The inhumanly fast world of high-speed trading, an excruciatingly slow experiment, and a physicist plays Zeus.
We kick things off with one of the longest-running experiments in the world. As Joshua Foer explains, the Pitch Drop Experiment is so slow, you can watch it for hours (check out the live cam) and not detect the slightest movement. But that doesn't mean ...
Jad starts us off with some wishful parental thinking: that no matter how many billions of lines of genetic code, or how many millions of years of evolution came before you, your struggles, your efforts, matter -- not just in a touchy feely kind of way, but in ways that ...
Stories of nature and nurture slamming into each other, & shaping our biological blueprints.
Robert and Carl Zimmer teamed up tonight to moderate a brain mapping brouhaha live at Columbia University. The subject: does the brain's wiring make us who we are? The event has ended, but thanks to everyone who tuned in for the live webcast (and the lively web chat archived below).
While Jad was on paternity leave, Carl Zimmer told Robert and producer Soren Wheeler about the ecosystem inside each and every one of us. According to Carl, when we're in the womb, we have no bacteria in us at all, but as soon as we're born we start gathering up ...
A look at the messy mystery in our middles, and what the rumblings deep in our bellies can tell us about ourselves.
In the early 1980s, epidemiologists were racing to understand a mysterious disease that was killing young men in California. As we now know, that disease was AIDS. And it soon grew into one of the biggest global pandemics in human history. But back in 1984, no one knew what it ...
Carl Zimmer is one of our go-to guys when we need help untangling a complicated scientific idea. But in this short, he unravels something much more personal.
In a brief snippet from a conversation Robert had with Richard Dawkins at the 92 Street Y in New York City, we learn that natural selection is often a brutal arms race, inherently full of suffering and cruelty. But if Darwin's big idea is really predicated on pain and selfishness, ...
In this episode, a question that haunted Charles Darwin: if natural selection boils down to survival of the fittest, how do you explain why one creature might stick its neck out for another?
Tales of lethargic farmers, zombie cockroaches, and even mind-controlled humans (kinda, maybe).
How stochasticity -- a wonderfully smarty-pants word for randomness -- drives our lives, and the patterns we see around us.