While humans were leaving the Stone Age and entering the Bronze, some Bristlecone pine trees grew from seeds to sprouts. They’ve been growing ever since. These 5,000-year-old pines are among the oldest organisms on Earth. Superlatives are also appropriate for the towering redwoods. Trees are amazing in many ways. They provide us with timber and cool us with shade, they sequester carbon and release oxygen, and are home to countless species. But they are also marvels of evolutionary adaptation. We consider the beauty and diversity of trees, and learn why their future is intertwined with ours.

Guests:

Kevin Dixon - Naturalist at The East Bay Regional Park District, Oakland, California

Daniel Lewis - Environmental historian and senior curator for the History of Science and Technology at the Huntington Library, art museum and botanical gardens in Pasadena, California, professor of the natural sciences and the environment at Caltech, and author of “Twelve Trees: The Deep Roots of our Future”

Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake

Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact [email protected] to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.

You can get early access to ad-free versions of every episode by joining us on Patreon. Thanks for your support!

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

After helping to sequence the human genome more than twenty years ago, biochemist Craig Venter seemed to recede from the public eye. But he hadn’t retired. He had gone to sea and taken his revolutionary sequencing tools with him. We chatted with him about his multi-year voyage aboard the research vessel Sorcerer II, its parallels to Darwin’s voyage, and the surprising discoveries his team made about the sheer number and diversity of marine microbes and their roles in ocean ecosystems.

Guests:

Craig Venter - Genomicist, biochemist, founder of the J. Craig Venter Institute, and co-author of “The Voyage of Sorcerer II: The Expedition that Unlocked the Secrets of the Ocean’s Microbiome.”

Jeff Hoffman - Lab manager at the J. Craig Venter Institute and expedition scientist on the Sorcerer II expedition.

Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake

Originally aired December 18, 2023

Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. 

Please contact [email protected] to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.

You can get early access to ad-free versions of every episode by joining us on Patreon. Thanks

for your support!

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Owls are both the most

accessible and elusive of birds. Every child can recognize one, but you’ll be

lucky to spot an owl in a tree, even if you’re looking straight at

it. Besides their camouflage and silent flight, these mostly nocturnal

birds, with their amazing vision and hearing, are most at home in the dead of

night, a time humans find alien and scary. Ecologist Carl Safina got to

know an injured baby screech owl well. Their relationship saved the owl’s life

and gave Safina insider’s wisdom about these aerial hunters of the night.

Guests:

Carl Safina – ecologist at

Stony Brook University, head of the non-profit Safina Center, and author of “Alfie

& Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe”

Tom Damiami – natural resources

interpreter, singer on Long Island, NY and leader of the Shelter Island Owl Prowl

Gordy Slack – science writer, former senior editor

of California Wild, the science and natural history magazine published by the

California Academy of Sciences

Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake

Originally aired November

6, 2023

Big Picture Science is

part of the Airwave Media podcast

network. Please contact [email protected] to inquire about

advertising on Big Picture Science.

You

can get early access to ad-free versions of every episode by joining us

on Patreon. Thanks for your

support!

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our information age is increasingly the disinformation age. The spread of lies and conspiracy theories has created competing experiences of reality. Facts are often useless for changing minds or even making compelling arguments. In this episode, author Naomi Klein and science philosopher Lee McIntyre discuss why the goal – not simply the byproduct - of spreading disinformation is to polarize society. They also offer ideas about how we might find our way back to a shared objective truth.  

Guests:

Naomi Klein - Associate professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia and a co-director at the Center for Climate Justice. Author of Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World

Lee McIntyre - Philosopher of science and a research fellow at the Center for Philosophy and the History of Science at Boston University, and author of Post-Truth and On Disinformation.

Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake

Originally aired December 11, 2023

Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact [email protected] to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.

You can get early access to ad-free versions of every episode by joining us on Patreon. Thanks for your support!

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“To live is to count and to count is to calculate.” But before we plugged in the computer to express this ethos, we pulled out the pocket calculator. It became a monarch of mathematics that sparked a computing revolution. But it’s not the only deceptively modest innovation that changed how we work and live. Find out how sewing a scrap of fabric into clothing helped define private life and how adding lines to paper helped build an Empire. Plus, does every invention entail irrevocable cultural loss?

Guests:

Keith Houston – author of “Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator.”

Hannah Carlson – teaches dress history and material culture at the Rhode Island School of Design, author of “Pockets: An Intimate History of How We Keep Things Close.”

Dominic Riley – bookbinder in the U.K.

Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake

*Originally aired October 30, 2023

Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact [email protected] to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.

You can get early access to ad-free versions of every episode by joining us on Patreon. Thanks for your support

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The SETI Institute’s search for alien biosignatures and technosignatures depends on radio telescopes. You may have seen the stunning photos of massive telescope arrays in the desert, but what types of alien signals might help researchers actually detect with those giant dishes?

In this fourth episode, Brian Edwards talks with physicist Chenoa Tremblay, a COSMIC Project Scientist who is based at the Very Large Array in New Mexico. They dig into the important role radio telescopes play in SETI, how powerful computers have supercharged the search for life off Earth, and imagine what kinds of biosignatures and technosignatures of alien life we are most likely to find.

Music by Jun Miyake

You can support the work of Big Picture Science by joining us on Patreon. Thanks for your support!

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This year has been a spectacular one for celestial phenomena. The northern lights delighted in unexpected ways while a total solar eclipse cast a shadow across North America. Those events were enough to make it a memorable year, but 2024 also shook up our understanding of the universe. A new reading of Voyager 2 data may explain Uranus’s weird magnetic field. And the impressive James Webb Space Telescope has detected an early and incredibly distant galaxy. Join us in our look back at some of the top space news from 2024.

Guests:

Andrew Fraknoi – Professor of Astronomy at the Fromm Institute at the University of San Francisco and SETI board member 

Jamie Jasinski - space plasma physicist for the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and author of a recent paper re-examining data from the Voyager 2 mission, published in Nature.

Phil Plait - astronomer, author, science communicator and frequent contributor at Scientific American.

Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake

Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact [email protected] to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.

You can get early access to ad-free versions of every episode by joining us on Patreon. Thanks for your support!

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Just because something is invisible doesn’t mean it isn’t there. We can’t see gases in our atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide, oxygen, and nitrogen, but we benefit from their presence with every breath we take. From the bubbles that effervesce in soda to the vapors that turn engines, gases are part of our lives. They fill our lungs, give birth to stars, and… well, how would we spot a good diner without glowing neon? In this episode, a materials scientist shares the history of some gaseous substances that we don’t usually see, but that make up our world.

Guest:

Mark Miodownik – Professor of materials and society at the University College London and the author of “It’s a Gas: The Sublime and Elusive Elements That Expand Our World.”

Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake

Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact [email protected] to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.

You can get early access to ad-free versions of every episode by joining us on Patreon. Thanks for your support!

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Imagine life without animals, trees, and fungi. The world would look very different. But while the first life was surely single-celled, we don’t know just how it evolved to multicellular organisms. Two long-term experiments hope to find out, and one has been running for more than 35 years. Hear about the moment scientists watched evolution take off in the lab, and how directed evolution was used to create a multicellular organism. Also, how single embryonic cells become humans, and what all of this says about the possibility of life on other worlds.

Guests:

Jeff Barrick – molecular scientist at the University of Texas at Austin where his lab oversees the Long-Term Evolution Experiment that’s been running since 1988. 

Will Ratcliff – an evolutionary biologist at Georgia Institute of Technology

Ben Stanger – cancer researcher, professor of medicine and developmental biology at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “From One Cell: A Journey into Life’s Origins and the Future of Medicine.”

Joseph L. Graves – evolutionary biologist and geneticist at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University and author of “A Voice in the Wilderness: A Pioneering Biologist Explains How Evolution Can Help Us Solve Our Biggest Problems.”

Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake

Originally aired October 9, 2023

Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact [email protected] to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.

You can get early access to ad-free versions of every episode by joining us on Patreon. Thanks for your support!

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Near death experiences can be profound and even life changing. People describe seeing bright lights, staring into the abyss, or meeting dead relatives. Many believe these experiences to be proof of an afterlife.

But now, scientists are studying these strange events and gaining insights into the brain and consciousness itself. Will we uncover the scientific underpinning of these near-death events? 

Guests:

Steve Paulson - executive producer of To the Best of Our Knowledge for Wisconsin Public Radio

Sebastian Junger - journalist, filmmaker and author of “The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea” 

Christoph Koch - neuroscientist at the Allen Institute in Seattle and chief scientist of the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation in Santa Monica California 

Daniel Kondziella - neuroscientist in the Department of Clinical Medicine at the University of Copenhagen

Featuring music by Dewey Dellay and Jun Miyake

Originally aired September 25, 2023

Big Picture Science is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please contact [email protected] to inquire about advertising on Big Picture Science.

You can get early access to ad-free versions of every episode by joining us on Patreon. Thanks for your support!

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How do we know where to look for life on other planets? SETI scientists use analog sites on Earth, not only to study how life has evolved here, but the geological conditions that made it possible. Devon Island in Canada is one such analog. It's been called Mars on Earth. 

In this third episode, Gary Niederhoff talks with planetary scientist Pascal Lee, co-founder of The Mars Institute, and principal investigator of the Haughton-Mars Project at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. They discuss how a remote arctic island offers clues about how liquid water once flowed on Mars, why the moons of the Red Planet are so mysterious, and Pascal’s discovery of a heretofore unrecognized Martian volcano in 2024.

Music by Jun Miyake

You can support the work of Big Picture Science by joining us on Patreon. Thanks for your support!

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices