Materials scientist and science writer Ainissa Ramirez talks about her latest book The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another.



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Inventing Us: How Inventions Shaped Humanity

Science Talk is a podcast of longer-form audio experiments from Scientific American--from immersive sonic journeys into nature to deep dives into research with leading experts.

Science

Science is an iterative process. Progress comes from people coming up with ideas that are sort of right and then new evidence and ideas coming in to update them to become even more correct.
Underlying this process is a willingness by scientists to accept that they might be wrong and be open to updating their ideas.
It turns out that social scientists have a term for this mindset. To find out more, I talked with two researchers who are studying this thing they call “intellectual humility.”
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Episode 4: This Simple Strategy Might Be the Key to Advancing Science Faster

Today’s episode of Uncertain is about the ways that studies can leave us overconfident and how “just-so stories” can make us feel overly certain about results that are still a work in progress. And sometimes studies get misleading results because of random error or weird samples or study design. But sometimes science gets things wrong because it’s done by humans, and humans are fallible and imperfect.
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Episode 3: When Uncertainty Hides in the Blindspot of Overconfidence

In this episode, we’ll talk with two researchers whose work probes the uncertainty surrounding how we perceive the world around us. 
It turns out that what we see may not always be a perfect reflection of reality. 

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Episode 2: Think Seeing is Believing? Think Again

Welcome to Uncertain, a five-part podcast miniseries from Scientific American. Here we will dive head first into the possibilities of the unknowing.
Over the next five episodes, I’ll be talking with people like her: explorers who work in the realm of uncertainty. Through them, we’ll discover the ways that uncertainty can spark curiosity and scientific breakthroughs. But we’ll also find out how uncertainty can bite us in the butt and make science really hard.
We’ll see how neglecting uncertainty can lead to overconfidence and how embracing uncertainty can allow for a more nuanced and accurate understanding of the world.
We’ll finish by examining how it’s possible to have confidence in scientific findings, even with their uncertainties.


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Episode 1: Uncertainty is Science's Super Power. Make It Yours, Too

Does the word "uncertainty" make you nervous? Does it rule your life? Would you say it kinda describes the state of the world these days? 
Enter Uncertain, a new limited podcast series from Scientific American.
In this series, host Christie Aschwanden will help to demystify uncertainty. She's going to take away its scariness–or, rather, a cast of scientific dreamers that she talked to, will. 
As you’ll see, uncertainty drives scientific discovery. Throughout scientific history, uncertainty has spurred our collective imagination and our need to know the things we don’t. 
To be clear, uncertainty makes science very difficult. So in this mini-series we’ll both learn how scientists push through those difficulties; and how they also avoid the bias, logical fallacies, and blindspots that can lurk behind uncertainty.
She'll get them to share their own habits of mind and techniques for facing, and embracing, the unknown. 
And even if you’re not a scientist, UNCERTAIN provides a practical way to think through what we don’t know in our lives—to face that uncertainty, and, hopefully, live better, more informed lives because of it.
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Inventing Us: How Inventions Shaped Humanity

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