From First Principles

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary , this special episode ranks the 26 scientists shown in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer by one standard only: their contribution to fundamental science. Starting with the Manhattan Project figures near the bottom and working up through the giants of quantum mechanics, relativity, nuclear physics, and logic, the episode turns a movie cast list into a surp...

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary , this episode is a deep dive into one of the strangest and most hard-fought materials science stories in decades: the claim that researchers have finally synthesized bulk hexagonal diamond, also known as lonsdaleite. They break down why this material matters, how it differs from ordinary cubic diamond, why scientists argued about its existence for more...

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary , this episode is a full deep dive on Artemis II as the crew returns from humanity’s first crewed lunar flyby in more than 50 years. Lester and Krishna break down the mission photo by photo, from launch and translunar injection to Earthset, Earthrise, the in-space solar eclipse, the science of lunar observations, and the skip-entry reentry profile bringi...

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary , this rundown episode covers five new science and tech stories at a high level: NASA’s Artemis 2 moon mission, what actually leaked in the Claude Code incident, a new cancer genomics paper suggesting domesticated cats may be unusually useful real-world models for human cancer, two leaked iPhone spyware toolkits, and a science-focused review of Project H...

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary , this episode is a deep dive into one of the hardest questions in neuroscience: what breaks in the brain during a coma, and can we figure out how to turn consciousness back on? We unpack a new paper from Daniel Toker et al. that uses an interpretable AI framework — not a generic black box chatbot model — to reverse engineer the biological mechanisms of...

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary , this episode is a fast-moving science rundown covering four remarkable stories from across AI, genetics, neuroscience, and paleontology. We dig into the story of a machine learning engineer who used AI tools to help design a personalized cancer vaccine for his dog, explore how an all-female fish species has survived far longer than evolutionary theory...

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary , this episode is a deep dive into one of the strangest science stories of the year: a dish of human neurons allegedly learning to play Doom . We go back to the original 2022 DishBrain paper out of Cortical Labs, unpack how biological neurons can be read and written with multi-electrode arrays, and then compare the peer-reviewed Pong result to the much n...

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary , this is our first standalone rundown episode — a faster, looser format where we hit several stories we didn’t have room to turn into full deep dives. This week: bacteria revived from a Romanian ice cave after 5,000 years , a speculative but fascinating theory linking solar storms to earthquakes , new evidence that dogs and humans share genetic roots fo...

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary , this episode is a deep dive into a new synthetic-biology breakthrough out of EPFL: OptoEvolution . The big idea is simple but powerful — traditional directed evolution is great at making proteins that are always “on,” but biology is full of proteins that need to switch states , respond to stimuli, and behave more like logic gates than static tools. Thi...

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary , this episode is a full deep dive on planetary defense . We break down NASA’s DART mission, why the goal was never to “blow up” an asteroid but to gently nudge it , and why the newest result is even bigger than the original headline: scientists can now directly detect that the Didymos–Dimorphos system changed not just locally, but in its heliocentric pa...

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary , this episode starts in astrobiology with a fresh experimental challenge to one of the biggest objections to lithopanspermia : can life actually survive the violence of being blasted off a planet by an asteroid impact? Then, after a packed Rundown, we pivot hard into immunology with a radical Stanford paper asking whether we could build one nasal vaccin...

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary , this episode has two main stories: an astrophysics update on a candidate “dark galaxy” in the Perseus Cluster (a halo that’s ~99.9% dark matter), and a major Alzheimer’s mechanism paper tracing how exercise protects the brain by repairing the blood–brain barrier —with an actionable drug-like path already emerging. Summary Candidate dark galaxy — Hubble...

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary , this episode has three main stories: interactive dream engineering (yes, two-way “communication” during lucid dreaming), the proton radius puzzle finally getting resolved by a precision lab measurement, and a sobering but hopeful look at ALS —including a breakthrough “ALS-in-a-dish” model that could finally make drug screening translate to humans. Summ...

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary, this episode is a Winter Olympics deep dive from first principles—physics, neuroscience, and climate science in one ride. • Why ice is slippery: the “water layer” story is incomplete—new nanoscale measurements suggest a far more viscous, thicker interfacial film than textbook intuition. • Choking under pressure: how high stakes can disrupt neural contro...

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary , this episode jumps from plant biochemistry to quantum metrology to cancer evolution. We start with a University of York breakthrough that solves a ~50-year mystery in alkaloid biosynthesis—identifying the “missing” enzyme behind a key asymmetric step plants use to build powerful defensive (and pharmaceutically useful) molecules. Then we go deep on quan...

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary , this episode is a full-spectrum moonshot: why Artemis II matters, how the mission actually works (SLS, Orion, translunar injection, free-return trajectories), and a first-principles teardown of the most common Apollo “hoax” claims—Van Allen belts, waving flags, shadows, and “why aren’t there stars?” We also run a quick Rundown of wild science headlines...

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary , this episode runs from JWST’s “Little Red Dots” (and what they imply about early supermassive black holes), to a TimeVault method for recording gene expression over time , to 8,000-year-old Halaf pottery that may encode geometric sequences — plus a quick Cloud9 follow-up on the “starless dark-matter halo” debate. Summary JWST’s Little Red Dots — why th...

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary , this episode runs from the deep math of string theory to the biology of sleep—then out to a starless “ghost cloud” that may be a naked dark-matter halo. We open with a Nature paper showing that physical networks in nature (brains, blood vessels, fungal networks) appear to organize like energy-minimizing surfaces—spitting out the same branching rules yo...

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary , this episode jumps from ancient engineering to modern AI and markets. We start with the newly uncovered Pompeii worksite that finally shows how Romans mixed their concrete — and why it “self-heals.” Then we pivot into a Princeton neuroscience idea that the brain builds complex thought like LEGO bricks (compositional neural subspaces). From there, we br...

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary , this Season Finale closes out Season 1 with a deep dive into the physics behind fusion’s biggest bottleneck: fast magnetic reconnection . We unpack why classic models predicted reconnection should be slow, why nature (and tokamaks) disagree, and how modern “plasmoid” reconnection helps explain solar flares, plasma instabilities, and the real engineerin...

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary , this single-story deep dive tells the full story of how humanity uncovered the structure of DNA — and the human tensions that shaped it. From Mendel’s pea-plant mathematics to Rosalind Franklin’s groundbreaking x-ray crystallography, from Cavendish–King’s College rivalries to the famous Photo 51, this episode follows the scientific and ethical arc behi...

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary , this episode spans astrophysics, forensic chemistry, and neuroimmunology. We begin with a deep dive into 3I/ATLAS , only the third confirmed interstellar object to ever pass through our solar system — larger and stranger than ‘Oumuamua and Borisov, with new imagery released as NASA reopened operations. Then we break down a true-crime forensic breakthro...

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary , this episode dives into three breakthroughs stretching across aerospace engineering, astrobiology, and quantum computing. We start with a Nature Communications paper from Stevens Institute that experimentally validates a 60-year-old hypothesis underpinning hypersonic flight modeling. Then we head 3,000 meters below the Pacific to explore a newly discov...

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary , this super-episode spans four wildly different frontiers: bioengineers hijacking bacterial evolution to mass-produce octopus camouflage pigment; orcas developing cultural hunting strategies against great white sharks; the bizarre chemistry behind civet-processed luxury coffee; and a UCLA breakthrough that pushes telescope resolution beyond the classica...

AI, Eyes, and the Sky — From Synthetic Genomes to Restored Vision and Cosmic Mysteries Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary, this episode of From First Principles explores three cutting-edge breakthroughs connecting medicine, technology, and astronomy. Summary • AI for Oncology, Minus the Privacy Risk: University of Toronto researchers develop OncoGAN —a generative model that creates realis...