From First Principles

Can light restore aspects of sight? Can recalling a cold experience change an animal's metabolism? And what can ghost particles and mirror-image molecules tell us about the universe? Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary follow up on our 2026 Nobel Prize episodes with research building on optogenetics, IceCube and molecular handedness. We unpack an early human vision-restoration trial, cold-memory exp...

Why does life favor one molecular mirror image? The 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry honors Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai for nonlinear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis. Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary unpack the science from first principles: chirality, Pasteur's crystals, enantiomeric excess, and how a tiny imbalance can grow into an overwhelming preference for one m...

Why build a telescope inside a billion tons of Antarctic ice? The 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics recognizes Francis Halzen's work on IceCube and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos from the cosmos. In Episode 62 of From First Principles, Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary explain neutrinos from the ground up: why these elusive particles make powerful cosmic messengers, how faint flashes of Cherenko...

How do you prove what a brain cell actually does? The 2026 Nobel Prize in Medicine celebrates a remarkable answer: give cells a light-sensitive protein, then switch their activity on or off with light. In Episode 61 of From First Principles, Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary explain optogenetics from the ground up and trace the discoveries of Peter Hegemann, Georg Nagel and Karl Deisseroth. We fol...

Who could win the 2026 Nobel Prizes? From the science behind Ozempic to quantum interference and droplets inside living cells, Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary make their picks for Medicine, Physics and Chemistry, and explain the discoveries behind them. In Episode 60 of From First Principles, we explore seven research areas with a case for Nobel recognition: GLP-1, optogenetics, optical coherenc...

What connects a noise complaint, holiday lights seen from space, and the physics of a coffee stain? Three unexpected paths from basic research to discoveries with real-world impact. Krishna Choudhary and Lester Nare explore the science behind the 2026 Golden Goose Awards: Zhen Xu's work on histotripsy, NASA's Black Marble nighttime satellite data, and Sidney Nagel's discoveries in soft...

What does it mean to solve an equation that describes almost every fluid around us, from the air over a wing to the water swirling down a drain? In Episode 58 of From First Principles, Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary build the Navier-Stokes equations from the ground up before digging into OpenAI’s claimed breakthrough and the debate surrounding it. Summary How Newton’s laws become equations for...

What science should you be watching this fall? From Nobel Prize season to NASA’s Roman Space Telescope, Mars’ moons and Mercury, Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary take a relaxed tour of the discoveries and missions on their radar. In Episode 57 of From First Principles, we explore why curiosity-driven research matters, what the Golden Goose Awards celebrate, and how questions that once sounded imp...

What can a yak living thousands of meters above sea level teach us about repairing the human brain? In Episode 56 of From First Principles , Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary break down a new Neuron paper that traces an evolutionary adaptation found in high-altitude animals to a previously hidden pathway involved in building and repairing myelin. Summary What myelin actually does and why losing it...

Which quantum computer will actually scale? In Part 2 of our quantum computing deep dive, Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary move from theory to hardware—comparing superconducting qubits, trapped ions, neutral atoms, and silicon spin qubits before going inside the new Nature cover paper Krishna co-authored with the HRL Quantum Team and collaborators. The episode begins with a simple question: what...

Quantum computers do not simply “try every answer at once.” So what do they actually do—and why have governments and technology companies spent billions trying to build them? In Part 1 of our two-part quantum computing deep dive, Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary build the field from first principles. The series was prompted by a new Nature cover paper, A digitally controlled silicon quantum proce...

Claude did not solve the Riemann Hypothesis. But what it actually did may be one of the clearest examples yet of how rapidly AI systems are changing the way difficult mathematics can be attacked. In Episode 53, Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary go from first principles on arguably the most famous unsolved problem in mathematics. We begin with Euler and the Basel problem, build the Riemann zeta fun...

In this anniversary episode, Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary look back at how two longtime friends turned their regular conversations about science into a show now shared by millions of people around the world, and what they hope to build with FFP Nation in Year Two. Then we turn to a new Nature paper challenging the idea that the precolonial Amazon was sparsely populated. Airborne LiDAR reveale...

What happens when electronics can operate at temperatures hot enough to melt aluminum? In this deep-dive episode, Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary examine a new high-temperature memory device developed by researchers at USC, the Air Force Research Laboratory, Kumamoto University, and their collaborators. Published in Science , the experimental memristor combines tungsten, hafnium oxide, and graph...

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary , this episode moves from astrobiology to science policy to the rapidly changing frontier of artificial intelligence and mathematics. First, researchers analyzing pristine samples returned from asteroid Ryugu report all five canonical nucleobases used by DNA and RNA. We explain what that does—and does not—mean for the origin of life, how JAXA’s Hayabusa2...

In this special interview episode, Lester Nare speaks with Juan Busso , Senior Football Data Scientist at FIFA, and Arron Ackerman , FIFA’s Team Lead for Football Performance Analysis, about the data science behind the Match Momentum visualization featured throughout the 2026 World Cup. What does “momentum” actually mean in football—and how can it be measured without reducing the game to possessio...

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary , this episode returns to the FFP science rundown with stories spanning astrophysics, precision medicine, medical imaging, artificial intelligence, and World Cup technology. We begin with the Event Horizon Telescope and its evolving view of M87*, the supermassive black hole 55 million light-years away. How do you image something that appears about as sma...

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary , this episode is part two of our July 4th America 250 special : a celebration of the scientific, technological, institutional, and cultural breakthroughs that helped shape the United States into one of the most important scientific nations in human history. In part one, we traced American science from Benjamin Franklin and the founding documents through...

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary , this episode is part one of our July 4th America 250 special : a celebration of the scientific, technological, institutional, and cultural innovations that helped shape the United States into one of the most important scientific nations in human history. For America’s 250th anniversary, we built an interactive timeline of the discoveries, inventions, i...

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary , this episode is our World Cup special — a deep dive into the science, physics, engineering, and data behind the beautiful game. We start with the offside rule and the controversy around semi-automated VAR. How can a system decide whether a player is onside or offside by only a few inches? Krishna breaks the problem down like an experimental physicist:...

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary , this episode marks Krishna’s return to the studio after paternity leave — and the timing could not be more fitting. Today’s deep dive is about inheritance: not just the classic Mendelian rules most of us learned in biology class, but the stranger, more dynamic world of non-Mendelian epigenetic inheritance . Starting from Gregor Mendel and his pea plant...

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary, this episode is the second interview in our ongoing collaboration series with Carnegie Observatories. Krishna sits down with Dr. Michael Blanton, the new Director of the Carnegie Observatories, for a wide-ranging conversation on how astronomy became one of the most data-rich sciences, how the Sloan Digital Sky Survey helped change the culture around ope...

Hosted by Lester Nare , this episode features astrophysicist Dan Gilman for a deep conversation on one of the biggest open questions in modern physics: what dark matter actually is . Starting from first principles, Lester and Dan walk through why the evidence for dark matter is now so strong, how strong gravitational lensing works, why tiny distortions in lensed light can reveal invisible clumps o...

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary , this interview features John Mulchaey , the 12th President of Carnegie Science and former Director of the Carnegie Observatories. The conversation starts with his early work on galaxy groups and dark matter, then expands into how Carnegie works as a scientific institution, what the Giant Magellan Telescope could unlock for exoplanets and astronomy, how...

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary , this rundown episode covers four new science stories at a high level: a huge new 3D ant imaging database built with synchrotron X-ray microtomography, a lunar agriculture experiment that grew chickpeas in simulated moon soil using fungi and worm waste, AI-assisted discovery of strange objects in the Hubble archive, and a new programmatic roadmap for ro...