Babbage from The Economist (subscriber edition)

Meat and dairy production accounts for around 12% of humanity’s greenhouse-gas emissions. Cultivating animal cells in a lab to produce meat products, rather than slaughtering animals, could be a way to reduce both the ethical and environmental burden of agriculture. In 2023 America's food regulator approved the first cultivated meat products—made by two companies—for public consumption. But there are both cost and technological challenges to overcome before cultivated meat can be made at the scale required.Host: Alok Jha, The Economist’s science and technology editor. Contributors: Guy Scriven, The Economist’s US technology editor; Sophia Bou-Ghannam and Josh Tetrick of Eat Just; Amy Chen and Zach Tyndall of Upside Foods; and Mark Post, a professor of tissue engineering at Maastricht University and the co-founder of Mosa Meat.Sign up for a free trial of Economist Podcasts+. If you’re already a subscriber to The Economist, you’ll have full access to all our shows as part of your subscription. For more information about how to access Economist Podcasts+, please visit our FAQs page or watch our video explaining how to link your account.

Have you ever wondered why you are the way that you are? The story of human evolution is well-understood…if you’re a man. But women have been infamously understudied by scientists. That is finally changing.Cat Bohannon, a researcher and author, has been documenting evolution from the point of view of female bodies. She argues that lactation, placental pregnancy and midwifery are among the many overlooked factors that help explain why humans have become such a successful species.Cat Bohannon is the author of “Eve: How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution” and a researcher in narrative and cognition.Host: Alok Jha, The Economist’s science and technology editor.Sign up for a free trial of Economist Podcasts+. If you’re already a subscriber to The Economist, you’ll have full access to all our shows as part of your subscription. For more information about how to access Economist Podcasts+, please visit our FAQs page or watch our video explaining how to link your account.

A highlight from The Economist in 2023 read aloud. In science, no model is perfect—but that doesn’t stop them being useful. Artificial brains are helping scientists study the real thing.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is edging closer to doing things that are recognised as human intelligence. Daniel Dennett, a celebrated philosopher who has spent decades considering what makes a mind, is concerned about giving AI too much autonomy, and about what he calls “counterfeit people”—how will real humans deal with an influx of the fake kind?The latest of Daniel Dennett’s many books is “I’ve Been Thinking”, a memoir offering advice on how to be a good thinker. He is Professor Emeritus at Tufts University.Host: Alok Jha, The Economist’s science and technology editor. Sign up for a free trial of Economist Podcasts+. If you’re already a subscriber to The Economist, you’ll have full access to all our shows as part of your subscription. For more information about how to access Economist Podcasts+, please visit our FAQs page or watch our video explaining how to link your account.

Books are the original medium for communicating science to the masses. In a holiday special, producer Kunal Patel asks Babbage’s family of correspondents about the books that have inspired them in their careers as science journalists.Host: Alok Jha, The Economist’s science and technology editor. Contributors: Rachel Dobbs, The Economist’s climate correspondent; Kenneth Cukier, our deputy executive editor; The Economist’s Emilie Steinmark; Geoff Carr, our senior editor for science and technology; and Abby Bertics, The Economist’s science correspondent. Reading list: “The Periodic Table” by Primo Levi; “When We Cease to Understand the World” by Benjamín Labatut; “A Theory of Everyone” by Michael Muthukrishna; “Madame Curie” by Ève Curie; “Sociobiology” by E. O. Wilson; “The Selfish Gene” by Richard Dawkins; “Why Fish Don't Exist” by Lulu Miller; and “How Far the Light Reaches” by Sabrina Imbler.Sign up for a free trial of Economist Podcasts+. If you’re already a subscriber to The Economist, you’ll have full access to all our shows as part of your subscription. For more information about how to access Economist Podcasts+, please visit our FAQs page or watch our video explaining how to link your account.

An article from The Economist read aloud. The excitement of 70,000 Swifties can shake the Earth, as recorded by the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network.

The kind of emissions reductions promised in this week’s sweeping COP28 agreement will not suffice to meet the most ambitious climate goals. So other plans to slow the warming are coming to the fore. Solar geoengineering—modifying the amount of Earth’s incoming sunlight—is a once-fringe idea that is at last being taken seriously. It is a strategy with considerable promise, and considerable potential risks. Host: Alok Jha, The Economist’s science and technology editor. Contributors: Rachel Dobbs, The Economist’s climate correspondent; Oliver Morton, a senior editor at The Economist; Douglas MacMartin, a geoengineering researcher at Cornell University; and Shuchi Talati, who leads the Alliance for Just Deliberation on Solar Geoengineering. Sign up for a free trial of Economist Podcasts+. If you’re already a subscriber to The Economist, you’ll have full access to all our shows as part of your subscription. For more information about how to access Economist Podcasts+, please visit our FAQs page or watch our video explaining how to link your account.

COP28 is underway in Dubai, and delegates are negotiating policies to slow the rise of global temperatures. While reducing CO2 emissions is the main focus, another, more potent, greenhouse gas—which leaks from cows' bellies, rice fields and oil and gas fields—has mostly been ignored. But this week, a long-awaited deal on methane was reached at the conference. Will it do enough to get emissions of the gas under control?Host: Alok Jha, The Economist’s science and technology editor. Contributors: Vijay Vaitheeswaran, The Economist’s global energy and climate innovation editor; Bryony Worthington, a climate campaigner; Claus Zehner, a mission manager at the European Space AgencySign up for a free trial of Economist Podcasts+. If you’re already a subscriber to The Economist, you’ll have full access to all our shows as part of your subscription. For more information about how to access Economist Podcasts+, please visit our FAQs page or watch our video explaining how to link your account.

An article from The Economist read aloud. Google DeepMind has once again demonstrated how AI is transforming scientific discovery. We report that over two million materials unknown to science have been found

As the COP28 climate summit kicks off, countries will be assessing and renewing their efforts to cut carbon emissions. But to meet the goal of keeping warming well below 2°C, as set out at the Paris agreement eight years ago, carbon dioxide will also need to be removed from the atmosphere at an unprecedented scale. How can carbon capture technologies be made attractive and cost-effective, so that people will scale them up in the future? Host: Alok Jha, The Economist’s science and technology editor. Contributors: Oliver Morton, a senior editor at The Economist; Rachel Dobbs, our climate correspondent; Colin Hale, a chemical engineer at Imperial College London; Gavin Jackson, The Economist’s economics and finance correspondent.Sign up for a free trial of Economist Podcasts+. If you’re already a subscriber to The Economist, you’ll have full access to all our shows as part of your subscription. For more information about how to access Economist Podcasts+, please visit our FAQs page or watch our video explaining how to link your account.