Big Picture Science

Poisonous snakes, lightning strikes, a rogue rock from space. There are plenty of scary things to fret about, but are we burning adrenaline on the right ones? Stepping into the bathtub is more dangerous than flying from a statistical point of view, but no one signs up for “fear of showering” classes. Find out why we get tripped up by statistics, worry about the wrong things, and how the “intelligence trap” not only leads smart people to make dumb mistakes, but actually causes them to make more.Guests: Eric Chudler – Research associate professor, department of bioengineering, University of Washington, Seattle and co-author of “Worried: Science Investigates Some of Life’s Common Concerns” Lise Johnson – Director of the Basic Science Curriculum, Rocky Vista University, and co-author of “Worried: Science Investigates Some of Life’s Common Concerns” Willie Turner – Vice President of Operations at the Hiller Aviation Museum in San Carlos, CA Charles Wheelan – Senior Lecturer and Policy Fellow, Dartmouth College, and author of “Naked Statistics” David Robson – Commissioning Editor for the BBC and author of “The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Make Dumb Mistakes” Originally aired May 27, 2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you bake, you can appreciate math’s transformative properties. Admiring the stackable potato chip is to admire a hyperbolic sheet. Find out why there’s no need to fear math - you just need to think outside the cuboid. Also, how nature’s geometric shapes inspire the next generation of squishy robots and an argument for radically overhauling math class. The end point of these common factors is acute show that’s as fun as eating Pi.Guests: Eugenia Cheng – Scientist in Residence at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, tenured at the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Sheffield, and author of “How to Bake Pi” Shankar Venkataramani – Professor of math at the University of Arizona Steven Strogatz – Professor of applied mathematics at Cornell University and author of “Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe” Daniel Finkel – Mathematician and founder and director of operations at “Math for Love”   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Water is essential for life – that we know. But the honeycomb lattice that forms when you chill it to zero degrees Celsius is also inexorably intertwined with life.Ice is more than a repository for water that would otherwise raise sea levels. It’s part of Earth’s cooling system, a barrier preventing decaying organic matter from releasing methane gas, and a vault entombing ancient bacteria and other microbes. From the Arctic to the Antarctic, global ice is disappearing. Find out what’s at stake as atmospheric CO2 threatens frozen H2O. Guests: Peter Wadhams- Emeritus Professor of Ocean Physics at Cambridge University in the U.K. and the author of A Farewell to Ice: A Report from the Arctic Eric Rignot- Earth systems scientist, University of California, Irving, senior research scientist, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Åsmund Asdal- Biologist, Nordic Genetic Resource Center, coordinator for operations and management of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, Svalbard, Norway John Priscu- Polar biologist, Montana State University Originally aired August 14, 2017  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Think you’re some kind of expert? Join the club. It’s one thing to question authority; another to offer up your untrained self as its replacement. Rebellion may be a cherished expression of American individualism, but, from sidelining Dr. Fauci to hiding public health data, find out what we lose when we silence health experts and “go with our gut” during a pandemic. Plus, from ancestors to algorithms: how we’ve replaced credentialed experts with sketchy web sites and social media posts.Guests: Charles Piller – Investigative reporter for Science magazine Alison Galvani – Epidemiologist and Director of the Center for Infectious Disease Modeling and Analysis, at Yale University  Tom Nichols – Professor, international affairs, U.S. Naval War College, and author of “The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters” Alex Bentley – Anthropologist, University of Tennessee and author of “The Acceleration of Cultural Change: From Ancestors to Algorithms” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Inhale. Now exhale. Notice anything different? Our response to the virus is changing the air in unexpected ways. A pandemic-driven pause on travel has produced clear skies and a world-wide air quality experiment. And a new study reveals that hundreds of tons of microplastics are raining down on us each day. But we can improve the quality of the breaths we do take; engineers have devised a high-tech mask that may kill coronavirus on contact. Plus, although you do it 25,000 times a day, you may not be breathing properly. Nose-breathing vs mouth breathing: getting the ins-and-outs of respiration.Guests: Janice Brahney - Environmental biogeochemist at Utah State University Sally Ng - Atmospheric scientist, chemical engineer at Georgia Tech. Chandan Sen - Professor, department of surgery, Indiana University School of Medicine. James Nestor - Author of “Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

COVID CuriositiesSome dogs and cats have become sick with COVID. But it’s not just domestic critters that are vulnerable: zoo animals have fallen ill too. There’s more strange news about the pandemic, for example scientists who track the coronavirus in our sewage, and computer models that show that flushing the toilet can launch persistent, pathogenic plumes into the room. And scientists have warned the WHO that infectious virus remains airborne. Also, how a shortage of glass vials could delay the deployment of a vaccine.Guests: Yvette Johnson-Walker - Epidemiologist at the University of Illinois College of Veterinary Medicine, and affiliate faculty with the University of Chicago Illinois School of Public Health. Rolf Halden - Professor and Director of the Biodesign Center for Environmental Health Engineering at Arizona State University. Bryan Bzdek - Chemist, School of Chemistry, University of Bristol, U.K. Megan Molteni - Staff writer, “Wired.”   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Your cat is smart, but its ability to choreograph a ballet or write computer code isn’t great. A lot of animals are industrious and clever, but humans are the only animal that is uniquely ingenious and creative. Neuroscientist David Eagleman and composer Anthony Brandt discuss how human creativity has reshaped the world. Find out what is going on in your brain when you write a novel, paint a watercolor, or build a whatchamacallit in your garage.But is Homo sapiens’ claim on creativity destined to be short-lived? Why both Eagleman and Brandt are prepared to step aside when artificial intelligence can do their jobs.Guests: Anthony Brandt – Professor of Composition and Theory, Rice University, and co-author of “The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World” David Eagleman – Neuroscientist, Stanford University, and co-author, “The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World”  Originally aired February 5, 2018 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Laughing rats, sorrowful elephants, joyful chimpanzees. The more carefully we observe, and the more we learn about animals, the closer their emotional lives appear to resemble our own. Most would agree that we should minimize the physical suffering of animals, but should we give equal consideration to their emotional stress? Bioethicist Peter Singer weighs in. Meanwhile, captivity that may be ethical: How human-elephant teamwork in Asia may help protect an endangered species.Guests: Frans de Waal - Primatologist and biologist at Emory University; author of “Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves.” Watch the video of Mama and Jan Van Hooff. Peter Singer – Philosopher, professor of bioethics at Princeton University. Jacob Shell - Professor of geography at Temple University, and author of “Giants of the Monsoon Forest: Living and Working with Elephants.” Kevin Schneider - Executive director of the Nonhuman Rights Project Originally aired June 24, 2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Crowded subway driving you crazy? Sick of the marathon-length grocery store line? Wish you had a hovercraft to float over traffic? If you are itching to hightail it to an isolated cabin in the woods, remember, we evolved to be together. Humans are not only social, we’re driven to care for one another, even those outside our immediate family.  We look at some of the reasons why this is so – from the increase in valuable communication within social groups to the power of the hormone oxytocin. Plus, how our willingness to tolerate anonymity, a condition which allows societies to grow, has a parallel in ant supercolonies.Guests: Adam Rutherford – Geneticist and author of “Humanimal: How Homo sapiensBecame Nature’s Most Paradoxical Creature – a New Evolutionary History” Patricia Churchland – Neurophilosopher, professor of philosophy emerita at the University of California San Diego, and author most recently of “Conscience: The Origins of Moral Intuition” Mark Moffett – Tropical biologist, Smithsonian Institution researcher, and author of “The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive and Fall” originally aired July 22, 2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sexist snow plowing? Data that guide everything from snow removal schedules to heart research often fail to consider gender. In these cases, “reference man” stands in for “average human.” Human bias also infects artificial intelligence, with speech recognition triggered only by male voices and facial recognition that can’t see black faces. We question the assumptions baked into these numbers and algorithms.Guests: Caroline Criado-Perez - Journalist and author of “Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men” Kade Crockford - Director of the Technology for Liberty Program at the ACLU of Massachusetts Amy Webb - Futurist, founder and CEO of the Future Today Institute, and author of “The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and There Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices