Unsung Science

By CBS News Radio

Society & Culture Business

What's Unsung Science about?

Hear the untold stories of mind-blowing achievements in science and tech. Host David Pogue, six-time Emmy winner and “CBS Sunday Morning” correspondent, takes you behind the scenes into the worlds of the people who’ve built the best in transportation, entertainment, food, internet, and health. Creators reveal their inspirations and roadblocks they encountered in bringing their breakthroughs to the public. 

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How Impossible Meats Might ...

02.11.2022

People talk about greenhouse-gas emissions from cars, planes, and factories, but one source out-pollutes them all: Cows. Raising meat animals like cows generates more methane than the entire fossil-fuel industry. So Pat Brown left his job as a Stanford biochemistry ...

Unsung Science episodes:

02.11.2022 How Impossible Meats Might Save the Earth People talk about greenhouse-gas emissions from cars, planes, and factories, but one source out-pollutes them all: Cows. Raising meat animals like cows generates more methane than the entire fossil-fuel industry. So Pat Brown left his job as a Stanford biochemistry ...
02.04.2022 The Man Who Stopped the Spammers By the year 2000, the internet was already becoming a cesspool. The bad guys used software bots to sign up for millions of fake email accounts—for sending out spam. PhD student Luis Von Ahn stopped them. He invented the CAPTCHA, ...
01.28.2022 Where Emoji Come From Each year, the powers that be endow our phones with about 70 new emoji. For 2022, you’ll be getting a mirror ball, a crutch, an X-ray, coral, a ring buoy, and a bird’s nest—with or without eggs in it. But ...
01.21.2022 How the Fitbit Knows You're Dreaming Over the last decade, a group of California scientists has quietly amassed the biggest sleep database ever assembled. It includes every dozing off, every wakeup, every REM-cycle, every chunk of deep sleep, from 15 billion nights of human slumber. It ...
01.14.2022 Subtitles for the Blind You already knew that you can turn on subtitles for your TV show or movie—handy if you’re hearing impaired, or just want to understand the dialogue better. But there’s a corresponding feature for people with low vision: audio description tracks, ...
01.07.2022 Chainsaws, Women, and the Cape Town Drought In 2018, following a historic three-year drought, the water sources in Cape Town, South Africa ran dry. It was the first major city to face Day Zero: when you’d turn on the faucet—and nothing would come out. The town leaders ...
12.31.2021 How to Prepare for Wildfires You’ve survived 2021—thanks, no doubt, to the science and tech that made your medical care, your internet, and your smartphone work. Tonight, New Year’s Eve, many podcast hosts are taking some time to reflect, to rest—and to post a re-run. ...
12.24.2021 Where to Live in the Climate-Change Era It’s the night before Christmas—and many podcasters (and listeners) are nestled all snug in their beds. But we didn’t want to leave you without a dose of witty Pogue science writing. So here, for your listening pleasure, is a free ...
12.17.2021 Leap Seconds, Smear Seconds, and the Slowing of the Earth The earth’s spinning is slowing down. Any clocks pegged to the earth’s rotation are therefore drifting out of alignment with our far more precise atomic clocks—only by a thousandth of a second every 50 years, but that’s still a problem ...
12.10.2021 How the Cellphone was Born: Three Months of Craziness In the early 1970s, “mobile phones” were car phones: Permanently installed monstrosities that filled up your trunk with boxes and, in a given city, could handle only 20 calls at a time. Nobody imagined that there’d be a market for ...
12.03.2021 How Apple and Microsoft Built the Seeing-Eye Phone Your smartphone can see, hear, and speak—even if you can’t. So it occurred to the engineers at Apple and Microsoft: Can the phone be a talking companion for anyone with low vision, describing what it’s seeing in the world around ...
11.26.2021 How to Prepare for Climate Change: Intro It's Thanksgiving weekend, and for many podcasts, a week off. But we didn't want to sock you with some re-run—or, worse, leave you with no episode at all. So David Pogue is here to offer a free chapter from his ...
11.19.2021 Who Makes the Fake Languages for Hollywood? The first time you heard “Star Trek” characters speak Klingon, or the “Game of Thrones” characters speaking Dothraki and High Valyrian, you might have assumed that the actors were just speaking a few words of gibberish, created by some screenwriter ...
11.12.2021 How NASA's $2 Billion Rover Landed Itself on Mars: "Seven Minutes of Terror" Perseverance, NASA's latest Mars rover, is a one-ton, $2 billion marvel. The plan was for it to enter the Mars atmosphere going 12,000 miles an hour. The problem: How do you slow it down enough to set it down gently ...
11.05.2021 Tornado Alley is Shifting Eastward—and We're Not Ready Tornadoes are nasty and dangerous. They appear and disappear so fast, there’s usually no time for evacuation—and the United States gets 75% of all the world’s tornadoes, about 1,300 of them a year. They occur all year ‘round, in all ...
10.29.2021 Audio Deepfakes and the End of Trust The media is plenty freaked out about “deepfakes”: Computer-generated videos of famous people saying things they never actually said. But only the video is faked; the audio parts, the voices of those fake celebrities, were supplied by human impersonators. But ...
10.22.2021 How We Almost Blew the Vaccine It may seem as though we got the Pfizer and Moderna COVID vaccines incredibly quickly. But Hungarian biochemist Katalin Karikó had been trying to make mRNA vaccines work for 30 years while fighting scientific gatekeepers who thought her idea was ...
10.15.2021 What Happened to the Mosquitoes in Fresno? Mosquitoes are the deadliest creatures on earth; they kill 500,000 people a year—and as the planet warms, more species are spreading North from the tropics. In 2013, a nasty new type, called Aedes Aegypti, arrived in Fresno, California. But traditional ...
09.27.2021 Introducing: Unsung Science with David Pogue The untold stories of mind-blowing achievements in science and tech. Host David Pogue takes you behind the scenes into the worlds of the people who’ve built the best in transportation, entertainment, food, Hear the untold stories of mind-blowing achievements in ...

Unsung Science

What's Unsung Science about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Unsung Science episodes:

How Impossible Meats Might Save the Earth

The Man Who Stopped the Spammers

Where Emoji Come From

How the Fitbit Knows You're Dreaming

Subtitles for the Blind

Chainsaws, Women, and the Cape Town Drought

How to Prepare for Wildfires

Where to Live in the Climate-Change Era

Leap Seconds, Smear Seconds, and the Slowing of the Earth

How the Cellphone was Born: Three Months of Craziness

How Apple and Microsoft Built the Seeing-Eye Phone

How to Prepare for Climate Change: Intro

Who Makes the Fake Languages for Hollywood?

How NASA's $2 Billion Rover Landed Itself on Mars: "Seven Minutes of Terror"

Tornado Alley is Shifting Eastward—and We're Not Ready

Audio Deepfakes and the End of Trust

How We Almost Blew the Vaccine

What Happened to the Mosquitoes in Fresno?

Introducing: Unsung Science with David Pogue