Historian Iain McCalman’s Dangerous Idea? The Anthropocene — the idea that humans have fundamentally changed our global climate. It’s scary, but we’re also seeing people come together in unprecedented ways to solve planetary problems.More
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Science and Technology
We've heard plenty about micro-dosing with LSD — in articles, books, even on this show. But psychiatrist Anna Fels has a new micro-dosing proposal. Not with a drug – with lithium.
More
Remember debating the mind-body duality in college? You probably argued the meaning of Descartes’ adage “I think, therefore I am” in your dorm. Maybe you even delved into the idea of what is consciousness. But for Lauren Slater, author of “Prozac Diary,” the mind-body argument isn’t just a debate or an intellectual pursuit.More
Alexander Weinstein’s “Children of the New World” is a collection of cautionary tales about extreme emotional attachment to software and silicon. More
Amy Stewart is a serious gardener with a side gig – writing about all the plants that could kill you.More
Machines that program themselves are all around us and they get smarter every day. But are you ready for the master algorithm that can tell a machine how to learn anything?More
App Intelligence? Santa Fe Institute president David Krakauer says we're on the verge of abdicating our free will to everyday apps.More
Researchers revisit the controversial but potentially life-changing treatment first explored in the 1960s.More
For years, women in science have battled discrimination, old boys’ clubs and gendered stereotypes. Now they’re blowing the whistle on sexual harassment, and some eminent career scientists are being held to account.More
Physicist Don Gurnett has recorded what you might hear from inside a spacecraft, and it isn't just the sound of desolate silence.More
A poem by Emily Dickinson, read by Anne Strainchamps.More
When we talk about bees, usually we mean honeybees. Or bumblebees. But that’s just two out of 20,000 different species of bees. Thor Hanson tells Anne about how different species of bees and humanity have developed dependence on one another.More
Jeff Schloss is an evolutionary biologist. He’s also Christian. As a scientist, he’s trying to develop an evolutionary theory for the origins of religion. But he says science can’t explain everything about religion.More
Machines are getting smarter. They have been for a long time. But is there anything uniquely human that they will never be able to do, like make art?More
Could a computer write the next West Side Story or Hamilton? That’s what composers Benjamin Till and Nathan Taylor tried to figure out—the result is a musical called “Beyond the Fence."More
Rebecca Solnit prepares the smartphone era for a time when we no longer know how to not know where we are.More