Every summer, headlines warn about rising temperatures, air quality, and using sunscreen, but there’s another silent danger that spikes this time of year: drownings. It can happen fast, and is tragically common among young children. While many assume drowning only happens in oceans or rough waters, most cases actually occur in backyard pools, vacation rentals, or even bathtubs.

Our guest today is a pediatric emergency physician who sees these drownings far too often. She’s made it her mission to move out of the emergency room and prevent these deaths before they happen, using public service campaigns, community partnerships, and practical tools every parent should know.

What if brain scans could help explain the symptoms of a psychotic episode as they happen? And what if artificial intelligence could identify the patterns to predict them? 

There’s a new frontier in mental health research using functional MRI and machine learning to examine the experience of patients with psychosis. Decoding brain activity is a complex puzzle that requires a new way of thinking about psychiatric illness. Not only in terms of behavior, but in terms of networks, circuits, and connectivity.

Parents of children with anxiety would try just about anything to help their kids feel better. Many approaches for therapists and educators seem to emphasize calming the overactive mind to give them relief from these intense emotions. In contrast to this conventional wisdom, Our guest today is a researcher who has found that activating the brain through creativity and imagination-based play might be better to unlock the brain’s natural ability to regulate itself. This leads to a broader exploration of all the ways that creativity may be one of the brain’s best ways of helping us to thrive.

Do you discuss financial planning with your friends? To many, talking about money is taboo. But our guest today researched the social connections of high-income individuals to learn more about the effect of our friendships on our finances. His results suggest that it pays to be friends with wealthy people, and especially to talk with them about money matters.

Exceptional athletic performance is optimized by mental toughness.  Some people develop this naturally, but the good news is that it can also be taught. Whether it’s a high-stakes athletic contest or an important boardroom presentation, our guest today knows the science behind staying cool under pressure. A former pro softball pitcher herself, she knows what it’s like to get “into the zone.” Her insights could help anyone perform better in their careers and in life.

Last January, as heavily populated parts of Los Angeles burned, images of the disaster brought the destructive power of wildfires into the public consciousness more than ever. Today, as thousands of acres burn in the Pacific Northwest and in Canada, wildfire smoke is causing hazy skies and air quality warnings all the way to the Great Lakes and even Florida. But beyond the danger of flames and pollution, what if there’s more in that smoke than we realized—something alive?

Our guest is professor of wildland fire science at the University of Idaho and a pyroaerobiologist, where she is working to uncover a surprising and little-known dimension of wildfire: living microbes, bacteria and fungi. These tiny organisms, pulled from burning forests and soils, are hitching a ride through the air, affecting ecosystems, agriculture, and human health hundreds of miles away.

Taylor Swift is one of the biggest musicians of our time, but why?

Our guest today is the author of Cranking Up Taylor Swift: Her Musical Journey in 11 Songs, and dives deep into the music, not to simply celebrate her success, but to ask why her work resonates, how it reflects larger cultural shifts, and what it reveals about the evolving sound of country and pop in the 21st century.

What’s your mindfulness practice? Everything from transcendental meditation to hot yoga, the resources available for settling your mind and centering your self are more plentiful than ever. Ironically, it’s a little bit overwhelming to choose from this abundance of mindfulness options. But one researcher is teasing apart the question, “does the type of mindfulness practice make a difference?” Some techniques call for focusing on a single object, like the breath, while others encourage a broader awareness, letting thoughts and feelings rise and fall without trying to change them. To uncover how these different approaches engage the brain, our guest today is using functional fMRI. This allows scientists to compare brain activity in people with high levels of anxiety as they practiced these methods, to reveal why some strategies may be more effective than others. Join us to explore how mindfulness training can shift the way people relate to worry and how certain practices may even help rewire habitual thought patterns.

Our guest this time works alongside the New Mexico community of Picuris Pueblo, one of the smallest and oldest Indigenous groups in the United States. A recent study, published in Nature, establishes a clear ancestral link between Picuris Pueblo and the ancient peoples of Chaco Canyon. The discovery represents a landmark in archaeological genetics, not just for its scientific findings, but for the way the research was conducted: at the invitation of the tribe, under their direction, and with their sovereignty over the process fully respected. We discuss why archaeology is a continuous process of reckoning with history, and how to move forward in meaningful partnership with Native communities. It all depends on changing not just our methods, but our mindset.

What if the cure we need for some deadly condition is already sitting on the pharmacy shelf, just waiting to be matched to the right disease? A whole field of research has emerged with the goal of repurposing an existing drug for a different disease than the one it was originally developed to treat. Now, with the potential of AI to scan billions of possible drug-disease combinations, this area of research has just been turbo charged. Some believe it could transform how medicine is practiced. We’ll talk about multi-system organ failure, drug repurposing at scale, and the surprising number of proven therapies that are gathering dust simply because no one is spreading the word. It's a story about science, survival, and the untapped potential of what we already have.