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The Weather: Simon Winchester
Season 1 Episode 96
The weather has always been a critical element of the human experience - deadly during storms and droughts, sustaining when aligned with the harvest schedule, beautiful and frightening, and integrat…
Published on 5 hours ago
The River War: James Muller
Season 1 Episode 95
In Episodes 10 and 11 of the Science History Podcast, I interviewed James Muller on the role that Winston Churchill played in the unparalleled advancement of science and technology during the first h…
Published on 4 weeks, 2 days ago
Lead Poisoning: Bruce Lanphear
Season 1 Episode 94
Our health, and the health of wildlife, depends on a clean environment. Since the advent of the industrial revolution, our environment has suffered from waves of pollution as different technologies c…
Published on 2 months ago
Attacks on University Research: Claudia Polsky
Season 1 Episode 93
The year 2025 has seen the most aggressive moves ever by the US executive branch against scientific research as the Trump Administration has gutted federal science and regulatory agencies and cancell…
Published on 3 months ago
ATSDR: Jaimi Dowdell
Season 1 Episode 92
In Episode 62, I interviewed two Reuters journalists about how industry and government in the United States use conservation easements to avoid rigorous cleanup of contaminated sites. Today, one of t…
Published on 3 months, 4 weeks ago
Political Bias: Bill von Hippel
Season 1 Episode 91
In prior episodes, we examined political interference and bias in science in a few contexts, including episode 3 on the history of U.S. congressional attacks on science, episode 57 on types of bias,…
Published on 4 months, 4 weeks ago
Physicists as Biologists: William Lanouette
Season 1 Episode 90
In prior episodes, I have interviewed many people about the history of physics and physics-adjacent topics such as nuclear disarmament. Many of the physicists we have discussed also made forays into …
Published on 5 months, 4 weeks ago
Göttingen Physics: Tim Salditt, Kurt Schönhammer, & Sarah Köster
Season 1 Episode 89
Prior to the rise of Nazism, the University of Göttingen hosted most of the top physicists in the world, either as resident or visiting scientists. With us to discuss the history of physics in Göttin…
Published on 7 months ago
Polymerase Chain Reaction: Henry Erlich
Season 1 Episode 88
The history of science is punctuated by moments of technological innovation that produce a paradigm shift and a subsequent flurry of discovery. A recent technological innovation that generated diver…
Published on 8 months ago
Meitner's Atom: Marissa Moss
Season 1 Episode 87
Lise Meitner was the most important female physicist of the 20th century. She made fundamental discoveries on the atom, including, most famously, being the first to discover the idea of fission. This…
Published on 9 months ago