Knowable

Latest Episodes:

How antidepressants changed ideas about depression Apr 26, 2022

Serendipitous discoveries led to drugs like Prozac and to new insights into the physical basis of this debilitating disorder. But scientists continue to search for deeper understandings and therapies that will bring relief to those who still struggle.

How particle accelerators came to be Mar 29, 2022

PODCAST: They started out so small, one could fit on the palm of your hand, but to make groundbreaking discoveries, physicists had to think really big — as in, vast machines with the power and capacity to reveal the tiniest building blocks of our universe.

The history of climate change offers clues to Earth’s future Mar 15, 2022

Digging — quite literally — into our planet’s past to study its paleoclimate has shed light on bygone ice ages and hints at trouble ahead for our now-warming planet.

Structural biology: How proteins got their close-up Mar 01, 2022

The journey to understanding these critically important molecules, in their thousands of different flavors, began with a chance discovery. Today, after decades of painstaking lab work and dizzying technological leaps, the field of protein science is exploding.

The search for exoplanets Feb 15, 2022

Not that long ago, scientists found evidence that our Sun wasn’t unique — other stars have their own orbiting bodies. It was a discovery centuries in the making. What does this mean for Earth today and our place in the universe? (Season 2/Episode. 2)

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The science of dreams Feb 01, 2022

Freud thought that dreams were the gateway to our unconscious mind. Today, many scientists think the opposite: that the dreaming brain is quite similar to our awake, conscious state. But dreaming is a very personal experience and one that we can’t share — making the phenomenon very difficult to study. We still don’t know for sure why we dream, but in this episode, we'll hear how psychologists, neuroscientists and philosophers have been trying to answer that question.

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Season two trailer Jan 25, 2022

What are the limits to what’s knowable — and how has our thinking about big questions in science and technology has evolved over time? Knowable Magazine’s science history podcast returns on February 1, with brand new episodes exploring the science of dreams, the search for extrasolar planets, the quest to treat depression and so much more. Subscribe today to stay in the know.