Big Picture Science

Latest Episodes:

We'll Always Have Parasites Oct 07, 2024

Show notes

Imagine tapeworms longer than the height of an adult human. Or microbes that turn their hosts into zombies. If the revulsion they induce doesn’t do it, the sheer number of parasites force us to pay attention. They are the most abundant form of animal life on Earth. Parasites can cause untold human suffering, like those that cause African River Blindness or Lyme disease, but their presence is also a sign of a health ecosystem. A parasitologist whose lab contains the largest parasite collection in the world gives us the ultimate inside story about these organisms.

Guest:

Scott Gardner - curator of parasites in the H.W. Manter Laboratory of Parasitology at the University of Nebraska State Museum, one of the largest collections of parasites in the world, and professor of biological sciences at University of Nebraska. Co-author of Parasites: The Inside Story.

Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake

Originally aired July 31, 2023

Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact advertising@airwavemedia.com to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.

You can get early access to ad-free versions of every episode by joining us on Patreon. Thanks for your support!

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Measure For Measure Sep 30, 2024

Show notes

Whether in miles or pounds, meters or kilograms, we take daily measure out our lives. But how did these units ever come to be, and why do we want to change them? From light-years to leap seconds, we look at the history of efforts to quantify our lives and why there’s always room for greater precision. Plus, we debate the virtues of staying imperial measurements vs. going metric.

Guest:

James Vincent - Author of Beyond Measure, the Hidden History of Measurement

Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake

Originally aired March 24, 2023

Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact advertising@airwavemedia.com to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.

You can get early access to ad-free versions of every episode by joining us on Patreon. Thanks for your support!

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Skeptic Check: Cell Phone Bans Sep 23, 2024

Show notes

As middle and high schools across the country implement new cell phone bans, we consider what drove this bold step and what science says about how digital devices affect our attention and focus. An assistant principal describes how his school implemented the ban, despite protest from students and parents, and what happened next.

Guests:

Alison - 14 year old high school student

Raymond Dolphin - eighth grade assistant principal at Illing Middle School in Manchester, Connecticut

Alan - 17 year old high school student

Gloria Mark - Psychologist, professor in the Department of Informatics at University of California, Irvine, author of book “Attention Span.”

Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake

Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact sales@advertisecast.com to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.

You can get early access to ad-free versions of every episode by joining us on Patreon. Thanks for your support!

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Cold Comfort Sep 16, 2024

Show notes

Air conditioning and refrigeration may beat the heat, but they also present a dilemma. The more we use them, the more greenhouse gases we emit, the hotter the planet becomes, and the more we require artificial cooling. Can we escape this feedback loop? We look at the origins of these chilling technologies, tour the extensive chain of cold that keeps food from perishing, and consider how a desert city like Phoenix could not exist without AC.

Guests:

Nicola Twilley – co-host of the Gastropod podcast, a contributing writer at The New Yorker, and the author of “Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves”

Erik Morrison – Chief cooling engineer at Transaera, Somerville, Massachusetts

Stan Cox – Lead scientist at the Land Institute, author of “Losing Our Cool: The Uncomfortable Truths about our Air-Conditioned World”

Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake

Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact sales@advertisecast.com to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.

You can get early access to ad-free versions of every episode by joining us on Patreon. Thanks for your support!

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Introducing Spotlight on SETI! Sep 12, 2024

Show notes

Are we alone? The search for life in the universe is on!

For 40 years, the SETI Institute has been a leader in the search for life and intelligence beyond Earth. Recent discoveries, such as exoplanets, have brought us closer than ever to answering the question of whether we are alone in the universe. To honor the Institute’s pioneering past as we look ahead to its future, Big Picture Science presents a new monthly podcast series highlighting the groundbreaking research of the SETI Institute.

In this first episode, Molly talks with Bill Diamond, SETI Institute President and CEO, about the founding of the SETI Institute, radio telescope arrays, and the New Copernican Revolution.

Music by Jun Miyake

You can support the work of Big Picture Science by joining us on Patreon. Thanks for your support!

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Shipwrecks Sep 09, 2024

Show notes

Shipwrecks are scenes of tragedy, but they are also bits of history frozen in time that can provide insights into events and ideas from long ago. That is, if we can find them. From an 11th century Viking sailing ship to a WW II era British cargo ship with a mailbag of letters onboard amazingly preserved, an underwater archeologist takes us on a deep dive into history.

Guest:

David Gibbins - underwater archeologist, novelist, and the author of nonfiction, including his latest book, “The History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks”.

Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake

Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact sales@advertisecast.com to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.

You can get early access to ad-free versions of every episode by joining us on Patreon. Thanks for your support!

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Calling All Aliens* Sep 02, 2024

Show notes

Are we alone in the universe? Is there other intelligence out there? COSMIC, the most ambitious SETI search yet, hopes to answer that. We hear updates on this novel signal detection project being conducted on the Very Large Array in the desert of New Mexico.

Also, we chat with award-winning science fiction writer Ted Chiang about how he envisions making contact with aliens in his stories, including the one that was the basis for the movie Arrival. And find out why some scientists don’t want only to listen for signals, they want to deliberately transmit messages to aliens. Is that wise and, if we did it, what would we say?

Guests:

Chenoa Tremblay – Postdoc researcher in radio astronomy for the SETI Institute and member of COSMIC science team

Ted Chiang – Nebula and Hugo award-winning science fiction writer, best known for his collections, Stories of Your Life and Others and Exhalation

Douglas Vakoch – Founder and president of METI International, a nonprofit research and educational organization devoted to transmitting intentional signals to extraterrestrial civilizations

Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake

*Originally aired April 3, 2023

Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact advertising@airwavemedia.com to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.

You can get early access to ad-free versions of every episode by joining us on Patreon. Thanks for your support!

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Life in the Solar System Aug 26, 2024

Show notes

Spewing lava and belching noxious fumes, volcanoes seem hostile to biology. But the search for life off-Earth includes the hunt for these hotheads on other moons and planets, and we tour some of the most imposing volcanoes in the Solar System.

Plus, a look at how tectonic forces reshape bodies from the moon to Venus to Earth. And a journey to the center of our planet reveals a surprising layer of material at the core-mantle boundary. Find out where this layer was at the time of the dinosaurs and what powerful forces drove it deep below.

Guests:

Samantha Hansen – Geologist at the University of Alabama

Paul Byrne – Associate professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis

Robin George Andrews – Science journalist and author of “Super Volcanoes: What They Reveal about Earth and the Worlds Beyond”

Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake

Originally aired May 29, 2023

Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact sales@advertisecast.com to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.

You can get early access to ad-free versions of every episode by joining us on Patreon. Thanks for your support!

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Catching Fire Aug 19, 2024

Show notes

We have too much “bad fire.” Not only destructive wildfires, but the combustion that powers our automobiles and provides our electricity has generated a worrying rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide. And that is driving climate change which is adding to the frequency of megafires. Now we’re seeing those effects in “fire-clouds,” pyrocumulonimbus events.

But there’s such a thing as “good fire.” Indigenous peoples managed the land with controlled fires, reaped the benefits of doing so, and they’re bringing them back.

So after millions of years of controlling fire, is it time for us to revisit our attitudes and policies, not just with regard to combustion, but how we manage our wildfires?

Guests:

David Peterson - Meteorologist, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory

Stephen Pyne - Emeritus professor at Arizona State University, fire historian, urban farmer, author of “The Pyrocene: How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next”

Richard Wrangham - Ruth B. Moore Research Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University and author of "Catching Fire: How Coooking Made Us Human"

Margo Robbins - Co-founder and president of the Cultural Fire Management Council (CFMC), organizer of the Cultural Burn Training Exchange (TREX) that takes place on the Yurok Reservation twice a year, and an enrolled member of the Yurok Tribe

Originally aired May 9, 2022

Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake

Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact advertising@airwavemedia.com to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.

You can get early access to ad-free versions of every episode by joining us on Patreon. Thanks for your support!

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Not Just a Phage Aug 12, 2024

Show notes

We’re hurtling towards a post-antibiotic world, as the overuse of antibiotics has given rise to dangerous drug-resistant bacteria. Can we fight back using viruses as weapons? An obscure medical therapy uses certain viruses called bacteriophages to treat infection. For a century attempts to turn phage-therapy into a life-saving treatment have faltered, but today there’s renewed interest in this approach. Can we use phages to forestall the antibiotic crisis?

Guests:

Claas Kirchhelle – Medical historian at the University College, Dublin

Tom Ireland – Journalist, editor of The Biologist and author of “The Good Virus: The Amazing Story and Forgotten Promise of the Phage”

Steffanie Strathdee – Associate Dean of Global Health Sciences at the University of California San Diego

Tom Patterson– Professor of psychiatry at the University of California San Diego

Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake

You can get early access to ad-free versions of every episode by joining us on Patreon. Thanks for your support!

Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact advertising@airwavemedia.com to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices