Carl Zimmer on Defining Life

At the center of Patrick Radden Keefe’s new book, “London Falling,” is a mystery: In 2019, a young man named Zac Brettler disappeared, and a few days later his body was found in the Thames River. Surveillance footage showed what appeared to be Zac jumping off the balcony of a nea ...  Show more

What is it about a bookstore? You walk in planning to browse for a few minutes, and somehow an hour later you’re still wandering the stacks with an armful of books you can’t seem to put down. For this week’s episode, our guest host, MJ Franklin, and the producer Sarah Diamond tak ...  Show more

Carl Zimmer is one of the finest science communicators of our time, having spent decades writing about biology, evolution, and heredity. His latest (and 16^th) book, <span style= "mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-theme-font: major-fareast;" ...

In the first years of the COVID pandemic, a debate raged: was the virus transmitted via respiratory droplets, or was it airborne? For some, this distinction seemed overly technical, pedantic even. But for others, it represented decades of dismissal and missed opportunities - oppo ...  Show more

In this Back To School episode we consider the "List of Life": the criteria that define what it is to be a living thing. Some are easy calls: A kitten is alive. A grain of salt is not. But what about the tricky cases, like a virus? Or, more importantly, what about futuristic andr ...  Show more

Sam Harris speaks with Sara Imari Walker about a scientific understanding of life. They discuss the contributions of physics to this topic, Erwin Schrödinger, the inadequacy of standard definitions of life, the prospect of "artificial" life, the role of information, ...