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75% of people globally want unbiased news (Pew Research) but are concerned they're not getting that.

Get balanced coverage with Symby. See how stories are covered across diverse outlets and spot when one side covers a story the other skips.

PODCAST

Science, Spoken

Get in-depth coverage of current and future trends in technology, and how they are shaping business, entertainment, communications, science, politics, and society.

science

All Episodes

7:22

Inside the Cleanroom Where NASA’s New Mars Lander...

Science, Spoken ·

2018/04/10

A few rules for the cleanroom where NASA’s new InSight Mars lander waits for launch. One, if you must sneeze, sneeze away from the spacecraft. Two, if you drop anything, let one of NASA’s escorts pick it up for you. Three, do not under any circumstances cross the black-and-yellow-striped tape and touch the spacecraft. Oh also—an engineer tells a dozen media in a conference room at Vandenberg Air Force Base—do not lick the spacecraft. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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15:06

Why Winning in Rock-Paper-Scissors Isn’t Everything

Science, Spoken ·

2018/04/09

Rock-Paper-Scissors works great for deciding who has to take out the garbage. But have you ever noticed what happens when, instead of playing best of three, you just let the game continue round after round? At first, you play a pattern that gives you the upper hand, but then your opponent quickly catches on and turns things in her favor. As strategies evolve, a point is reached where neither side seems to be able to improve any further. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit

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8:11

Use Science (Not Surgery) to Create Your Best Selfie

Science, Spoken ·

2018/04/09

Around 2013, plastic surgeons like Boris Paskhover started to notice a bizarre trend in their doctor’s offices. More and more young patients—under 40, as young as 20—were asking for nose jobs. In Paskhover’s office in New York, new patients would plop down, hand over their phone, and complain about how their schnoz looked in selfies. In turn, Paskhover would hand them a mirror and tell them to take a look. “This is what you really look like,” he says. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit

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6:11

With Some Structure, Stem Cells Might Still Stop...

Science, Spoken ·

2018/04/06

Getting older is supposed to give you perspective. But for one out of five people over the age of 65, it does the opposite. Macular degeneration is a common progressive eye condition, one that thins and breaks down a tissue behind the center of the retina. Without that tissue, the light-sensing cells it supports atrophy and die, making it impossible to get a clear picture of anything straight ahead of you—like, say, the faces of your loved ones or anything past your steering wheel. Learn more about

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7:09

Do You Weigh More at the Equator or at the North Pole?

Science, Spoken ·

2018/04/06

It's tough being a parent. Sometimes I try to help my kids with their physics homework because I like to pretend that I'm sort of OK with physics. Recently, my daughter wanted me to check her answer for this question. Where do you weigh more, at the equator or at the North Pole? Oh boy. I'm not sure what answer to give. OK, I think I know the answer and I also think I know the answer that the teacher wants (and these two answers might not be the same). Really, it's not the best question. Learn more

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6:18

Why These Bumblebees Are Wearing Itty-Bitty QR Codes

Science, Spoken ·

2018/04/05

Step one: Gently suck up the bumblebees with a special vacuum. Step two: Place them in the fridge to chill until they’re immobilized. Step three: Remove bees and superglue a sort of tiny, simplified QR code on their backs. Superglue what, you say? Yes, QR codes—a pretty significant upgrade for entomologists. Researchers used to stand over colonies, laboriously tracking the behavior of individual bees. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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10:05

Too Much Engineering Has Made Mississippi River...

Science, Spoken ·

2018/04/05

Scientists, environmentalists, and anyone who lives within a hundred miles of the winding Mississippi River will tell you—have told you, repeatedly, for 150 years—that efforts to tame the river have only made it more feral. But scientists would like more than intuition, more than a history of 18th-century river level gauges and discharge stations, more than written and folkloric memory. They would like proof. Luckily, rivers inscribe their history onto the landscape. Learn more about your ad

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13:02

The Woman Who Knows Everything About the Universe

Science, Spoken ·

2018/04/04

In 1965, physicist Richard Feynman was busy. He was busy winning the Nobel Prize, and he was busy learning to draw. One day during that productive time in his life, he saw astrophysics student Virginia Trimble striding across Caltech's campus and thought, There's a good model. Soon, she was posing for him a couple Tuesdays a month, in exchange for $5.50 each session and a lot of physics talk. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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6:22

A Flawed Study Shows How Little We Understand...

Science, Spoken ·

2018/04/04

Biotech has been betting big on Crispr, the gene-editing technique that promises to snip away some of humanity’s worst diseases. But last May, a small case study suggested the much-hyped technology might actually be quite dangerous—and pop went the Crispr bubble, briefly tanking shares of Crispr companies like Editas Medicine, Intellia Therapeutics, and Crispr Therapeutics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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67:55

2001: A Space Odyssey Predicted The Future—50 Years Ago

Science, Spoken ·

2018/04/04

It was 1968. I was 8 years old. The space race was in full swing. For the first time, a space probe had recently landed on another planet (Venus). And I was eagerly studying everything I could to do with space. Then on April 2, 1968 (May 15 in the UK), the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey was released—and I was keen to see it. So in the early summer of 1968 there I was, the first time I’d ever been in an actual cinema (yes, it was called that in the UK). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit

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7:34

Mini Brains Just Got Creepier—They’re Growing Their...

Science, Spoken ·

2018/04/03

The first human brain balls—aka cortical spheroids, aka neural organoids—agglomerated into existence just a few short years ago. In the beginning, they were almost comically crude: just stem cells, chemically coerced into proto-neurons and then swirled into blobs in a salty-sweet bath. But still, they were useful for studying some of the most dramatic brain disorders, like the microcephaly caused by the Zika virus. Then they started growing up. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit

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24:11

The Next Best Version of Me: How to Live Forever

Science, Spoken ·

2018/04/03

George Church towers over most people. He has the long, gray beard of a wizard from Middle-earth, and his life’s work—poking and prodding DNA and delving into the secrets of life—isn’t all that far removed from a world where deep magic is real. The 63-year-old geneticist presides over one of the largest and best-funded academic biology labs in the world, headquartered on the second floor of the massive glass and steel New Research Building at Harvard Medical School. Learn more about your ad choices

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7:54

The Case of the Missing Dark Matter

Science, Spoken ·

2018/04/02

Physicists don’t know much about dark matter. They can’t agree on what it’s made of, how much a single particle weighs, or the best way to construct a Play-Doh diorama of it. (How would you do it? Dark matter is invisible—light doesn’t interact with it at all.) Nobody has ever caught a dark matter particle on Earth. But after 30-plus years of telescope observations, most researchers do agree on one thing: The universe contains a lot of it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit

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8:09

All The Places Tiangong-1 Won’t Land (And Where It...

Science, Spoken ·

2018/04/02

No one knows exactly when or where China's abandoned Tiangong-1 space station will return to Earth. But the map on Ted Muelhaupt's computer gives him a better idea than most. "I'm looking at it right now, and it's telling me the vehicle's not gonna land in Quito," he says. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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15:18

Telomeres Are the New Cholesterol. Now What?

Science, Spoken ·

2018/03/30

“I am a bit concerned about your telomeres,” the doctor told me, evenly. Telomeres are the caplike segments at the ends of the strands of DNA that make up your chromosomes—think of the plastic aglets at the ends of a shoelace—and some of mine, he could see, were not as long as he would have liked them to be. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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9:07

A New Way to Dispose of Corpses—With Chemistry!

Science, Spoken ·

2018/03/30

The Resomator stands monolithic in the corner of a room on the ground floor of a building at UCLA. It’s as sterile as a hospital in here, but every patient is already dead. This is the penultimate stage of their time under the care of Dean Fisher, director of the Donated Body Program at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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11:40

What Are Screens Doing to Our Eyes—And Our Ability to...

Science, Spoken ·

2018/03/29

The eyes are unwell. Their childhood suppleness is lost. The lenses, as we log hours on this earth, thicken, stiffen, even calcify. The eyes are no longer windows on souls. They’re closer to teeth. To see if your own eyes are hardening, look no further than your phone, which should require no exertion; you’re probably already there. Keep peering at your screen, reading and staring, snubbing life’s third dimension and natural hues. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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5:34

Model How Light Reflects Off a Mirror With Python

Science, Spoken ·

2018/03/29

Ever wonder how a mirror works? If you want to find the path that light takes when reflecting off a surface, you could use Fermat's Principle. This states something like this: The path that light takes is the path that takes the least time. When going from point A to point B, light will travel along the path that takes less time than any other options. I actually used this idea in a question for my students learning about the variational principle with a question using Fermat's Principle. Learn more

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5:11

You Know Who's Really Addicted to Their Phones? The...

Science, Spoken ·

2018/03/28

Millennials, we’re assured by endless headlines, are the people most addicted to their devices. Addled by social networking, obsessed with taking selfies and hustling for likes, youngsters can’t put their damn phones down. Amirite? Nope. That is wrong. The data suggests that the ones most hooked on their devices are those graying GenXers. Research by Nielsen, for example, found that Americans aged 35 to 49 used social media 40 minutes more each week than those aged 18 to 34. Learn more about your ad

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6:42

How Cannabis Tech Can Help Build a Better Cup of Coffee

Science, Spoken ·

2018/03/28

In the hills near Santa Barbara, something funky is growing. No, it’s not the newest strain of bubba kush. It’s coffee, sprouting farther north than it should be. Coffee belongs in the tropics—it doesn't like cold snaps. But here at Frinj Coffee, a special variety called geisha flourishes. And it’s about to get a whole lot more special—thanks, actually, to cannabis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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