Shhhh! It’s the sound and silence episode

Dean Russell had just wrapped several reporting projects on climate change, mental health, and COVID. “My world was just so serious,” he said. That’s when his boss approached Dean with an idea. What if they made a fiction podcast about climate change? At first Dean wasn’t sold, b ...  Show more

Producer Felix Poon goes on a field trip to the headquarters of Consumer Reports, where they test snow blowers on wet sawdust, drop bicycle helmets on anvils, and cover space heaters in towels to see how long it takes them to catch fire. How do they come up with this stuff? And, ...  Show more

Humans are noisy. The National Park Service estimates that all of our whirring, grinding, and revving machines are doubling or even tripling global noise pollution every 30 years. A lot of that noise is negatively affecting wildlife and human health. In this guest episode, the te ...  Show more

We’re constantly assaulted by “noise” all around us: crowds, vehicles, social media. As quiet spaces around us dwindle, what is it doing to our minds and bodies? Why do we need silence for our health? Acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton takes Dr. Sanjay Gupta on a tour to one of th ...  Show more

If you’ve ever found your blood pressure rising because some guy down the street doesn’t know how to keep the trigger on a leaf blower pulled all the way, then you’ve experienced noise pollution. Not only is it annoying, it turns out it’s deadly too! Learn all about it in this cl ...  Show more

Original broadcast date: Friday, October 16, 2020. Sound surrounds us, from cacophony even to silence. But depending on how we hear, the world can be a different auditory experience for each of us. This hour, TED speakers explore the science of sound. Guests on the show include N ...  Show more