Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchEduardo Mercado III, "Why Whales Sing" (JHU Press, 2025)
With breathtaking complexity and haunting beauty, the songs of whales have long fascinated scientists. Whales are the only mammals that can sing cont…
7 months, 2 weeks ago
Marcus Chown, "A Crack in Everything: How Black Holes Came in from the Cold and Took Cosmic Centre Stage" (Apollo, 2025)
What is space? What is time? Where did the universe come from? The answers to mankind's most enduring questions may lie in science's greatest enigma:…
7 months, 3 weeks ago
James Trefil and Shobita Satyapal, "Supermassive: Black Holes at the Beginning and End of the Universe" (Smithsonian Books, 2025)
Black holes, demystified: follow along the quest to understand the history and influence of one of space science's most fascinating and confounding p…
7 months, 3 weeks ago
Liam Graham, "Physics Fixes All the Facts" (Springer Nature, 2025)
Episode 7
Complex systems seem to magically emerge from the interactions of their parts. A whirlpool emerges from water molecules. A living cell from organic m…
7 months, 3 weeks ago
Vlatko Vedral, "Portals to a New Reality: Five Pathways to the Future of Physics" (Basic Books, 2025)
For the last century, physics has been treading along the paths set by the same two theories--quantum theory and general relativity--and, let's face …
7 months, 4 weeks ago
Brian Potter, "The Origins of Efficiency" (Stripe Press, 2025)
Efficiency is the engine that powers human civilization. It's the reason rates of famine have fallen precipitously, literacy has risen, and humans ar…
8 months ago
Rick A López, "Rooted in Place: Botany, Indigeneity, and Art in the Construction of Mexican Nature, 1570-1914" (U Arizona Press, 2025)
Episode 235
Since the first moment of conquest, colonizers and the colonized alike in Mexico confronted questions about what it meant to be from this place, what…
8 months ago
Roger Moorhouse, "Wolfpack: Hitler’s U-Boat War 1939-45" (HarperCollins, 2025)
Winston Churchill famously remarked that the threat of the German U-Boats was the only thing that had “really frightened” him during World War Two. T…
8 months ago
Harry Cliff, "Space Oddities: The Mysterious Anomalies Challenging Our Understanding of the Universe" (Doubleday, 2024)
Nothing captivates the human imagination like the vast unknowns of space. Ancient petroglyphs present renderings of the heavens, proof that we have b…
8 months ago
Alice Lovejoy, "Tales of Militant Chemistry: The Film Factory in a Century of War" (U California Press, 2025)
The history of film calls to mind unforgettable photographs, famous directors, and the glitz and hustle of the media business. But there is another t…
8 months ago