SciMar with Dan Riskin

Inside the Breakthrough - How Science Comes to Life

Science EN ↓ 28 episodes

In Season 2 of the series we will share a new collection of surprising and unusual stories from the history of science. In each episode we will feature two seemingly unrelated stories from the past. Then, Dan Riskin will connect the dots between those stories and offer insight into how that history impacts modern medical research. We are learning from the past so we can understand the present, and inform the future. Along the way we will learn how a professor at Stanford turned mild mannered young men into cruel vicious prison guards, and how the Irish Potato Famine really had nothing to do wi...

Author

SciMar with Dan Riskin

Episodes

Ross Geller and Marie Curie are Outsiders 22.02.2021 28:28

The TV show Friends was king of primetime for a decade and while all six characters were ‘friends’ one of them was not like the others: Ross. We look at why he was such a poor fit with this group and what that means for real life scientists. Marie Curie studied at the Sorbonne. She discovered Polonium and Radium. Eventually she became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize. All that makes her a uniq...

How Bad Timing Killed the Electric Car 08.02.2021 26:24

There was a time that the battle between Electric, Gasoline, and Steam powered cars was a dead heat. So why did gas win? Was it price? Or power? Speed, noise, marketing, or political influence? Or was it just Bad Timing? Reader’s Digest magazine told us about the invention of the LED 60 years ago. But those tiny lights that make your phone screen so clear didn’t transition immediately into everyda...

Eureka! Before and After 25.01.2021 25:00

When we tell science stories they usually have a long complicated build up, and finish with someone yelling Eureka. But is Eureka really the end? What if we look at it as the beginning? Or the middle? In this first episode, we meet Archimedes - a brilliant scientist from ancient Greece that is credited with the first use of the word “Eureka!” And we also travel to England for the story of Alexande...