Time is really weird. You may be inclined to say only the present is real, while the future and past have a sort of “unreality” to them. Or perhaps you think only the past and present are real, while the future is unwritten. Philosophers have tried to understand how time, religion, and physics relate throughout time itself. Our understanding of how time works underwent a radical shift when relativity came along. We can no longer say that you and I experience the present in the...

What would it be like if New York City was partially underwater?  What would it feel like, what would it taste like?  How would the economy continue to tick, how would commuters reach their jobs?  To answer this, our guest today uses art to tell the narrative of climate change.   We aren’t all numbers people.  Therefore, using art to tell the story of climate change can make the effects of climate change real to a population that may not be fully engaged with the science or the trends. ...

AI in healthcare can do amazing things.  It can help doctors diagnose their patients.  It can streamline patient care, and can help people to receive the best care possible.  But what happens when AI in healthcare goes awry? Today, our guest is Dr. Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad.  Muhammad  discusses the promise of healthcare, but also reminds us that it has limitations.  Sometimes, AI can be biased, especially against certain minority populations and women.  Sometimes, we humans may not...

There are places where people can choose to ignore climate change.  Then, there are places that it could never be considered a myth.  Here, the effects of climate change can never be ignored – with floods, heat waves, extreme storms, or literal rising waters.  Such a place is India – particularly, North Bihar.  The floods in India are so extreme that hundreds of villages and thousands of farms can find themselves underwater.  Rivers can dramatically shift course overnight.  And it is not only...

Pope Francis has taken a special interest in science. Part of his interest is AI – particularly, how to make AI systems more ethical. Today, we are joined by Dr. Brian Patrick Green, the Director of Technology Ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. We discuss why ethics in AI systems is important, from suggested videos on YouTube to privacy to how AI algorithms decide who is approved for a loan. We also discuss what exactly morality is, if AI could...

Grief in the time of COVID is a very real thing. COVID has changed the way we interact with each other and the world. But perhaps most poignantly, it has introduced new types of grief in our lives. The grief of the dying, not allowed to touch or even see family members one last time. The grief of losing friendships, old traditions, or normal life. Or even the grief of waiting for a COVID vaccine, seeing others return to some sort of normalcy around you. Today, our guest is Dr. Kristel...

Quantum entanglement is weird. Two particles can share properties no matter where they are in the Universe. Have they always shared these properties, and they are somehow hidden from us, or do they decide these properties the moment they are measured, and somehow communicate across the vastness of space, instantaneously? Or is something else at work? Can people become entangled? Can we put a human consciousness in a sort of "Schrodinger's Cat" situation, where they are in two states at...

Gratefulness and COVID feel like they don’t belong in the same sentence. But a year into this pandemic, perhaps there are some lessons we can learn, and some ways that this year has changed us all – maybe for the better.

Today, I am joined by Seth Villegas from Boston University's School of Theology to talk about transhumanism - gradually merging body with machine to become faster, stronger, or even live forever. Why is this movement so appealing? And what does this apparently secular movement have to do with religion?

What similarities do the brains of religious people share? Do these similarities span differences in lifestyle, geography, culture, and religion? I am joined by Dr. Adam Weinberger, a neuroscientist and psychologist at Georgetown University and the University of Pennsylvania.

Last month, scientists published word that an incredible discovery was made on Venus.  They found what is called a “biomarker” in the clouds of Venus.  Now, a biomarker is not life, but a chemical that may indicate life is present. In Venus’ case, this chemical is phosphine. It’s hard to explain why phosphine would exist in the atmosphere of Venus without life being present, especially in the quantities found. This exciting discovery has renewed the conversation – what if we find life within...

Can online privacy exist today? What kind of ways does our personal data leak out when we are going about our buisness online, or even in person? I talk to Rob Shavell, co-founder of a privacy company called Abine

We all know that nature is good for us. We know to take care of the Earth, don’t pollute, be mindful of climate change. But how does being in nature affect us personally? How does it change our bodies and our minds, our biology, and our brains? Today I talk to Dr. Peter Kahn, a professor in the Department of Psychology and the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences at the University of Washington. We talk about why nature is so good for us, and how much of nature we have lost – and we...

Environmental racism - it's the term for the fact that communities of color are often hit harder by climate change or pollution than others. This happens both in our country and around the world. What can we do about it? Today, Dr. Gregory Simpson joins us. Gregory is a minister and has a doctorate in organic chemistry. He talks about the situation from Tuvalu to the US to his home of Jamaica, and how education is key in transforming the world.

The world you see is not really the world that exists. Your eyes and your brain are working together to “lie” to you all the time.  But, they don’t do this with some evil vendetta in mind.  In reality, they do it to make sense of the enormous amount of information flowing in from the world around you.  They have to make projections about what really exists.  And sometimes, they get it wrong.  Welcome to the science of subjectivity. We can see this in all sorts of real world examples.  Trying...

There’s a lot of opinions about the current Paleo diet. Some proponents say eat what our ancestors ate – meat, veggies, fruit, nuts. But what about things like lentils? Beans? Milk or wheat? Are those allowed in the Paleo diet? There are differing opinions. How do we really know what our ancestors ate? Stomachs don’t fossilize, so this actually is a pretty difficult question to answer. In order to figure it out, archaeologists and scientists have to use indirect methods, and...

To say we live in changing times is an understatement. The world right now is a pressure cooker. Already, people around the world were losing their jobs, their lives, and their ability to even venture into public places with the coronavirus outbreak. But then add to that the tragic murder of George Floyd by the police, igniting protests across the country and world.  Amid all of this, our online presence is having an affect on what is occurring, with social media playing a roll in black lives...

With the wildfires in California, extreme insect infestations in forests, and the duration between rainstorms lengthening, the western United States is in the midst of a drought.  But this drought could be the part of something larger – a so-called “megadrought”, which the United States has not seen the likes of for four hundred years. Megadroughts themselves are large events – ones that can last hundreds of years.  Modern American culture has never seen a megadrought.  How will this affect...

When did language originate?  It’s a tricky question to answer.  We can’t go back in time.  We can’t even look at “fossilized brains” to see how they worked.  So how can we understand the origins of language? Scientists have a few ways to do this.  One way is to scan the brains of living animals – humans, chimpanzees, apes, and monkeys.  They can see how these brains work, how they are different than ours, and how they are the same.  Using this, they can infer some of our own evolutionary...

How can we stay connected during this era of COVID-19? I talk to Eric Elnes, who was diagnosed positive with COVID-19 at the start of this outbreak. It is partially due to him that we learned that people can be asymptomatic. We discuss how he keeps his church together through technology during this era of social distancing, how technology can help us all during this time, and why we need each other.

Have you ever been tempted to use one of those pre-generated replies at the bottom of your gmail message? These so-called smart replies may be convenient, but according to our guest Jess Hohenstein, they might be affecting how we interact and how other people think of you.

When it comes to the teaching of science, one of the most controversial topics is evolution, and one of the most controversial areas where it is taught is the deep south of the United States.  Teaching evolution in the south has been challenging.  Teachers skip it, and those that do teach it at best have students boycott their class, and at worse get serious pushback from parents, students, and administration.  Many students never learn this critical piece of scientific curriculum.  And...

Listeners, I can say with about 100% certainty that you are being affected by the COVID-19 pandemic (unless you were on the German TV show Big Brother).  I bet your world has been turned upside down.  I just want to say – you’re not alone. Today I bring you just a short message.  I hope in two weeks I can get a normal episode to you. In the meantime, stay safe and sane, and remember, we’re all in this together.

More than one million people live in poverty in this world, and many of those are malnourished.  Meanwhile, the population of the world keeps increasing.  Simply cutting down forests to make more farmland is not the solution to feed the world = as deforestation leads to increasing climate change and more and more species going extinct.  It looks like we have exceeded the capacity of this planet. But is that really true?  What if I told you we could feed 10 billion people, maybe more?  This...