Big Picture Science

Latest Episodes:

Skeptic Check: Pandemic Fear Mar 09, 2020

Show notes

Contagion aside, coronavirus is a powerful little virus. It has prompted a global experiment in behavior modification: elbow bumps instead of handshakes, hand sanitizer and mask shortages, a gyrating stock market.

Pragmatism motivates our behavior toward the spread of this virus, but so do fear and panic. In 1918, amplified fear made the Spanish Flu pandemic more deadly.

Can we identify when we’re acting sensibly in the face of COVID-19, or when fear has hijacked our ability to think rationally and protect ourselves?

Guests:

Peter Hall - Professor of public health and health systems at the University of Waterloo
David DeSteno - Social psychologist and professor of psychology at Northeastern University
David Smith - Virologist and Head of the Division of Infectious Diseases and Global Public Health, University of California, San Diego
John Barry - writer, adjunct faculty at the Tulane School of Tropical Medicine and author of The Great Influenza; The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History

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

DecodeHer [rebroadcast] Mar 02, 2020

Show notes

They were pioneers in their fields, yet their names are scarcely known – because they didn’t have a Y chromosome. We examine the accomplishments of two women who pioneered code breaking and astronomy during the early years of the twentieth century and did so in the face of social opprobrium and a frequently hostile work environment.

Henrietta Leavitt measured the brightnesses of thousands of stars and discovered a way to gauge the distances to galaxies, a development that soon led to the concept of the Big Bang.

Elizabeth Friedman, originally hired to test whether William Shakespeare really wrote his plays, was soon establishing the science of code breaking, essential to success in the two world wars.

Also, the tech industry is overwhelmingly male. Girls Who Code is an initiative to redress the balance by introducing girls to computer programming, and encouraging them to follow careers in tech.

Guests:

Jason Fagone – Author of “The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America’s Enemies”
Lauren Gunderson – Playwright of Silent Sky, which is being performed all over the world, form the First Folio Theatre to the Repertory Philippines
Reshma Saujani – Founder and CEO of Girls Who Code, and the author of "Brave, Not Perfect: Fear Less, Fail More, and Live Bolder”

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

AI: Where Does it End? Feb 24, 2020

Show notes

The benefits of artificial intelligence are manifest and manifold, but can we recognize the drawbacks … and avoid them in time?

In this episode, recorded before a live audience at the Seattle meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, we discuss who is making the ethical decisions about how we use this powerful technology, and a proposal to create a Hippocratic Oath for AI researchers.

Guests:

Oren Etzioni - CEO of The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence
Mark Hill - Professor of computer sciences at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and chair of the Computing Community Consortium

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

Climate Changed Feb 17, 2020

Show notes

Have you adapted to the changing climate? Rising waters, more destructive wildfires, record-breaking heatwaves. Scientists have long predicted these events, but reporting on climate change has moved from prediction to description. There’s no time for dwelling on “we should haves.” Communities and organizations are being forced to adapt. Find out what that means, the role of the new “resilience officers,” and the unique response of Native American cultures. Plus, is the coronavirus outbreak made worse by climate change?

Guests:

James Randerson – Professor of Earth Science, University of California, Irvine
Victor Rodriguez – PhD student, Carnegie Mellon University, Department of Engineering and Public Policy
Kyle Whyte – Professor in the Departments of Philosophy and Community Sustainability, and tribal member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation
Tracey Goldstein – Professor in the Department of Pathology, Immunology, and Microbiology, University of California, Davis

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

Frogs' Pants (Rebroadcast) Feb 10, 2020

Show notes

It’s one of the most bizarre biological experiments ever. In the 18th century, a scientist fitted a pair of tailor-made briefs on a male frog to determine the animal’s contribution to reproduction. The process of gestation was a mystery and scientists had some odd-ball theories.

Today, a 5th grader can tell you how babies are made, but we still don’t know exactly what life is. In our quest to understand, we’re still at the frogs’ pants stage.

Find out why conception took centuries to figure out. Also, why the 1970s Viking experiments, specifically designed to detect life on Mars, couldn’t give us a definitive answer. Plus, can knowing where life isn’t help define what it is? Take a tour of the world’s barren places.

Guests:

Jay Gallentine - Author of books about space and space history.
Edward Dolnick - Author and former science writer at the Boston Globe. His book is The Seeds of Life: From Aristotle to Da Vinci, from Shark’s Teeth to Frogs’ Pants.
Chris McKay - Planetary scientist, NASA Ames Research Center.

Originally aired July 10, 2017

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

Skeptic Check: Science Denial (rebroadcast) Feb 03, 2020

Show notes

Climate change isn’t happening. Vaccines make you sick. When it comes to threats to public or environmental health, a surprisingly large fraction of the population still denies the consensus of scientific evidence. But it’s not the first time – many people long resisted the evidentiary link between HIV and AIDS and smoking with lung cancer.

There’s a sense that science denialism is on the rise. It prompted a gathering of scientists and historians in New York City to discuss the problem, which included a debate on the usefulness of the word “denial” itself. Big Picture Science was there. We report from the Science Denial symposium held jointly by the New York Academy of Sciences and Rutgers Global Health Institute.

Find out why so many people dig in their heels and distrust scientific findings. Plus, the techniques wielded by special interest groups to dispute some inconvenient truths. We also hear how simply stating more facts may be the wrong approach to combating scientific resistance.

Guests:

Melanie Brickman Borchard- Director of Life Sciences Conferences at New York Academy of Sciences
Nancy Tomes- professor of history at Stony Brook University
Allan Brandt - professor of history of science and medicine at Harvard University. Author of “The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America”
Sheila Jasanoff- Director of Program on Science, Technology and Society and professor of environment, science and technology at Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University
Michael Dahlstrom - Associate Director of Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication, and associate professor at Iowa State University
Matthew Nisbet - professor of communication and public policy at Northeastern University
Arthur (Art) Caplan - professor and founding head of medical ethics at NYU School of Medicine

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

A Twist of Slime Jan 27, 2020

Show notes

Your daily mucus output is most impressive. Teaspoons or measuring cups can’t capture its entire volume. Find out how much your body churns out and why you can’t live without the viscous stuff. But slime in general is remarkable. Whether coating the bellies of slithery creatures, sleeking the surface of aquatic plants, or dripping from your nose, its protective qualities make it one of the great inventions of biology. Join us as we venture to the land of ooze!

Guests:

Christopher Viney - Professor of materials science and engineering at the University of California, Merced
Katharina Ribbeck - Bioengineer at MIT
Anna Rose Hopkins – Chef and partner at Hank and Bean in Los Angeles
Ruth Kassinger - author of “Slime: How Algae Created Us, Plague Us, and Just Might Save Us”

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

The Ears Have It Jan 20, 2020

Show notes

What’s the difference between a bird call and the sound of a pile driver? Not much, when you’re close to the loudest bird ever. Find out when it pays to be noisy and when noise can worsen your health. Just about everyone eventually suffers some hearing loss, but that’s not merely aging. It’s an ailment we inflict on ourselves. Hear how a team in New York City has put sensors throughout the city to catalog noise sources, hoping to tame the tumult.

And can underwater speakers blasting the sounds of a healthy reef bring life back to dead patches of the Great Barrier Reef?

Guests:

Mark Cartwright – Research Assistant Professor at New York University’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Charles Mydlarz – Research Assistant Professor at New York University’s Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) and the Music and Audio Research Lab (MARL)
David Owen – Staff writer at The New Yorker, and author of Volume Control: Hearing in a Deafening World
Jeff Podos – Professor in the Department of Biology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Steve Simpson – Professor of Marine Biology and Global Change, Exeter University, U.K.

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

Perpetual Emotion Machine [rebroadcast] Jan 13, 2020

Show notes

Get ready for compassionate computers that feel your pain, share your joy, and generally get where you’re coming from. Computers that can tell by your voice whether you’re pumped up or feeling down, or sense changes in heart rate, skin, or muscle tension to determine your mood. Empathetic electronics that you can relate to.

But wait a minute – we don’t always relate to other humans. Our behavior can be impulsive and even self-sabotaging – our emotions are often conflicted and irrational. We cry when we’re happy. Frown when we’re pensive. A suite of factors, much of them out of our control, govern how we behave, from genes to hormones to childhood experience.

One study says that all it takes for a defendant to receive a harsher sentence is a reduction in the presiding judge’s blood sugar.

So grab a cookie, and find out how the heck we can build computers that understand us anyway.

Guests:

Rosalind Picard – Professor at the MIT Media Lab and co-founder of the companies Affectiva and Empatica.
Robert Sapolsky – Professor of neuroscience at Stanford University, and author of Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.

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

Your Brain's Reins [rebroadcast] Jan 06, 2020

Show notes

You are your brain. But what happens when your brain changes for the worse – either by physical injury or experience? Are you still responsible for your actions?

We hear how the case of a New York man charged with murder was one of the first to introduce neuroscience as evidence in court. Plus, how technology hooks us – a young man so addicted to video games, he lacked social skills, or even a desire to eat. Find out how technology designers conspire against his digital detox.

Also, even if your brain is intact and your only task is choosing a sock color, are you really in control? How your unconscious directs even mundane behavior … and how you can outwit it.

Guests:

Kevin Davis – Author of The Brain Defense: Murder in Manhattan and the Dawn of Neuroscience in America’s Courtrooms
Hilarie Cash – Co-founder and chief clinical officer of reSTART, an internet addiction recovery program
Adam Alter – Assistant professor of marketing and psychology at New York University, Stern School of Business, and author of Irresistible: the Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked
Peter Vishton – Psychologist at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia

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

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected