University of California Audio Podcasts (Audio)

The extraordinary abilities of the cerebral cortex are central to what sets humans apart from other species. A defining feature of the cortex is its organization along a sensorimotor-to-association (S–A) axis, extending from primary sensorimotor areas to transmodal association regions that support abstract cognition. This axis varies across species and has been profoundly remodeled in humans. Nena...

Human brain expansion is often discussed in terms of the genetic and molecular innovations that drove uniquely human cognitive abilities. Yet evolution is fundamentally a process of tradeoffs. Disproportionate expansion of forebrain structures increases the demands placed on long-range connectivity, metabolism, and cellular maintenance, imposing costs that scale with brain size. Alex Pollen, assoc...

AI in healthcare raises urgent questions about bias, privacy, and power. Safiya U. Noble, Ph. D., examines how AI systems can reproduce social and racial inequities when they rely on incomplete data, hidden assumptions, and proxies such as healthcare spending. Noble points to problems in search engines, image generation, facial recognition, and medical algorithms, including cases where systems mis...

Jamaica Kincaid is an Antiguan-American writer known for her vivid, poetic prose and exploration of themes like colonialism, family, identity, and the legacy of the Caribbean. Her deeply personal and reflective style has made her one of the most influential voices in contemporary literature. Born Elaine Potter Richardson on May 25, 1949, in St. John’s, Antigua, she moved to the United States as a...

Dr. Bruce Miller, director of the UCSF Edward and Pearl Fein Memory and Aging Center, examines what neurodegenerative disease reveals about the neural basis of creativity and the social mind. Research in frontotemporal dementia (FTD) shows that visual creativity is not rare: a subset of patients—particularly those with left anterior temporal degeneration—develop new or intensified artistic abiliti...

Artificial intelligence is changing how businesses use data, make decisions, and organize work. UC San Diego Rady School of Management's Thomas Beyer looks at that evolution from the early push to collect as much data as possible, through predictive analytics and generative AI, to emerging systems that can act more proactively across business environments. Beyer examines the promises and limits of...

Alzheimer’s disease unfolds over many years through a complex interplay of amyloid, tau, genetics, lipid biology, and the brain’s immune response. John Hardy, Ph. D., explains how rare inherited forms of Alzheimer’s disease helped shape current thinking about how the disease begins, then connects those discoveries to broader questions about late onset disease and why it develops differently across...

Seizures caused by epilepsy can have a dramatic impact on one's quality of life. For Nolan, his seizures cost him everyday independence, including the ability to drive. When he decided to have surgery, he chose awake brain surgery led by Dr. Edward Chang, a neurosurgeon at UCSF. During surgery, Nolan speaks and responds as the medical team carefully maps the language regions of his brain — guiding...

Climate action needs more than great science, it needs people who understand how communities, institutions, and policy actually change. The Climate Action Lab in UC San Diego’s School of Social Sciences spotlights alumni building climate careers across sustainability, climate, and public policy. Panelists trace the paths that led them into the field, share how social science training helped them n...

Azim Surani, Director of Research at the Gurdon Institute and Professor Emeritus at University of Cambridge, received the Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences, specifically in the field of Life Sciences and Medicine, for his work in demonstrating how male and female mammalian genomes receive distinct imprints during germ cell development. Genomic imprinting introduced a novel concept to Mendelian genetic...

From stone tools and shelters to symbolic art and abstract thought, human history is shaped by a brain built to form and share ideas. Joseph Paradiso, Professor in Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Lab, explores what comes next after the early visions of ubiquitous computing have largely arrived in today’s Internet of Things world, where low-power sensors and interfaces are embedded in smar...

Cognitive resilience depends on how the brain responds to environment, aging, and inflammation. J. Tiago Gonçalves, Ph. D., studies the hippocampus to examine how spatial memory is shaped by factors such as cognitive enrichment, exercise, social interaction, disease, and age. Gonçalves explains how adult neurogenesis and microglia help support the brain’s ability to encode information, and how dis...

Trustworthy machine learning requires models that still work when real-world data changes, and Adam Klivans, Ph. D., Director of the Institute for Foundations of Machine Learning (IFML), emphasizes learning under “distribution shift” as a major barrier to relying on models to predict disease across different patient populations. IFML focuses on foundational algorithms and mathematical techniques t...

Widely regarded as one of the most respected figures in American broadcast journalism, Judy Woodruff is known for her decades-long career covering politics and current events. She is also the author of the book, This Is Judy Woodruff at the White House. Renowned for her calm, balanced reporting and commitment to journalistic integrity, Woodruff has covered every U.S. presidential election since 19...

Alpha Clinics in California accelerate the development of regenerative medicine therapies that use cells and genes to treat serious diseases. Patient advocate Tara Radcliffe Ghiglieri shares lived experience with gene therapy, while Sheldon Morris, M.D., M.P.H., Mehrdad Abedi, M.D., Daniela A. Bota, M.D., Ph. D., Catriona Jamieson, M.D., Ph. D., Michael Lewis, M.D., Mark Walters, M.D., and Leo D....

A fundamental question in biology is: how did humans acquire their unique characteristics? What allows us to stand upright, while our primate ancestors walked on all fours? What brain alterations drove our increased intelligence and allowed us to perceive our own mortality? One of the mechanisms that has been hypothesized to be involved is changes in gene expression elicited by nucleotide alterati...

Off-the-shelf immune cell therapies using engineered T cells represent an important direction in cancer treatment. Lili Yang, Ph. D., at UCLA develops an off-the-shelf platform based on invariant natural killer T (iNKT) cells generated from hematopoietic stem cells, often sourced from cord blood. Yang programs these stem cells with iNKT cell receptors, chimeric antigen receptors (CARs), and genes...

Guy Kawasaki, chief evangelist of Canva and a former Apple evangelist who helped market the Macintosh in 1984, shares his 10 tips for writing your own story forward. A New York Times bestselling author, Kawasaki uses reinvention and resilience as a framework for decision-making in personal and professional life. His books include "Wiser Guy: Life-Changing Revelations and Revisions from Tech’s Chie...

Humans excel at transmitting ideas, skills, and knowledge across generations, and at building on those competencies in a cumulative manner. James Rilling, Professor of Psychology at Emory University, explores how the transmission of our cumulative culture is assumed to depend on both language and mental perspective-taking, or theory of mind. If humans have specialized abilities in these domains, w...

How fast are you really aging, and what could that mean for brain health? Aladdin H. Shadyab, Ph. D., explores the gap between chronological age and biological age, and why that difference matters for long-term health. Shadyab describes tools that use information from blood to estimate how quickly the body is aging, including approaches that look beyond the body as a whole to consider aging in spe...

The distinct biology of the human brain, scaffolded by language and culture, allows ideas to be formed, named, shared, and accumulated across generations. Dean Falk, Professor of Anthropology, Florida State University, explains how paleoneurologists study the brains of human ancestors by producing endocasts from fossilized skulls and measuring cranial capacities. Dated skulls indicate brain size m...

Latin dance is a living blend of rhythms, histories, and styles, and Araceli Cervantes approaches it as both cultural practice and personal craft. Cervantes is an actress and dancer whose love for the arts began early and continues to shape her work. Drawing on training that spans Mexican traditional dance as well as contemporary and Latin forms, she brings both technique and joy to performance. A...

The postpartum period is a major transition that reshapes the body, emotions, and daily life all at once. Julia Cormano, MD, FACOG presents a clear overview of recovery after delivery, explaining common physical changes, expected discomforts, and practical ways to support healing. Cormano emphasizes that experiences vary, and that understanding what is typical can reduce stress and help families f...

Our brains are engines of imagination—an “idea organ” that has transformed both our species and the planet. Genevieve Konopka, Chair of the Department of Neurobiology in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, asks how genes drive the development of the cell types that build the human brain and give rise to cognition, and how cognitive behavior emerges from evolutionarily adapted genomic prog...

Humans live in a world of ideas—born in the brain, shared through language, accumulated in culture across generations, and made reality. From the first flaked stone tools to the building of shelters, from figurative and symbolic art to abstract thought, our brains are engines of imagination—an “idea organ” that has transformed both our species and the planet itself. The distinct biology of the hum...