And Athena Aktipis has some advice for you.

Until recently, there hasn’t been a great way of assessing groundwater storage, or understanding how climate change is impacting it.

Matthew’s recent paper looks at the potential connections between ocean temperatures and epic winters, like the one we experienced in the Mountain West in 2022-23.

For 21 years, the pub event series known as Nerd Nite has cross-crossed the globe, making science accessible and fun.

In The Asteroid Hunter, Dante Lauretta chronicles the quest to retrieve a sample from Bennu, which is one of the large asteroids that is most likely to collide with the Earth.

The young adults who comprise Generation Z live in a world of far less violent crime relative to the generation before them. So, why are so many of them struggling? Educator John Creger thinks he has part of the answer: They often need help understanding who they are in this world.

Anne Curzan might seem like a strange sort of English teacher. The veteran professor doesn’t believe in “right” and wrong” when it comes to grammar. Rather, she wants people to be able to make informed choices about language.

Laura Lewis met a bonobo named Louise as part of a study on the capacity of bonobos to remember the faces of apes they’d spent time with decades earlier. And Louise remembered.

Like many Americans, Sarah McCammon grew up in a deeply evangelical family, where she was plagued by fears and deep questions about her belief system, but scared to leave.

Until recently, nematodes weren’t known to live in the Great Salt Lake. And, in fact, very little lives there — because the lake’s salinity makes most life untenable. But, as it turns out, these tiny worms were doing just fine.

When humans debate climate policy, the questions asked are often posed in terms of what will work best. Fairness isn’t always, or even often, taken into account. But Stacia Ryder thinks that needs to change.

Ultra-processed food and the companies that produce them contribute significantly to the epidemic in diabetes, cancer, dementia, and other chronic disease. Is it time to regulate these products like tobacco? And will it take a class action suit to make that happen? Erik Peper believes so.

Memory is not a rigid, static picture of what came before. Rather, it’s a nebulous, ever-changing conceptualization of who we were, what we believed, what happened to us, and what was happening around us.

There is precedent for humans connecting with other living things, like getting attention, love, and companionship from dogs and cats and a few other animals that have been domesticated to provide partnership. Now, there’s a new option for meeting this need — social robots — who may end up being even better at fulfilling the human desire for connection.

When an Austrian bug collector discovered a new species of beetle in the 1930s, he bestowed upon it the name of a person he greatly admired. He called it Anophthalmus hitleri — and sent Adolf Hitler a note announcing the onomastic tribute. After nearly 90 years, should species still be named after horrible people?

Long before Julius Caesar became one of the most powerful rulers in the world, he was a relatively unknown curator of the Via Appia, a road stretching from Rome on the Tyrrhenian Coast to the Salento Peninsula on the Adriatic Sea. Our guest John Keahey traversed the Via Appia, and he joins us to talk about it.

A new book by Lowell Baier is not just a history of The Endangered Species Act, but an explanation of what’s gone right and what’s gone wrong in the implementation of this historic federal statute.

Slavery in the United States is often thought to be an institution of the American South, but western states played a part as well. In Utah, a law passed in 1852 made slavery and the slave trade legal, and this law was passed under the urging of the first territorial governor, Brigham Young. Historian Paul Reeve joins the program to discuss newly unearthed documents about Brigham Young and Utah's...

Water crises are nothing new. Indeed they’ve influenced the very course of human history again and again but we’ve never had a planet with 10 billion people on it before, and so can we solve the water crisis at a global scale?

If we are going to go to Mars, we’re going to need to bring a lot of things that we need to live that the red planet, so far as we can tell, just doesn’t have... and that includes bugs.