Inquiring Minds

On the show this week guest host Cynthia Graber talks to George Church—a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and the author of Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves. Church explains how, using cutting-edge genetic manipulation techniques, we may be able to help eradicate some of the world's worst diseases. Cynthia and Church also talk about everything from...

On the show this week we talk to cognitive scientist Paul Bloom about the morality of babies. Most of us think of babies as selfish, impulsive, and for the most part out of control. We tend to think of their morality as shaped by experience—by society, by their parents, by early childhood events. But Bloom and his collaborators at Yale have some pretty compelling evidence that at least some parts...

On the show this week we welcome guest host David Corn, political journalist and Washington bureau chief for Mother Jones. Corn interviews astrobiologist David Grinspoon about the science behind Christopher Nolan’s new movie, Interstellar—what it gets right, and what it gets wrong. Corn also talks to Indre about what the recent elections mean for those of us who value science. Spoiler: it’s not lo...

On the show this week Indre talks to Adam Savage about the future of science communication (and why it’s terrifying TV networks), why he’s worried Elon Musk might become a Marvel supervillain, and why it’s so important to him that women be better represented in his field. Indre also talks to host of The Story Collider, Ben Lillie, about the Antares Rocket explosion, flavonols, and Ben explains why...

On the show this week we talk to author William Gibson about time travel, cronuts, and his new 22nd century novel. We also talk to infectious disease doctor and co-founder of Wellbody Alliance, Dan Kelly, who is currently in Sierra Leone fighting the Ebola outbreak. Kelly explains what the situation looks like from the ground, what work he’s doing there, and what we can do to help. iTunes: itunes....

On the show this week we talk to Steven Johnson, author of the new book How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World. In it, Johnson argues that seemingly mundane scientific breakthroughs have changed our world in profound ways—impacting everything from life expectancy to women's fashion. We also welcome guest host Cynthia Graber who talks about a recent article she wrote for Nova...

On the show this week we talk to cognitive psychologist, neuroscientist, musician, and writer Daniel Levitin about his new book The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload. We also talk to microbiologist Siouxsie Wiles about the Ebola virus—what the risks really are, and why many people might be overreacting. Also, Chris has a huge announcement. Support the show: https...

San Francisco! Come see us interview Adam Savage live on Oct. 28! http://www.bayareascience.org/event/im-story-collider/ On the show this week we talk to celebrated Harvard cognitive scientist and psycholinguist Steven Pinker about his new book The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. Pinker explains how to write in clear, "classic" prose that share...

Come see us interview Adam Savage live in San Francisco on Oct. 28! http://www.bayareascience.org/event/im-story-collider/ On the show this week we talk to author and social activist Naomi Klein about her new book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. In it, Klein argues that we are past the time when incremental change can get us to where we need to be to properly address the chall...

On the show this week we talk to former Vice President Al Gore. He shares his thoughts on President Obama's global warming record, the upcoming United Nations climate meeting, the impact of fracking, and China's plans for a massive carbon market. This episode also features a discussion inspired by an article written by Cailin O’Connor at Slate on the often overlooked influence of random noise on o...

On the show this week we talk to Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan, who has focused much of his research on employing the tools of social science to study fact-checking—why it so often fails, and what can be done to make it work better. The cynical view on fact-checking is "too negative," argues Nyhan. "I think you have to think about what politics might look like without...

On the show this week we talk about randomness with science writer William Poundstone, author of the new book Rock Breaks Scissors. Poundstone explains why we’re so terrible at trying to come up with random sequences ourselves—and how understanding these pitfalls can actually help you predict, with accuracy above chance, what someone else is going to do even when he or she is trying, purposefully,...

"Its Islam over everything." So read the Twitter bio of Douglas McAuthur McCain—or, as he reportedly called himself, "Duale Khalid"—the San Diego man who is apparently the first American to be killed while fighting for ISIS. According to NBC News, McCain grew up in Minnesota, was a basketball player, and wanted to be a rapper. Friends describe him as a high school "goofbal...

One of the most difficult parts of getting a Ph. D. is finishing your dissertation. Beyond the mountain of work a dissertation requires, graduate students also have to face feelings of inadequacy, disappointment, and anxiety about the looming job search. Sometimes, they need a gentle, supportive push to quit stressing about every last comma and—after years of blood, sweat, and tears— finally turn...

On the political right, it's pretty popular these days to claim that the left exaggerates scientific worries about hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking." In a recent National Review article, for instance, a Hoover Institution researcher complains that 53 percent of Democrats in California support a fracking ban "despite the existence of little if any credible scientific evidence of fr...

On the show this week we talk to University of Pennsylvania professor of medicine David Casarett about his book Shocked: Adventures in Bringing Back the Recently Dead. Casarett explains the science of resuscitation—and what exactly it means to be “dead.” We talk about cryonics, the idea that you might be able to preserve your brain—or your whole body—by freezing it immediately after you die, and t...

Charles Dickens, perhaps the greatest of the Victorian novelists, was a man of strict routine. Every day, notes his biographer Claire Tomalin, Dickens would write from 9:00 am to 2:00 pm. After that, he would put his work away and go out for a long walk. Sometimes he walked as far as 30 miles; sometimes, he walked into the night. "If I couldn't walk fast and far, I should just explode and per...

What makes a great athlete? Talent? Training? Or is mostly genetic? On the show this week we get some answers from sports writer David Epstein while discussing his new book The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance. Epstein explains a lot—from why growing up in a small town increases your likelihood of becoming a professional athlete to how softball pitcher Jennie F...

You don't know it yet. There's no way that you could. But 400 years from now, a historian will write that the time in which you're now living is the "Penumbral Age" of human history—meaning, the period when a dark shadow began to fall over us all. You're living at the start of a new dark age, a new counter-Enlightenment. Why? Because too many of us living today, in the years just after t...

On the show this week we welcome Arthur I. Miller—physics Ph. D., science historian, philosopher—and an art aficionado to boot. We talked to Miller about his new book, Colliding Worlds: How Cutting-Edge Science is Redefining Contemporary Art, in which he makes the case for the existence of a "third culture" that, today, is mashing together art, science, and technology into one big domain...

It's the 4th of July, and you love your country. Your likely next step: Fire off some small scale explosives, and drink a lot of beer. But that last word ought to trouble you a little. Beer? Is that really the best you can do? Isn't it a little, er, uncreative? Amy Stewart, our guest this week, has some better ideas for you. Author of the New York Times bestselling book The Drunken Botanist: The P...

There's nothing quite as satisfying as a really good joke. Someone has made a clever new connection between two mundane things that we've all encountered—and suddenly we have a lovely "aha" moment. We find it funny. That sense of revelation accompanying a good joke or comic is very similar to what many scientists experience when they finally figure out a great explanation for some kind o...

Chances are that when you think about math—which, for most of us, happens pretty infrequently—you don't think of it in anything like the way that Jordan Ellenberg does. Ellenberg is a rare scholar who is both a math professor (at the University of Wisconsin-Madison) and a novelist. And in his fascinating new book, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking, he deploys analyses of poet...

We've all been mesmerized by them—those beautiful brain scan images that make us feel like we're on the cutting edge of scientifically decoding how we think. But as soon as one neuroscience study purports to show which brain region lights up when we are enjoying Coca-Cola, or looking at cute puppies, or thinking we have souls, some other expert claims "it's just a correlation," and you w...

Remember those stick-figures of chemical compounds you were forced to memorize in high school? Remember how useless it seemed at the time? Can you still articulate the difference between a covalent bond and an ionic one (without checking Wikipedia)? If not, pay attention: You might be caught flat-footed during the zombie apocalypse. The CDC suggests (half-seriously) having a zombie-preparedness ki...