The DemystifySci Podcast

Is life inevitable? Or are we the unbelievable result of an against-all-odds game that has produced a pair of eyeballs capable of unravelling the mysteries of the universe? Nick Lane, Biochemist at the University College London, is torn. On the one hand, life seems like it has no choice but to occur. The biochemistry of metabolism is completely spontaneous, even in the absence of cells. But comple...

At the very bottom of all our attempts to explain nature there is a single question. Why is there anything at all? What are the forces that take an entire universe of undifferentiated matter and give it form? According to Ray Tomes of the Cycles Research Institute, the universe we occupy is shaped by the resonant pressure of cycles. The whole universe rings like a bell, with a fundamental frequenc...

Fundamentally, this is a conversation about applied consciousness. We talk about the way that the "self" emerges from the resonant "structures" of the mind. These antennae decide the way that external stimuli are processed and integrated into experience, and so serve as the roots from which conscious experience springs. We talk about what happens when the antennae are tuned to a destructive resona...

Adam Frank has had a wide-ranging career in everything from computational information theory to astrobiology. Our conversation with him is equally wide-ranging but we do focus in on the search for life beyond our planet. What should we be looking for? Where should we focus our efforts? Support the scientific revolution with a monthly donation: https://bit.ly/3lcAasB #extraterrestrial #astrophysics...

These days, spring comes at strange times, winter barely arrives, and summer seems like it will never end. Conventional wisdom points to a single molecular cause - the rising tide of CO2 from increasing human activity. But that's an incomplete story, says Astrophysicist Nir Shaviv. It treats the Earth like it floats unmolested through the black night of the universe. But the full story is bigger,...

Dr. Paul DeLespinasse is the innovator of a Periodic Table of Associations, which allows one to easily triage and understand the legitimacy of laws based on salient conserved features. His work was in part inspired by 20th century physicist Dewey Larson and our conversation centers around the new ways in which democracy can be more justly managed in an increasingly chaotic information landscape. S...

Dr. Karl Friston is the most widely-cited neuroscientist in the world, known for his development of parametric mapping, a method for comparing brain scans between different patients that basically enabled the whole field of functional neuroscience. To follow up his insights into the human brain, Dr. Friston has turned his mathematical mind to other questions of life and consciousness, such as the...

Science is the source of modern myths, and cosmology - the study of the cosmos and our place in them - is the foundation on which the house of science is built. But we know that these myths, about the location of the Earth in the universe, about the verdant surface of Mars, about the firmament above a flat earth studded with glowing orbs, about the formation of the solar system - all these myths c...

DemystifySci is a show of opposites, and in the court of Science it is vital that we present both sides of any debate. To balance our tendency to favor arguments that undermine consensus, we have a conversation with Dr. Ethan Siegel, blogger, professor, podcaster, and high priest of the big bang and inflation cosmology. This is a primer of the foundations of thought in mainstream physics, and so c...

Photons don't exist, and the experimental results that got Clauser and Aspect a Nobel prize are a result of an incorrect interpretation of the data. So says experimental Physicist Eric Reiter, who has reproduced the famous experiments that show violations of Bell’s inequality and come out the other side with a much less spooky interpretation of quantum weirdness. According to Reiter’s Threshold Mo...

Most economic theories are what one would call "bounded," which is to say that they are based on a narrow window of human activity, be that time, or place, or category. This limitation produces ideas with middling real-world efficacy, as they cannot be widely applied to, say, the whole of humankind. But, what if an economic theory of everything, a decoder ring for why the condition of our species...

Living at the end of an era, what are the historical lessons can we learn from civilizations in collapse? We speak with David Carballo, Boston University archaeologist and anthropologist about the lost city of Teotihuacan which, at the start of the Common Era, was one of the largest cities in the world, boasting a population of more than 100,000 inhabitants from all corners of Mesoamerica. But all...

Why are you the way that you are? Why do you hurry, or focus on the technical details, or let your mind drive up anxiety and worry? Do you know? Or, do you, like most people, simply take for granted that your internal state is inevitable and largely unchangeable? That you're just a happenstance combination of genetics, upbringing, scarring social moments, and the civilizational frame you've been b...

What if we're wrong about entanglement? This is the question that's been driving Carver Mead, Caltech Physicist and veteran of the semiconductor industry, and at this point, he's pretty sure that Bell's Theorem is wrong. This is a bold claim! After all, Clauser, Aspect and Zeilinger just won Nobel, the biggest prize in the world, for their work on painstaking experiments that seem to prove the spo...

Professor Lee Cronin is an organic chemist, but he isn't just interested in the usual research path of describing new chemicals, though he does do that - he's interested in understanding the fundamental principles of chemistry, and how they can be used for the search for life on other planets... and for the creation of life, de novo, on our own.    And that's tricky, because the origin o...

Is Earth's crustal formation influenced by its position in the galaxy? And how would we know? It's obvious there are many celestial cycles, from the earthly ones that Milankovitch described to the orbit of the solar system through the galaxy, but how can we tie those to geological planetary cycles, like the 800 m.y. resonance of the core, the 500-300 m.y. supercontinent cycle, and the ~ 30 m.y. im...

Untold numbers of people across North America have been caught up in the wake of the opioid crisis - loved ones lost, lives interrupted, cities overrun with addicts. This tableau has unfolded in countless cities, against the faraway backdrop of an underworld drug empire that terrorizes the people of Mexico. Author Sam Quinones has spent the last decade of his life on both sides of the border, repo...

Astronomer, Dr. Steven Finkelstein, joins us for the third week of astro/cosmo discussions centered around the new James Webb (JWST) data. Dr. Finkelstein captured some of the first images of our most distant known galaxies. In this episode we discuss how the data is compiled and processed and how small changes in these pipelines can alter distance estimates by orders of magnitude. We also discuss...

This is the second installment of three episodes this month in the astro/cosmo department at DemystifySci. This is John Moffat, Cambridge cosmologist and out-of-the-box mathematical physicist. Dr. Moffat is working on various modified gravity regimes to make sense of the latest James Webb data, which suggests Galaxies were fully formed just a couple hundred million years after the Bang. We discuss...

A rockin' conversation with Professor Batygin about his perspectives on modern cosmology, how paradigms shift, and what the field looks like at the very horizon. We want to know - what are the roads to forming new planets? What about stars? What about heavy elements? This is another piece of the "why is this happening" puzzle, where we attempt to understand how and why certain ideas in science app...

Why are there electric anomalies at so many ancient structures? Why do structures built outside the classical periods of complex civilizations fail to display the same anomalies? Why do seeds taken to the top of a Mayan pyramid germinate faster than those left behind in the hotel room? Why are so many ancient buildings built with telluric currents and ley lines in mind? These are just some of the...

We take for granted today that public health systems around the world have the capacity to trace the progression of outbreaks, to determine how cancer clusters are linked to environmental effects, how dirty water causes outbreaks of transmissible illnesses... but where did all this knowledge come from? Contrary to popular belief, it wasn't from John Snow's identifying the origin of the Cholera epi...

This week we have Dr. Gerald Pollack on the show, who is here to tell us about the role of electricity in weather - but to get there, we have to go all the way to the beginning and deal with the structure of the atom, the nature of charge, and what are clouds, anyways? Support the scientific revolution with a monthly donation: https://bit.ly/3lcAasB #electricuniverse #science #weather Check our sh...

Dr. Matthew Johnson searches for safe and powerful ways to utilize mind-altering drugs for positive change in psychiatric patients' lives. His psych lab at Johns Hopkins focuses on behavioral modification in the wake of psilocybin, salvia, DMT, and other psychedelic therapies. On this week's episode, Dr. Johnson waxes wild on escaped patients, CIA mind control, and the myriad hijinks and challenge...

Dr. Madhulika Guhathakurta is a leader in heliophysics development at NASA who is very much interested in expanding the questions and paradigms being investigated. This week we talk with Lika about her favorite projects, including the use of AI to mine data and make new discoveries. She also opens up about new initiatives aimed at determining the exact relationship between solar weather and geosei...