Even Jellyfish Sleep
Do jellyfish dream of gelatinous sheep? No one can say.
Meet Mary Somerville: The Brilliant Woman for Whom the Word “Scientist” Was Coined
That women should face such an Everestine climb toward inclusion and equality is a piece of curious and rather cruel cultural irony, for the very word “scientist” didn’t always have…
The 100th birthday of Indian chemist Asima Chatterjee
For the latest Google Doodle, the search giant is honoring an award-winning chemist whose research in organic chemistry had a profound impact on how plants are used for medicinal purposes.…
Tool-wielding monkeys
HUMANS aren’t the only primate to have pushed their prey towards extinction. Monkeys have also over-exploited animals for food. Long-tailed macaques forage for shellfish on islands off Thailand, then crack…
Are We Living in a Simulation?
Elon Musk thinks we definitely could be, and it seems he is not alone. The idea that we might simply be products of an advanced post-human civilisation, that are simply…
Refresh Your Mind
This week, Manoush’s book - the book that started with you, listeners - hits the shelves. To encourage you to #GetBored and find brilliance, we made a weird earworm. It’s…
Proms Extra: Sleep and Insomnia
Nick Littlehales, sports sleep coach and chair of the British Sleep Council, talks with novelist A. L. Kennedy about sleep and insomnia. {listen}
Why Science-Fiction Writers Couldn’t Imagine the Internet
On Star Trek, humans talked to computers—they even used something like floppy disks and memory sticks—but nowhere did crew members get information from ethereal machines whose locations and identities were…
Technobabble
UK podcast star Helen Zaltzman of The Allusionist helps me figure out why one set of poorly understood pseudo-scientific terms can sink a scene, while another set can make a…
The Culture Inside
Is there a part of ourselves that we don’t acknowledge, that we don’t even have access to and that might make us ashamed if we encountered it? We begin with…