Big Picture Science

A thousand years ago, most people didn’t own a single book. The only way to access knowledge was to consult their memory. But technology – from paper to hard drives – has permitted us to free our brains from remembering countless facts. Alphabetization and the simple filing cabinet have helped to systematize and save information we might need someday.But now that we can Google just about any subject, have we lost the ability to memorize information? Does this make our brains better or worse?Guests: Judith Flanders – Historian and author, most recently of A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order Craig Robertson – Professor of Media Studies, Northeastern University and author of The Filing Cabinet: A Vertical History of Information David Eagleman – Neuroscientist and author, Stanford University   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As we struggle to control a viral invader that moves silently across the globe and into its victims, we are also besieged by other invasions. Murder hornets have descended upon the Pacific Northwest, threatening the region’s honeybees. In Africa, locust swarms darken the sky. In this episode, we draw on a classic science fiction tale to examine the nature of invasions, and what prompts biology to go on the move.Guests: Peter Ksander – Associate professor at Reed College in the Department of Theater. Producer of the spring 2020 production of War of the Worlds Eva Licht – A senior at Reed College, and producer and director of War of the Worlds Chris Looney – Entomologist with the Washington State Department of Agriculture, where he manages its general entomology laboratory Nipun Basrur – Neurobiologist at The Rockefeller University Amy Maxmen – Reporter at the journal Nature, in which her story about pandemic war games appeared. Originally aired August 31, 2020  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The benefits of artificial intelligence are manifest and manifold, but can we recognize the drawbacks … and avoid them in time? In this episode, recorded before a live audience at the Seattle meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, we discuss who is making the ethical decisions about how we use this powerful technology, and a proposal to create a Hippocratic Oath for AI researchers.Guests: Oren Etzioni - CEO of The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence Mark Hill - Professor of computer sciences at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and chair of the Computing Community Consortium Originally aired February 24, 2020  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Climate change isn’t happening. Vaccines make you sick. When it comes to threats to public or environmental health, a surprisingly large fraction of the population still denies the consensus of scientific evidence. But it’s not the first time – many people long resisted the evidentiary link between HIV and AIDS and smoking with lung cancer.There’s a sense that science denialism is on the rise. It prompted a gathering of scientists and historians in New York City to discuss the problem, which included a debate on the usefulness of the word “denial” itself. Big Picture Science was there. We report from the Science Denial symposium held jointly by the New York Academy of Sciences and Rutgers Global Health Institute. Find out why so many people dig in their heels and distrust scientific findings. Plus, the techniques wielded by special interest groups to dispute some inconvenient truths. We also hear how simply stating more facts may be the wrong approach to combating scientific resistance.Guests: Melanie Brickman Borchard - Director of Life Sciences Conferences at New York Academy of Sciences Nancy Tomes - professor of history at Stony Brook University Allan Brandt - professor of history of science and medicine at Harvard University. Author of “The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America” Sheila Jasanoff - Director of Program on Science, Technology and Society and professor of environment, science and technology at Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University Michael Dahlstrom - Associate Director of Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication, and associate professor at Iowa State University Matthew Nisbet - professor of communication and public policy at Northeastern University Arthur (Art) Caplan - professor and founding head of medical ethics at NYU School of Medicine   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

They’re cute and cuddly. But they can also be obnoxious.Science writer Mary Roach has numerous tales about how our animal friends don’t always bow to their human overlords and behave the way we’d want. The resulting encounters, such as when gulls disrupt the Vatican’s Easter mass, make for amusing stories. But others, such as wolves threatening farmers’ livestock, can be tragic.We hear what happens at the messy crossroads of human and wildlife encounters.Guest: Mary Roach – Author of bestselling nonfiction books, most recently “Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law.”  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Above the Arctic Circle, much of the land is underlaid by permafrost. But climate change is causing it to thaw. This is not good news for the planet. As the carbon rich ground warms, microbes start to feast… releasing greenhouse gases that will warm the Earth even more.Another possible downside was envisioned by a science-fiction author. Could ancient pathogens–released from the permafrost’s icy grip–cause new pandemics? We investigate what happens when the far north defrosts.Guests: Jacquelyn Gill – Associate professor of paleoecology at the University of Maine. Jim Shepard – Novelist and short story writer, and teacher of English at Williams College, and author of “Phase Six.” Scott Saleska – Global change ecologist, professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona, and co-founder of IsoGenie.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Without sand, engineering would be stuck in the Middle Ages. Wooden houses would line mud-packed streets, and Silicon Valley would be, well, just a valley. Sand is the building material of modern cities, and we use more of this resource than any other except water and air. Now we’re running out of it. Hear why the Roman recipe for making concrete was lost until the 19th century, and about the super-secret mine in North Carolina that makes your smartphone possible. Plus, engineered sand turns stormwater into drinking water, and why you might think twice about running barefoot on some tropical beaches once you learn about their biological source.And, a special report from the coast of Louisiana where livelihoods and ecosystems depend on the successful release of Mississippi sand from levees into sediment-starved wetlands.Guests: Vince Beiser – Journalist and author of “The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How it Transformed Civilization” Joe Charbonnet – Science and policy associate at the Green Science Policy Institute in Berkeley, California Pupa Gilbert – Biophysicist and geobiologist, University of Wisconsin, Madison Rudy Simoneaux – Engineer manager, Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, Baton Rouge, Louisiana Elizabeth Chamberlain – Post-doctoral researcher in Earth and Environmental Sciences, Vanderbilt University Originally aired January 14, 2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

SMS isn’t the original instant messaging system. Plants can send chemical warnings through their leaves in a fraction of a second. And while we love being in the messaging loop – frenetically refreshing our browsers – we miss out on important conversations that no Twitter feed or inbox can capture. That’s because eavesdropping on the communications of non-human species requires the ability to decode their non-written signals.Dive into Arctic waters where scientists make first-ever recordings of the socializing clicks and squeals of narwhals, and find out how climate shifts may pollute their acoustic landscape. Also, why the chemical defense system of plants has prompted one biologist to give greenery an “11 on the scale of awesomeness.” And, you can’t see them, but they sure can sense one another: how communicating microbes plan their attack.Guests: Susanna Blackwell – Bio-acoustician with Greeneridge Sciences. Hear her recordings of narwhals here. Simon Gilroy – Professor of botany, University of Wisconsin, Madison. His video of glowing green caterpillar-munched plants can be viewed here. Peter Greenberg – Professor of microbiology, University of Washington, Seattle Originally aired October 29, 2018 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It was a radical idea a century ago, when Einstein said space and time can be bent, and gravity was really geometry. We hear how his theories inspire young minds even today.At small scales, different rules apply: quantum mechanics and the Standard Model for particles. New experiments suggest that muons – cousins of the electron – may be telling us that the Standard Model is wrong. Also, where the physics of both the large and small apply, and why black holes have no hair.Guests: Hakeem Oluseyi – Astrophysicist, affiliated professor at George Mason University, and author of “A Quantum Life: My Unlikely Journey from the Street to the Stars” Janna Levin – Professor of physics and astronomy, Barnard College at Columbia University Mark Lancaster – Professor of particle physics, University of Manchester Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

They were developed in a matter of months, and they’re 90 percent effective at stopping infection. They protect against serious illness or death. And yet, roughly one-third of Americans refuse to get the Covid vaccine.How can this be? How could something that our ancestors would have considered a miracle be refused by so many? The reasons are many, and not all are because of an anti-vax attitude. We talk to health professionals to learn what’s stopping the public from stopping the pandemic.Guests: Paul Offit – Pediatrician and Director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Tanagne Haile-Mariam – Professor of Emergency Medicine, George Washington University School of Medicine Nsikan Akpan – Former Health and Science Editor for New York Public Radio   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices