The Pulse

Anxiety can feel like a buzzing electric current that fuels our thoughts and behaviors. There are the well-known symptoms — chest pains, rapid heartbeat, constant fidgeting, shortness of breath, nausea — but anxiety can also be sneaky, rearing its head in all different ways. For instance — maybe it shows up in the way you check your phone constantly, worried that a friend who hasn’t texted back has gotten in a car accident. Or it manifests in your constant chatter at the office, trying to mask the fact that you feel uncomfortable around others. Or it’s the endless doctor’s visits, trying to find some kind of physical reason for why you’re not feeling well.

On this episode, we explore the undercurrent of anxiety so many of us feel, how it impacts our behaviors, and what we can do about it. We hear stories about the unexpected relief from anxiety that some people have felt while working from home during the pandemic, the relationship between anxiety and uncertainty, and advice on how to get through it. We also hear how Maiken Scott attempts to reduce her own over-the-top startle response.

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Our sense of smell can bring us quick bursts of joy, like a whiff of bread baking, that freshly brewed cup of coffee, or your favorite perfume. But it’s also an important alarm system, alerting us to dangers ranging from gas leaks to spoiled food. Even though smell is such an important part of how we experience the world, it’s been studied far less than our other senses. This came into sharper focus during the pandemic, when COVID-19 left millions of people without their sense of smell, and without answers. On this episode, we explore our sense of smell and its connection to our health, emotions, and memory. We talk about the mechanics of smell, and how smell connects to our memories. We investigate whether humans emit pheromones that make them attractive to others. We meet a woman who’s struggled with parosmia — a distorted sense of smell — ever since she contracted COVID-19. And we visit a smell lab that deals with some of the worst smells on Earth — in an effort to contain them in space.

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Plastic gets a bad rap — over the years, it’s become synonymous with environmental destruction, cheap fakery, needless consumption, and mass-produced junk. But there’s a reason plastic is everywhere — it’s inexpensive, strong, and versatile; a shapeshifter that over the past century has revolutionized the way we live, from science and medicine to consumer goods.

So, what exactly is it that makes plastic both a miracle and a menace? On this episode, we explore the science behind the dual nature of plastic. We hear stories about how plastic shaped everything from our homes to women’s bodies; what’s standing in the way of creating greener plastics; and how waxworms and garbage dump bacteria could hold the key to breaking down our plastic waste.

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The United States spends more on health care than any other country in the world — and that spending is going up every year. In some respects, that’s good news, because it means that new treatments, medications, and tests are available, and people are living longer. But it also means that health care and insurance is getting more expensive. There’s always pressure to control or reduce costs and to find inefficiencies, which impacts patient care in so many ways. On this episode, we explore the complicated relationship between medicine and money. We hear about how financial pressures led to the closure of Philadelphia maternity wards — and the surprising results; the lengths one Canadian man goes to to get his life-saving meds; and the complicated financial realities of running a hospital.

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Artificial intelligence has seen huge advances in the last decade, very notably in the technology of natural language processing. NLP has gotten increasingly better at convincingly parroting us back to ourselves, and can sometimes briefly pass for human speech, and even write computer code. But, AI can only work with data that it receives from humans, and when the data is corrupt or biased, the systems will faithfully reproduce the corruption.

(Read the transcript for this episode.)

Intelligent machines will play a much larger role in the future than they do now, and we’re trying to imagine that future as we’re racing toward it. Some people envision things straight out of a Black Mirror episode with terrifying killer robots, or super smart machines taking away jobs.

MIT Media Lab researcher Kate Darling says those angsty visions are not helpful in getting a better grasp of what the future will hold. Instead, she suggests that we should look at our relationship with artificial intelligence and robots more like our relationship with animals. She talks to host Maiken Scott about her new book “The New Breed: What Our History with Animals Reveals About Our Future with Robots”.

In a lot of ways, artificial intelligence acts as our personal butlers — it filters our email, manages the temperature in our homes, finds the best commute, shapes our social media, runs our search engines, even flies our planes. But as AI gets involved in more and more aspects of our lives, there are nagging fears. Will AI replace us? Make humans irrelevant? Make some kind of terrible mistake, or even take over the world?

On this episode, we hear from scientists and thinkers who argue that we should look at AI not as a threat or competition, but as an extension of our minds and abilities. They explain what AI is good at, and where humans have the upper hand. We look at AI in three different settings: medicine, work, and warfare, asking how it affects our present — and how it could shape our future.

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Menopause typically happens during a time of life when women need to be on top of their game; managing their careers, raising children, and perhaps caring for aging parents. And thus the hormonal changes that happen can be a huge disruption, bringing with them sleepless nights, raging sweats, weight gain and mood swings. Worse yet, menopause has been viewed as a marker of irrelevance for women, and because of that, they tend to avoid the topic. ObGyn and outspoken women’s health advocate Jen Gunter hopes to change the conversation with her new book, “The Menopause Manifesto.” She offers advice on treating symptoms, dives deep into hormones, and offers a whole new and empowered framework for thinking about this time of transition. She talked to host Maiken Scott about the book, hormone therapy, diets and much more.

There’s long been an idea that sharing our DNA for research benefits the greater good — that it leads to new insights, new medications, and new discoveries. In humans, 99.9% of DNA is the same. It’s the 0.1% that makes us different — holding the secrets to everything from what we look like, to where we come from, to what causes certain diseases.

Most samples in DNA data banks come from people of white European ancestry, and many other groups are either underrepresented or not represented at all. This has implications for drug development, medical advances, and other research projects. There have been several efforts to diversify DNA data banks, and to collect samples from people all over the world, but many communities have been reluctant to participate. They have been burned by previous research efforts, or feel like they don’t stand to benefit from the findings. On this episode, we explore participation in DNA research, why it matters, and how the process could become more equitable.

We hear about Black Americans trying to break through the “wall of slavery” to discover more about their ancestry, along with a global genetic research program that got entangled in ethical controversy, and became known as “the vampire project.”

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The patch, the gum, lozenges, medication — it seems like there are endless ways to quit smoking. But for some people, none of them work, and they have to head off the beaten path to find something that’ll help them quit.

On this episode, we take a look at some of the less-studied ways people have used to quit smoking, why they work — or don’t — and what can get in the way.

We hear stories about Allen Carr, the man behind “The Easy Way to Stop Smoking,” and his quest to gain acceptance from the scientific mainstream; American Indians’ deep cultural connection to tobacco, and how it’s been exploited; and the truth behind the effects of vaping on our health, and what that means for ex-smokers.

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