This week's show

Worrier Mentality
May 27, 2019

Skeptic Check: Worrier Mentality
Perceived vs real threats

Poisonous snakes, lightning strikes, a rogue rock from space.  There are plenty of scary things to fret about, but are we burning adrenaline on the right ones?  Stepping into the bathtub is more dangerous than flying from a statistical point of view, but no one signs up for “fear of showering” classes. 

Find out why we get tripped up by statistics, worry about the wrong things, and how the “intelligence trap” not only leads smart people to make dumb mistakes but actually causes them to make more.

Guests:

Descripción en español

New Water Worlds
May 20, 2019
New Water Worlds
Will we rise to the challenge of a rising sea level?

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(repeat) The seas are rising.   It’s no longer a rarity to see kayakers paddling through downtown Miami.

Is Life Inevitable?
May 13, 2019
Is Life Inevitable?
Moving from chemistry to biology

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A new theory about life’s origins updates Darwin’s warm little pond.  Scientists say they’ve created the building blocks of biology in steaming hot springs.

Rethinking Chernobyl
May 06, 2019
Rethinking Chernobyl
New facts emerge.

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The catastrophic explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in April 1986 triggered the full-scale destruction of the reactor.  But now researchers with access to once-classified Soviet documents are challenging the official version of what happened both before and after the explosion.

Identity Crisis
Apr 29, 2019
Identity Crisis
The search for the ultimate biomarker.

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(repeat) DNA is the gold standard of identification.