372 | Erik Winfree on DNA Computers and Robots
When we think of computers, we think of machines running on some kind of silicon chips. But the idea is more general: at heart, a computer i...
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Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
Ever wanted to know how music affects your brain, what quantum mechanics really is, or how black holes work? Do you wonder why you get emotional each time you see a certain movie, or how on...
Episodes
20 of 450 episodes371 | Kyle Harper on How Humans Have Shaped Life on Earth
Humanity is merely one species out of millions living on Earth, but we have a disproportionate impact on the rest of the biosphere. Recent t...
Ask Me Anything | October 2026
Welcome to the October 2026 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also th...
370 | Daniel Akerib on a Faint Hint of Dark Matter
One reason it's been so hard to directly detect the dark matter is that we're not sure what it is. But for a long time, a leading candidate...
369 | Gregg Caruso on Living Well Without Free Will
The worry about debates over free will is that they degenerate into semantics -- what do you mean by "free will," really? But there are impo...
368 | Elizabeth Alexander on Why Democracy Needs Imagination
In all sorts of ways, the modern world makes it difficult to nurture our individual humanity and connect with the humanity of others. The di...
Mindscape Ask Me Anything, Sean Carroll | September 2026
Welcome to the September 2026 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also...
367 | Jared Diamond on the Course of History and the Role of leaders
The course of history is affected by many things, including the political and social situations of large groups of people, their biological...
366 | Jim Al-Khalili on Time, Quantum, Biology, and Cosmology
Everyone lives through time, but we continue to struggle to fully understand it. We remain unsure whether time is fundamental or emergent, w...
365 | Vitor Cardoso on Why Black Holes Are Special
Black holes, as Stephen Hawking discovered, do grow old: they emit radiation, lose mass, and eventually evaporate away. But our fascination...
364 | Stuart Firestein on How Science Relies on Ignorance and Failure
One of the paradoxes of science is that it seeks objectively true understanding of the world, but its methodology is driven by ignorance, fa...
363 | Chandra Sripada on How LLMs and Humans are Cognitive Cousins
Large Language Models display an uncanny ability to construct human-sounding speech, and can synthesize concepts in novel ways. Is this beca...
Mindscape Ask Me Anything, Sean Carroll | August 2026
Welcome to the August 2026 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the...
362 | Luis Bettencourt on the Universal Properties of Self-Organizing Cities
People who live in large cities produce more patents per person than those who live in small towns. They also walk faster down the street, a...
361 | Bonnie Bassler on How Bacteria Talk and Work Together
One of the characteristics of life is that living organisms gather information and put it to use. Even one of the simplest lifeforms, bacter...
Mindscape Ask Me Anything, Sean Carroll | July 2026
Welcome to the July 2026 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the o...
360 | Marc Berman on the Science of Touching Grass
Modern life has, in many ways, removed us from the environments in which our ancestors lived and adapted. Not only do we spend time looking...
359 | Solo: Theories of Dark Energy
The cosmological constant, as discussed last episode, provides a perfectly good (thus far) explanation for why we observe the universe to be...
358 | Solo: Vacuum Energy and the Cosmological Constant
The most surprising discovery in fundamental physics during my career as a scientist was undoubtedly the acceleration of the universe , anno...
357 | Jeff Coller on mRNA, Vaccines, and Bespoke Therapeutics
Messenger RNA (mRNA) plays a literally central role in the functioning of life as we know it, shuttling information back and forth between t...