Science Talk

By Scientific American

Technology Science & Medicine

What's Science Talk about?

Science Talk takes you deeply into the world of science audio. Sometimes we travel deep into the wilderness. Sometimes deep into the mind of a scientific expert. The experience will always stimulate your auditory neurons, even if you don't know quite where you're headed at the start. Also check our podcast from Scientific American : "60-Second Science." To view all of our archived podcasts please go to www.scientificamerican.com/podcast

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LAST EPISODE

Racism in Health: The Roots...

08.10.2023

What is behind the Black maternal mortality crisis, and what needs to change? In this podcast from Nature and Scientific American, leading academics unpack the racism at the heart of the system.

Science Talk episodes:

08.10.2023 Racism in Health: The Roots of the U.S. Black Maternal Mortality Crisis What is behind the Black maternal mortality crisis, and what needs to change? In this podcast from Nature and Scientific American, leading academics unpack the racism at the heart of the system.
04.26.2022 Love Computers? Love History? Listen to This Podcast In the newest season of Lost Women of Science, we enter a world of secrecy, computers and nuclear weapons—and see how Klára Dán von Neumann was a part of all of it.
12.14.2021 Top 10 Emerging Tech of 2021 The World Economic Forum and Scientific American team up to highlight technological advances that could change the world—including self-fertilizing crops, on-demand drug manufacturing, breath-sensing diagnostics and 3-D-printed houses.
11.08.2021 Listen to This New Podcast: The Lost Women of Science A new podcast is on a mission to retrieve unsung female scientists from oblivion.
10.21.2021 An Unblinking History of the Conservation Movement In her new book Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction, science journalist Michelle Nijhuis looks into the past of the wildlife conservation field, warts and all, to try to chart its future.
09.28.2021 Inside the Nail-Biting Quest to Find the 'Loneliest Whale' It is a tale of sound: the song of a solitary whale that vocalizes at a unique frequency of 52 hertz, which no other whale—as the story goes—can seemingly understand. It is also a tale about science and ocean life, ...
09.08.2021 Listen to This: 'Hope Lies in Dreams,' a New Podcast from Nature Biotechnology This is a story of desperation, anger, poverty—and triumph over long odds to crack the code of a degenerative disease that had been stealing the lives of children since it was first discovered more than a century ago.
09.03.2021 Summer of Science Reading, Episode 4: Navigating Loss and Hope with Nature In Science Book Talk, a new four-part podcast miniseries, host Deboki Chakravarti acts as literary guide to two science books that share a beautiful and sometimes deeply resonant entanglement. In this week’s show: World of Wonders, by Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and ...
08.27.2021 Summer of Science Reading, Episode 3: Abandoned and Underground but Not Lost In Science Book Talk, a new four-part podcast miniseries, host Deboki Chakravarti acts as literary guide to two science books that share a beautiful and sometimes deeply resonant entanglement. In this week’s show: Underland, by Robert MacFarlane, and Islands of ...
08.13.2021 Summer of Science Reading, Episode 2: Life beneath Our Feet In Science Book Talk, a new four-part podcast miniseries, host Deboki Chakravarti acts as literary guide to two science books that share a beautiful and sometimes deeply resonant entanglement. In this week’s show: Entangled Life, by Merlin Sheldrake, and Gathering ...
08.06.2021 Summer of Science Reading, Episode 1: The Many Mysteries of Fish In Science Book Talk, a new four-part podcast miniseries, host Deboki Chakravarti acts as literary guide to two science books that share a beautiful and sometimes deeply resonant entanglement. In this week’s show: Why Fish Don’t Exist, by Lulu Miller, ...
07.30.2021 National Park Nature Walks, Episode 10: The Otherworldly Sounds of an Elk Rut Here is our next installment of a new pop-up podcast miniseries that takes your ears into the deep sound of nature. Host Jacob Job , an ecologist and audiophile, brings you inches away from a multitude of creatures, great and ...
07.16.2021 National Park Nature Walks, Episode 9: Inside a Migratory Bird Sanctuary Here is our next installment of a new pop-up podcast miniseries that takes your ears into the deep sound of nature. Host Jacob Job , an ecologist and audiophile, brings you inches away from a multitude of creatures, great and ...
07.02.2021 National Park Nature Walks, Episode 8: The Blue Oaks of Sequoia Here is our next installment of a new pop-up podcast miniseries that takes your ears into the deep sound of nature. Host Jacob Job , an ecologist and audiophile, brings you inches away from a multitude of creatures, great and ...
06.18.2021 National Park Nature Walks, Episode 7: Into the Wilderness by Canoe Here is our next installment of a new pop-up podcast miniseries that takes your ears into the deep sound of nature. Host Jacob Job , an ecologist and audiophile, brings you inches away from a multitude of creatures, great and ...
06.04.2021 National Park Nature Walks, Episode 6: Yellowstone Bison and Marsh Birds Here is our next installment of a new pop-up podcast miniseries that takes your ears into the deep sound of nature. Host Jacob Job , an ecologist and audiophile, brings you inches away from a multitude of creatures, great and ...
04.22.2021 The Deepest Dive to Find the Secrets of the Whales On Earth Day, Scientific American sits down with National Geographic underwater photographer Brian Skerry to talk about free diving with whales and filming the giant mammals within five meters or less. “We have to get within a few meters of ...
04.16.2021 National Park Nature Walks, Episode 5: A Northwoods Voyage Here is our next installment of a new pop-up podcast miniseries that takes your ears into the deep sound of nature. Host Jacob Job , an ecologist and audiophile, brings you inches away from a multitude of creatures, great and ...
04.13.2021 First in Space: New Yuri Gagarin Biography Shares Hidden Side of Cosmonaut It’s been 60 years, to the day, since Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was the first human to travel to space in a tiny capsule attached to an R-7 ballistic missile, a powerful rocket originally designed to carry a three- to ...
04.09.2021 National Park Nature Walks, Episode 4: Beautiful Swamp Here is our next installment of a new pop-up podcast miniseries that takes your ears into the deep sound of nature. Host Jacob Job , an ecologist and audiophile, brings you inches away from a multitude of creatures, great and ...
04.02.2021 National Park Nature Walks, Episode 3: Where Lewis and Clark Trod Here is our next installment of a new pop-up podcast miniseries that takes your ears into the deep sound of nature. Host Jacob Job , an ecologist and audiophile, brings you inches away from a multitude of creatures, great and ...
03.26.2021 National Park Nature Walks, Episode 2: Sequoia Heights Here is our next installment of a new pop-up podcast miniseries that takes your ears into the deep sound of nature. Host Jacob Job , an ecologist and audiophile, brings you inches away from a multitude of creatures, great and ...
03.19.2021 National Park Nature Walks, Episode 1: Rocky Mountains Today we launch a new pop-up podcast miniseries that takes your ears into the deep sound of nature. Host Jacob Job , an ecologist and audiophile, brings you inches away from a multitude of creatures, great and small, amid the ...
03.17.2021 AI Can Now Debate with Humans and Sometimes Convince Them, Too Today on the Science Talk podcast, Noam Slonim of IBM Research speaks to Scientific American about an impressive feat of computer engineering: an AI-powered autonomous system that can engage in complex debate with humans over issues ranging from subsidizing preschool ...
02.12.2021 Climate Change Could Shred Guitars Known for Shredding It is the wood that the rock greats have sworn by—swamp ash, in the form of their Fender Telecaster and Stratocaster guitars—for more than 70 years. If you have ever listened to rock, you have probably heard a solid-body swamp ...
02.04.2021 On Finding Yourself in a Butterfly's Wings Today on the Science Talk podcast, Alexis Gambis , a New York University biologist and independent filmmaker, speaks about making Son of Monarchs , which won the 2021 Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. The ...
12.30.2020 A Breakdown of Beavers Environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb talks about his book Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter .
12.14.2020 America on Dialysis Kidney disease affects millions of Americans, but corporate capture of dialysis, along with disparities in treatment and transplant access, mean that not everyone's journey is the same. On this Science Talk podcast, we speak with Carrie Arnold, lead reporter in ...
12.11.2020 What Science Has Learned about the Coronavirus One Year On About a year ago, SARS-CoV-2 (which wasn’t called that yet) was just beginning to emerge in a cluster of cases inside China . We know what has happened since then, but it bears repeating: there have been 69 million cases ...
12.09.2020 2020's Top 10 Tech Innovations Scientific American and the World Economic Forum sifted through more than 75 nominations for the most innovative and potentially game-changing technologies in 2020. The final top 10 span the fields of medicine, engineering, environmental sciences and chemistry. And to win ...
12.03.2020 Inventing Us: How Inventions Shaped Humanity Materials scientist and science writer Ainissa Ramirez talks about her latest book The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another .
08.29.2020 175 Years of Scientific American: The Good, the Bad and the Debunking We look back at some highlights, midlights and lowlights of the history of Scientific American, featuring former editor in chief John Rennie. Astrophysicist Alan Guth also appears in a sponsored segment.
08.24.2020 Bread Science: A Yeasty Conversation “Baking is applied microbiology,” according to the book Modernist Bread . During pandemic lockdowns, many people started baking their own bread. Scientific American contributing editor W. Wayt Gibbs talks about Modernist Bread, for which he was a writer and editor.
08.14.2020 The Coming or Possibly Nearly Here Storm Former Scientific American editor Mark Alpert talks about his latest sci-fi thriller The Coming Storm, which warns about the consequences of unethical scientific research and of ignoring the scientific findings you don’t like.
08.07.2020 COVID-19 Vaccine Ethics: Who Gets It First and Other Issues Contributing editor W. Wayt Gibbs spoke with Arthur Caplan , head of the NYU Grossman School of Medicine’s division of medical ethics, about some of the ethical issues that researchers have to consider in testing and distributing vaccines against COVID-19.
07.30.2020 How Your Homes and Buildings Affect You Journalist and author Emily Anthes talks about her book The Great Indoors: The Surprising Science of How Buildings Shape Our Behavior, Health, and Happiness .
07.21.2020 African-Americans, Nature and Environmental Justice Journalist Bob Hirshon reports from the Taking Nature Black conference, reporter Shahla Farzan talks about tracking copperhead snakes, and nanoscientist Ondrej Krivanek discusses microscopes with subangstrom resolution.
06.28.2020 How Nature Helps Body and Soul Journalist and author Florence Williams talks about her book The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier and More Creative .
06.26.2020 The Messenger Is the Message Behavioral scientist Stephen Martin and psychologist Joseph Marks talk about their book Messengers: Who We Listen To, Who We Don’t, and Why .
06.21.2020 Air, Sea and Space: Ocean Health, Atmosphere Insights and Black Holes Biological oceanography expert Miriam Goldstein talks about issues facing the oceans. Reporter Adam Levy discusses air pollution info available because of the pandemic. And astrophysicist Andrew Fabian chats about black holes.
06.18.2020 Science on the Hill: Calculating Climate For the fourth Science on the Hill event, Future Climate: What We Know, What We Don’t, experts talked with Scientific American senior editor Mark Fischetti about what goes into modeling our climate—and how such models are used in addition to ...
05.29.2020 Your Brain, Free Will and the Law Stanford University neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky talks about human behavior, the penal system and the question of free will.
05.19.2020 No, No Nobel: How to Lose the Prize Physicist Brian Keating talks about his book Losing the Nobel Prize: A Story of Cosmology, Ambition, and the Perils of Science’s Highest Honor .
05.05.2020 Galileo's Fight against Science Denial Astrophysicist and author Mario Livio talks about his latest book, Galileo: And the Science Deniers, and how the legendary scientist’s battles are still relevant today.
04.28.2020 Where Is Everybody Else in the Universe? Guest host W. Wayt Gibbs talks with Jason Wright, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Pennsylvania State University’s Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds, about what’s known as the Fermi paradox: In a universe of trillions of planets, where ...
04.25.2020 Why Exercise Is So Good For You Health journalist Judy Foreman talks about her new book Exercise Is Medicine: How Physical Activity Boosts Health and Slows Aging .
04.24.2020 COVID-19: What the Autopsies Reveal Pathologists are starting to get a closer look at the damage that COVID-19 does to the body by carefully examining the internal organs of people who have died from the novel coronavirus.
04.03.2020 COVID-19: The Need for Secure Labs--and Their Risks Coronavirus research requires high-containment labs. Journalist Elisabeth Eaves talks with Scientific American contributing editor W. Wayt Gibbs about her article “The Risks of Building Too Many Bio Labs,” a joint project of the New Yorker and the Bulletin of the ...
03.27.2020 Flat Earthers: What They Believe and Why Michael Marshall, project director of the Good Thinking Society in the U.K., talks about flat earth belief and its relationship to conspiracy theories and other antiscience activities.
03.24.2020 COVID-19: Predicting the Path and Analyzing Immunity Scientific American contributing editor W. Wayt Gibbs continues to report on the coronavirus outbreak from his home in Kirkland, Wash., site of the first U.S. cases. In this installment, he talks with researchers about what their models show for the ...

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Science Talk

What's Science Talk about?

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Science Talk episodes:

Racism in Health: The Roots of the U.S. Black Maternal Mortality Crisis

Love Computers? Love History? Listen to This Podcast

Top 10 Emerging Tech of 2021

Listen to This New Podcast: The Lost Women of Science

An Unblinking History of the Conservation Movement

Inside the Nail-Biting Quest to Find the 'Loneliest Whale'

Listen to This: 'Hope Lies in Dreams,' a New Podcast from Nature Biotechnology

Summer of Science Reading, Episode 4: Navigating Loss and Hope with Nature

Summer of Science Reading, Episode 3: Abandoned and Underground but Not Lost

Summer of Science Reading, Episode 2: Life beneath Our Feet

Summer of Science Reading, Episode 1: The Many Mysteries of Fish

National Park Nature Walks, Episode 10: The Otherworldly Sounds of an Elk Rut

National Park Nature Walks, Episode 9: Inside a Migratory Bird Sanctuary

National Park Nature Walks, Episode 8: The Blue Oaks of Sequoia

National Park Nature Walks, Episode 7: Into the Wilderness by Canoe

National Park Nature Walks, Episode 6: Yellowstone Bison and Marsh Birds

The Deepest Dive to Find the Secrets of the Whales

National Park Nature Walks, Episode 5: A Northwoods Voyage

First in Space: New Yuri Gagarin Biography Shares Hidden Side of Cosmonaut

National Park Nature Walks, Episode 4: Beautiful Swamp

National Park Nature Walks, Episode 3: Where Lewis and Clark Trod

National Park Nature Walks, Episode 2: Sequoia Heights

National Park Nature Walks, Episode 1: Rocky Mountains

AI Can Now Debate with Humans and Sometimes Convince Them, Too

Climate Change Could Shred Guitars Known for Shredding

On Finding Yourself in a Butterfly's Wings

A Breakdown of Beavers

America on Dialysis

What Science Has Learned about the Coronavirus One Year On

2020's Top 10 Tech Innovations

Inventing Us: How Inventions Shaped Humanity

175 Years of Scientific American: The Good, the Bad and the Debunking

Bread Science: A Yeasty Conversation

The Coming or Possibly Nearly Here Storm

COVID-19 Vaccine Ethics: Who Gets It First and Other Issues

How Your Homes and Buildings Affect You

African-Americans, Nature and Environmental Justice

How Nature Helps Body and Soul

The Messenger Is the Message

Air, Sea and Space: Ocean Health, Atmosphere Insights and Black Holes

Science on the Hill: Calculating Climate

Your Brain, Free Will and the Law

No, No Nobel: How to Lose the Prize

Galileo's Fight against Science Denial

Where Is Everybody Else in the Universe?

Why Exercise Is So Good For You

COVID-19: What the Autopsies Reveal

COVID-19: The Need for Secure Labs--and Their Risks

Flat Earthers: What They Believe and Why

COVID-19: Predicting the Path and Analyzing Immunity

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