Each week, UnDisciplined takes a fun, fascinating and accessible dive into the lives of researchers and explorers working across a wide variety of scientific fields.
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We all know politicians, advertisers and social media algorithms are trying to influence what we believe. But what about our own brains? How do we know when our beliefs are helping us, and when we’re instead engaged in a form of inner propaganda? And how can we use this knowledge to our advantage?
When wildfire threatens a community, what determines who makes it out safely? Emergency managers, firefighters, and weather all play critical roles, but so do the choices we make before and during an evacuation. After three decades of studying fast-moving fires, University of Utah researcher Tom Cova explains what he has learned about preparation, quick decisions, and why neighbors helping…
When we think about cancer, we tend to think about what doctors can do. But what about what patients can do? How much of that is hope? How much of it is science?
The ocean takes up roughly 70% of the planet, but we still don’t know too much about everything that is out there. Most ocean life is very small, and tends to change based on the ocean’s conditions. So even if you took a sample of ocean water right now, there’s really no guarantee that it would resemble a sample taken later.A recent study by Sarah Tucker and her team offers some direction for…
Twenty years ago, Richard Louv helped us begin to think differently about childhood and nature.Now, he's asking a related but perhaps even more provocative question: what happens when we really notice the world around us? What do we experience in terms of attention, awe, loss, and what it means to love a very complex world?
For years, comedy thrived on cynicism. The world was a mess, people were selfish, and anyone who believed otherwise was the punchline.But from Ted Lasso, to Paddington, to Come From Away, some of our most beloved stories are finding humor, heart, and even heroism in empathy, earnestness, and human decency.This summer, Lyric Repertory Company is producing Gutenberg! The Musical! It’s a delightfully…
In the United States, we tend to celebrate people who pick a destination, set a goal, believe in themselves, and refuse to quit until they get exactly where they always knew they’d be.But real life is messier than that. Dreams change. and sometimes careers stall — we get relegated to something less than what we dreamed of.That's what happened to Todd Smith, a part-time sports writer and full-time…
If one of the most important roles of science fiction is that it makes unfamiliar ideas emotionally legible, what are the ideas that we need to be reading about right now?
A few years back, we had David Sinclair on the program. David is one of the world’s top researchers working on the question of whether we can extend human lifespans.A couple years after that, Nate Price was with us. Nate is also looking at this question, though from a different angle: he wants to know how we can pack more healthy years into the lifespans we already have.But here on the program, we…
There is no denying it: A.I. has changed higher education, and teachers are trying to catch up — to figure out how to live in this new world, and how to make learning meaningful.Stephen Aguilar studies how emerging technologies shape teaching, learning, and motivation. He’s also co-leading work at the USC center for generative A.I. and society, which just released a new report examining how…
Scott Simon has spent a lifetime telling other people’s stories on national public radio. But every now and then, along the way, he’s found reasons to tell the stories of the animals with whom we share this world, and he’s collected those stories, and more, in his latest book.
