What if we're wrong about entanglement? This is the question that's been driving Carver Mead, Caltech Physicist and veteran of the semiconductor industry, and at this point, he's pretty sure that Bell's Theorem is wrong. This is a bold claim! After all, Clauser, Aspect and Zeilinger just won Nobel, the biggest prize in the world, for their work on painstaking experiments that seem to prove the spooky paradox - some information can travel faster than light! Not so fast, says Carver Mead. There's no problem with the experimental design, or the observation that the photons are "entangled." The problem lies upstream of the experiment, at the threshhold of understanding. What is a photon? What are the atoms doing when they're generating the signal that's being measured, and how does a physical understanding of the wave function change the spookiness of quantum mechanics?    

Professor Lee Cronin is an organic chemist, but he isn't just interested in the usual research path of describing new chemicals, though he does do that - he's interested in understanding the fundamental principles of chemistry, and how they can be used for the search for life on other planets... and for the creation of life, de novo, on our own.   

Is Earth's crustal formation influenced by its position in the galaxy? And how would we know? It's obvious there are many celestial cycles, from the earthly ones that Milankovitch described to the orbit of the solar system through the galaxy, but how can we tie those to geological planetary cycles, like the 800 m.y. resonance of the core, the 500-300 m.y. supercontinent cycle, and the ~ 30 m.y. impact cycle?  Professor Chris Kirkland and team from Australia's Curtin University have developed a zircon-based approach that they say can tease apart the cyclic secrets of crust formation. We talk radiometric dating, limits and benefits of the technique, asymptotic time horizons, and the difficulties of doing geology on a galactic scale.   

Untold numbers of people across North America have been caught up in the wake of the opioid crisis - loved ones lost, lives interrupted, cities overrun with addicts. This tableau has unfolded in countless cities, against the faraway backdrop of an underworld drug empire that terrorizes the people of Mexico. Author Sam Quinones has spent the last decade of his life on both sides of the border, reporting from the front lines. He's traced the origin of the crisis, detailed the toll it took on the government of Mexico, the people living there, and how unlimited quantities magic pain pills erased an entire generation, with no regard for social or class lines. What makes this conversation unique is that, despite the darkness he's seen, Quinones has finally found a glimmer of hope among the wreckage. We talk destruction, absolution, and rebirth. We talk of the drug wars, of the way that wall street colluded to make the crisis, and how we all played a role. But more than that, we talk about the way that we can pull ourselves out of this mess, by taking a lesson from the cities where the crisis really started.   

Astronomer, Dr. Steven Finkelstein, joins us for the third week of astro/cosmo discussions centered around the new James Webb (JWST) data. Dr. Finkelstein captured some of the first images of our most distant known galaxies. In this episode we discuss how the data is compiled and processed and how small changes in these pipelines can alter distance estimates by orders of magnitude. We also discuss tired light and the usual explorations of paradigm shifts in science.

This is the second installment of three episodes this month in the astro/cosmo department at DemystifySci. This is John Moffat, Cambridge cosmologist and out-of-the-box mathematical physicist. Dr. Moffat is working on various modified gravity regimes to make sense of the latest James Webb data, which suggests Galaxies were fully formed just a couple hundred million years after the Bang. We discuss the possibility that we are witnessing modern renditions of the classical Ptolemaic epicycles as mathematicians scramble to patch up the standard models.  

A rockin' conversation with Professor Batygin about his perspectives on modern cosmology, how paradigms shift, and what the field looks like at the very horizon. We want to know - what are the roads to forming new planets? What about stars? What about heavy elements? This is another piece of the "why is this happening" puzzle, where we attempt to understand how and why certain ideas in science appear unchallengeable, in service of slowly helping the paradigm shift.   A HUGE thanks to all our new patrons this month, and for everyone that's been with us since the very beginning. We love that you help us keep this project growing, and are excited for the future.

Why are there electric anomalies at so many ancient structures? Why do structures built outside the classical periods of complex civilizations fail to display the same anomalies? Why do seeds taken to the top of a Mayan pyramid germinate faster than those left behind in the hotel room? Why are so many ancient buildings built with telluric currents and ley lines in mind? These are just some of the questions that Cliff Dunning of Earth Ancients Radio helps us deal with in our attempt to understand a simple question: are modern humans really the first technologically advanced civilization to grace the face of the Earth?   

We take for granted today that public health systems around the world have the capacity to trace the progression of outbreaks, to determine how cancer clusters are linked to environmental effects, how dirty water causes outbreaks of transmissible illnesses... but where did all this knowledge come from? Contrary to popular belief, it wasn't from John Snow's identifying the origin of the Cholera epidemic as the pump on Broad Street. No, John Snow was using techniques that were passed to him fully formed. The real source of epidemiological tools lies in the brutal and bloody arc of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, a finding that shocked Gettysburg College history professor Jim Downs when he found it buried in the dusty archives from which his research is sourced.

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PODCAST INFO:  Anastasia completed her PhD studying microbial communication at Columbia University. When not talking to brilliant people or making movies, she spends her time painting and exploring the woods. Michael Shilo also did his PhD at Columbia studying the elastic properties of molecular water. When he's not in the film studio, he's exploring sound in music. They are both freelance professors at various universities.

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This week we have Dr. Gerald Pollack on the show, who is here to tell us about the role of electricity in weather - but to get there, we have to go all the way to the beginning and deal with the structure of the atom, the nature of charge, and what are clouds, anyways?