Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchViolet Moller, "The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found" (Doubleday, 2019)
Episode 51
Violet Moller has written a narrative history of the transmission of books from the ancient world to the modern. In The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-…
6 years, 10 months ago
Vanessa Heggie, "Higher and Colder: A History of Extreme Physiology and Exploration" (U Chicago Press, 2019)
Episode 523
Vanessa Heggie talks about the history of biomedical research in extreme environments. Heggie is a Fellow of the Institute for Global Innovation at t…
6 years, 11 months ago
David R. Montgomery, "Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life" (W. W. Norton, 2018)
Episode 201
In Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life (W. W. Norton & Co., 2018), Dr. David R. Montgomery portrays hope amidst the backdrop that fo…
6 years, 11 months ago
John D. Hawks, "Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story" (National Geographic, 2017)
Episode 34
John D. Hawks talks about new developments in paleoanthropology – the discovery of a new hominid species Homo Naledi in South Africa, the Neanderthal…
6 years, 11 months ago
Paul Sutter, "Your Place in the Universe: Understanding Our Big, Messy Existence" (Prometheus, 2018)
Episode 15
In Your Place in the Universe: Understanding Our Big, Messy Existence (Prometheus, 2018), Paul Sutter presents an in-depth yet accessible tour of the…
6 years, 11 months ago
Robin Scheffler, “A Contagious Cause: The American Hunt for Cancer Viruses and the Rise of Molecular Medicine" (U Chicago Press, 2019)
Episode 65
Could cancer be a contagious disease? Although this possibility might seem surprising to many of us, it has a long history. In fact, efforts to devel…
6 years, 11 months ago
Philip W. Clements, "Science in an Extreme Environment: The American Mount Everest Expedition" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2018)
Episode 521
Historian of Science Philip W. Clements discusses the 1963 American Mount Everest Expedition. His book, Science in an Extreme Environment: The Americ…
7 years ago
David Munns, "Engineering the Environment: Phytotrons and the Quest for Climate Control in the Cold War" (U Pittsburgh Press, 2017)
Episode 191
“Phytotron” is such a great name for something that is, when you look at it, a high-tech greenhouse. But don’t sell it short! The phytotron was not o…
7 years ago
Nicholas Shea, "Representation in Cognitive Science" (Oxford UP, 2018)
Episode 189
In order to explain thought in natural physical systems, mainstream cognitive science posits representations, or internal states that carry informati…
7 years ago
Stephan Bullard, "A Day-by-Day Chronicle of the 2013-2016 Ebola Outbreak" (Springer, 2018)
Episode 517
Why did Ebola, a virus so deadly that it killed or immobilized its victims within days, have time to become a full-blown epidemic? That’s what happen…
7 years ago