Smart Tea

Your mind can be a powerful drug, but when (if ever) is it ethical to choose mind over matter? Aarati tells the story of an army doctor who observed the placebo effect in soldiers and then went on to transform how we conduct clinical trials. 

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Yellow fever killed thousands of people in the 1800s but no one understood how it spread. Aarati tells the story of the Cuban doctor who discovered that mosquitos can act as a vector for disease. 

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For more information and sources for this episode, visit https://www.smartteapodcast.com. 

From laptops to cell phones to electric cars, our modern world runs on lithium-ion batteries. Aarati tells the story of one of the scientists who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for creating lightweight, rechargeable, batteries. 

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For more information and sources for this episode, visit https://www.smartteapodcast.com. 

On June 24, 1975, Eastern Airlines 66 mysteriously crashed when attempting to land at JFK airport. Authorities called in Mr. Tornado to investigate. Aarati tells the story of Dr. Ted Fujita, who analyzed the destruction from severe storms and gave us a scale to quantify tornados.

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For more information and sources for this episode, visit https://www.smartteapodcast.com. 

After retirement, Dr. Alice Stewart continued to raise awareness of how radiation could cause cancer, immunodeficiencies, and other possible health defects. She stood up against government entities on behalf of workers who were dying of radiation poisoning and continued to fight against nuclear weapons manufacturing for the rest of her life. 

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For more information and sources for this episode, visit https://www.smartteapodcast.com. 

In this two part series, Aarati tells the story of the epidemiologist who realized there was a link between prenatal x-rays and childhood cancer. She  undertook a lifelong crusade to warn people against the dangers of radiation.

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For more information and sources for this episode, visit https://www.smartteapodcast.com. 

Stress affects men and women differently. We sit down with Kiara Rodríguez-Acevedo, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Pennsylvania to ask her how she is blending neuroscience and epigenetics to uncover how estrogen levels in the brain influence stress vulnerability and resilience.

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For more information and sources for this episode, visit https://www.smartteapodcast.com. 

Happy Black History month! In this episode, Aarati tells the unlikely story of a carpenter turned lab technician. Vivien Thomas created a blood shunt for the hearts of blue babies without ever having gone to medical school or earning a degree... and without getting credit for decades.

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For more information and sources for this episode, visit https://www.smartteapodcast.com. 

Ants may not be very big, but we have a lot to learn from these tiny creatures! We sit down with Andrew Robertson, a PhD candidate at Georgia Tech and winner of Galactic Polymath Education Studio's 2025 #MySciJourney competition, and talk about his work on ants and other social insects.

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For more information and sources for this episode, visit https://www.smartteapodcast.com. 

It's episode 50! Aarati tells the story of the temperamental Russian chemist who figured out a way to organize all the known (and unknown) elements into a table that ordered them by increasing atomic weight and grouped them into categories. 

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For more information and sources for this episode, visit https://www.smartteapodcast.com.