The DemystifySci Podcast

Edo Kaal believes that it would be more useful to think about the atomic nucleus in terms of architecture rather than abstract mathematics. His Structured Atom Model (SAM) addresses the material basis of whether or not an element is radioactive, how the isotopes differ from one another, how instability occurs for large elements after lead, why alpha decay occurs, and much, much more. We ask the ob...

Did life emerging from the Earth itself? This week on AIRWAVES we talk to Dr. Karen Lloyd about the mysterious world of the deep, hot biosphere. Miles below our feet is a dark world of filled with creatures for whom we have no context, and who far outnumber those who bask in the light of the planet's surface. Who lives down there? How will they rewrite the book of biology? Are we ready for what we...

Support the scientific revolution with a monthly donation: https://bit.ly/3lcAasB We've all heard the popular theories explaining the clockwork cycle of glaciations that generally boil down to a series of overlapping eccentricities in the Earths' solar exposure. These Milankovitch cycles still don't entirely satisfy our need to explain the bistability of the system: what causes the Earth to regula...

AIRWAVES is a new audio-only series from DemystifySci where we explore topics that don't yet fit into the dialogues we're releasing here every week. Let us know what you think and which of these paths we should explore even farther. Check our short-films channel, @DemystifySci:  https://www.youtube.com/c/DemystifyingScience   Join our mailing list https://bit.ly/3v3kz2S   &nbsp...

What will the world look like when humans step into technological maturity and take evolution into their own hands? Philosopher and transhumanist David Pearce believes that this is an inevitable step in human development, and that we must turn our attention to the most noble cause imaginable - the alleviation of unnecessary suffering. But just because we can, does that mean we should?   ...

Wal Thornhill, the Chief Advisor for the Thunderbolts Project, has spent his life working on an electrical solution to the problem of grand unification. What is the place from which his ideas spring? We start with how the work of Immanuel Velikovsky inspired him as a young man, get him to sketch out the foundational concepts for how everything can be described through the lens of electricity, and...

What does the emergence of consciousnesses have to do with the fact that spacetime is doomed? Well, even after decades of experimentation, no one had managed to boot up consciousness from inanimate objects. Donald Hoffman, professor of cognitive neuroscience at UC Irvine, thinks this is because the very premise upon which most consciousness research is based, that the material world comes first an...

Dr. Michael Clarage is a founding member of the SAFIRE project who has recently turned his attention to the nascent field of biophotonics, which has him wondering - are we underestimating the effects of electromagnetic radiation on the human body? Is it possible to assemble a DNA sequence with nothing but sound? Is there such a thing as a morphogenic field? This week, Dr. Clarage takes us on a wal...

What is the dividing line between the feeling of sitting in a fluorescently lit cubicle vs flying down the Gold Coast, sea foam in your hair and music in your ears? Obviously almost everything, but where is the root of the subjective emotional experience, the qualia, come from? Andrés Gómez Emilsson, director of research at the Qualia Research Institute, suggests that it lives in the harmonic patt...

UC Berkeley professor Gibor Basri studies brown dwarves - cool objects that are not quite planets, not quite stars. But before we could get to the strange phenomena of these deuterium and lithium fusers, we had to cover some basics. How do you tell the difference between a planet and a star? Is it thier formation, their location, or something else entirely? The answer is fuzzier than you would exp...

What do ice ages, geology, crust shifts and super ancient civilizations have to do with each other? Well, when taken together, they tell the story of much, much longer timeline of technologically advanced humans. Our episode this week is with engineer and archeological researcher Mario Buildreps, who after years of research into the architecture of ancient cities, found something very strange. No...

NASA's Dr. Michelle Thaller sees the story of star birth, life, and death as an unfinished puzzle. We talk about the angular momentum paradox, the pitfalls of steady-state astronomy, and an integrated future, where gravity is just one force among many that creates the celestial sky. #NASA #Astronomy #Paradigmshift  Support independent media at our Patreon: https://bit.ly/3lcAasB Check our sho...

How do you explain a gold chain pulled from a 300 million year old lump of coal, a perfectly crafted brass bell pulled from a mine in the Appalachians, delicately inscribed stone obelisks found deep in gold mines, hammers embedded in impossibly ancient rock? Archaeology can't... which is why most researchers disregard these findings in order to maintain a 300,000-year-old timeline for modern human...

We normally think of planets as inanimate balls of nickel and silicon, animated by the molten rumbling of the inner core. How does our world change when someone like NASA’s David Grinspoon reveals that planets are actually powerful beings? It requires zooming out from our own experience, lived in the narrow corridors of the human scale. It requires us to think on the galactic scale, to entertain i...

The Ministry of Truth wants Dr. Meryl Nass' medical license, but she's not going to give it up without a fight. In this week's episode we talk about the manmade fingerprints of epidemics, the large-scale clampdown on medicines that have been considered safe for widespread use for decades, and the social changes that have happened over the last few years that look like they're here to stay.  &...

There are three steps to mass formation psychosis, and signs point to the fact that we are living through the very last stage. In this week's conversation, Ghent University's Dr. Mattias Desmet, lays out his psychological theory of how entire societies go insane and fall prey to totalitarianism. What are the conditions that bind people into collectives rather than communities? What causes a woman...

Did an Alien Craft crash into the Pacific Ocean near Papua New Guinea? Dr. Avi Loeb, Harvard University astronomer, certainly seems to think so. We have him on the show to talk about his potential discovery of a second interstellar object (following up on his earlier model for Oumuamua) and his mission to find the fragments that will settle the debate once and for all. We talk about what it takes...

What makes the voice of god real? This is the question that has driven Tanya Luhrmann's research for the last twenty years. She has lived with witches, with christians, with zoroastrians, with psychologists, and finds the same pattern woven through the lives of believers: They have trained themselves to have a sensory experience of god. On the podcast we talk about where this ability comes from in...

What if plate tectonics isn't settled science? Consensus suggests  Earth's crust has been going through relatively constant supercontinent cycles for as long as there has been a solid crust. There are all kinds of measurements and experiments that seem to confirm this observation - but there are whose who insist that the ancient history of the Earth is not what it seems. Rather than being for...

Supply chain collapse and food shortages are on everyone's mind these days. Is the answer to homestead, to prep, to drop out? Most likely not - it's nearly impossible to grow enough food in a small garden to sustain a family. But don't let the garden grow over quite yet - there's more to growing and getting your own food than survival.  Tamar Haspel moved from NYC to the woods and was surpris...

Julian Barbour's latest book, The Janus Point: A New Theory of Time takes us on a wild hallucinatory ride through the story of everything ever, all at once. Such are the questions of mathematical cosmologists, who look toward the perfection of numbers in search of an origin story for this thing we call existence... Support the podcast by becoming a Patron @DemystifySci  ªº¬˚∆≤≥≤≥ https://www....

Astronaut Donald Pettit champions a theory he developed while studying under Octave Levenspiel at Oregon State University. In short, it is apparent that large winged dinosaurs could not fly under today's atmospheric conditions. Pettit suggests that the solution to dino-flight is that the Earth's atmosphere was much thicker in the past, lending buoyancy to the giant animals while maintaining today'...

Is competition really all there is? If you take the word of those who insist that natural selection is solely responsible for all of life on earth, then yes. The story goes that competition drives fitness, that maximizing fitness ensures survival, and that survival ensures your traits become fixed in the population. But that's not the whole story. On the other side of the competitive evolutionary...

What will we find when we reach out to touch the celestial center of our planetary system? Will we be able to finally explain the pernicious problem of coronal heating? Of solar wind acceleration? We sit down with Dr. Nicola J Fox, head of NASA's Heliophysics department, to talk about the strange things being discovered by the Parker Solar Probe at very limits of human ingenuity.    Supp...

Today's conversation is all about what large-scale patterns in Nature can teach us about the individuals at the helm of decision making within those ensembles. Dr. Ted Pavlic trains AIs to detect these sorts of otherwise invisible interactions. The hope is that this approach, similar to that of Tuft's biologist Dr. Michael Levin, will allow for the remediation of large scale dysfunctions like canc...