What does it mean to understand death? For centuries, philosophers have argued that only humans can truly comprehend mortality. But what if they’re wrong? In this episode, we speak with philosopher Susana Monsó, author of Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death, to explore whether animals can grasp their own mortality. From grieving elephants to corpse-removing ants and possums that play dead, we investigate what animal behavior reveals about their concept of death. Do dogs understand when ...
Mar 06, 2025•32 min•Ep 163•Transcript available on Metacast In 2000, the United States declared that measles had been eliminated. But just 15 years later, the disease made a comeback—and it hasn’t gone away since. In this episode, Dr. Adam Ratner, director of the Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases at NYU and author of Booster Shots: The Urgent Lessons of Measles and the Uncertain Future of Children's Health, explains why measles outbreaks are occurring again—as vaccine hesitancy and the antivax movement is on the rise—and what this means for the f...
Feb 20, 2025•35 min•Ep 162•Transcript available on Metacast What makes a good life? For decades, psychologists have debated whether true fulfillment comes from happiness—a life of comfort and joy—or meaning—a life of purpose and impact. But what if there's a third way? University of Chicago psychology professor Shigehiro Oishi has spent his career studying happiness, meaning, and what truly brings people deep satisfaction. His new research suggests that some of the most fulfilled people don’t prioritize either—they live psychologically rich lives, full o...
Feb 06, 2025•33 min•Ep 161•Transcript available on Metacast Imagine a future in which Band-Aids talk to your cells, pacemakers are powered by light and your gut microbiome gets a tune-up—all thanks to tiny bioelectric devices. Sounds like sci-fi, right? Think again. Prof. Bozhi Tian of the University of Chicago is on the frontier of bioelectronics, building living machines that can heal, enhance and maybe even transform what it means to be human. In this episode, he explains his research lab’s work and explores the thrilling, strange and sometimes unsett...
Jan 23, 2025•29 min•Ep 160•Transcript available on Metacast Five years after COVID became a global pandemic, could another health crisis be on our horizon? According to scientists who study diseases, the possibility of a fungal pandemic—the subject of science fiction TV shows like “The Last of Us,” could be more of a reality, thanks to climate change and our warming planet. As fungi are adapting to warmer climates, they are becoming increasingly stronger and more resistant against the drugs we have to fight them. Arturo Casadevall is one of the scientist...
Jan 09, 2025•27 min•Ep 159•Transcript available on Metacast As we step into 2025, many of us are thinking about how to turn our New Year's resolutions into lasting changes. But what if the secret to success lies not in willpower but in the words we use every day? To kick off the year, we’re sharing our past episode with Jonah Berger, a professor at The Wharton School and author of Magic Words: What to Say to Get Your Way. In this episode, Berger uncovers the science behind the language we use and how it shapes our habits, decisions, and relationships. Fr...
Jan 02, 2025•32 min•Ep 158•Transcript available on Metacast We have long heard the claims that a glass of red wine is good for your heart, but it turns out that the research that fueled this wisdom was actually skewed. Some studies made it appear like moderate drinkers were healthier than people who didn't drink at all, leading the public to believe that alcohol was healthier than it is. While drinking alcohol occasionally might not have catastrophic effects on your health, the data shows that even moderate drinking will reduce your life expectancy. In t...
Dec 19, 2024•33 min•Ep 157•Transcript available on Metacast For centuries, death has been seen as a final, inescapable line—a moment when the heart stops and the brain ceases to function. But revolutionary research asks: What if everything we thought we knew about death was wrong? Sam Parnia, an associate professor of medicine at NYU Langone, is the author of Lucid Dying: The New Science Revolutionizing How We Understand Life and Death. His groundbreaking work explores how science is pushing the boundaries of life and death, uncovering the potential to r...
Dec 05, 2024•30 min•Ep 156•Transcript available on Metacast This year’s election might have been the most contentious in modern memory. It's not just that politics have changed, but it seems that people have too. You’ve probably heard this phrase: “People aren’t as kind as they used to be”. Maybe you’ve experienced the feeling that people are acting meaner to each other, year after year. But is it true? Are people really less kind than they used to be? With that question in mind, and as we take some time off for the Thanksgiving holiday, we wanted to res...
Nov 21, 2024•32 min•Ep 155•Transcript available on Metacast What if we could predict the economy the way we predict the weather? What if governments could run simulations to forecast the effects of new policies—before they happen? And what if the key to all of this lies in the same chaotic systems that explain spinning roulette wheels and rolling dice? J. Doyne Farmer is a University of Oxford professor, complexity scientist, and former physicist who once beat Las Vegas casinos using his scientific-based methods. In his recent book “Making Sense of Chaos...
Nov 14, 2024•33 min•Ep 154•Transcript available on Metacast https://haarc.center.uchicago.edu/ We used to think aging inevitably led to memory loss, but a small group of people—known as SuperAgers—are defying the odds. These individuals, all over 80, have the memory performance of someone in the 50s. The question is: how? One of the leading experts studying SuperAgers is University of Chicago neurologist Emily Rogalski. She explores the fascinating science behind SuperAgers—uncovering what makes their physical brains different and how their lifestyle cho...
Oct 31, 2024•23 min•Ep 153•Transcript available on Metacast On Big Brains, we get to speak to a lot of groundbreaking scholars and experts, but some conversations we walk away knowing we’ve just heard from someone who is really changing the world. We certainly felt that way years ago after talking to University of Chicago scholar James Robinson, and it turns out…the Nobel Prize committee agreed in 2024 when it awarded him a share of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Robinson was honored for the exact work that we...
Oct 17, 2024•29 min•Ep 152•Transcript available on Metacast How old is the universe—and how fast is it expanding? These are part of one of the biggest—and most contested—questions in science, and the answers could change our understanding of physics. In this episode, we talk with renowned UChicago astronomer Wendy Freedman, who’s spent decades trying to solve these very questions. There are two ways to measure how fast the universe is expanding, also known as the Hubble constant; Freedman has done groundbreaking research to calculate this number using st...
Oct 03, 2024•24 min•Ep 151•Transcript available on Metacast One of the biggest questions of every election is: What’s going on with young voters? There is endless speculation on the news about what young people care about, but very little good research examining their views on the candidates and the issues that matter most to them. The first-of-its-kind GenForward Survey changed that when it was created in 2016 at the University of Chicago. Led by renowned University of Chicago political scientist Cathy Cohen, the survey digs into what is animating young...
Sep 19, 2024•29 min•Ep 150•Transcript available on Metacast More and more women in the United States are saying no to motherhood. Alarmingly, in 2023, the U.S. fertility rate reached the lowest number on record. But the idea of non-motherhood is actually not a new phenomenon, nor did it come out of the modern feminist movement. For centuries, women have made choices about limiting births and whether or not to become mothers at all. This history is documented in a new book, "Without Children: The Long History of Not Being a Mother," by University of Chica...
Sep 05, 2024•32 min•Ep 149•Transcript available on Metacast Race has played a huge role in the creation of mass homeownership in the United States. Discriminatory housing practices including redlining, exclusionary zoning and whitewashing led to great disparities in home ownership among White and Black homeowners. Despite the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968, the damage had been done to communities of color and the rates of Black homeownership. Mass homeownership actually changed the definition, perception and value of race, according to a new boo...
Aug 22, 2024•27 min•Ep 148•Transcript available on Metacast If you’ve spent any time playing with modern AI image generators, it can seem like an almost magical experience; but the truth is these programs are more like a magic trick than magic. Without the human-generated art of hundreds of thousands of people, these programs wouldn’t work. But those artists are not getting compensated, in fact many of them are being put out of business by the very programs their work helped create. Now, two computer scientists from the University of Chicago, Ben Zhao an...
Aug 08, 2024•29 min•Ep 147•Transcript available on Metacast In the near future, birth defects, traumatic injuries, limb loss and perhaps even cancer could be cured through bioelectricity—electrical signals that communicate to our cells how to rebuild themselves. This innovative idea has been tested on flatworms and frogs by biologist Michael Levin, whose research investigates how bioelectricity provides the blueprint for how our bodies are built—and how it could be the future of regenerative medicine. Our podcast is taking a quick summer break, but we wa...
Jul 25, 2024•28 min•Ep 146•Transcript available on Metacast Can you heal faster just by tricking your brain? Could you lose weight with only a change of mindset? Could you think yourself into being younger? If you think the answer to all these questions is no, you haven’t read the research from renowned Harvard University psychologist Ellen Langer. Our podcast is taking a quick summer break, but we wanted to take this time to share some of our favorite episodes with you. The summer is a perfect time to take a step back, evaluate where we are in our lives...
Jul 11, 2024•34 min•Ep 145•Transcript available on Metacast We've all been stuck at some point in our lives — whether we've been stuck at a job and wanting to make a career change, stuck in a location and wanting to move somewhere new, or stuck in relationships or friendships. But the method to getting “unstuck” and achieving a breakthrough might be easier than you think. Using research-backed tools, New York University's Adam Alter shares his tips for how to get unstuck in his new book, Anatomy of a Breakthrough. Alter shares success stories from some o...
Jun 27, 2024•34 min•Ep 144•Transcript available on Metacast There is a science to what we remember and what we don't. For instance, why do we remember certain pieces of artwork, some brands’ logos, or even people's faces? University of Chicago psychologist Wilma Bainbridge has been studying what makes things memorable for over a decade. Through her research, she has found that there is a common thread about what most people remember—and even what we remember incorrectly (a phenomenon called the Mandela effect)—but most recently, why some visuals are intr...
Jun 13, 2024•27 min•Ep 143•Transcript available on Metacast If aliens landed on Earth tomorrow, how would we talk with them? Well, we already have a kind of creature on this planet we could attempt to talk to first, and in the last few years a team of renowned scientists have been exploring the ocean studying sperm whales to get that conversation going. David Gruber is a professor of biology and environmental science at CUNY and the founder of Project CETI , an interdisciplinary scientific initiative that is using the latest developments in AI to underst...
May 30, 2024•26 min•Ep 142•Transcript available on Metacast We all know that extreme weather events like hurricanes are getting worse due to climate change, but what scientists would really like to know is: By how much worse exactly? This year a team of researchers argued that hurricanes have become so much more extreme due to climate change that we need to add a new category 6 to the Saffir-Simpson scale, which measures the wind speed of hurricanes. One of those scientists was Michael Wehner from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Using the latest a...
May 16, 2024•28 min•Ep 141•Transcript available on Metacast We've all heard the phrase "Manifest Your Destiny" when it comes to wanting that new promotion, figuring out a new career path or just trying to achieve that long-term goal. It turns out that the act of manifestation is not merely pseudoscience—it actually has a body of research in neuroscience to back it up. Dr. James Doty has been exploring this topic throughout his career; and offers scientific research as well as tools on how to manifest your goals in his new book, Mind Magic: The Neuroscien...
May 02, 2024•31 min•Ep 140•Transcript available on Metacast They’re perhaps the oldest questions in the science: Why do we die? And could we find a way to live forever? But for decades, anti-aging research was a “backwater” of the scientific community, consider too fanciful and unrealistic. That is until the last few years. Modern advances in biology have taught us a lot about how we age and why we die—could that knowledge help us turn back the clock? In his new book, “ Why We Die: The New Science of Ageing and the Quest for Immortality ”, Nobel Prize-wi...
Apr 18, 2024•33 min•Ep 139•Transcript available on Metacast Every dog owner has faced the hard realization that their dog won’t live as long as they do, but we’ve all probably wondered: Why do some dogs live longer than others? It turns out that several factors are at play, according to the largest research study of dogs, known as The Dog Aging Project. Prof. Daniel Promislow of the University of Washington is co-director of the project, which examines how biology, lifestyle and environment can increase both the health and lifespan of more than 50,000 do...
Apr 04, 2024•33 min•Ep 138•Transcript available on Metacast For more than a century, scientists have been studying Alzheimer’s disease and developing theories about its underlying cause. The leading theory for decades has been that abnormal amyloid plaques in the brains of those who suffer from the disease are the central cause. But, according one renowned Alzheimer’s researcher, this myopic focus is not only flawed, but may be holding back our search for a cure. Neurobiologist Karl Herrup argues that we need to go back to the drawing board, redefine the...
Mar 21, 2024•29 min•Ep 137•Transcript available on Metacast Mosquito-borne diseases are one of the greatest global health threats, infecting around 700 million people every year with Zika virus, dengue fever, malaria and yellow fever — which can all be deadly if left untreated. Unfortunately, the mosquito population is not slowing down, and factors like climate change and increased global travel are broadening the mosquito's range. The effort to stop the mosquito is not an easy task; insecticides and vaccines can't completely stop the spread of these dis...
Mar 07, 2024•31 min•Ep 136•Transcript available on Metacast How do you stop a government from continuing to commit human rights abuses? You could take them to an international court of justice, or file a complaint at the UN. But none of those bodies have any enforcement power. Short of going to war, the only option on the table in most international situations is to name and shame. But is that strategy effective? In her new book, “ The Geopolitics of Shaming: When Human Rights Pressure Works and When It Backfires ,” University of Chicago political scient...
Feb 22, 2024•34 min•Ep 135•Transcript available on Metacast The Supreme Court’s decision on whether Colorado can take former President Donald Trump off the ballot in the 2024 election may be one of the most consequential in its history. The case will turn on the court’s interpretation of Amendment 14, Section 3 of the Constitution, which bars any previous elected official from holding office if they participated in an insurrection. When making their case, Colorado followed the logic of a law review article co-authored last year by University of Chicago P...
Feb 06, 2024•36 min•Ep 134•Transcript available on Metacast 
