Science Talk

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Science
**Science Talk**

Science Talk is a podcast of longer-form audio experiments from Scientific American–from immersive sonic journeys into nature to deep dives into research with leading experts.

Latest Episodes:

Episode 5: How Do We Know Anything? May 01, 2024

Show notes

On this show, we’ve been talking about uncertainty from a variety of different angles.

We’ve heard how uncertainty can be a spark for creativity and scientific discovery.

We’ve discussed how uncertainty can go unseen and make science really difficult.

And we’ve explored some of the research techniques and habits of mind that researchers use to deal with uncertainty.

Today we’re going to end with two final questions: If science is always uncertain, how can we ever know anything? How can we have confidence in science if there’s always underlying uncertainty?

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Episode 4: This Simple Strategy Might Be the Key to Advancing Science Faster Apr 24, 2024

Show notes

Science is an iterative process. Progress comes from people coming up with ideas that are sort of right and then new evidence and ideas coming in to update them to become even more correct.

Underlying this process is a willingness by scientists to accept that they might be wrong and be open to updating their ideas.

It turns out that social scientists have a term for this mindset. To find out more, I talked with two researchers who are studying this thing they call “intellectual humility.”

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Episode 3: When Uncertainty Hides in the Blindspot of Overconfidence Apr 17, 2024

Show notes

Today’s episode of Uncertain is about the ways that studies can leave us overconfident and how “just-so stories” can make us feel overly certain about results that are still a work in progress. And sometimes studies get misleading results because of random error or weird samples or study design. But sometimes science gets things wrong because it’s done by humans, and humans are fallible and imperfect.

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Episode 2: Think Seeing is Believing? Think Again Apr 10, 2024

Show notes

In this episode, we’ll talk with two researchers whose work probes the uncertainty surrounding how we perceive the world around us.

It turns out that what we see may not always be a perfect reflection of reality.

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Episode 1: Uncertainty is Science's Super Power. Make It Yours, Too Apr 03, 2024

Show notes

Welcome to Uncertain, a five-part podcast miniseries from Scientific American. Here we will dive head first into the possibilities of the unknowing.

Over the next five episodes, I’ll be talking with people like her: explorers who work in the realm of uncertainty. Through them, we’ll discover the ways that uncertainty can spark curiosity and scientific breakthroughs. But we’ll also find out how uncertainty can bite us in the butt and make science really hard.

We’ll see how neglecting uncertainty can lead to overconfidence and how embracing uncertainty can allow for a more nuanced and accurate understanding of the world.

We’ll finish by examining how it’s possible to have confidence in scientific findings, even with their uncertainties.

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Coming Soon: 'Uncertain' - A New Short Series on the Thrill of Not Knowing Mar 27, 2024

Show notes

Does the word "uncertainty" make you nervous? Does it rule your life? Would you say it kinda describes the state of the world these days?

Enter Uncertain, a new limited podcast series from Scientific American.

In this series, host Christie Aschwanden will help to demystify uncertainty. She's going to take away its scariness–or, rather, a cast of scientific dreamers that she talked to, will.

As you’ll see, uncertainty drives scientific discovery. Throughout scientific history, uncertainty has spurred our collective imagination and our need to know the things we don’t.

To be clear, uncertainty makes science very difficult. So in this mini-series we’ll both learn how scientists push through those difficulties; and how they also avoid the bias, logical fallacies, and blindspots that can lurk behind uncertainty.

She'll get them to share their own habits of mind and techniques for facing, and embracing, the unknown.

And even if you’re not a scientist, UNCERTAIN provides a practical way to think through what we don’t know in our lives—to face that uncertainty, and, hopefully, live better, more informed lives because of it.

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Racism in Health: The Roots of the U.S. Black Maternal Mortality Crisis Aug 10, 2023

Show notes

What is behind the Black maternal mortality crisis, and what needs to change? In this podcast from Nature and Scientific American, leading academics unpack the racism at the heart of the system.

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Love Computers? Love History? Listen to This Podcast Apr 26, 2022

Show notes

In the newest season of Lost Women of Science, we enter a world of secrecy, computers and nuclear weapons—and see how Klára Dán von Neumann was a part of all of it.

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Top 10 Emerging Tech of 2021 Dec 14, 2021

Show notes

The World Economic Forum and Scientific American team up to highlight technological advances that could change the world—including self-fertilizing crops, on-demand drug manufacturing, breath-sensing diagnostics and 3-D-printed houses.

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Listen to This New Podcast: The Lost Women of Science Nov 08, 2021

Show notes

A new podcast is on a mission to retrieve unsung female scientists from oblivion.

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