This episode marks the official 100th episode of the Big Brains podcast. To celebrate this milestone, our Senior Producer Matt Hodapp joins host Paul M. Rand for a behind-the-scenes conversation about the philosophy behind the program, their favorite moments, as well as where the podcast has been—and where it’s going.

Hello Big Brains listeners! Our podcast is coming up on an important milestone … our 100th episode! As part of the month-long celebration, we’re looking back at some of our favorite episodes—highlighting a different world-changing idea or discovery each week. The way we talk is not something we spend a lot of time thinking about. But, when it comes to communicating, what we’re saying may only be as important as how we say it. That’s what Prof. Katherine Kinzler of the University of Chicago argues in her new book, "How You Say It: Why You Talk the Way You Do—And What It Says About You". It's an exploration of how speech creates and deepens our social biases.

Hello Big Brains listeners! Our podcast is coming up on an important milestone … our 100th episode! As part of the month-long celebration, we’re looking back at some of our favorite episodes—highlighting a different world-changing idea or discovery each week. What are the biggest questions in science today: Can we cure cancer, solve the climate crisis, make it to Mars? For Nobel laureate Jack Szostak, the biggest question is still much more fundamental: What is the origin of life? Jack Szostak has dedicated his lab to piecing together the complex puzzle of life’s origins on Earth. The story takes us back billions of years and may provide answers to some of our most mysterious questions: Where did we come from—and are we alone in the universe?

Hello Big Brains listeners! Our podcast is coming up on an important milestone … our 100th episode! As part of the month-long celebration, we’re looking back at some of our favorite episodes—highlighting a different world-changing idea or discovery each week. For the more than 20 million people with a felony record, incarceration doesn’t end at the prison gate. They enter what University of Chicago scholar Reuben Jonathan Miller calls the “afterlife” of mass incarceration. Miller, an assistant professor at the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy and Practice, is the author of a new book, Halfway Home: Race, Punishment and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration—an intimate portrait that draws on his sociological research and personal experiences. It’s a unique sociological look at our system of mass incarceration and how it continues to imprison people after their sentence and also punishes their families.

Hello Big Brains listeners! Our podcast is coming up on an important milestone … our 100th episode! As part of the month-long celebration, we’re looking back at some of our favorite episodes—highlighting a different world-changing idea or discovery each week. This week, we look back at our episode with UChicago economist, Raghuram Rajan. He became infamous for predicting the 2008 financial collapse three years before it happened. Rajan says that there are three pillars in our society: the state, the markets and the community. In his new book, he traces the history of how the state and markets have grown, while the community has weakened. He says these pillars need to be brought back to an equilibrium in order to address many of the global issues we face today.

There have been myths and tropes about welfare since it was created. We often hear critics say that welfare discourages people from working — but are these claims really true? This debate often plays out through theory and anecdotes, yet it’s rare to get good data about the true effects of welfare. A groundbreaking paper by University of Chicago economist Manasi Deshpande does just that. It’s a first-of-its-kind study that tells a clear story about the life-long effects of one kind of welfare on employment and criminal involvement. The findings are thorough, surprising, and Deshpande hopes they will entirely reframe the debate about welfare in America.

Batteries have revolutionized our lives, especially the invention of rechargeable batteries, which have enabled us to have cellphones, laptops, and electric vehicles. But as we transition to more forms of green energy, we're facing a serious dilemma: Will our current lithium-ion batteries be able to sustain us? Battery scientist Shirley Meng says we need to explore different metals and elements that could last longer and charge faster. Meng is a chief scientist at the Argonne National Laboratory and a professor at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago. For the past two decades, she has been pioneering research on new energy storage materials — ones that are affordable, can be mined ethically, and most importantly, ones that can be recycled efficiently.

Do animals dream? If you’re a pet owner, it may seem obvious that your furry friends dream. Most of us have seen dogs running in their sleep or cats meowing during a nap. But this is an academic podcast and really proving that animals dream isn’t so simple. In his new book, When Animals Dream: The Hidden World of Animal Consciousness, philosopher David M. Pena-Guzman of San Francisco State University argues the science shows that animals really do dream, and that those dreams are evidence of consciousness.

It’s not your imagination, summers have been getting hotter and hotter with extreme heatwaves occurring earlier and more frequently. But why is this happening and can we better predict heatwaves in advance to give people time to prepare? In June of 2021, an unprecedented heatwave shocked the Pacific Northwest and Canada. It ended up being one of the most deadly extreme weather events in the region. But no one could figure out how it occurred, until one Professor of Geophysical Science at the University of Chicago, Noboru Nakamura, saw it as an opportunity to test a new theoretical framework he had developed for understanding atmospheric phenomena. On this episode, we discuss the science of heatwaves, the mystery behind the Pacific Northwest heatwave, and how Nakamura’s framework can be used to better understand and predict climate change and other extreme weather events.

We can’t always see the consequences of air pollution around us, but it’s costing us years off our lives. According to a new Air Quality Life Index report from the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC), air pollution is taking 2.2 years off the average global life expectancy. In some of the most polluted regions in the world, residents are expected to lose an average five years of their lives, if the current high levels of pollution persist. While smog seem like a difficult problem to tackle, some countries have proven it’s possible to clean up the air. In the past seven years, China has reduced air pollution as much as the United States has in the past three decades. And since India’s Gujarat state launched the world's first clean air market in 2019, they’ve been successful in cutting particulate pollution by at least 20 percent. In this episode, we speak with EPIC’s Air Quality Programs Director Christa Hasenkopf and EPIC’s South Asia Director Anant Sudarshan about why we need to treat air pollution as a global health threat—and what we can do about it.