Podcast Episodes
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Does Dad's Fitness Make Its Way Into Sperm?
Season 1
We already know that what we eat, drink, and inhale can affect which parts of our DNA are expressed, and which aren’t. But recent research poses a sh…
1 month, 1 week ago
The Shape That Can’t Pass Through Itself
Imagine you’re holding two equal-size dice. Is it possible to bore a tunnel through one die that’s big enough for the other to slide through? It is —…
1 month, 2 weeks ago
Audio Edition: How Much Energy Does It Take To Think?
Season 1
Studies of neural metabolism reveal our brain’s effort to keep us alive and the evolutionary constraints that sculpted our most complex organ.
The sto…
1 month, 3 weeks ago
AI Filters Will Always Have Holes
Season 1
Ask ChatGPT how to build a bomb, and it will flatly respond that it “can’t help with that.” But users have long played a cat-and-mouse game to try to…
1 month, 3 weeks ago
ICYMI: Birds' Migratory Mitochondria
(This episode was first published in June 2025.)
Changes in the number, shape, efficiency and interconnectedness of organelles in the cells of flight …
2 months ago
ICYMI: Is Gravity Just Rising Entropy?
(This episode was first published in July 2025.)
Where does gravity come from? In both general relativity and quantum mechanics, this question is a b…
2 months, 1 week ago
Audio Edition: The Core of Fermat’s Last Theorem Just Got Superpowered
Season 1 Episode 39
By extending the scope of the key insight behind Fermat’s Last Theorem, four mathematicians have made great strides toward building a “grand unified …
2 months, 2 weeks ago
Taking the Temperature of Quantum Entanglement
Season 1 Episode 38
We all know that hot coffee cools down. But quantum mechanics can enable heat to flow the “wrong” way, making hot objects hotter and cold objects col…
2 months, 2 weeks ago
How Hard Is It to Untie a Knot?
Season 1 Episode 37
In math and science, knots do far more than keep shoes on feet. For more than a century, mathematicians have studied the properties of different knot…
2 months, 3 weeks ago
Audio Edition: How a Problem About Pigeons Powers Complexity Theory
Season 1 Episode 36
When pigeons outnumber pigeonholes, some birds must double up. This obvious statement — and its inverse — have deep connections to many areas of math…
3 months ago