Inquiring Minds

It's the 4th of July, and you love your country. Your likely next step: Fire off some small scale explosives, and drink a lot of beer.But that last word ought to trouble you a little. Beer? Is that really the best you can do? Isn't it a little, er, uncreative?Amy Stewart, our guest this week, has some better ideas for you. Author of the New York Times bestselling book The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create The World's Great Drinks, she's a master of the wild diversity of ways in which, since time immemorial, human civilizations (virtually all of them) have created alcoholic drinks from the sugars of their native plants.It seems human beings pretty much always find a way when it comes to getting hammered. Indeed, when you think about it, you can argue that learning how to do so was one of the first human sciences. In a sense, it's closely akin to capturing and using solar energy: Making alcohol, too, hinges upon tapping into the power created by the sun. "It is not much of an exaggeration to claim that the very process that gives us the raw ingredients for brandy and beer is the same one that sustains life on the planet," writes Stewart in The Drunken Botanist.This episode also features a conversation with Mother Jones reporter Molly Redden about how the Supreme Court flubbed reproductive health science in the Hobby Lobby case, and of Facebook's troubling recent study that involved trying to alter users' emotional states.iTunes: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/inquiring-minds/id711675943RSS: feeds.feedburner.com/inquiring-mindsStitcher: stitcher.com/podcast/inquiring-mindsSupport the show: https://www.patreon.com/inquiringminds

There's nothing quite as satisfying as a really good joke. Someone has made a clever new connection between two mundane things that we've all encountered—and suddenly we have a lovely "aha" moment. We find it funny.That sense of revelation accompanying a good joke or comic is very similar to what many scientists experience when they finally figure out a great explanation for some kind of previously unknown phenomenon. But don't take it from us. Take it from the scientifically-trained author and illustrator Zach Weinersmith (née Weiner), creator of the popular webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (SMBC), known for its science-themed humor."I suspect what's actually going on with people who are thought of as very creative is they're good at two skills, one of which is generating connections rapidly, and two, editing out the garbage quickly," explains Weinersmith on this week's episode.In Weinersmith's case, some of funniest jokes are actually about just plain bad scientific thinking—and they teach a lesson about what science is, and what it isn't. The comic artist is now one of the main forces behind an event series, entitled the "Festival of Bad Ad Hoc Hypotheses," that specializes in "celebrations of well-argued and thoroughly-researched but completely incorrect evolutionary theory." The winner takes home a sculpture of Charles Darwin, "shrugging skeptically." The first festival took place at MIT in late 2013.On the show this week we talked to Weinersmith about science, comics, and how to make a really great bad hypothesis.This episode also features a short discussion with Cynthia Graber, author of the new PBS/NOVANext article "The Next Green Revolution May Rely on Microbes," and a discussion of the science of why human biting is so dangerous, and of how our hormones influence political choices.iTunes: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/inquiring-minds/id711675943RSS: feeds.feedburner.com/inquiring-mindsStitcher: stitcher.com/podcast/inquiring-mindsSupport the show: https://www.patreon.com/inquiringminds

Chances are that when you think about math—which, for most of us, happens pretty infrequently—you don't think of it in anything like the way that Jordan Ellenberg does. Ellenberg is a rare scholar who is both a math professor (at the University of Wisconsin-Madison) and a novelist. And in his fascinating new book, How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking, he deploys analyses of poetry, politics, and even religion in a bold recasting of what math is in the first place.For Ellenberg, the stuff you hated about math in high school isn't the core of the thing. He's emphatic that mathematics isn't simply about the calculations involving, you know, numbers; rather, it's a highly nuanced approach to solving problems that we all, unavoidably, encounter. Ellenberg's chapters range from showing how mathematical thinking undermines many popular proofs for the existence of God (Paley's design argument, Pascal's wager), to explaining how math helps us understand why smoking causes lung cancer (contrary to claims by one early statistician who actually argued that the causation might be reversed—that lung cancer might cause smoking!).On the show this week we talked to Ellenberg about his book, and math: why you’re probably thinking about it all wrong, and why it’s so powerful.This episode also features a short interview with Tasneem Raja, author of the must-read new article "We Can Code It: Why computer literacy is key to winning the 21st century" in Mother Jones, and a discussion of new findings about autism and possibly how to stop it—by making brain cells better able to communicate with one another.iTunes: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/inquiring-minds/id711675943RSS: feeds.feedburner.com/inquiring-mindsStitcher: stitcher.com/podcast/inquiring-mindsSupport the show: https://www.patreon.com/inquiringminds

Sam Kean, a captivating science writer and author of 'The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons', shares fascinating stories of patients whose unique brain conditions reveal profound insights about our minds. He discusses how these historical case studies challenge the reliance on colorful brain scans and highlights intriguing tales of individuals who lost the ability to recognize animals. The conversation touches on oxytocin’s role in bonding and muscle regeneration, and even includes insights from Neil deGrasse Tyson on the impact of the 'Cosmos' series.

Remember those stick-figures of chemical compounds you were forced to memorize in high school? Remember how useless it seemed at the time? Can you still articulate the difference between a covalent bond and an ionic one (without checking Wikipedia)? If not, pay attention: You might be caught flat-footed during the zombie apocalypse.The CDC suggests (half-seriously) having a zombie-preparedness kit (after all, it would also be useful in case of pandemics and hurricanes). But chemist and blogger Raychelle Burks has a simpler solution—one that would have greatly de-grossified a famous scene from The Walking Dead, in which Rick and his fellow apocalypse survivors slathered the guts of dead humans all over themselves, to jam the zombies' chemosenses with the smell of rotting flesh and thereby, escape."They used chemical camouflage," explains Burks, to trick the zombies into thinking they were fellow undead. The only problem: Icky and dangerous exposure to blood, guts, and pathogens. Burks has a better idea. "There's a couple of key chemicals that smell really stinky," she explains on this week’s episode. "Two right off the top would be—and they've got great names—cadaverine and putrescine…and they do smell like their names." In fact, these chemicals are used to train cadaver dogs, which search for dead bodies. "You could make up a death cologne," Burks continues. "Kind of use chemical camouflage to your advantage so that you can sneak through a zombie horde."Known as Dr. Rubidium on Twitter—a name she chose because element 37 of the periodic table, Rubidium, has the symbol "RB," the same as her initials—Burks is a self-described "magical unicorn": A black, female, analytical chemist working at Nebraska's Doane College. Professionally, much of her research has focused on how to create quick chemical tests to help law enforcement officials detect the presence of explosives, and particularly those that are peroxide based, which are both extremely dangerous, and also fairly easy to make.On the show this week, we talked to Burks about a wide range of chemistry-related topics, including the widespread confusion over terms like "natural," "organic," and "chemical."This episode also features a discussion of a controversial study concluding that hurricanes with female names are deadlier, as well as new research into how spiders use their webs to detect sound vibrations.iTunes: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/inquiring-minds/id711675943RSS: feeds.feedburner.com/inquiring-mindsStitcher: stitcher.com/podcast/inquiring-mindsSupport the show: https://www.patreon.com/inquiringminds

Remember "Climategate"? It was the 2009 non-scandal scandal in which a trove of climate scientists' emails, pilfered from the University of East Anglia in the UK, were used to call all of modern climate research into question. Why? Largely because a cursory reading of those emails—showing climate scientists frankly discussing how to respond to burdensome data requests and attacks on their work, among other content—showed a side of researchers that most people aren't really used to seeing. Suddenly, these "experts" looked more like ordinary human beings who speak their minds, who sometimes have emotions and rivalries with one another, and (shocker) don't really like people who question the validity of their knowledge.In other words, Climategate demonstrated something that sociologists of science, or those in the so-called field of "science studies," have know for some time—that scientists are mortals, just like all the rest of us. "What was being exposed was not something special and local but 'business as usual' across the whole scientific world," writes Cardiff University scholar Harry Collins, one of the original founders of the field of "science studies," in his masterful new book, Are We All Scientific Experts Now? But that means that Climategate didn't undermine the case for human-caused global warming at all, says Collins. Rather, it demonstrated why it is so hard for ordinary citizens, who don't have a lot of experience of how the scientific community works, to understand what is going on inside of it—much less to snipe and criticize from the outside.That's a case that Collins makes not only about the climate issue—but also to rebut vaccine deniers, HIV-AIDS skeptics, and all manner of scientific cranks and mavericks. All of them, he argues, are failing to understand what's so important and powerful about a group of experts coming to a scientific consensus.On the show this week we talked to Collins about why scientific expertise matters—especially in a world where more and more people are getting their answers from Google searches.iTunes: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/inquiring-minds/id711675943RSS: feeds.feedburner.com/inquiring-mindsStitcher: stitcher.com/podcast/inquiring-mindsSupport the show: https://www.patreon.com/inquiringminds

If you want to truly grasp the scale of the Earth's polar ice sheets, you need some help from Isaac Newton. Newton taught us the universal law of gravitation, which states that all objects are attracted to one another in proportion to their masses (and the distance between them). The ice sheets covering Antarctica and Greenland are incredibly massive—Antarctica's ice is more than two miles thick in places and 5.4 million square miles in extent. These ice sheets are so large, in fact, that gravitational attraction pulls the surrounding ocean towards them. The sea level therefore rises upward at an angle as you approach an ice sheet, and slopes downward and away as you leave its presence.This is not good news for humanity. As the ice sheets melt due to global warming, not only do they raise the sea level directly; they also exert a smaller gravitational pull on the surrounding ocean. So water sloshes back towards the continents, where we all live. "If Antarctica shrinks and puts that water in the ocean, the ocean raises around the world, but then Antarctica is pulling the ocean towards it less strongly," explained the celebrated Penn State glaciologist Richard Alley on this week’s episode. "And as that extra water around Antarctica spreads around the world, we will get a little more sea level rise in the US than the global average."Alley, a self-described “registered Republican” and host of the PBS program Earth: The Operators’ Manual, spoke on the occasion of truly dire news, of the sort that ice sheet experts like him have been dreading for some time. Last week, we learned from two separate research teams that the ice sheet of West Antarctica, which comprises just one relatively small part of Antarctic ice overall but contains enough frozen water to raise global sea levels by some 10 or 11 feet, has been irrevocably destabilized. Scientists have long feared that of all the planet's great ice sheets, West Antarctica would be the first to go, because much of it is marine-based—the front edge of the ice sheet is bathing in increasingly warm water, which is melting it from beneath. On the show this week we talked to Alley about the science of ice sheets and what this most recent news means for our future.This episode also features a discussion of a controversial project to replicate some of the most famous studies in social science, and of new research on whether firstborn children are more politically conservative than their later-born siblings.iTunes: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/inquiring-minds/id711675943RSS: feeds.feedburner.com/inquiring-mindsStitcher: stitcher.com/podcast/inquiring-mindsSupport the show: https://www.patreon.com/inquiringminds

In late April, former Daily Show correspondent John Oliver kicked off his HBO news-satire program, Last Week Tonight. Oliver, who spent nearly eight years at The Daily Show and has a solid background in political satire, is off to a good start. His weekly series—which offers biting commentary on the past week's biggest news stories, both national and international—is barely into its inaugural season, and it seems to be hitting the right notes. The premiere episode, for example, featured an exclusive televised interview with Gen. Keith Alexander (Ret.), his first since stepping down as director of the National Security Agency.In another recent episode, Oliver expressed his frustration with the so-called climate "debate" in America by staging a more representative debate between a few climate skeptics and nearly a hundred scientists. One of the guys on the correct side of the "debate" was Bill Nye, who was booked for the show basically at the last minute."We just wanted to really play with that idea that the very fact that the climate debate is framed as a debate at all is problematic," Oliver says. On Inquiring Minds this week, guest host Asawin Suebsaeng talked to John Oliver about Last Week Tonight, politics, climate change, and how he went about finding a, um, very specific kind of model for the show.This episode also features a discussion of surprising new scientific findings about why we don't remember much from our childhoods—because we were so busy growing new brain cells.iTunes: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/inquiring-minds/id711675943RSS: feeds.feedburner.com/inquiring-mindsStitcher: stitcher.com/podcast/inquiring-mindsSupport the show: https://www.patreon.com/inquiringminds

When the audio of LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling telling his girlfriend not to "bring black people" to his team's games hit the Internet, the condemnations were immediate. It was clear to all that Sterling was a racist, and the punishment was swift: the NBA banned him for life. It was, you might say, a pretty straightforward case.When you take a look at the emerging science of what motivates people to behave in a racist or prejudiced way, though, matters quickly grow complicated. In fact, if there's one cornerstone finding when it comes to the psychological underpinnings of prejudice, it's that actual out-and-out or "explicit" racists—like Sterling—are just one part of the story. Perhaps far more common are cases of so-called "implicit" prejudice, where people harbor subconscious biases, of which they may not even be aware, but that come out in controlled psychology experiments.Much of the time, these are not the sort of people whom we would normally think of as racists. "They might say they think it's wrong to be prejudiced," explains New York University neuroscientist David Amodio, an expert on the psychology of intergroup bias, on this week’s episode. Amodio says that white participants in his studies "might write down on a questionnaire that they are positive in their attitudes about black people…but when you give them a behavioral measure, to how they respond to pictures of black people, compared with white people, that's where we start to see the effects come out."On the show this week we talk to Amodio about his research on the neuroscience of prejudice, its implications, and what we can do about it.This episode of also features a discussion of how scientists turned to a group of video gamers to help solve a complex problem involving how the human retina detects motion, and of the release of the groundbreaking National Climate Assessment.iTunes: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/inquiring-minds/id711675943RSS: feeds.feedburner.com/inquiring-mindsStitcher: stitcher.com/podcast/inquiring-mindsSupport the show: https://www.patreon.com/inquiringminds

Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe, an evangelical Christian, has had quite the run lately. A few weeks back, she was featured in the first episode of the Showtime series The Years of Living Dangerously, meeting with actor Don Cheadle in her home state of Texas to explain to him why faith and a warming planet aren't in conflict. Then, Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people of 2014; Cheadle wrote the entry.Why is Hayhoe in the spotlight? Simply put, 25 to 30 percent of Americans are evangelical Christians, and their belief in the science of global warming is well below the national average. And if anyone has a chance of reaching this vast and important audience, Hayhoe does. "I feel like the conservative community, the evangelical community, and many other Christian communities, I feel like we have been lied to," explains Hayhoe on this week’s episode. "We have been given information about climate change that is not true. We have been told that it is incompatible with our values, whereas in fact it's entirely compatible with conservative and with Christian values."On the show this week we talked to Hayhoe about climate change, science, religion, and not only why Evangelicals should care about our changing climate, but why they should feel compelled to do something about it.This episode also features a discussion of recent findings that laboratory mice respond differently to male researchers, and new breakthroughs in "therapeutic cloning," or the creation of embryonic stem cell lines from cloned embryos.iTunes: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/inquiring-minds/id711675943RSS: feeds.feedburner.com/inquiring-mindsStitcher: stitcher.com/podcast/inquiring-mindsSupport the show: https://www.patreon.com/inquiringminds