Inquiring Minds

Mary Roach has been called "America's funniest science writer." Master of the monosyllabically titled bestseller, she has explored sex in Bonk, corpses in Stiff, and the afterlife in Spook. Her latest book, now out in paperback, is Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal. It's, you know, completely gross. But in a way that you can't put down.What kind of things might you learn in a Mary Roach book about the alimentary canal, that convoluted pipeline that runs from where you food goes in all the way to where something else comes out? Well, how about why suicide bombers don't carry bombs in their rectums: Their bodies would absorb much of the explosion and prevent any chance of achieving their deadly objective. It's one of the "reasons to be thankful for your anus," observes Roach on this week's episode.On the show, Roach took host Indre Viskontas on a quick tour of the colon and discussed some uses of the alimentary canal that are surely outside the normal range of advised behavior (just Google "hooping"—not the Hula Hoop kind—and you'll see what we mean). But this isn't all funny; the science of the gut can help you live more, er, comfortably. We talk to Roach about all that and more on this week’s show.This episode also features a discussion of whether humans differ, genetically, in our sensitivity to pain, and on the latest dismal survey showing just how much scientific knowledge Americans refuse to accept.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

Jared Diamond, author of a suite of massive, bestselling books about the precarious state of our civilization (including the Pulitzer-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel), calls himself "cautiously optimistic" about the future of humanity. What does that mean? "My estimate of our chances that we will master our problems and have a happy future, I would say the chances are 51 percent," Diamond explains on this week’s episode. "And the chances of a bad ending are only 49 percent," he adds.Diamond didn't start out as the globe-romping author, prognosticator, and polymath whose books—kind of like those of Stephen Hawking—we feel like we have to have read in order to feel moderately intelligent. Rather, after a Cambridge training in physiology, Diamond at first embarked on a career in medical research. By the mid-1980s, he had become recognized as the world's foremost expert on, of all things, the transport of sodium in the human gall bladder. But then in 1987, something happened: his twin sons were born. "I concluded that gall bladders were not going to save the world," remembers Diamond. "I realized that the future of my sons was not going to depend upon the wills that my wife and I were drawing up for our sons, but on whether there was going to be a world worth living in in the year 2050."The result was Diamond's first book, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal. It's the book that came before Guns, Germs, and Steel, but it very much lays the groundwork for that later work, as well as for Diamond's 2005's ecological jeremiad Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. In a sense, The Third Chimpanzee ties together Diamond's thinking: It's a sweeping survey of who we humans are—evolutionarily speaking, that is—and what that says about whether we can solve the "various messes that we're making now," as Diamond puts it. And this month, The Third Chimpanzee has been released in a new, shortened and illustrated edition for young adults, underscoring Diamond's sense that our entire future depends on "enabl[ing] young people to make better decisions than their parents."In other words, if you want to really, really simplify Diamond's message these days, it would be something like this: Go forth, young chimpanzees, and clean up the mess we made. Or else. For Diamond, the story of who we are is also the story of what we must do. The younger among us, anyway.This episode also features a discussion of the science (and superstition) behind this week's "blood moon," and the case of K.C., the late amnesiac patient who taught us so much about the nature of human memory.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

We all know the Darwin fish, the clever car-bumper parody of the Christian "ichthys" symbol, or Jesus fish. Unlike the Christian symbol, the Darwin fish has, you know, legs. Har har.But the Darwin fish isn't merely a clever joke; in effect, it contains a testable scientific prediction. If evolution is true, and if life on Earth originated in the oceans, then there must have once been fish species possessing primitive limbs, which enabled them to spend some part of their lives on land. And these species, in turn, must be the ancestors of four-limbed, land-living vertebrates like us.Sure enough, in 2006, scientists found one of those transitional species: Tiktaalik roseae, a 375 million-year-old Devonian period specimen discovered in the Canadian Arctic by paleontologist Neil Shubin and his colleagues. Tiktaalik, explains Shubin this week’s episode, is an "anatomical mix between fish and a land-living animal.""It has a neck," says Shubin, a professor at the University of Chicago. "No fish has a neck. And you know what? When you look inside the fin, and you take off those fin rays, you find an upper arm bone, a forearm, and a wrist." Tiktaalik, Shubin has observed, was a fish capable of doing a push-up. It had both lungs and gills. It's quite the missing link.On the show this week, we talk to Shubin about Tiktaalik, his bestselling book about the discovery, Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5 Billion Year History of the Human Body, and the recently premiered three-part PBS series adaptation of the book, featuring Shubin as host who romps from Pennsylvania roadsides to the melting Arctic in search of fossils that elucidate the natural history of our own anatomy.This episode also features a discussion of the growing possibility of an El Nino developing later this year, and the bizarre viral myth about animals fleeing Yellowstone Park because of an impending supervolcano eruption.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

Thomas Jefferson was a smart dude. And in one of his letters to John Adams, dated June 27, 1813, Jefferson made an observation about the nature of politics that science is only now, two centuries later, beginning to confirm. "The same political parties which now agitate the United States, have existed through all time," wrote Jefferson. "The terms of Whig and Tory belong to natural, as well as to civil history," he later added. "They denote the temper and constitution of mind of different individuals."Tories were the British conservatives of Jefferson's day, and Whigs were the British liberals. What Jefferson was saying, then, was that whether you call yourself a Whig or a Tory has as much to do with your psychology or disposition as it has to do with your ideas. At the same time, Jefferson was also suggesting that there's something pretty fundamental and basic about Whigs (liberals) and Tories (conservatives), such that the two basic political factions seem to appear again and again in the world, and have for "all time."Jefferson didn't have access to today's scientific machinery—eye tracker devices, skin conductance sensors, and so on. Yet these very technologies are now being used to reaffirm his insight. At the center of the research are many scholars working at the intersection of psychology, biology, and politics, but one leader in the field is John Hibbing, a political scientist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln whose "Political Physiology Laboratory" has been producing some pretty stunning results.This week, we talk to Hibbing about his research and what he says we actually do now know about these important differences between liberals and conservatives.This episode also features a discussion of whether we are finally on the verge of curing AIDS, and new research suggesting that great landscape painters, like JMW Turner, were actually able to capture the trace of volcanic eruptions, and other forms of air pollution, in the color of their sunsets.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

How do you become a scientist? Ask anyone in the profession and you'll probably hear some version of the following: get a Bachelor's of Science degree, work in a lab, get into a PhD program, publish some papers, get a good post-doctoral position, publish some more papers and then apply for a tenure-track job at a large university. It's a long road—and you get to spend those 10 to 15 years as a poor graduate student or underpaid postdoc, while you watch your peers launch careers, start families, and contribute to their 401(k) plans.And then comes the academic job market. According to Brandeis University biochemist Dr. Gregory Petsko, who recently chaired a National Academy of Sciences committee on the postdoctoral experience in the US, less than 20 percent of aspiring postdocs today get highly coveted jobs in academia. That's less than one in five. Naturally, many more end up in industry, in government, and in many other sectors—but not the one they were trained for or probably hoping for. "We're fond of saying that we should prepare people for alternative careers," explains Pesko, "without realizing that we're the alternative career."Ethan Perlstein was one of these postdocs—before he decided he'd had enough. He had gotten his Ph.D. at Harvard under Stuart Schreiber, the legendary chemist, and then gone on to a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship in genomics at Princeton. He'd published in top journals, like the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Genetics. He'd put in 13 years. But that "came to a close at the end of 2012," says Perlstein on this week’s episode, "when I encountered what I have been calling the postdocalypse, which is this pretty bad job market for professionally trained Ph.Ds—life scientists, in particular." After two years of searching for an assistant professorship, going up against an army of highly qualified, job-hungry scientists, he gave up.We talked to Perlstein about the postdocalypse, what it means for science, and what he’s doing about it.This episode also features a story about the upcoming release of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's report on global warming impacts, and a discussion about the difficult question of when screening for disease conditions is (and isn't) a good idea.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

We all heard the cosmos-stretching news this week. On Monday, a team of researchers working with a special telescope at the South Pole confirmed that they had observed evidence of "inflation," the sudden and rapid expansion of the universe that occurred in an unimaginably small slice of time just after the Big Bang, the beginning of space and time some 13.8 billion years ago. The researchers achieved this feat by examining what is known as the cosmic microwave background or CMB, which has been called the "residual heat of creation." It is a light glow that suffuses the universe and that is nearly as old as the Big Bang itself—its leftover radiation and, you might say, its signature. For most of us, though, all this talk of "inflation"—which quickly gets even more complicated, with phrases like "gravitational waves" and "polarized light" getting thrown around—can seem pretty intimidating. But that's the wrong way to look at it. If we don't understand the stunning insights of modern astrophysics and cosmology, it's just because nobody has explained them to us well enough—yet. There are science communicators out there who are more than up to the task, though, and one of them is Slate blogger and self-described "bad astronomer" Phil Plait. On the show this week, we talk to Plait about this recent discovery—he explains what is actually going on, and what we can take away from it. This episode of Inquiring Minds also features a discussion of troubling new research on the melting of Greenland, and on whether or not basketball players actually get "hot," statistically speaking, becoming more likely to make future shots if they have already made several shots in a row.Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/inquiringminds

Last week, Fox's and National Geographic's new Cosmos series set a new milestone in television history. According to National Geographic, it was the largest global rollout of a TV series ever, appearing on 220 channels in 181 countries, and 45 languages. And, yes, this is a science show we're talking about. You will have to actively resist the force of gravity in order to lift up your dropped jaw, and restore a sense of calm to your stunned face. At the center of the show is the "heir apparent" to legendary science popularizer and original Cosmos host Carl Sagan: astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who we interview on this week's episode about what it's like to fill Sagan's shoes. Tyson discusses topics ranging from what we know now about the Cosmos that Sagan didn't to why science seems to have gotten so supercool again. This episode also features a discussion of whether bringing extinct species back to life is a good idea, and of new research suggesting that climate change led to the rise of Genghis Khan.Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/inquiringminds

Who are you?The question may seem effortless to answer: You are the citizen of a country, the resident of a city, the child of particular parents, the sibling (or not) of brothers and sisters, the parent (or not) of children, and so on. And you might further answer the question by invoking a personality, an identity: You're outgoing. You're politically liberal. You're Catholic. Going further still, you might invoke your history, your memories: You came from a place, where events happened to you. And those helped make you who you are.Such are some of the off-the-cuff ways in which we explain ourselves. The scientific answer to the question above, however, is beginning to look radically different. Last year, New Scientist magazine even ran a cover article entitled, "The great illusion of the self," drawing on the findings of modern neuroscience to challenge the very idea that we have seamless, continuous, consistent identities. "Under scrutiny, many common-sense beliefs about selfhood begin to unravel," declared the magazine. "Some thinkers even go so far as claiming that there is no such thing as the self."What's going on here? When it comes to understanding this new and very personal field of science, it's hard to think of a more apt guide than Jennifer Ouellette, author of the new book Me, Myself, and Why: Searching for the Science of Self. Not only is Ouellette a celebrated science writer; she also happens to be adopted, a fact that makes her life a kind of natural experiment in the relative roles of genes and the environment in determining our identities. The self, explains Ouellette in this episode, is "a miracle of integration. And we haven't figured it out, but the science that is trying to figure it out is absolutely fascinating."This episode also features a discussion about a case currently before the Supreme Court that turns on how we determine, scientifically, who is intellectually disabled, and of the recent discovery of a 30,000 year old "giant virus" frozen in Arctic ice.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

As Edward Frenkel sees it, the way we teach math in schools today is about as exciting as watching paint dry. So it's not surprising that when he brings up the fact that he's a mathematician at dinner parties, the eyes quickly glaze over. "Most people, unfortunately, have a very bad experience with mathematics," Frenkel says. And no wonder: the math we learn in school is as far from what Frenkel believes is the soul of mathematics as a painted fence is from The Starry Night by Van Gogh, Frenkel's favorite painter.The Russian born Berkeley mathematician, whose day job involves probing the connections between math and quantum physics, wants to change that. Rather than alienating drudgery, Frenkel views math as an "archipelago of knowledge" that's universally available to all of us, and he's been everywhere of late spreading the word. In particular, Frenkel is intent on warning us about how people are constantly using (or misusing) math to get our personal data, to hack our emails, to tank our stock markets. "The powers that be sort of exploit our ignorance, and manipulate us more when we are less aware of mathematics," says Frenkel, on this week’s episode. If you hated math in high school, maybe that will catch your attention.This episode also features a discussion about whether offshore wind farms can protect our coasts from hurricanes, and new insights on the possible physical location of memory within the brain.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

Just when weather weary Americans thought they'd found a reprieve, the latest forecasts suggest that the polar vortex will, again, descent into the heart of the country next week, bringing with it staggering cold. If so, it will be just the latest weather extreme in a winter that has seen so many of them. California has been extremely dry, while the flood-afflicted UK has been extremely wet. Alaska has been extremely hot (as has Sochi), while the snow-pummeled US East Coast has been extremely cold. They're all different, and yet on a deeper level, perhaps, they're all the same.This weather now serves as the backdrop—and perhaps, as the inspiration—for an increasingly epic debate within the field of climate research. You see, one climate researcher, Jennifer Francis of Rutgers University, has advanced an influential theory to explain winters like this. The hypothesis is that by rapidly melting the Arctic, global warming is slowing down the fast-moving river of air far above us known as the jet stream—in turn causing weather patterns to get stuck in place for longer, and leading to more extremes of the sort that we've all been experiencing.On the other hand, in a letter to the journal Science last week, five leading climate scientists—mainstream researchers who accept a number of other ideas about how global warming is changing the weather, from worsening heat waves to driving heavier rainfall—strongly contested Francis's jet stream claim, calling it "interesting" but contending that "alternative observational analyses and simulations have not confirmed the hypothesis." One of the authors was the highly influential climate researcher Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, who we welcomed on the show this week alongside Francis to debate the matter.This episode also features a discussion about Indre's new 24 lecture course "12 Essential Scientific Concepts," which was just released by The Teaching Company as part of the "Great Courses" series.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