Dr. Lexi Walls is a biochemist, not a prophet—though, admittedly, it can sometimes be hard to tell the difference. Six years ago, when Lexi started researching coronaviruses, they were an understudied and poorly understood class of viruses. When Lexi wrote about the “tremendous pandemic potential of coronaviruses” in December 2019, no one realized that the seeds of the COVID-19 pandemic had already been sown. When Lexi completed her doctoral dissertation that same month on the structure of coronavirus spike proteins, she couldn’t have imagined how large those spike proteins soon would loom in ..read more

Life: our planet is teeming with it. The staggering diversity of the biological world is visible everywhere, from tiny insects to sprawling trees, from orchids and corgis to mold and lemurs and banana slugs and oyster mushrooms and . . . you get the idea. But even the boundless wonder of the macroscopic world may pale in comparison to all the life we cannot see. Jocelyn and Bradley are joined this week by Dr. Hannah Gavin, a veritable Willy Wonka of microbes, who introduces us to a vast, complex world of dazzling drama invisible to the naked eye but present all around us—and even within us. H ..read more

We’re counting down to Darwin Day, and you’re all invited to the par-TAY! This week, Jocelyn and Bradley celebrate the origin of Origin of Species author Charles Darwin with evolutionary geneticist and frequent (fruit) flier Dr. Kristi Montooth. Kristi regales us with tales of her work with model organism extraordinaire Drosophila, explaining why it’s hard to get some flies drunk, and why they owe their survival and ubiquity to the properties of their magical membranes. She also discusses the pivotal role the humble fruit fly played in the so-called “modern synthesis” of evolution and genetic ..read more

Fruit flies in straightjackets. Bees at slumber parties. Climate change in Game of Thrones. Everybody’s looking for something, and this episode has something for everyone! A plant ecologist turned pollinator physiologist, Anna Tatarko tells Jocelyn and Bradley about the exciting methods she is using to study bee brains, and how this work is helping scientists to understand how bees smell, sleep, learn, dance, and possibly dream. In particular, she shares her research on how some pesticides interfere with bees’ olfactory processing, explaining how she hopes to extend her work to focus on the ..read more

“Hope” is the thing with feathers - That perches in the soul - And sings the tune without the words - And never stops - at all - Emily Dickinson was clearly onto something when she penned these famous lines. Across countless generations, birds have captivated our imaginations with their incredible beauty, their staggering diversity, and their unique talents. For Dr. Scott Edwards, birds are fascinating organisms with a rich and complex evolutionary history, but they are also harbingers of hope at a moment when we sorely need it. Scott joins Jocelyn and Bradley to discuss his work as an ornit ..read more

What the hell just happened? What does it all mean? And where do we go from here? If 2020 left you with a few lingering questions, you are not alone. Fortunately, London-based physician and filmmaker Dr. Nidhi Gupta is here to put it all in perspective. Nidhi tells Bradley and Jocelyn about her work on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK, and she describes her own battle with the virus. She shares her journey from medicine into filmmaking, including the genesis and goals of her current documentary film project, Start. Stop. Repeat, in which she explores the causes, effects, and ..read more

C’mon, it’s lovely weather for a podcast together with you! In our fa-la-la-last episode of 2020, Jocelyn and Bradley are celebrating Sir Isaac Newton’s 378th birthday with some Newtonmas caroling and a rousing discussion of physicists’ favorite fetish . . . We are referring, of course, to unification. The hosts consider whether the desire for a singular “theory of everything” can be traced back to Newton’s work, which was the first to bring the terrestrial and celestial realms under the same set of physical laws. They discuss the ironic fact that gravity—the original unifying force in the cos ..read more

When Dr. Stephon Alexander listens to the music of the cosmos, he hears structure, but also flexibility. He hears familiar cadences and novel riffs. He hears strings vibrating in ten-dimensional spacetime and resonating loops of quantum gravity. He hears Einstein’s musical mind and Coltrane’s cosmic sensibility. He hears the jazz of physics. And so will you. In this episode, Stephon tells Jocelyn and Bradley how a journey wending through the dusty halls of old jazz clubs and the chalky floors of physics offices ultimately led him from Trinidad to the Bronx to Brown University. He shares how h ..read more

This episode is gonna get twisted, y’all. Jocelyn and Bradley are joined by science sensation Dr. Carin Bondar, Biologist with a Twist, who regales us with weird, wonderful, twisted tales of the natural world! From the many talents of animal genitalia to the biological superpowers that make moms uniquely equipped to rule the world, Carin considers what humans can learn about ourselves by looking at the social lives of animals. The friends also discuss how anti-anthropomorphism—the assumption that nonhuman animals do not think and feel as humans do—is as baseless and potentially dangerous as v ..read more

If science is a kind of dance between humans and the universe, perhaps nowhere is the choreography more intricate and complex than when consciousness contemplates itself in the form of the human brain. Jocelyn and Bradley are joined this week by Grace Huckins—neuroscientist, philosopher, visionary—who invites us on a tour of the cosmos within. Grace discusses her Ph.D. research using fMRI and machine learning to develop a more dynamic understanding of the biological processes underlying mental illness, sharing how her approach uses brain scans to construct brain stories. The friends discuss th ..read more