Science Focus Podcast Archives

This Is What It Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You

This Is What It Sounds Like is a journey into the science and soul of music that reveals the secrets of why your favorite songs move you. But it’s also a story of a musical trailblazer who began as a humble audio tech in Los Angeles, rose to become Prince’s chief engineer for Purple Rain, and then created other No. 1 hits ,including Barenaked Ladies’ “One Week,” as one of the most successful female record producers of all time. […Learn More]

Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong-and the New Research That’s Rewriting the Story

What science has gotten so shamefully wrong about women, and the fight, by both female and male scientists, to rewrite what we thought we knew

For hundreds of years it was common sense: women were the inferior sex. Their bodies were weaker, their minds feebler, their role subservient. No less a scientist than Charles Darwin asserted that women were at a lower stage of evolution, and for decades, scientists—most of them male, of course—claimed to find evidence to support this. […Learn More]

Superior: The Return of Race Science

An astute and timely examination of the re-emergence of scientific research into racial differences.

Superior tells the disturbing story of the persistent thread of belief in biological racial differences in the world of science. […Learn More]

Wonderdog: The Science of Dogs and Their Unique Relationship with Humans

A celebration of dogs, the scientists who’ve lived alongside them, and how canines have been key to advancements in science for the betterment of all species. […Learn More]

Transcendence: How Humans Evolved through Fire, Language, Beauty, and Time

In the tradition of Guns, Germs, and Steel and Sapiens, a winner of the Royal Society Prize for Science Books shows how four tools enabled has us humans to control the destiny of our species […Learn More]

An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

In An Immense World, Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses, allowing us to perceive the skeins of scent, waves of electromagnetism, and pulses of pressure that surround us. We encounter beetles that are drawn to fires, turtles that can track the Earth’s magnetic fields, fish that fill rivers with electrical messages, and even humans who wield sonar like bats. We discover that a crocodile’s scaly face is as sensitive as a lover’s fingertips, that the eyes of a giant squid evolved to see sparkling whales, that plants thrum with the inaudible songs of courting bugs, and that even simple scallops have complex vision. […Learn More]

Sounds Wild and Broken: Sonic Marvels, Evolution’s Creativity, and the Crisis of Sensory Extinction

A lyrical exploration of the diverse sounds of our planet, the creative processes that produced these marvels, and the perils that sonic diversity now faces

We live on a planet alive with song, music, and speech. David Haskell explores how these wonders came to be. In rain forests shimmering with insect sound and swamps pulsing with frog calls we learn about evolution’s creative powers. From birds in the Rocky Mountains and on the streets of Paris, we discover how animals learn their songs and adapt to new environments. […Learn More]

Eating to Extinction: The World’s Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them

Dan Saladino’s Eating to Extinction is the prominent broadcaster’s pathbreaking tour of the world’s vanishing foods and his argument for why they matter now more than ever

Over the past several decades, globalization has homogenized what we eat, and done so ruthlessly. The numbers are stark: Of the roughly six thousand different plants once consumed by human beings, only nine remain major staples today. Just three of these—rice, wheat, and corn—now provide fifty percent of all our calories. Dig deeper and the trends are more worrisome still: […Learn More]

Can Fish Count?: What Animals Reveal About Our Uniquely Mathematical Minds

An entertaining investigation of the numerical abilities of animals and our own appetite for arithmetic

The philosopher Bertrand Russell once observed that realizing that a pair of apples and the passage of two days could somehow both be represented by the concept we call “two” was one of the most astonishing discoveries anyone had ever made. So what do we make of the incredible fact that animals seem to have inherent mathematical abilities? […Learn More]

Beasts Before Us: The Untold Story of Mammal Origins and Evolution

For most of us, the story of mammal evolution starts after the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs, but over the last 20 years scientists have uncovered new fossils and used new technologies that have upended this story.
[…Learn More]