Big Picture Science

The world is a noisy place. But now we have a better idea what the fuss is about. Not only can we record sound, but our computers allow us to analyze it. Bird sonograms reveal that our feathery friends give each other nicknames and share details about their emotional state. Meanwhile, hydrophones capture the sounds of dying icebergs, and let scientists separate natural sound from man-made in the briny deep. Plus, native Ohio speakers help decipher what Neil Armstrong really said on that famous day. And, think your collection of 45 rpm records is impressive? Try feasting your ears on sound recorded before the Civil War. Guests: •  Bob Dziak – Oceanographer, Hatfield Marine Science Center, Oregon State University, Program Manager, Acoustics Program, NOAA •  Michael Porter – Senior scientist of H.L.S. Research, La Jolla, California •  Patrick Feaster – Sound media historian at Indiana University •  Laura Dilley – Assistant professor in the Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders, Michigan State Univer

We love our family and friends, but sometimes their ideas about how the world works seem a little wacky. We asked BiPiSci listeners to share examples of what they can’t believe their loved-ones believe, no matter how much they hear rational explanations to the contrary. Then we asked some scientists about those beliefs, to get their take. Discover whether newspaper ink causes cancer … if King Tut really did add a curse to his sarcophagus … the efficacy of examining your irises – iridology – to diagnose disease … and more! Oh, and what about string theory? Is it falsifiable? Guests: •  Steven Novella – Physician at Yale University, host of the podcast, “Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe” •  Matthew Hutson – Author of The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking: How Irrational Beliefs Keep Us Happy, Healthy, and Sane •  Brian Greene – Physicist, Columbia University, author of The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos and The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the

We make split second decisions about others – someone is male or female, black or white, us or them. But sometimes the degrees of separation are incredibly few. A mere handful of genes determine skin color, for example. Find out why race is almost non-existent from a biological perspective, and how the snippet of DNA that is the Y chromosome came to separate male from female. Plus, why we’re wired to categorize. And, a groundbreaking court case proposes to erase the dividing line between species: lawyers argue to grant personhood status to our chimpanzee cousins. Guests: David Page – Biologist and geneticist, at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Stephen Stearns – Evolutionary biologist, Yale University John Dovidio – Social psychologist at Yale University Steven M. Wise – Lawyer, Nonhuman Rights Project Descripción en español Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We all want to turn back time. But until we build a time machine, we’ll have to rely on a few creative approaches to capturing things as they were – and preserving them for posterity. One is upping memory storage capacity itself. Discover just how much of the past we can cram into our future archives, and whether going digital has made it all vulnerable to erasure. Plus – scratch it and tear it – then watch this eerily-smart material revert to its undamaged self. And, what was life like pre-digital technology? We can’t remember, but one writer knows; he’s living life circa 1993 (hint: no cell phone). Also, using stem cells to save the white rhino and other endangered species. And, the arrow of time itself – could it possibly run backwards in another universe? Guests: Michael S. Malone – Professor of professional writing at Santa Clara University and the author of The Guardian of All Things: The Epic Story of Human Memory Oliver Ryder – Director of genetics, San Diego Zoo Institute for Conservation Resear

We often hear fantastic scientific claims that would change everything if true. Such as the report that algae is growing on the outside of the International Space Station or that engineers have built a rocket that requires no propellant to accelerate. We examine news stories that seem too sensational to be valid, yet just might be – including whether a killer asteroid has Earth’s name on it. Plus, a journalist investigates why people hold on to their beliefs even when the evidence is stacked hard against them – from skepticism about climate change to Holocaust denial. And, why professional skeptics are just as enamored with their beliefs as anyone else. Guests: Lynn Rothschild – Evolutionary biologist and astrobiologist at NASA Ames Research Center Will Storr – Journalist, author of The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science Steven Novella – Assistant professor, Yale University School of Medicine, host of the “Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe” podcast David Morrison – Director of the C

A planet is a planet is a planet. Unless it’s Pluto – then it’s a dwarf planet. But even then it’s a planet, according to experts. So what was behind the unpopular re-classification of Pluto by astronomers, and were they justified? As the New Horizons spacecraft closes in on this small body, one planetary scientist says that this dwarf planet could be more typical of planets than Mars, Mercury, and Saturn. And that our solar system has not 8 or even 9 planets, but 900. Also, meet a type of planet that’s surprisingly commonplace, although we don’t have one in our solar system: super Earths. Could they harbor life? And the DAWN mission continues its visit to the two most massive residents of the asteroid belt: Vesta and Ceres. Discover what these proto-planets may reveal to us about the early solar system. Guests: Alan Stern – Planetary scientist, Southwest Research Institute, Principal Investigator of the New Horizons mission Marc Rayman – DAWN Mission chief engineer and mission director David Stevenson

Hi ho, hi ho … it’s out with work we go! As you relax this holiday weekend, step into our labor-atory and imagine a world with no work allowed. Soft robots help us with tasks at home and at the office, while driverless cars allow us to catch ZZZZs in the front seat. Plus, the Internet of Everything interconnects all your devices, from your toaster to your roaster to … you. So there’s no need to ever get off the couch. But is a machine-ruled world a true utopia? And, the invention that got us into our 24/7 rat race: Edison’s electric light. Guests: Barry Trimmer – Professor of biology, neuroscience, and biomedical engineering at Tufts University, and editor-in-chief, Soft Robotics Red Whittaker – Roboticist at Carnegie Mellon University Ernest Freeberg – Historian, University of Tennessee, and author of The Age of Edison: Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America Rob Chandhok – Computer scientist, president of Qualcomm Interactive Platforms Andre Bormanis – Television writer, producer, scr

We’ve all hit the snooze button when the alarm goes off, but why do we crave sleep in the first place? We explore the evolutionary origins of sleep … the study of narcolepsy in dogs … and could novel drugs and technologies cut down on our need for those zzzzs. Plus, ditch your dream journal: a brain scanner may let you record – and play back – your dreams. And, branch out with the latest development in artificial light: bioluminescent trees. How gene tinkering may make your houseplants both grow and glow. Guests: Emmanuel Mignot – Professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, and director of the Stanford Center for Sleep Sciences and Medicine, Stanford University Kyle Taylor – Molecular biologist at Glowing Plant Jerry Siegel – Neuroscientist and professor of psychiatry, the University of California, Los Angeles Jack Gallant – Professor of psychology and neuroscience, University of California, Berkeley Descripción en español First released May 27, 2013. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit mega

Maybe goodbye isn’t forever. Get ready to mingle with mammoths and gaze upon a ground sloth. Scientists want to give some animals a round-trip ticket back from oblivion. Learn how we might go from scraps of extinct DNA to creating live previously-extinct animals, and the man who claims it’s his mission to repopulate the skies with passenger pigeons. But even if we have the tools to bring vanished animals back, should we? Plus, the extinction of our own species: are we engineering the end of humans via our technology? Guests: Beth Shapiro – Associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, University of California, Santa Cruz Ben Novak – Biologist, Revive and Restore project at the Long Now Foundation, visiting biologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz Hank Greely – Lawyer working in bioethics, director of the Stanford Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford University Melanie Challenger – Poet, writer, author of On Extinction: How We Became Estranged from Nature Nick Bostr

Who’s watching you? Could be anyone, really. Social media sites, webcams, CCTV cameras and smartphones have made keeping tabs on you as easy as tapping “refresh” on a tablet. And who knows what your cell phone records are telling the NSA? Surveillance technology has privacy on the run, as we navigate between big data benefits and Big Brother intrusion. Find out why wearing Google Glass could make everything you see the property of its creator, and which Orwellian technologies are with us today. But just how worried should we be? A cyber security expert weighs in. Also, the benefits of an eye in the sky. A startup company claims that their suite of microsatellites will help protect Earth’s fragile environment. And Gary catches a cat burglar! Guests: Robert Gehl – Professor in the Department of Communication, University of Utah. His article, “A Mind Meld with the Surveillance State” appeared in an online issue of The Week. Hal Rappaport – Technology consultant for businesses, author of the paranormal thrill

Face it – humans are pattern-seeking animals. We identify eyes, nose and mouth where there are none. Martian rock takes on a visage and the silhouette of Elvis appears in our burrito. Discover the roots of our face-tracking tendency – pareidolia – and why it sometimes leads us astray. Plus, why some brains can’t recognize faces at all … how computer programs exhibit their own pareidolia … and why it’s so difficult to replicate human vision in a machine Guests: Phil Plait – Astronomer, Skeptic, and author of Slate Magazine’s blog Bad Astronomy Josef Parvizi – Associate professor, Stanford University, and clinical neurologist and epilepsy specialist at Stanford Medical Center Nancy Kanwisher – Cognitive neuroscientist, at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT Greg Borenstein – Artist, creative technologist who teaches at New York University Pietro Perona – Professor of electrical engineering, computation and neural systems, California Institute of Technology Descripción en español First r

Think back, way back. Beyond last week or last year … to what was happening on Earth 100,000 years ago. Or 100 million years ago. It’s hard to fathom such enormous stretches of time, yet to understand the evolution of the cosmos – and our place in it – your mind needs to grasp the deep meaning of eons. Discover techniques for thinking in units of billions of years, and how the events that unfold over such intervals have left their mark on you. Plus: the slow-churning processes that turned four-footed creatures into the largest marine animals that ever graced the planet and using a new telescope to travel in time to the birth of the galaxies. Guests: Jim Rosenau – Artist, Berkeley, California Robert Hazen – Senior staff scientist at the Geophysical Laboratory at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, executive director of the Deep Carbon Observatory and the author of The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet Neil Shubin – Biologist, associate dean of biological sci

It’s hard to get lost these days. GPS pinpoints your location to within a few feet. Discover how our need to get from A to B holds clues about what makes us human, and what we lose now that every digital map puts us at the center. Plus, stories of animal navigation: how a cat found her way home across Florida, and the magnetic navigation systems used by salmon and sea turtles. Also, why you’ll soon be riding in driverless cars. And, how to map our universe. Guests: John Bradshaw – Director of the University of Bristol’s Anthrozoology Institute, author of Dog Sense: How the New Science of Dog Behavior Can Make You A Better Friend to Your Pet and, most recently, Cat Sense Kenneth Lohmann – Biologist at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill Simon Garfield – Author of On the Map: A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks William “Red” Whittaker – Roboticist at Carnegie Mellon University James Trefil – Physicist at George Mason University, author of Space Atlas: Mapping the Unive

You are surrounded by products. Most of them, factory-made. Yet there was a time when building things by hand was commonplace, and if something stopped working, well, you jumped into the garage and fixed it, rather than tossing it into the circular file. Participants at the Maker Faire are bringing back the age of tinkering, one soldering iron and circuit board at a time. Meet the 12-year old who built a robot to solve his Rubik’s Cube, and learn how to print shoes at home. Yes, “print.” Plus, the woman who started Science Hack Day … the creation of a beard-slash-cosmic-ray detector … the history of the transistor … and new materials that come with nervous systems: get ready for self-healing concrete. (Photo is a model of the first transistor built in 1947 at the Bell Telephone Labs in New Jersey that led to a Nobel Prize. Today’s computers contain many million transistors … but they’re a lot smaller than this one, which is about the size of a quarter. Credit: Seth Shostak.) Guests: Lucy Beard – Founder of

Alien life. A flurry of recent discoveries has shifted the odds of finding it. Scientists use the Kepler telescope to spot a planet the same size and temperature as Earth … and announce that there could be tens of billions of similar worlds, just in our galaxy! Plus, new gravity data suggests a mammoth reservoir of water beneath the icy skin of Saturn’s moon Enceladus … and engineers are already in a race to design drills that can access the subsurface ocean of another moon, Jupiter’s Europa. Meanwhile, Congress holds hearings to assess the value of looking for life in space. Seth Shostak goes to Washington to testify. Hear what he said and whether the exciting discoveries in astrobiology have stimulated equal enthusiasm among those who hold the purse strings. Guests: Elisa Quintana – Research scientist at the SETI Institute and NASA Ames Research Center Christopher McKay – Planetary scientist, NASA Ames Research Center Victoria Siegel – Autonomous systems engineer for Stone Aerospace Inc. Cynthia Phi

What goes up must come down. But it’s human nature to want to put things back together again. It can even be a matter of survival in the wake of some natural or manmade disasters. First, a portrait of disaster: the eruption of Tambora in 1815 is the biggest volcanic explosion in 5,000 years. It changed the course of history, although few people have heard of it. Then, stories of reconstruction: assembling, disassembling, moving and reassembling one of the nation’s largest T. Rex skeletons, and what we learn about dinos in the process. Also, the reanimation of Gorongosa National Park in Africa, after years of civil war destroyed nearly all the wildlife. And a handbook for rebuilding civilization itself from scratch. Guests: Gillen D’Arcy Wood – Professor of English, University of Illinois, author of Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World Patrick Leiggi – Museum of the Rockies, Bozeman, Montana Matt Carrano – Curator of dinosauria, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution Greg

Imagine biting into a rich chocolate donut and not tasting it. That’s what happened to one woman when she lost her sense of smell. Discover what scientists have learned about how the brain experiences flavor, and the evolutionary intertwining of odor and taste. Plus a chef who tricks tongues into tasting something they’re not. It’s chemical camouflage that can make crabgrass taste like basil and turn bitter crops into delicious dishes – something that could improve nutrition world-wide. Meanwhile, are we a tasty treat for aliens? Discover whether we might be attractive snacks for E.T. And, out-of-this-world recipes from a “gAstronomy” cookbook! Guests: Bonnie Blodgett – Author of Remembering Smell: A Memoir of Losing—and Discovering—the Primal Sense Gordon Shepherd – Neurobiologist, Yale University School of Medicine, author of Neurogastronomy: How the Brain Creates Flavor and Why It Matters Homaro Cantu – Chef and owner of restaurants Moto and iNG in Chicago, chairman and founder of Cantu Designs Fir

We all crave power: to run laptops, charge cell phones, and play Angry Birds. But if generating energy is easy, storing it is not. Remember when your computer conked out during that cross-country flight? Why can’t someone build a better battery? Discover why battery design is stuck in the 1800s, and why updating it is key to future green transportation (not to mention more juice for your smartphone). Also, how to build a new type of solar cell that can turn sunlight directly into fuel at the pump. Plus, force fields, fat cells and other storage systems. And: Shock lobster! Energy from crustaceans? Guests: Dan Lankford – Former CEO of three battery technology companies, and a managing director at Wavepoint Ventures Jackie Stephens – Biochemist at Louisiana State University Kevin MacVittie – Graduate student of chemistry, Clarkson University, New York Nate Lewis – Chemist, California Institute of Technology Alex Filippenko – Astronomer, University of California, Berkeley Peter Williams – Physicist,

Happy Birthday, World Wide Web! The 25-year-old Web, along with the Internet and the personal computer, are among mankind’s greatest inventions. But back then, who knew? A techno-writer reminisces about the early days of the WWW and says he didn’t think it would ever catch on. Also, meet an inventor who claims his innovation will leave your laptop in the dust. Has quantum computing finally arrived? Plus, why these inventions are not as transformative as other creative biggies of history: The plow. The printing press. And… the knot? And, why scientific discoveries may beat out technology as the most revolutionary developments of all. A new result about the Big Bang may prove as important as germ theory and the double helix. Guests: Kevin Kelly – Senior maverick, Wired, author of What Technology Wants Eric Ladizinsky – Physicist, co-founder and the chief scientist of D-Wave Systems Palo Alto, California Aaron Gardner – Bakery manager, Hy-Vee Store, Chillicothe, Missouri George Dyson – Historian of tech

One plus one is two. But what’s the square root of 64, divided by 6 over 12?* Wait, don’t run for the hills! Math isn’t scary. It helps us describe and design our world, and can be easier to grasp than the straight edge of a protractor. Discover how to walk through the city and number-crunch simultaneously using easy tips for estimating the number of bricks in a building or squirrels in the park. Plus, why our brains are wired for finger-counting … whether aliens would have calculators … and history’s most famous mathematical equations (after e=mc2). *The answer is 16 Guests: Ian Stewart – Emeritus professor of Mathematics, University of Warwick, U.K., author of In Pursuit of the Unknown: 17 Equations That Changed the World Michael Anderson – Psychologist and neuroscientist, Franklin & Marshall College, Lancaster, PA Keith Devlin – Mathematician and Director of the Human Sciences and Technology Advanced Research Institute, Stanford University John Adam – Mathematician, Old Dominion University, Norfol