Back to Top

17 Mar 2020

The Minds of Single-celled Organisms – Jeremy Gunawardena

Can even a single-celled organism truly learn? In Episode 70, Jeremy Gunawardena with the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School talks with us about his replication of an experiment originally conducted over a century ago, which suggested that at least one single-cell organism - t......
Listen to the episode..The Minds of Single-celled Organisms – Jeremy Gunawardena
29 Oct 2019

Hearing Better than a Barn Owl – Saptarshi Das

How can what engineers learn from how barn owls pinpoint the location of the faintest sounds apply to their development of nanotechnologies capable of doing even better? In episode 61, we're joined by Saptarshi Das, a nano-engineer from Penn State University, who talks with us about his open-acces......
Listen to the episode..Hearing Better than a Barn Owl – Saptarshi Das
17 Sep 2019

The Neuroscience of Terrorism – Nafees Hamid

What can brain scans of radicalized jihadists tell us about how they react to what they perceive as attacks on their sacred values? In episode 58, we're joined by Nafees Hamid from Artis International who talks with us about his article “Neuroimaging ‘will to fight’ for sacred values: an empiric...
Listen to the episode..The Neuroscience of Terrorism – Nafees Hamid
2 Apr 2019

Trusting Our Machines – Neera Jain

Might enabling computational aids to "self-correct" when they’re out of sync with people be a path toward their exhibition of recognizably intelligent behavior? In episode 46, Neera Jain from Purdue University discusses in her experiments into monitoring our trust in AI's abilities so as to drive ...
Listen to the episode..Trusting Our Machines – Neera Jain
10 Jul 2018

Prehistoric Origins of Birds – Bhart-Anjan Bhullar

What can prehistory tell us about the origins of modern birds? Bhart-Anjan Bhullar from Yale University talks with us about how the discovery of a 95 million year old Ichthyornis fossil in 2014 revealed some unexpected insights into the minds — and mouths — of today's birds. His article, "Complete...
Listen to the episode..Prehistoric Origins of Birds – Bhart-Anjan Bhullar
20 Feb 2018

Universals in Song – Sam Mehr & Manvir Singh

Sam Mehr and Manvir Singh from Harvard's Music Lab talk with us about their research suggesting that people across the world can detect the social purpose of other cultures' songs based only on how they sound. Their open-access article, "Form and function in human song"  was published in Current B...
Listen to the episode..Universals in Song – Sam Mehr & Manvir Singh
5 Sep 2017

Semantic Meaning in Images – Devi Parikh

A picture may be worth 1000 words, but can we also teach computers to create stories from the stories that lie inside our images? In this episode, Devi Parikh of Georgia Tech’s school of interactive computing discusses her work training computers to determine the semantic meaning within images...
Listen to the episode..Semantic Meaning in Images – Devi Parikh