Sports recovery–making the most of your workouts with less pain and/or more gain–was the topic in this episode of “Read Science!” when our guest was Christie Aschwanden, a science journalist and elite athlete herself, and author of Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery. We discussed what science has to say about rest, adaptation, hyponatremia, ice baths, cryotherapy, IR treatments, diet supplements, placebos, and even beer; and we saw how science goes about establishing their efficacy–or lack of it.
All of it added up to a fascinating and wide-ranging discussion with lots of insight and good stories, too.
Like “Read Science!” on Facebook to hear about upcoming programs, easy links to the archive, and news about RS! guests: https://www.facebook.com/ReadScience/ .
Sports recovery–making the most of your workouts with less pain and/or more gain–was the topic in this episode of “Read Science!” when our guest was Christie Aschwanden, a science journalist and elite athlete herself, and author of Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery. We discussed what science has to say about rest, adaptation, hyponatremia, ice baths, cryotherapy, IR treatments, diet supplements, placebos, and even beer; and we saw how science goes about establishing their efficacy–or lack of it.
All of it added up to a fascinating and wide-ranging discussion with lots of insight and good stories, too.
Like “Read Science!” on Facebook to hear about upcoming programs, easy links to the archive, and news about RS! guests: https://www.facebook.com/ReadScience/ .
Theoretical physicists often will talk about their favorite theories as “beautiful”, and many will use criteria of what they call “beauty” to judge the likely veracity of competing theories, as well as the success of their own work. Most physicists are aware of this–but where does this idea come from, is there any sense to it, and what does “beauty” even mean when talking about the math that physical theories are written in?
These are some of the questions tackled by Sabine Hossenfelder in her compelling book, Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray+. As she explores these ideas, and talks with a number of physicists about the ideas, she deepens her own understanding of what it means, and ponders what’s at stake for foundational physics theories, sharing her journey with us.
Discussing her book, her journalistic journey, and recounting stories and conclusions as we talked about “Lost in Math” with her, is what this episode of “Read Science!” was all about.
Like “Read Science!” on Facebook to hear about upcoming programs, easy links to the archive, and news about RS! guests: https://www.facebook.com/ReadScience/ .
Theoretical physicists often will talk about their favorite theories as “beautiful”, and many will use criteria of what they call “beauty” to judge the likely veracity of competing theories, as well as the success of their own work. Most physicists are aware of this–but where does this idea come from, is there any sense to it, and what does “beauty” even mean when talking about the math that physical theories are written in?
These are some of the questions tackled by Sabine Hossenfelder in her compelling book, Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray+. As she explores these ideas, and talks with a number of physicists about the ideas, she deepens her own understanding of what it means, and ponders what’s at stake for foundational physics theories, sharing her journey with us.
Discussing her book, her journalistic journey, and recounting stories and conclusions as we talked about “Lost in Math” with her, is what this episode of “Read Science!” was all about.
Like “Read Science!” on Facebook to hear about upcoming programs, easy links to the archive, and news about RS! guests: https://www.facebook.com/ReadScience/ .
The details of just how our Solar System came to be, starting with a large, rotating solar nebula and ending with our Sun, our planetary companions, and moons and asteroids and comets, have been vague up until recent decades when scientists turned their deductive attention toward those unassuming asteroids and comets. Remote observations, observations up close with dramatic, technically challenging spacecraft missions, like Rosetta, and even missions with spacecraft that have returned sample to Earth, have all contributed deductive components that are coming together to make a clear, comprehensive, and at times very surprising story about the early days of our Solar System.
All these things were on our minds when we talked in this episode to Natalie Starkey, author of Catching Stardust : Comets, Asteroids and the Birth of the Solar System. Her authoritative book presents a wealth of recently learned facts and the knowledge that we deduce from all this recent scientific work. It also gave us more to talk about (as usual!) than we could fit into our surprisingly short hour-long conversation.
Like “Read Science!” on Facebook to hear about upcoming programs, easy links to the archive, and news about RS! guests: https://www.facebook.com/ReadScience/ .
The details of just how our Solar System came to be, starting with a large, rotating solar nebula and ending with our Sun, our planetary companions, and moons and asteroids and comets, have been vague up until recent decades when scientists turned their deductive attention toward those unassuming asteroids and comets. Remote observations, observations up close with dramatic, technically challenging spacecraft missions, like Rosetta, and even missions with spacecraft that have returned sample to Earth, have all contributed deductive components that are coming together to make a clear, comprehensive, and at times very surprising story about the early days of our Solar System.
All these things were on our minds when we talked in this episode to Natalie Starkey, author of Catching Stardust : Comets, Asteroids and the Birth of the Solar System. Her authoritative book presents a wealth of recently learned facts and the knowledge that we deduce from all this recent scientific work. It also gave us more to talk about (as usual!) than we could fit into our surprisingly short hour-long conversation.
Like “Read Science!” on Facebook to hear about upcoming programs, easy links to the archive, and news about RS! guests: https://www.facebook.com/ReadScience/ .
Probability, statistics, and math–oh my! For some, it’s the stuff of nightmares, but reading Ben’s book makes it all more of a dream. Who ever thought math could be such fun!
Our guest in this episode was Ben Orlin, mathematician, bad artist, and author of Math with Bad Drawings: Illuminating the Ideas that Shape Our Reality. While his book is indeed all about mathematical ideas, Ben elucidates those ideas with accuracy, clarity, and interesting examples. And to be honest, the drawings are fun and DO help get the ideas across. We talked about math, what it’s like to be a mathematician, what it’s like to be a student trying to learn math, and what seems to work best helping novices successfully approach the important ideas of mathematics.
Like “Read Science!” on Facebook to hear about upcoming programs, easy links to the archive, and news about RS! guests: https://www.facebook.com/ReadScience/ .
Probability, statistics, and math–oh my! For some, it’s the stuff of nightmares, but reading Ben’s book makes it all more of a dream. Who ever thought math could be such fun!
Our guest in this episode was Ben Orlin, mathematician, bad artist, and author of Math with Bad Drawings: Illuminating the Ideas that Shape Our Reality. While his book is indeed all about mathematical ideas, Ben elucidates those ideas with accuracy, clarity, and interesting examples. And to be honest, the drawings are fun and DO help get the ideas across. We talked about math, what it’s like to be a mathematician, what it’s like to be a student trying to learn math, and what seems to work best helping novices successfully approach the important ideas of mathematics.
Like “Read Science!” on Facebook to hear about upcoming programs, easy links to the archive, and news about RS! guests: https://www.facebook.com/ReadScience/ .
By the end of nineteenth century, buying food in American was dangerous–sometimes deadly. “Milk” might contain formaldehyde, most often used to embalm corpses. Decaying meat was preserved with both salicylic acid, a pharmaceutical chemical, and borax, a compound first identified as a cleaning product. This didn’t happen by accident; food manufacturers knowingly used poisons and non-food adulterants, sometimes as preservatives, sometimes just to cheat the customer and increase profits.
Against the powerful forces of food and drink manufacturers trying to quash any form of governmental regulation, come the somewhat reluctant crusader Harvey Washington Wiley, a chemistry professor from Purdue University who, in 1883, was named chief chemist of the Agriculture Department.
Therein lies a tale that includes unprecedented experiments on food additives, shocking revelations, intransigent politicians, and implacable food and drink manufacturers, but finally led to the passing of the Food and Drug Act of 1906–then the troubles really began!
This fascinating–at times disgusting–and cautionary tale is engagingly told by Pulitzer Prize winner author, and director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT, Deborah Blum. She was our guest, and her book The Poison Squad: One Chemist’s Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century our topic, for this episode of “Read Science!”
Like “Read Science!” on Facebook to hear about upcoming programs, easy links to the archive, and news about RS! guests: https://www.facebook.com/ReadScience/ .
By the end of nineteenth century, buying food in American was dangerous–sometimes deadly. “Milk” might contain formaldehyde, most often used to embalm corpses. Decaying meat was preserved with both salicylic acid, a pharmaceutical chemical, and borax, a compound first identified as a cleaning product. This didn’t happen by accident; food manufacturers knowingly used poisons and non-food adulterants, sometimes as preservatives, sometimes just to cheat the customer and increase profits.
Against the powerful forces of food and drink manufacturers trying to quash any form of governmental regulation, come the somewhat reluctant crusader Harvey Washington Wiley, a chemistry professor from Purdue University who, in 1883, was named chief chemist of the Agriculture Department.
Therein lies a tale that includes unprecedented experiments on food additives, shocking revelations, intransigent politicians, and implacable food and drink manufacturers, but finally led to the passing of the Food and Drug Act of 1906–then the troubles really began!
This fascinating–at times disgusting–and cautionary tale is engagingly told by Pulitzer Prize winner author, and director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT, Deborah Blum. She was our guest, and her book The Poison Squad: One Chemist’s Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century our topic, for this episode of “Read Science!”
Like “Read Science!” on Facebook to hear about upcoming programs, easy links to the archive, and news about RS! guests: https://www.facebook.com/ReadScience/ .
David Quammen returned to “Read Science!” to discuss his latest book with us, The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life. When the subject is the entire history of life on Earth, you know we had lots to talk about: the discovery of Archaea as the (contentious) “Third Domain of LIfe” (along with Eukarya an Prokarya), endosymbiosis, and horizontal gene transfer, plus all the stuff in between and all the scientists involved in updating our understanding of evolution and the inadequacies of “The Tree of Life”. As usual, we had a spirited discussion that ran out of time well before we ran out of things to talk about.
Like “Read Science!” on Facebook to hear about upcoming programs, easy links to the archive, and news about RS! guests: https://www.facebook.com/ReadScience/.
David Quammen returned to “Read Science!” to discuss his latest book with us, The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life. When the subject is the entire history of life on Earth, you know we had lots to talk about: the discovery of Archaea as the (contentious) “Third Domain of LIfe” (along with Eukarya an Prokarya), endosymbiosis, and horizontal gene transfer, plus all the stuff in between and all the scientists involved in updating our understanding of evolution and the inadequacies of “The Tree of Life”. As usual, we had a spirited discussion that ran out of time well before we ran out of things to talk about.
Like “Read Science!” on Facebook to hear about upcoming programs, easy links to the archive, and news about RS! guests: https://www.facebook.com/ReadScience/.
We love dinosaurs, and their story is a big one. In this episode we talked with paleontologist Steve Brusatte about his new book, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World.
Dinosaurs were, by a huge margin, the most successful group of animals the Earth has ever seen, their time on the planet covering some 140 million years. In that time, what we think of as “dinosaur” exhibited a lot of diversity, with a lot of fascinating stories.
Our conversation was geologic in scope, covering the emergence of the dinosaurs from the late Permian, through the Triassic and Jurassic, all the way to the end of the Cretacious and their untimely demise by meteor strike. We also got up-to-date information on the latest methods for studying dinosaur fossils (CAT scans and digital modeling), and the most recent additions to our knowledge (feathers! colors! birds!).
Like “Read Science!” on Facebook to hear about upcoming programs, easy links to the archive, and news about RS! guests: https://www.facebook.com/ReadScience/.
We love dinosaurs, and their story is a big one. In this episode we talked with paleontologist Steve Brusatte about his new book, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World.
Dinosaurs were, by a huge margin, the most successful group of animals the Earth has ever seen, their time on the planet covering some 140 million years. In that time, what we think of as “dinosaur” exhibited a lot of diversity, with a lot of fascinating stories.
Our conversation was geologic in scope, covering the emergence of the dinosaurs from the late Permian, through the Triassic and Jurassic, all the way to the end of the Cretacious and their untimely demise by meteor strike. We also got up-to-date information on the latest methods for studying dinosaur fossils (CAT scans and digital modeling), and the most recent additions to our knowledge (feathers! colors! birds!).
Like “Read Science!” on Facebook to hear about upcoming programs, easy links to the archive, and news about RS! guests: https://www.facebook.com/ReadScience/.
‘Heredity’, to this episode’s guest, is a big idea. Today, we think of heredity almost exclusively in terms of the genes we get from our biological parents–but what about before genetics became an idea? With its root meaning in ‘inheritance’, what the word encompasses has shifted, expanded, and contracted, in varied and fascinating ways.
In this episode we talked with Carl Zimmer about his magnificent new book, She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, And Potential Of Heredity. With an encyclopedic approach and a fine ear for clarity of expression, Zimmer takes a comprehensive look at the state of the science in understanding the intricate operating of genetic inheritance, and adds historical depth to the exploration with compelling and illuminating stories from the past few centuries. The book is jam-packed with history, stories, personal reflections, and lots of science. Perhaps needless to say, we talked about as many of its ideas as we could pack into our hour-long conversation, and still only scratched the surface.
Like “Read Science!” on Facebook to hear about upcoming programs, easy links to the archive, and news about RS! guests: https://www.facebook.com/ReadScience/.