How Outliers Helped Defeat Cholera

Before 2022, there was a wall between AI and the real world — models could reason impressively, but couldn't look anything up, run code, or check whether anything they said was actually true. This episode traces the moment that wall came down, through two landmark papers: ReAct, ...  Show more

AI agents are having a moment — and unpacking them properly takes more than a single conversation. This episode kicks off a dedicated multi-part season exploring AI agents from every angle, building up a complete picture piece by piece rather than skimming the surface. Think of i ...  Show more

In the 1800s cholera was a mysterious disease killing millions around the world. No-one knew how to stop it till an English doctor, John Snow, began investigating the outbreak of 1854. At a time before germ theory was properly understood, many public health experts thought diseas ...  Show more

Throughout human history, cities have grappled with how to keep excrement separate from drinking water. In the Middle Ages, gong farmers excavated human waste from city dwellers and took it to the countryside to be used as fertilizer. In the 19th century, cities grew so big, this ...  Show more

Governments globally are taking serious measures to halt the spread of the covid-19 coronavirus, from shutting schools to cancelling major events. On the panel for this special episode dedicated to the disease are New Scientist journalists Rowan Hooper, Penny Sarchet and Donna Lu ...  Show more

Professor Cath Noakes studies how air moves and the infection risk associated with different ventilation systems. Early in the pandemic, she was invited to join the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, SAGE and asked to study the transmission routes for Covid-1 ...  Show more