Unsung Science

In the days of old, creating a song required a composer, a lyricist, an arranger, a recording engineer, a band or orchestra. Today, in the pop world, a single person often handles those jobs in a single studio. In this extraordinary episode, you’ll hear two-time Grammy winner Oak Felder create a new song, in real time, start to finish—and you’ll gain incredible insight into how technology and tale...

Planes contribute 9% of the world’s carbon pollution, but electrifying them has always seemed impossible; batteries have never been powerful or light enough to carry themselves. But in 2023, batteries reached a tipping point in power and weight. Beta Technologies, based in Vermont, is flying its six-passenger vertical-takeoff airplanes every day. David Pogue was there at takeoff. Learn more about...

The U.S. has fallen into polarized, partisan, political bickering. Online, liberals and conservatives seem to despise each other. But nobody seems to stop to ask: How did we get our liberal and conservative views in the first place? We formed our opinions by carefully weighing the issues and thoughtfully choosing a stance, right? Well, no; turns out over half of our political leanings are determin...

Every month, over a billion people open their phones and fire up Google Maps. Its original function—offering driving directions, with real-time traffic tracking—was disruptive enough in 2008, when most people had to pay $10 a month for traffic data. But since that time, it’s become a global business directory, a transit timetable, crowdedness monitor, a Street View miracle—and now, in its newest r...

For the most part, we don’t hunt whales anymore, but we’re still killing them—mostly by driving ships into them. One species, the North Atlantic right whale, is now extinct in most parts of the world; only 340 are left. But it may not be too late. An extraordinary coalition of nonprofits, research institutions, foundations, and even megalithic shipping corporations are teaming up to develop techno...

On Christmas Day, 2021, NASA launched the James Webb Space Telescope into orbit a million miles from Earth—a huge and insanely ambitious machine, billions of dollars over budget and 14 years past deadline. Now, as the telescope completes its first year of capturing astonishing images of the universe as it was just after the Big Bang, its creators discuss why so many things went right. Learn more a...

People use all kinds of words to describe Elon Musk, from “genius” to “megalomaniac,” from “visionary” to “erratic”—but now there’s less reason to call him “enigmatic,” thanks to Walter Isaacson’s new 688-page biography. Isaacson hung out with Musk for two years, attending meetings, witnessing meltdowns, taking Musk’s 3 a.m. phone calls. In this special “Unsung Science” episode, Isaacson describes...

In April 1978, MIT professor Amar Bose was flying home to Boston from Switzerland. But when he tried to listen to music through the airline’s headphones, he couldn’t hear a darned thing. He spent the rest of the flight doing acoustical math—and sketching out an idea for headphones that literally subtracted background noise from what you hear. Today, noise-canceling headphones are everywhere. But t...

There’s a new kind of jack in town—well, new as of 2014—called USB-C. This single, tiny connector can carry power, video, audio, and data between electronic gadgets—simultaneously. It can replace a laptop’s power cord, USB jacks, video output jack, and headphone jack. The connector is symmetrical, so you can’t insert it upside-down. It’s identical end for end, too, so it doesn’t matter which end y...

Genealogy has been around a while. So has DNA evidence. But what if you combined the two? What if you could use DNA from a crime scene, compare the unknown killer’s genetics with public databases of other people’s DNA, figure out who his relatives are, and thereby determine his identity? That’s the system that CeCe Moore invented five years ago. So far, she’s cracked over 270 cold cases using this...

We’ve known about the placebo effects for over 200 years. That’s where doctors give you a pill containing no actual medicine, but you still get better. Recent studies have uncovered a broader range of benefits from the including alleviated pain, nausea, heart rate, hay fever, allergies, insomnia, depression, anxiety, fatigue, and even symptoms of Parkinson’s. Weirder yet, the characteristics of th...

In 1994, Masahiro Hara got tired of having to scan six or seven barcodes on every box of Toyota car-parts that zoomed past him on the assembly line. He wondered why the standard barcode from the 70s was still used...Why couldn’t someone invent a barcode that used two dimensions instead of one that could work from any angle or distance, even even if it got smudged or torn? And so, studying a game o...

The lost OceanGate submersible has captured the world’s attention. In the summer of 2022, “CBS News Sunday Morning” correspondent and "Unsung Science" host David Pogue was invited to join an expedition to visit the Titanic wreck with OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, as well as Titanic dive veteran P.H. Nargeolet, aboard the one-of-a-kind sub. David covered his adventure in a two-part episode in Decemb...

In his senior year of college, a monstrous ailment fell upon Doug Lindsay. His skin felt flayed. His heart raced. The room spun. He was so weak, he couldn’t sit up in bed, let alone walk. Worst of all, doctors had no idea what was wrong with him. Only one person on earth had the time and motivation to figure out what was wrong with Doug Lindsay: Doug Lindsay. Over the next 14 years, he consumed me...

We’ve been shipping stuff across oceans for centuries. But until 1956, we loaded our ships in the dumbest way possible: one at a time. Then Malcolm McClean came along. He envisioned lifting the big metal box part off a truck and setting it directly down onto a ship. Every one of these boxes would be identical and interchangeable, maximizing space and minimizing waste. The shipping container was bo...

The first time you heard “Star Trek” characters speak Klingon, or the “Game of Thrones” characters speaking Dothraki and High Valyrian, you might have assumed that the actors were just speaking a few words of gibberish, created by some screenwriter to sound authentic. But these are complete languages, with vocabulary, syntax, grammar, and even made-up histories. There’s only one person on the plan...

We’re overrun with plastic. It’s in our oceans, our water, our food. Something has to be done—preferably by corporations, which churn out millions of tons of plastic every year. Enter: the toothpaste tube. It might seem like a minor player in the plastic problem, but we throw 20 billion toothpaste tubes into the landfill every year. Recycling plants can’t take them, because they’re made of plastic...

After 17 years of trying to prop up their failing farm outside of London, Charlie Burrell and Isabella Tree were stressed, exhausted, and $1.7 million in debt. They decided to stop farming—no more plowing, planting, irrigating, chemicals. They gave away the farm—to nature.  20 years later, their land has one of the most important biodiversity hotspots in the UK. These 3500 acres teem with species,...

65 million years ago an asteroid struck the earth. In the ensuing planetary darkness, the dinosaurs went extinct. But the dinosaurs didn’t have a space program! Now we can spot incoming asteroids with steadily improving confidence. If we see one on a collision course with the Earth, we know from the movies that the solution is to nuke it...Right? Actually, NASA has a better idea. If you can just n...

In 1915, British explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton’s historic expedition to Antarctica stalled when floating ice trapped, crushed, and finally sank his ship, Endurance. Shackleton’s men survived 21 months on the ice, alone and freezing, and became one of the most incredible adventure stories ever recorded. The ship itself, Endurance, was not seen again for 106 years. Every attempt to find it wound up...

Deepfakes, those computer-generated videos of well-known people saying things they never actually said, strike a lot of experts as terrifying. If we can’t even trust videos we see online, how does democracy stand a chance? As photo- and video-manipulation apps get cheaper and better, the rise of fake Obamas, Trumps, and Ukrainian presidents seemed unstoppable. But then a coalition of 750 camera, s...

The star attraction of NASA’s Mars 2020 mission is the Perseverance rover. But bolted to its underside was a stowaway: A tiny, 19-inch helicopter called Ingenuity. She was intended to fly five times on Mars, as a wild experiment to see if anything could fly in Mars’s incredibly thin atmosphere. But as the speed, altitude, length, and usefulness of Ingenuity’s flights improved, her mission was exte...

In early 2023 ChatGPT blew up the internet. It’s an AI app that can create any piece of writing you ask for. Poems, homework, lyrics, essays, outlines, recipes, interview questions, and even code. All are indistinguishable from something written by a person, all instantaneous and free. In schools, cheaters began cheating immediately. Educators were horrified, calling it the end of homework, colleg...

From NASA helicopters in space to robot bouys at sea, “CBS Sunday Morning” correspondent David Pogue is covering all the latest innovations across tech and science on season 2 of Unsung Science. Hear interviews with industry leaders who take you behind the scenes of the world’s greatest advances in transportation, food, space, internet, and health. New episodes every other Friday. Learn more about...

In “Back to Titanic” Part 1, David Pogue told of his invitation to join an expedition to visit the wreck of the Titanic in a custom submersible. The company, OceanGate, ordinarily charges $250,000 per person, as part of a new wave in adventure travel.   Bad weather immediately canceled the dive that Pogue and the “CBS Sunday Morning” crew were scheduled to join—but the CEO offered a consolation di...