Time may be a fundamental quality of the universe, but physicists still can't explain what time is. That hasn't stopped theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser from devoting much of his life to studying the origins of time and the formation of the cosmos.More
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Science and Technology
Physicist Carlo Rovelli travels to the core of a black hole, where the arrow of time reverses and a white hole is born. More
“Bad River” is Mary Mazzio’s documentary about a small tribe, the Bad River band of Lake Superior Chippewa, and their legal battle to get rid of an oil pipeline. She examines the conflicting ideas we have about how to live on the land and even whether it can be owned.More
Artist Katie Paterson works with melting glaciers, fossilized insects and the dust from meteorites to help us expand our time horizons. Her art bridges cosmic and human timescales, revealing the beauty in vast temporal expanses.More
Philosopher and conceptual artist Jonathon Keats engineers monumental-scale clocks that run on “river time” or “arboreal time” to un-standardize our atomic time. He says we need to make time more pluralistic, to envision a kind of chrono-diversity.More
Acoustic ecologist and sound artist Alex Braidwood has recorded many dawn choruses, from first-light to full sunrise, in his Iowa backyard and all over the world. On his album, “Serotinous Repose,” he turns the dawn chorus into music.More
People in these disaster zones now face an agonizing choice: rebuild or relocate? Urban planner Brian Stone says we need radical new thinking for our cities to survive.More
Lightning hitting your house or a storm flooding your basement used to be an “act of God.” But can you call a flood or wildfire a “natural” disaster if climate change is the cause and humans failed to prevent the calamity? More
Writer Annalee Newitz has spent a lot of time walking around ancient lost cities and imagining future human civilizations on other planets. Newitz is a hard-headed, realistic optimist who believes the one technology that can save us is stories.More
Tony Bossis was one of the lead investigators on the 2016 study that found stress reduction in cancer patients after a single dose of psilocybin. He's fascinated by how the mystical experiences of the great religions map onto psychedelic experiences.More
Suzanne Simard transformed our understanding of forest ecology by uncovering the fungal networks that trees use to communicate with each other. Anne Strainchamps went walking with Simard to see firsthand how a forest is like a kinship network.More
Journalist Zoë Schlanger has been tracking the new science of plant intelligence. Plants can exhibit some of the same behaviors as animals with nervous systems, including decision-making and elaborate defenses against predators.More
Are the really big psychedelic experiences just hallucinations, or do they crack open some transpersonal dimension of consciousness? Philosopher Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes believes we need a metaphysics of psychedelics to explain these experiences.More
Behavioral neurologist Michael Trimble takes us on an evolutionary journey to unpack one of the few things that make Homo sapiens unique — we cry emotional tears. More
Psychedelic therapy has shown great promise for treating depression, but it's still unclear why exactly it works. Psychiatrist Charles Raison wants to know if it's the drug or the trip that makes psychedelics so potent. Is it biology or consciousness?More
The news about psychedelics tends to focus on clinical trials and lab research. But there’s a long tradition of underground guides working with plant medicines who refer to "unseen beings" and plants as "teachers." Psychologist Rachel Harris talked with many women elders in the psychedelic underground. She calls them "spiritual warriors."More
Maia Szalavitz is an expert in addiction. She is also someone who has experienced it personally as a young woman. It was during that time that she came upon a concept that is only now changing how we think about recovery on a mass scale —harm reduction.
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Tool-making? Agriculture? Language? French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene believes there’s an even more basic cognitive skill that gave humans an evolutionary jump start — geometry.More