Podcast Episodes

Audio Edition: The Road Map to Alien Life Passes Through the ‘Cosmic Shoreline’

Season 1 Episode 21

Astronomers are ready to search for the fingerprints of life in faraway planetary atmospheres. But first, they need to know where to look — and that means figuring out which planets are likely to hav…

Published on 1 month, 2 weeks ago

A New Quantum Math of Cryptography

Season 1 Episode 20

We’re living in the golden age of cryptography. Since the 1970s, we've had more confidence in encryption than ever before. But there's a difference between confidence and absolute certainty. And comp…

Published on 1 month, 2 weeks ago

How an Outsider Optimized Sphere-Packing

Season 1 Episode 19

How many oranges can you fit in a box? Mathematicians are obsessed with perfecting their answer to this question in not just our familiar three-dimensional world, but in higher and higher dimensions …

Published on 1 month, 3 weeks ago

Audio Edition: Undergraduate Upends a 40-Year-Old Data Science Conjecture

Season 1 Episode 18

A young computer scientist and two colleagues show that searches within data structures called hash tables can be much faster than previously deemed possible.

The story How Undergraduate Upends a 40-Y…

Published on 2 months ago

‘It’s a Mess’: A Brain-Bending Trip to Quantum Theory’s 100th Birthday Party

Season 1 Episode 17

As far as we know, quantum mechanics is a universal theory that explains matter and light more or less perfectly. It shows us why atoms don't collapse and why electrons don't spiral into the nucleus …

Published on 2 months ago

How Smell Guides Our Inner World

Season 1 Episode 17

When some people smell the molecule benzyl acetate, they identify a distinctly banana-y scent. But when others sniff the same compound, they get hints of nail polish remover. How can this be? Smell i…

Published on 2 months, 1 week ago

Audio Edition: How ‘Event Scripts’ Structure Our Personal Memories

Season 1 Episode 16

By screening films in a brain scanner, neuroscientists discovered a rich library of neural scripts — from a trip through an airport to a marriage proposal — that form scaffolds for memories of our ex…

Published on 2 months, 2 weeks ago

When ChatGPT Broke an Entire Field

Season 1 Episode 16

The study of natural language processing, or NLP, dates back to the 1940s. It gave Stephen Hawking a voice, Siri a brain and social media companies another way to target us with ads. In less than fiv…

Published on 2 months, 2 weeks ago

Is Mathematics Mostly Chaos or Mostly Order?

Season 1 Episode 15

As weird as it sounds, infinity comes in many shapes and sizes. And attempting to quantify it is sort of like a dog chasing its own tail. Or like infinities chasing infinities infinite numbers of tim…

Published on 2 months, 3 weeks ago

Audio Edition: After 20 Years, Math Couple Solves Major Group Theory Problem

Season 1 Episode 14

Britta Späth has dedicated her career to proving a single, central conjecture. She’s finally succeeded, alongside her partner, Marc Cabanes.

The story After 20 Years, Math Couple Solves Major Group Th…

Published on 2 months, 3 weeks ago