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From First Principles

Krishna Choudhary and Lester Nare

From First Principles is a fast, funny, and rigorous breakdown of the biggest science stories of the week, hosted by Lester Nare and physicist Krishna Choudhary, PhD. We go past headlines into the actual mechanics: what happened, why it matters, and what everyone’s missing. Expect physics, space, AI, energy, biotech, and the occasional “wait… is that real?” story. If you’re curious, skeptical, and you like learning in public — you’re in the right place.

science

All Episodes

01:11:23

Nobel Prize in Medicine 2026 Explained: Optogenetics...

From First Principles ·

2026/10/05

How do you prove what a brain cell actually does? The 2026 Nobel Prize in Medicine celebrates a remarkable answer: give cells a light-sensitive protein, then switch their activity on or off with light.In Episode 61 of From First Principles, Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary explain optogenetics from the ground up and trace the discoveries of Peter Hegemann, Georg Nagel and Karl Deisseroth. We follow the story from algae swimming toward light to channelrhodopsins, precisely controlled neurons, and

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00:40:31

2026 Nobel Prize Predictions: Medicine, Physics &...

From First Principles ·

2026/10/03

Who could win the 2026 Nobel Prizes? From the science behind Ozempic to quantum interference and droplets inside living cells, Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary make their picks for Medicine, Physics and Chemistry, and explain the discoveries behind them.In Episode 60 of From First Principles, we explore seven research areas with a case for Nobel recognition: GLP-1, optogenetics, optical coherence tomography, the Aharonov–Bohm effect, atomic force microscopy, biomolecular condensates and

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02:07:22

Golden Goose Awards 2026: The Science Behind the...

From First Principles ·

2026/09/29

What connects a noise complaint, holiday lights seen from space, and the physics of a coffee stain? Three unexpected paths from basic research to discoveries with real-world impact.Krishna Choudhary and Lester Nare explore the science behind the 2026 Golden Goose Awards: Zhen Xu's work on histotripsy, NASA's Black Marble nighttime satellite data, and Sidney Nagel's discoveries in soft matter physics.We start with focused ultrasound and the tiny bubbles that can break apart targeted

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04:09:02

What OpenAI Actually Did to Navier-Stokes (EP 58)

From First Principles ·

2026/09/24

What does it mean to solve an equation that describes almost every fluid around us, from the air over a wing to the water swirling down a drain?In Episode 58 of From First Principles, Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary build the Navier-Stokes equations from the ground up before digging into OpenAI’s claimed breakthrough and the debate surrounding it.SummaryHow Newton’s laws become equations for a moving fluidVelocity fields, incompressibility, pressure and the nonlinear convective termWhy viscosity

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01:03:30

What’s Next in Science? Nobel Prizes, Space Missions...

From First Principles ·

2026/09/14

What science should you be watching this fall? From Nobel Prize season to NASA’s Roman Space Telescope, Mars’ moons and Mercury, Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary take a relaxed tour of the discoveries and missions on their radar.In Episode 57 of From First Principles, we explore why curiosity-driven research matters, what the Golden Goose Awards celebrate, and how questions that once sounded impractical can lead to unexpected breakthroughs. Then we turn to space: Roman’s search for dark energy and

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01:35:37

The Yak Mutation That Could Help Repair the Brain (EP...

From First Principles ·

2026/09/07

What can a yak living thousands of meters above sea level teach us about repairing the human brain?In Episode 56 of From First Principles, Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary break down a new Neuron paper that traces an evolutionary adaptation found in high-altitude animals to a previously hidden pathway involved in building and repairing myelin.SummaryWhat myelin actually does and why losing it disrupts neural communicationHow multiple sclerosis damages myelin and why the brain’s natural repair

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03:46:20

Why Spin Qubits Will Win the Quantum Race (Part 2)...

From First Principles ·

2026/08/31

Which quantum computer will actually scale?In Part 2 of our quantum computing deep dive, Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary move from theory to hardware—comparing superconducting qubits, trapped ions, neutral atoms, and silicon spin qubits before going inside the new Nature cover paper Krishna co-authored with the HRL Quantum Team and collaborators.The episode begins with a simple question: what makes a good quantum computer? We evaluate each architecture using three criteria: qubit quality, qubit

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02:11:10

How Quantum Computing Actually Works (Part 1) (EP 54)

From First Principles ·

2026/08/20

Quantum computers do not simply “try every answer at once.” So what do they actually do—and why have governments and technology companies spent billions trying to build them?In Part 1 of our two-part quantum computing deep dive, Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary build the field from first principles.The series was prompted by a new Nature cover paper, A digitally controlled silicon quantum processing unit, co-authored by Krishna and members of the HRL Quantum Team and collaborators. Before getting

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01:47:25

What Claude Actually Did to the Riemann Hypothesis...

From First Principles ·

2026/08/14

Claude did not solve the Riemann Hypothesis. But what it actually did may be one of the clearest examples yet of how rapidly AI systems are changing the way difficult mathematics can be attacked.In Episode 53, Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary go from first principles on arguably the most famous unsolved problem in mathematics.We begin with Euler and the Basel problem, build the Riemann zeta function from the ground up, explain its deep connection to prime numbers, move into the complex plane and

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01:47:13

The Amazon’s Hidden Civilization (One Year...

From First Principles ·

2026/08/06

In this anniversary episode, Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary look back at how two longtime friends turned their regular conversations about science into a show now shared by millions of people around the world, and what they hope to build with FFP Nation in Year Two.Then we turn to a new Nature paper challenging the idea that the precolonial Amazon was sparsely populated. Airborne LiDAR revealed hundreds of geometric earthworks hidden beneath the rainforest canopy. Combining the new survey with

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01:44:27

The Tech Elon Has Been Waiting For (EP 51)

From First Principles ·

2026/07/31

What happens when electronics can operate at temperatures hot enough to melt aluminum?In this deep-dive episode, Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary examine a new high-temperature memory device developed by researchers at USC, the Air Force Research Laboratory, Kumamoto University, and their collaborators.Published in Science, the experimental memristor combines tungsten, hafnium oxide, and graphene. It operated reliably at 700°C—roughly 1,300°F—retained data for more than 50 hours, and survived more

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01:52:34

AI Breaks a 90-Year Math Problem, Life’s Alphabet in...

From First Principles ·

2026/07/23

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary, this episode moves from astrobiology to science policy to the rapidly changing frontier of artificial intelligence and mathematics.First, researchers analyzing pristine samples returned from asteroid Ryugu report all five canonical nucleobases used by DNA and RNA. We explain what that does—and does not—mean for the origin of life, how JAXA’s Hayabusa2 mission collected uncontaminated asteroid material, and why comparisons with NASA’s Bennu samples

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00:39:45

FIFA Data Scientists Explain Match Momentum (EP 49)

From First Principles ·

2026/07/17

In this special interview episode, Lester Nare speaks with Juan Busso, Senior Football Data Scientist at FIFA, and Arron Ackerman, FIFA’s Team Lead for Football Performance Analysis, about the data science behind the Match Momentum visualization featured throughout the 2026 World Cup.What does “momentum” actually mean in football—and how can it be measured without reducing the game to possession or shots? Juan and Arron explain how FIFA translates football principles into mathematical models,

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01:48:24

Black Hole Movies, Digital Heart Twins, and World Cup...

From First Principles ·

2026/07/14

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary, this episode returns to the FFP science rundown with stories spanning astrophysics, precision medicine, medical imaging, artificial intelligence, and World Cup technology.We begin with the Event Horizon Telescope and its evolving view of M87*, the supermassive black hole 55 million light-years away. How do you image something that appears about as small as a donut on the Moon? Krishna explains angular resolution, the Rayleigh limit, radio interferometry,

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02:21:15

America 250: The Breakthroughs That Built American...

From First Principles ·

2026/07/03

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary, this episode is part two of our July 4th America 250 special: a celebration of the scientific, technological, institutional, and cultural breakthroughs that helped shape the United States into one of the most important scientific nations in human history.In part one, we traced American science from Benjamin Franklin and the founding documents through Sputnik, NASA, DARPA, Bell Labs, the transistor, information theory, nuclear physics, molecular biology,

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01:50:15

America 250: The Breakthroughs That Built American...

From First Principles ·

2026/07/02

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary, this episode is part one of our July 4th America 250 special: a celebration of the scientific, technological, institutional, and cultural innovations that helped shape the United States into one of the most important scientific nations in human history.For America’s 250th anniversary, we built an interactive timeline of the discoveries, inventions, institutions, and funding systems that enabled American science to grow from Benjamin Franklin’s experiments

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00:59:43

The Physics of the World Cup: VAR, Smart Balls, and...

From First Principles ·

2026/06/29

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary, this episode is our World Cup special — a deep dive into the science, physics, engineering, and data behind the beautiful game.We start with the offside rule and the controversy around semi-automated VAR. How can a system decide whether a player is onside or offside by only a few inches? Krishna breaks the problem down like an experimental physicist: player speed, ball-contact time, camera frame rate, significant digits, and the error budget behind the

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01:37:34

New Rules For Heredity (Non-Mendelian Inheritance of...

From First Principles ·

2026/06/26

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary, this episode marks Krishna’s return to the studio after paternity leave — and the timing could not be more fitting. Today’s deep dive is about inheritance: not just the classic Mendelian rules most of us learned in biology class, but the stranger, more dynamic world of non-Mendelian epigenetic inheritance.Starting from Gregor Mendel and his pea plants, Lester and Krishna rebuild the foundations of genetics from first principles: dominant and recessive

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00:43:27

Dr. Michael Blanton on Open Data, Galaxy Surveys, and...

From First Principles ·

2026/06/04

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary, this episode is the second interview in our ongoing collaboration series with Carnegie Observatories. Krishna sits down with Dr. Michael Blanton, the new Director of the Carnegie Observatories, for a wide-ranging conversation on how astronomy became one of the most data-rich sciences, how the Sloan Digital Sky Survey helped change the culture around open data, what the next era of astronomical data science and AI could look like, and one of the galaxy

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01:06:34

How Scientists Actually Study Dark Matter (EP 42)

From First Principles ·

2026/05/21

Hosted by Lester Nare, this episode features astrophysicist Dan Gilman for a deep conversation on one of the biggest open questions in modern physics: what dark matter actually is. Starting from first principles, Lester and Dan walk through why the evidence for dark matter is now so strong, how strong gravitational lensing works, why tiny distortions in lensed light can reveal invisible clumps of matter, and how the next generation of surveys may transform the field. Krishna is out on family leave

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