Read Science!

Streamed live on 6 September 2018. David Quammen returned to “Read Science!” to discuss his latest book with us, The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life. When the subject is the entire history of life on Earth, you know we had lots to talk about: the discovery of Archaea as the (contentious) “Third […]

Streamed live on 18 June 2018. We love dinosaurs, and their story is a big one. In this episode we talked with paleontologist Steve Brusatte about his new book, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World. Dinosaurs were, by a huge margin, the most successful group of animals […]

Streamed live on 29 May 2018. ‘Heredity’, to this episode’s guest, is a big idea. Today, we think of heredity almost exclusively in terms of the genes we get from our biological parents–but what about before genetics became an idea? With its root meaning in ‘inheritance’, what the word encompasses has shifted, expanded, and contracted, […]

Streamed live on 13 March 2018. Is it possible to run a marathon in under 2 hours? Probably. Running a mile in under 4 minutes was impossible until Roger Bannister did it. Reaching the peak of Mt. Everest without the help of supplemental oxygen was impossible until Messner and Habeler did it in 1978. The […]

Streamed live on 11 January 2018. Perhaps the longest running scientific experiment of the 20th, and now 21st centuries, has been taking place in a remote “City of Science” (“Akademgodok”) in Siberia, involving raising generations of foxes selected from a larger population (bred for their fur) based on an individual’s demeanor toward humans. The goal […]

Streamed live on 7 December 2017. Think about this: the Hubble Space Telescope has 300 times the mass of a golden retriever. Or this: Hally’s Comet has 109 times the mass of a blue whale. Surprised? NOT surprised? Welcome to the fun world of magnitude: the sizes, masses, speed, and most anything else you can […]

Streamed live on 30 November 2017. Meet Elizebeth and William Friedman, quite possibly the most important people in recent US history that most people have never heard of: the power couple who conjured the US’s code-breaking capabilities virtually out of thin air in World War I, thanks largely to happenstance. Sometimes as a pair, sometimes […]

Streamed live on 9 November 2017. “This is one of those books where we predict the future.” So say authors Kelly & Zach Weinersmith as the first sentence of the introduction to their book, Soonish : Ten Emerging Technologies That’ll Improve and/or Ruin Everything. As they note, predicting the future is easy, but getting the […]

Streamed live on 9 November 2017. Americans have an uneasy relationship with death and dying, but could benefit greatly from a more forthright approach. Different cultures have very different funerary customs, and the differences highlight the benefits that could come from changes in habits. Surprisingly many of our customs, which we think must be steeped […]

Streamed live on 12 October 2017. When Julius Caesar, having been stabbed in the Roman Senate, exhaled his last breath, the molecules in his breath began spreading around the Earth. How likely is it that, when you inhale, you inhale a molecule that Caesar exhaled? Well, that answer, plus many, many more observations and answers […]