Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchGina Rippon, "Gender and Our Brains: How New Neuroscience Explodes the Myths of the Male and Female Minds" (Vintage, 2020)
Episode 149
For decades if not centuries, science has backed up society’s simple dictum that men and women are hardwired differently, that the world is divided b…
5 years, 8 months ago
Robert Plomin, "Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are" (MIT Press, 2019)
Episode 30
Have you ever felt, “Oh my God, I’m turning into my mother (or father)!” ? Robert Plomin explains why that happens in Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who…
5 years, 8 months ago
Valerie Olson, "Into the Extreme: U.S. Environmental Systems and Politics Beyond Earth" (U Minnesota Press, 2018)
Episode 264
What if outer space is not outside the human environment but, rather, defines it? This is the unusual starting point of Valerie Olson’s Into the Extr…
5 years, 8 months ago
Rene Almeling, "GUYnecology: The Missing Science of Men’s Reproductive Health" (U California Press, 2020)
Episode 160
Rene Almeling’s new book GUYnecology: The Missing Science of Men’s Reproductive Health (University of California Press, 2020) provides an in-depth lo…
5 years, 8 months ago
Scholarly Communication: An Interview with Joerg Heber of PLOS
Episode 2
Open Access is spelled with a capital O and a capital A at the Public Library of Science (or PLOS, for short), a nonprofit Open Access publisher. Amo…
5 years, 8 months ago
Boel Berner, "Strange Blood: The Rise and Fall of Lamb Blood Transfusion in 19th-Century Medicine and Beyond" (Transcript Verlag, 2020)
Episode 96
In the mid-1870s, the experimental therapy of lamb blood transfusion spread like an epidemic across Europe and the USA. Doctors tried it as a cure fo…
5 years, 8 months ago
Kat Arney, "Rebel Cell: Cancer, Evolution, and the New Science of Life's Oldest Betrayal" (Benbella Books, 2020)
Episode 28
Cancer exists in nearly every animal and has afflicted humans as long as our species has walked the earth. In Rebel Cell: Cancer, Evolution, and the …
5 years, 8 months ago
Morality in Nature: What Honeybees and Flowers Can Tell Us about its Origin
Episode 24
Is morality solely a human creation? Or can we find evidence of morality in other parts of nature? Honeybees and flowers have co-evolved to form a mu…
5 years, 8 months ago
Jeremy England, "Every Life is on Fire: How Thermodynamics Explains the Origins of Living Things" (Basic Books, 2020)
Episode 27
“How did life begin? Most things in the universe aren't alive, and yet if you trace the evolutionary history of plants and animals back far enough, y…
5 years, 8 months ago
Frans de Waal, "Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves" (Norton, 2019)
Episode 4
Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves (W. W. Norton & Company) is a fascinating exploration of the rich emotional li…
5 years, 8 months ago