Ideas Worth Exploring

Polymers are everywhere. There are dozens of types of plastics, but there are also biological polymers such as DNA and proteins, and together, most of the materials you use every day are made of one of the two types of polymer. Even I’m made out of polymers! Let’s talk about what they are and why they’re taking over the world.

Gambling, advertising, politics, and household chores. What do these have to do with each other? They’re all areas where your brain can steer you wrong when making decisions, as we’ll see in today’s episode. We’re going to be talking about one of the most influential ideas in the science of judgment and decision making, called dual process theory. This model is explained clearly in the book Thinking Fast and Slow by Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman. The book talks about psychological research on how our intuition and reasoning work, and explains where our brains tend to make mistakes, and how to correct those errors. In this episode, I compare your intuition, your System 1, to a robot doing paperwork, and your reason, your System 2, to a detective. I then talk about six heuristics and biases: anchoring and adjustment, loss aversion, availability, attribute substitution, representativeness, and confirmation bias, and how these affect your decision making.

A walk through the history of the universe, starting with the Big Bang and the creation of the elements in stars, moving through the first molecular replicators, the RNA world hypothesis, and the evolution of life by natural selection. Punctuated equilibrium. The extreme destruction caused by the asteroid that extincted the dinosaurs. The development of animal culture, except for octopuses, which are uncultured cephalopods. Human intelligence, modern civilization, and what lies ahead of us: extinction or spreading throughout the stars. And the possibility of civilization powered by black holes before the universe finally succumbs to heat death. Enjoy!

Pretend you’re making a new planet from scratch, and you want to know how the climate and weather patterns will be affected by each new feature you add. In this episode we will answer the questions: why is it warmer near the equator? Why does going up in elevation make it colder? We’ll also talk about the terms: albedo, the urban heat island effect, and the Coriolis effect. Finally, we’ll talk about El Niño and what we know about it. So let’s start making a planet!

Unlike in Pokemon, evolution in our world happens slowly, over many generations. In this episode, we talk about how all life on earth is part of the same family and arose from a single common ancestor through a branching pattern of evolution, and how this happens through natural selection, or “survival and reproduction of the fittest”. Also, whales have fingers. I thought you ought to know.

You may have heard of something called the Big Bang, where all the stuff in the universe spread out from a single point. Did you know that the Big Bang is still happening? Well, it is, and you’re in the middle of it! This episode is about the universe, what it looks like, and how it is changing. Also, dark energy, the mysterious thing that makes up the majority of the stuff in our universe, and several possibilities for how the universe might end: The Big Crunch, The Big Freeze, and The Big Rip.

The universe is full of stuff. Big stuff, small stuff, red stuff, blue stuff, normal stuff, ridiculously weird stuff. Most people don’t understand just how weird some of that stuff is. That stuff is called matter. It’s finally time to answer that classic question: what’s the matter. This episode will cover quarks, leptons (including neutrinos), antimatter, and dark matter.

What is a memory, physically? Do people really only use 10% of their brain? Is my short term memory bad, or is it just my short term memory? Answers to follow!

Brains! Brains are made of neurons that use electrical and chemical signals in a way that somehow gets turned into us thinking and writing podcasts about brains. This episode is about how neurons do math by using salt to power a rollercoaster.

Keto, paleo, flexitarian, Mediterranean, it seems like everyone is interested in the newest diet fad. But does eating soy protein puree really make you healthier than eating chocolate covered caramels? Today we’re talking about nutrients: fats, proteins, carbs, and all the other yummy-sounding molecules.

How do ducks float? Is it because they’re made of wood? Well, why does wood float? The answer, in a way, has to do with a naked man and a crown. But the real answer is found in the physics of buoyancy. This episode is all about buoyancy, the upward force you feel when floating in fluid.

You’re flying through the universe on your spaceship, seeing the sights, having a great time, when all of a sudden you see a black hole! Oh no, it’s sucking you in! Then it touches you and you get spaghettified, and that’s the end of you. That’s how you imagine an encounter with a black hole would be, right? No! It would be so much more interesting than that. Allow me to explain…

X-rays, gamma rays, microwaves, radio waves, what do they have in common? They’re all colors of light that you can’t see. This episode about electromagnetic radiation, the thing that makes your eyes, your phone, and your oven function as intended. I hope you find it enlightening!

If you took all the DNA from your body and stretched it out in a line, it would be twice the diameter of the solar system! Learn all about DNA and what makes it is the key to inheritance, and also a little bit of how animal cloning works.

What’s a chemistry? Today we’re talking about atoms! (Don’t trust them, they make up everything!) and uncovering the mystery of why the table is periodic.

You're stuck floating in space, ten feet from your spaceship, with no way to move, except... a sack full of gumballs. What do you do?

Every child asks it at some point: where does lightning come from? The answer may shock you! Learn about the prankster Benjamin Franklin and his exploits with electricity!

People once believed that when you sneezed, your soul left your body, and so they would say “bless you” to prevent the devil from snatching your soul. Now, people don’t tend to worry about that as much, instead they worry about getting infected by invisible creatures floating in the sneeze droplets. Today we’re going to talk about viruses, those nasty microscopic opportunistic unemployed robots all around you, and why they make you sneeze.

You know the 10 second rule: if you drop a piece of bacon on the ground, you have 10 seconds to pick it up before the bacteria attack. That’s obviously a myth, right? Right? Right. That one is a myth. But today you’ll learn about several things that sound crazy but are actually true. For example, your poop is alive, bread has alcohol in it, bears dissolve in water, and skin cells are made out of carrots. Or something like that, I don’t know, just listen to the episode.

If you visit the Mütter museum in Philadelphia, you’ll see pieces of Einstein’s brain preserved on microscope slides. This episode is about an amazing secret that his brain discovered, the fact that time and space change when you move really fast: special relativity.