Big Brains

Climate change can feel like an impossible crisis these days. Every week there is some new report about the irreversible damage we’re doing to our planet and the havoc it will bring to people’s lives. We all know cutting emissions is the solution, yet governments and companies seem no closer to meeting the goals that scientists say we must hit. It can feel hopeless.

There is one possible controversial solution to climate change many in the mainstream haven’t discussed. It’s so controversial, in fact, that some experts say we shouldn’t even be discussing it. But University of Chicago Professor David Keith says we need to talk about it. It’s called solar geoengineering—the process in which you reflect a small fraction of sunlight back into space. As the founding director of the Climate Systems Engineering Initiative at UChicago, Keith is leading a team that will research solar geoengineering and other novel solutions to climate change. 

By now, you've probably heard about the dangers of PFAS “forever chemicals.” These chemicals are all around us—they're in waterproof hiking boots, electronics, nonstick pans and even our drinking water—but there's no way for them to break down in our environment. Epidemiological studies have linked to these chemicals to numerous diseases—from kidney cancer, liver cancer, obesity, decreased fertility and more.

American toxicologist Linda Birnbaum has been sounding the alarms about how PFAS are harming our health for the last few decades. She was previously the director of the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences at the NIH and is currently an adjunct professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She explains that while we cannot completely avoid PFAS, there are steps we can take to limit our exposure.

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How many times have you heard this phrase: “Back in the day, people were nicer” or “People aren’t as kind as they used to be?” Most of us have experienced the feeling that people are becoming meaner over time, year after year. But is it true? Are people really less kind than they used to be?

That’s the question that has bothered psychologist Adam Mastroianni most of his life. He set out to find an answer—a search that recently culminated in a paper published in the journal Nature titled, “The Illusion of Moral Decline.” While the title may be a giveaway for his findings, he asks: If people are becoming less moral, why do we all feel the same way—and what can we do to shake this “illusion?”

Link to the advertised Chicago Booth Review Podcast: https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/podcast?source=cbr-sn-bbr-camp:podcast23-20231102#sort=%40articledate%20descending

Of the academic books that have become household names, “Freakonomics” must be at the top of the list. The 2005 book by University of Chicago scholar Steven Levitt and journalist Stephen Dubner created not only a whole new way of thinking about discovering answers to complex problems, but launched a media empire—from book sequel to a movie to a hit podcast.

On this special episode, we sat down with Levitt during the inaugural UCPN Podcast Festival, to talk about the legacy of Freakonomics. Almost 20 years later, he told our audience how he views himself as a “data scientist” and not just an economist, what he’s learned about using a coin flip to make hard decisions in life, and why he thinks he may have found the “holy grail” of solving crime. 

Link to the advertised Chicago Booth Review Podcast: https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/podcast?source=cbr-sn-bbr-camp:podcast23-20231019

Since the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, University of Chicago Prof. Robert Pape has been closely observing the threats to our democracy. Now, the renowned terrorism expert says that violent ideas coming from a dedicated minority are moving from fringe to mainstream.

In 2021, Pape's team along with NORC at the University of Chicago launched the Dangers to Democracy tracker, an ongoing series of surveys to track Americans' thoughts and attitudes about political violence. In one recent survey, about 12 million Americans said they believe violence is justified to restore Trump to power. Still, Pape believes the data may give us some answers about how to move forward, and how to strengthen the center.

Big Brains is sponsored by the Graham School for Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies.

Free speech is probably one of the most polarizing public topics of debate. And those arguments only become more intense when it comes to free expression on college and university campuses. Should professors be allowed to say whatever they want? What about speakers being invited to campus? Who gets to say what is acceptable and unacceptable?

The University of Chicago has had a unique and long history of defending free expression, and this year is building upon that commitment by launching The Chicago Forum on Free Inquiry and Expression. That forum is being led by renowned UChicago law professor Tom Ginsburg. He joins our podcast along with President Paul Alivisatos to talk about why universities must have a commitment to free inquiry—and how this new forum plans to promote free and open discourse, while addressing present-day challenges.

Big Brains is sponsored by the Graham School for Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies.

Can you heal faster just by tricking your brain? Could you lose weight with only a change of mindset? Could you think yourself into being younger? If you think the answer to all these questions is no, you haven’t read the research from renowned Harvard University psychologist Ellen Langer.

Langer is a bit of a legend. She’s the first woman to ever receive tenure in psychology at Harvard, and her work has earned her the moniker: “The Mother of Mindfulness”. Her 40-year research career into the mind-body connection—and how mindfulness can hack that system—has delivered some unbelievable results that she believes hold the key to revolutionizing our health. She complies all of her work in her latest book “The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health.”

Big Brains is sponsored by the Graham School for Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies.

Reading is one of the most significant practices in the modern age of information, but it has a complicated history. Scientists began studying reading over a century ago; they built eye movement devices to study how fast and efficiently we read, and even proposed methods on the best ways to teach kids how to read. But all of this well-intentioned science led to various debates, from America's Reading Wars to today's anti-elite and anti-science movement. 

In a new book, The Science of Reading: Information, Media, and Mind in Modern America, Prof. Adrian Johns, chair of the Department of History at the University of Chicago, dives into reading's complicated history and what we can learn from it to better shape the future of reading. 

Big Brains is sponsored by the Graham School for Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies.

One of the first areas to be affected by AI has been science. Researchers have already started to integrate these new technologies into their work, but what does it mean to let these systems into our labs? Can they be trusted? And, if they so, how radically can they push science forward?

Prof. Rebecca Willett is the faculty director of AI at the University of Chicago Data Science Institute. She is at the forefront of thinking through how AI will change science, and in this episode, she examines the opportunities—and the dangers—of this rapidly emerging technology.

Big Brains is sponsored by the Graham School for Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies.

AI promises to change every part of our society, but one area that has already started to be affected is law. And AI may do more than just upend the profession of lawyers. One professor here at the University of Chicago believes that, with its ability to handle massive data sets, AI could be used to entirely change the law itself, making it personal for every individual based on how they live their lives. It’s a radical idea, but one we may need to start confronting sooner rather than later.

In the last few months AI has become the number one topic on everyone’s mind. This is the second episode of a three-part series on the ways today's researchers think AI will build the world of tomorrow. As we continue our summer break, these first two episodes are re-releases, with the final part of the series featuring a brand-new guest. Given the recent developments in AI, coming back to these episodes has made them all the more fascinating and important. We hope you get as much out of them as we did. Thanks for listening!

Big Brains is sponsored by the Graham School for Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies.

Science is facing a perplexing problem. Although there are far more scientists today than ever before, publishing research at a faster and faster pace, new and novel advancements have slowed not increased. But one expert at the University of Chicago thinks he may have found a way out of this progress standstill…artificial intelligence.

In the last few months AI has become the number one topic on everyone’s mind. This is the first episode of a three part series on the ways today's researchers think AI will build the world of tomorrow. As we continue our summer break, these first two episodes will be re-releases, with the final part of the series featuring a brand new guest. Given the recent developments in AI, coming back to these episodes has made them all the more fascinating and important. We hope you get as much out of them as we did. Thanks for listening!

Big Brains is sponsored by the Graham School for Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies.

Everyone is talking about the upcoming summer blockbuster, Oppenheimer. We are always incredibly captivated by behind the curtain looks at some of the most momentous events in our history. Uncovering the secret details and hidden motivations of the people that have shaped our past. And all the buzz got me thinking about a fascinating prior episode of our show that did just that.

You may think you know the history of space travel, from Sputnik to NASA to our recent shift toward privatized space travel. But what if there was a lost history of our origins with space science that would make us rethink the whole narrative?

We’re taking a summer break while we work on some special episodes and will be back in August, but in the meantime we wanted to share some of our best and most relevant episodes. These episodes contain some fascinating and life-changing information for new and returning listeners.

Big Brains is sponsored by the Graham School for Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies.

Many cities in the US have been experiencing smoky and hazy skies lately. Some of you have probably been affected by poor air quality due to the ongoing wildfires in Canada that are causing pollution to travel as far as Chicago and New York. On a former episode of our podcast, we spoke with some of the leading experts on air pollution about how this problem has been getting worse and the cost we’re all paying for it.

We’re taking a summer break while we work on some special episodes and will be back in August, but in the meantime we wanted to share some of our best and most relevant episodes. These episodes contain some fascinating and life-changing information for new and returning listeners. 

We can’t always see the consequences of air pollution around us, but it’s costing us years off our lives. According to a new Air Quality Life Index report from the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC), air pollution is taking 2.2 years off the average global life expectancy. In some of the most polluted regions in the world, residents are expected to lose an average five years of their lives, if the current high levels of pollution persist. 

While smog seem like a difficult problem to tackle, some countries have proven it’s possible to clean up the air. In the past seven years, China has reduced air pollution as much as the United States has in the past three decades. And since India’s Gujarat state launched the world's first clean air market in 2019, they’ve been successful in cutting particulate pollution by at least 20 percent. 

In this episode, we speak with EPIC’s Air Quality Programs Director Christa Hasenkopf and EPIC’s South Asia Director Anant Sudarshan about why we need to treat air pollution as a global health threat—and what we can do about it.

Big Brains is sponsored by the Graham School for Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies.

Music plays an important role in all of our lives. But listening to music or playing an instrument is more than just a creative outlet or hobby — it’s also scientifically good for us. Research shows that music can stimulate new connections in our brains; keeping our cognitive abilities sharp and our memories alive.

In a new book entitled Every Brain Needs Music: The Neuroscience of Making and Listening to Music, Prof. Larry Sherman explores why we all need music for our mental wellbeing — and how it can even help us later in life.

Sherman is professor of neuroscience at Oregon Health & Science University.

Everyone wishes they had a superpower. Well, it turns out you’ve had a secret power since you were a child, you just don’t know how to use it yet. That’s the power of language. In a fascinating new book, “Magic Words: What To Say To Get Your Way," Prof. Jonah Berger of the Wharton School uses massive data sets and machine learning to tease out the “magic words” that can transform our lives.

Could changing just a single word in your mind help you stick to that diet? Could mastering when to say “you” and when to say “I” save your marriage? Does the word “could” make you more creative than “should”? We find answers to these questions and more as we delve into the science-backed power of words.

If there is something both sides of the political aisle can agree on, it’s that there is something deeply wrong with health insurance in the United States. What they can’t agree on is how to fix it. The right blames everything on the Affordable Care Act, while those on the left say we need Healthcare For All. But what if there was another option?

In a recent paper published in JAMA, leading health economist and University of Chicago Provost Katherine Baicker lays out an innovative blueprint for health care—not to tinker with our system on the margins, but to redesign the entire thing. It’s a fascinating idea that takes us through the complex history of health insurance, how that web got so tangled up and how we can straighten it out.

Link to the advertised Chicago Booth Review podcast: https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/podcast?source=cbr-sn-bbr-camp:podcast23-20230525

Why do we fight? It’s a seemingly simple question, but it turns out the answers are surprising, deep and crucial to understanding our world. Considering how costly any conflict is in lives and money, why do wars happen at all? This is one of those episodes that will change how you view some of our most important issues, from the war in Ukraine, to understanding gang fights, and even a possible conflict with China.

We’re taking the week off to work on some truly special episodes coming out in the next few weeks, but thought this was a perfect opportunity to re-share one of our episodes that we think is an absolutely must listen. So please enjoy, and we’ll see you next week for an all new Big Brains.

We often think our debates around sexuality and gender are a modern phenomenon. Some people argue that identities like trans and non-binary have only existed recently. But could the evidence for queer and gender-nonconforming lives actually stretch back centuries? 

In a recent book entitled Byzantine Intersectionality, Prof. Roland Betancourt of the University of California-Irvine uncovers an overlooked history from the Byzantine era. His work shows how surprisingly modern medieval conversations about sex and gender were—or, as he puts it, how medieval our modern conversations seem.

As extremist groups on the alt-right have begun to claim an ideological lineage to Byzantium, Betancourt’s work has become a critical work for contextualizing our current moment—and drawing lessons from this neglected history.

In the near future, birth defects, traumatic injuries, limb loss and perhaps even cancer could be cured through bioelectricity—electrical signals that communicate to our cells how to rebuild themselves. This innovative idea has been tested on flatworms and frogs by biologist Michael Levin, whose research investigates how bioelectricity provides the blueprint for how our bodies are built—and how it could be the future of regenerative medicine. 

Levin is professor of biology at Tufts University and director of the Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology.

Over his distinguished career, Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman has dedicated his research to understanding and solving the problem of inequality. He has closely studied how investing in early childhood development is linked to better outcomes—from higher earnings, to violence reduction, and even breaking the cycle of poverty.

His groundbreaking research has been applied across the globe—from Jamaica to Denmark and China, and it has given policymakers important insights into education, job-training programs, minimum wage legislation and more. His most recent work has centered on examining social mobility, and he’s help found an entire field on the economics of human flourishing.

Heckman is the Henry Schultz Distinguished Service Professor in Economics at the University of Chicago, where he has been a faculty member since 1973. He directs the Center for the Economics of Human Development.

In today's grocery stores, you can find more sugary snacks, artificial ingredients, and ultra-processed packaged foods. At the same time, the United States has seen an increase in obesity, which is costing our healthcare system, too. Nutritionist Marion Nestle says the problem today isn't that Americans don't know how to eat healthy, rather the food environment that we live in has made it much harder to do so.

In this episode, she discusses what policy changes are needed—from the way food studies are funded, to offering nutrition education in schools, to regulating the food industry better. Nestle is a Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, & Public Health at New York University, Emerita, and the author of many books, including Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health, and Slow Cooked: An Unexpected Life in Food Politics.

Link to the advertised Chicago Booth Review podcast: https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/podcast?source=cbr-sn-cap-camp:podcast23-20230320 

Link to the advertised Chicago Booth Review podcast: https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/podcast?source=cbr-sn-cap-camp:podcast23-20230320 

What is the key to living a happy and fulfilling life? The answer is actually quite simple, according to the two scholars behind the longest scientific study of happiness every conducted.

Beginning in 1938, the Harvard Study of Adult Development tracked three generations of families to uncover what contributed to their happiness. In their new book, The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness, Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz tell the stories behind their participants' lives and provide key insights on the recipe to happiness. 

Marc Schulz, a professor at Bryn Mawr College, joins the podcast to discuss the book and their study.

As we head into 2023, many of us are setting our new year's resolutions and new goals for the year. It can be hard to stick to these resolutions or accomplish these goals, but there's a technique we can use to help us. We wanted to re-release our episode with Katy Milkman, a behavior scientist who wrote the best-selling book, How To Change: The Science of Getting From Where You Are To Where You Want To Be.

Katy Milkman is a professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, host of Charles Schwab’s popular behavioral economics podcast Choiceology, and co-founder and co-director of the Behavior Change for Good Initiative. In this episode, she explores the best research—from “nudges” to “temptation bundles”—on how to change our behaviors and habits for good.

Most people think they know humanity’s history of space exploration, from Sputnik to NASA to our recent shift toward privatized space travel. But what if there was a lost history of our origins with space science that would make us rethink the whole narrative?

Jordan Bimm is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago The Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge and a space historian. Bimm’s uncovered a forgotten chapter of space history that paints a much more militaristic picture of our relationship to space, and he sees a direct through line to our present moment. He says we can’t conceive a brighter future for space exploration until we reckon with its darker past.

By 2050 humanity is going to have to produce 50% more food in order to feed a growing population. That’s a lot, especially given that we currently have trouble feeding the current global population, and that food production is already responsible for about a third of the greenhouse gases that cause climate change.

But an incredible new genetic breakthrough may have just given us a way to address both those problems. Chuan He is a distinguished professor of chemistry at the University of Chicago, and he recently made a genetic discovery that has massive implications for feeding the world, addressing climate change and even fighting cancer.

The University of Chicago Podcast Network is excited to announce the launch of a new show, it’s called "Entitled" and it’s about human rights. Co-hosted by lawyers and UChicago Law School Professors, Claudia Flores and Tom Ginsburg, Entitled explores the stories around why rights matter and what’s the matter with rights.

We’re going to share the first episode of that show with you this week, and recommend you go subscribe! We’ll be back next week with a new Big Brains about an incredible scientific breakthrough that will have huge implications for climate change, cancer treatment, and food scarcity! It’s a must listen! Please enjoy Entitled, and we’ll see you next week!

Many of the most important moments in our lives rely on the judgment of others. We expect doctors to diagnose our illnesses correctly, and judges to hand out rulings fairly. But there’s a massive flaw in human judgment that we’re just beginning to understand, and it’s called “noise.”   In a new book, former University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein along with his co-authors, Daniel Kahneman and Olivier Sibony, take us through the literature on noise, explains how it shows up in our world and what we can do to fight it. From misdiagnoses to unequal treatment in courtrooms, noise is the “silent killer” we didn’t even know was there.

Even if you’ve never eaten an Impossible Burger, you’ve probably heard of them. But you may not know the science and story behind those meatless products.

Pat Brown is a University of Chicago alum, the founder and CEO of Impossible Foods, and a scientist at Stanford University. He says the meat industry is the “greatest threat humanity has ever faced,” and that “cracking the code” of plant-based food products could be our only hope for the future.

When was the last time you heard a positive story about climate change, a story about someone with a new idea or innovative solution to help reduce our carbon footprint?

This is that story. Michael Greenstone is a Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, Director of the Energy Policy Institute of the University of Chicago (EPIC) and former chief economist in the Obama White House. Now, he’s developed a new nonprofit called Climate Vault, which could be a powerful new tool in the fight against climate change, and it’s built around a simple idea: outbidding polluters for the right to pollute.

Why does our universe work the way it does? What are its laws? How did it start with the Big Bang‚ and how will it end?

Scientists like Prof. Dan Hooper from the University of Chicago use something called the Standard Model of Physics to explain our universe, but there’s one big problem: The model has black hole-sized gaps in it. What is dark matter? What is dark energy and why does it make up 70 percent of our universe? Where is all the anti-matter?

Hooper says it will probably take a paradigm-shifting discovery to answer these questions, and that those are a once-in-a-lifetime event. But, this year, something called the muon G-2 experiment at UChicago-affiliated Fermilab may have been just that discovery. It threatens to break the “standard model” and open a whole new kind of physics. Hooper explains it all, and responds to our previous episode with Harvard’s Avi Loeb about aliens.

When’s the last time you thought about property taxes? We mostly accept them as a part of society, and assume that they’re being calculated fairly. But a leading University of Chicago scholar says that assumption is wrong.

A breakthrough study from Prof. Christopher Berry has shown that, on average, homeowners in the bottom 10% of a jurisdiction pay an effective tax rate that is double of what’s paid by the top 10%. Essentially, the poorest homeowners are subsidizing the richest, with disproportion effects on people of color who own property. We talk with Berry about why this happening, how it’s affecting communities—and what we can do about it.

The possibility of alien life has captivated the human imagination for decades and has been at the center of some of our most popular fictional stories. But one scientist has made a controversial claim that aliens are no long a fiction but a reality.

Avi Loeb is a theoretical physicist and former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University. For the past few years, he’s argued that an alien artifact, called Oumuamua, passed by Earth in 2017.

As you can imagine, a Harvard professor going on record that aliens exist caused quite a stir in the scientific community. On this episode, we talk through this controversy with Loeb and why he thinks we need to invest more in the search for alien life by developing a new field of “space archaeology.”

The so-called “Big Tech” industry has dramatically improved our daily lives, but at what cost? Few people have gotten a closer look at these companies than Kara Swisher, writer for The New York Times and podcast host—and she says we need to wrestle more with that question.

Recently she shared her expertise with University of Chicago students as a fellow at the Institute of Politics. She taught a seminar called “The Five Horsemen of the Techpocalypse,” which examined Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook. She recently joined the Big Brains podcast to give us her impressions of that experience, and to discuss the future of “Big Tech.”

The solutions to global poverty can appear obvious, even if they’re difficult to implement. But, as University of Chicago economist Michael Kremer has discovered, interventions that may seem like common sense can actually be wrong.

In 2019, Kremer won a Nobel Prize for his work studying ways to alleviate global poverty. A pioneer in the use of randomized control trials in economics, Kremer has examined poverty interventions like scientists do medical treatments—putting interventions through a trial to isolate effects. Kremer’s studies often reveal surprising and counterintuitive ways of fighting global poverty and have radically altered thousands of lives.

For the more than 20 million people with a felony record, incarceration doesn’t end at the prison gate. They enter what University of Chicago scholar Reuben Jonathan Miller calls the “afterlife” of mass incarceration.

Miller, an assistant professor at the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy and Practice, is the author of a new book, Halfway Home: Race, Punishment and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration—an intimate portrait that draws on his sociological research and personal experiences. It’s a unique sociological look at our system of mass incarceration and how it continues to imprison people after their sentence and also punishes their families.

Anthony Fauci has spent the past year trying to curb the worst health crisis the world has seen in a century. 

In a recent University of Chicago event, Fauci reflected on how the COVID-19 pandemic has been a “painful learning experience” for he and other health officials. On this episode of the Big Brains podcast, please enjoy Fauci’s conversation with Prof. Katherine Baicker, dean of the Harris School of Public Policy, who presented him with the 2020 Harris Dean’s Award.

Subscribe to Big Brains on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Spotify.

The coronavirus pandemic has raised countless ethical questions: How do we balance restricting freedoms with protecting others, how do we ethically distribute vaccines, should we force people to get vaccinated—or should we ask healthy people to get infected with COVID-19 in the name of science?

There’s no one better to discuss these dilemmas with than Laurie Zoloth. She’s a Professor of Religion and Ethics at the University of Chicago, one of the leading thinkers on bioethics, and serves on committees and advisory boards with organizations like the CDC and NIH. On this episode, we ask her all our COVID-19 ethical questions—and her answers might surprise you.

The Doomsday Clock has been set at 100 seconds to midnight—as close to total destruction as we were in 2020. But after a year of increasingly dangerous weather and wildfires, not to mention the COVID-19 pandemic, why didn’t the clock move?

Rachel Bronson is the president and CEO of the Bulletin of The Atomic Scientists, the organization that sets the clock. We sit down with her to talk about the thinking behind this year’s clock, climate change, pandemics and the ever-increasing threat of nuclear war.

What are the biggest questions in science today: Can we cure cancer, solve the climate crisis, make it to Mars? For Nobel laureate Jack Szostak, the biggest question is still much more fundamental: What is the origin of life?

A professor of genetics at Harvard University, Szostak has dedicated his lab to piecing together the complex puzzle of life’s origins on Earth. The story takes us back billions of years and may provide answers to some of our most mysterious questions: Where did we come from—and are we alone in the universe?

Our podcast is all about research. Every episode we investigate what scholars have discovered and why it matters. But we’re going to get meta on this episode and look at what makes this research possible—and the dangers of taking it for granted, especially during crises like the COVID-19 pandemic.

Barbara Snyder, JD’80, is president of the Association of American Universities (AAU), an organization composed of America’s leading research universities. On this episode, she lays out the case for investing more in academic research, and what we may lose if we don’t.

Our team is taking some time off to be with their families for the holidays. But, just in case you have a long flight, car ride, or maybe need something to do in-between Zoom calls, we’re re-sharing one of the most enlightening and engaging conversations we've ever had on this show to get you through it. Please enjoy, and we’ll see you with all-new episodes after the holidays.

What is the most popular form of media today: Movies? Music? Books? Nope, it’s video games. With 2.5 billion gamers today, games are set to be the type of media that most defines our world. And two scholars at the University of Chicago are re-thinking how to leverage them in a way to address some of the world’s biggest issues.

Prof. Patrick Jagoda and Assoc. Prof. Kristen Schilt are designing alternate reality games that allow players to become active participants not just as players, but as designers. By using these games to educate users about climate change, marginalization and public health, these scholars and players are investigating how the process of crafting alternate realities can help reshape the real world in which we live.

With so many contentious issues in our deeply polarized world, the real or virtual Thanksgiving dinner table may be a hard place to find a lot of empathy this year.

As we take a week off to reconnect with our families, we wanted to re-share this enlightening episode with Professor of Neurobiology, Peggy Mason, all about how empathy works and how we can make our empathy stronger.

This week, we’re featuring another University of Chicago Podcast Network show. It’s called Capitalisn’t.

Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court has many focusing on question about how the new court will judge cases on social issues like abortion, but we rarely hear enough about the economic cases the court deals with. It turns out, the Supreme Court actually has a huge influence on our economy, not just social issues.

On this episode of Capitalisn't, their team interrogates the relationship between the Supreme Court and the economy, and how the new court may rule on business issues. 

We hope you enjoy and we’ll see you next week for a new episode of Capitalisn’t!

It’s hard to think of a presidential election that has raised as many questions as 2020. What do these results tell us about the views and desires of the American public, what the polls got right and wrong, and how all of this will affect our economy? To find some answers, we turned to two leading UChicago scholars—and fellow University of Chicago Podcast Network hosts to discuss what comes next, following the historic election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

Big Brains host Paul M. Rand welcomes Luigi Zingales, professor of economics and host of the Capitalisn’t podcast; and William Howell, chair of the Department of Political Science and host of the Not Another Politics Podcast, to untangle the record-setting 2020 campaign and debate the future of the country, post-President Trump.

When should a government choose to reveal a secret—or conceal it? Your knee-jerk reaction may be to say they should never hide anything from the public. But political scientist Austin Carson of the University of Chicago says his research complicates that answer.

Carson has spent his career reading massive amounts of declassified material. What he’s found shows how governments can use secrecy to deescalate conflicts and maintain peace. But he says balancing this utility of secrecy with democracy is incredibly important.

The Supreme Court today may be more politicized than any other time in U.S. history. With the expected confirmation of Judge Amy Coney Barrett, President Trump will have appointed three justices in less than four years, and the American public has come to see the bench as divided by “left” and “right.” But how can we bring the Court back in line with its Constitutional ideals?

Prof. Geoffrey Stone, a distinguished scholar at the University of Chicago Law School, has spent his career studying the Supreme Court and the Constitution. In this episode, he explains the history of how the Supreme Court became a political institution—and how we may turn it around.

Since their inception, natural history museums have struggled with how to represent Native Americans and their culture. People from these communities are often not included in the conversation, and their artifacts can be mishandled. But the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, in partnership with the Neubauer Collegium at the University of Chicago, is trying to change that.

A historic exhibition, Apsáalooke Women and Warriors, is the first large-scale show to be curated by an Indigenous person. Along with an overhaul of its Native North American Hall, the Field Museum is trying to address the racially insensitive past of many natural history museums by including Native Americans in the process.

The 2020 presidential election this November is happening amid an unprecedented pandemic. As states scramble to scale up mail-in voting, President Trump claims it will lead to widespread fraud. But what does a leading expert on voting think?

Assoc. Prof. Anthony Fowler is a leading University of Chicago scholar on voting and voter behavior. On this episode, we discuss mail-in and mobile voting, why he thinks it should be illegal not to vote, and how the voting map may look deceiving on Election Night.

Imagine a new technology that could create unbreakable encryption, supercharge the development of AI, and radically expedite the development of drug treatments for everything from cancer to COVID-19. That technology could be quantum computing and the quantum internet.

David Awschalom is a professor in quantum science and engineering at the University of Chicago, and he’s one of the leading experts in the field. With new massive investments in quantum from the Department of Energy, he’s hoping to lead the development of this new technology as Chicago emerges as a leading global hub for quantum research.

The quarantine to stem the tide of the coronavirus pandemic has left many people trapped inside, alone. Loneliness and isolation were already a major health crisis in our country before COVID-19, and things have only gotten worse.

During this time, we want to revisit a conversation we had with University of Chicago professor Linda Waite. Her first of its kind research into social well-being has provided key insights into how our social lives affect our physical health.

The way we talk is probably not something most of us spend a lot of time thinking about, but when it comes to communicating, what we’re saying may only be as important as how we say it.

That’s what Prof. Katherine Kinzler of the University of Chicago argues in her new book, How You Say It: Why You Talk the Way You Do—And What It Says About You—an innovative exploration of how speech creates and deepens our social biases, starting from the point of view of children. With our national discourse focused on discrimination based on race, she says a largely overlooked aspect of that conversation extends beyond skin color: discrimination based on speech.

People have been taking psychoactive drugs since the beginning of human history, but there hasn’t been a lot of good scientific study of these substances. One person who has been trying to turn a scientific lens toward them is University of Chicago Professor Harriett de Wit, and what she’s discovered is surprising.

The latest research shows that there may be more uses for drugs like MDMA and LSD than sending people on mind-altering trips. In fact, they could radically change how some people engage with therapy. De Wit also examines microdosing, why it is so popular, and whether it does what people suggest.

What are we going to do about police misconduct? Many are calling for a total defunding of the police, while others are looking for systems to enhance accountability through reform. Many have pointed to civilian oversight agencies, but University of Chicago legal scholar Sharon Fairley says that these agencies can often become corrupt.

Last year, Fairley completed the most comprehensive study of civilian oversight agencies ever conducted. Its insights are exhaustive for how to make these agencies effective at holding police accountable. In this episode, we go through the history of civilian oversight and explain some of the most important reforms that Fairley suggests.

There have always been, and probably always will be, conspiracy theories, but we’ve certainty seen a dramatic increase this year. Misinformation around the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic have created page after internet page of conspiracy theories. And the protests following the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police have also generated a whole host of conspiracies.

On this episode, we’re going to take a data driven look at conspiracies theories, who believes them and why. We’ll get scientific answers to some of the most mysteries questions surrounding conspiracy theories.

Just a note, we originally recorded this episode last year, but, as we take the week off to celebrate the holiday with our families, we think this episode deserves a re-listen during, especially at this moment in our society.

In the last few weeks, our country has been rocked by nationwide protests following the killing of George Floyd, and many other black people, at the hands of police. To be true to the mission of our show, we’re using our platform to address the underlying and historical racial injustices that have driven the protests in the only way we know how: by talking to UChicago scholars.

On this episode, we brought together a panel of experts— Prof. Cathy Cohen, Asst. Prof. Reuben Jonathan Miller and Asst. Prof. John Rappaport—to tackle this conversation from different viewpoints. Our conversation examined the role of formerly incarcerated people in the protests, police reform and calls to “defund the police,” and how young people are making them hopeful about the future.

What happens to the world after a pandemic? Lots of experts have been talking about what we may be able to expect after COVID-19 from the 1918 Spanish flu and The Black Death. But, as any historian will tell, history is often more complicated than people think.

Ada Palmer is an associate professor of Early Modern European History at the University of Chicago and an expert on the Renaissance that followed the Black Death. But she says the “Golden Age” may not have been as golden as we think. On this episode, she clearly explains what lessons for coronavirus we can really learn from historic pandemics.

Our society has always relied on leaders to effectively manage crises. But with the COVID-19 pandemic ravaging society, it’s more important than ever to understand what effective leadership should look like right now.

Daniel Diermeier is the former provost of the University of Chicago and the recently appointed chancellor of Vanderbilt University. But he’s also a world-renowned crisis management scholar. On this episode, he shares his expertise on how business and political leadership should be managing this crisis.

The coronavirus pandemic has taken a toll on our students. As we move into the summer, schools will need to understand the best way to address these issues.To understand what students have lost and how schools can help them recover, there’s no better person to talk to than Elaine Allensworth, the director of the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research. On this episode, she explains what the best research tells us about education during this crisis.

The coronavirus pandemic has laid bare the most profound challenges in our world. One of the most prominent has been governmental dysfunction. As director for the Center For Effective Government at the , this is an issue close to Prof. William Howell’s work.

So far, experts have largely wanted to focus on the actions of President Trump during this pandemic, but Howell says governmental ineffectiveness goes beyond just the president. It’s rooted deep in our political incentives and institutions.

One of the most tragic aspects of the coronavirus outbreak has been the disproportionate effect COVID-19 has had on communities of color in cities around the country.

Assoc. Prof. Monica Peek of the University of Chicago Medicine has dedicated her practice and career to studying racial health disparities. Her research, and the work of many others, has shown that many diseases and chronic conditions disproportionately affect communities of color. Coronavirus is no exception.

The coronavirus outbreak has devastated many sectors of our society, and brought many of the issues we were facing before the pandemic to the forefront. This is especially true of health care.

Prof. Katherine Baicker is a leading scholar in the economic analysis of health policy and dean of the Harris School of Public Policy. On this episode, she explains how the coronavirus is revealing how our public and private health systems need to change today and in the future to address this pandemic and the pandemics to come.

Why do we feel empathy for some people, but not others? Where does this feeling of empathy come from? These questions have been the focus of one University of Chicago neurobiologist’s career. And to find answers, Prof. Peggy Mason started studying an unlikely creature: rats.

It turns out that rodents have a lot to teach us about empathy. And the implications of Mason’s work give us important insights into how to tackle some of society’s most difficult problems.

The outbreak of the coronavirus in China is a global tragedy. While much of the attention has been on the disease itself, many global experts have been focusing on the economic side-effects. Some economists are even hinting that the effects on China’s economy could be just as disastrous in the long-term as the disease itself.

You’ve probably seen plenty of stories about how this outbreak could derail China’s economy, but why exactly is that the case and what would that look like on the ground? There’s no better person to put these questions to than Chang-Tai Hsieh, a Professor of Economics at Chicago Booth, a faculty director of the Becker Friedman Institute in China, a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Banks of San Francisco, New York, and Minneapolis, as well as the World Bank's Development Economics Group and the Economic Planning Agency in Japan, and the recipient of the Sun Ye-Fang award for research on the Chinese economy. 

Since its inception following World War II, the Doomsday Clock has measured our time until apocalypse in minutes. This year, for the first time, the clock set our time to midnight in just seconds. Rachel Bronson is the CEO and president of the Bulletin of The Atomic Scientists, the organization that sets the clock. Even though the Clock is a metaphor, she says understanding the meaning behind it is a matter of life and death. 

This year, the Bulletin cited two major factors in their decision: the threat of nuclear destruction and the ever worsening problem of climate change. But are we really closer to nuclear destruction than during the Cold War? And is there any hope that we could turn the hands of doom back on climate change?

Subscribe to Big Brains on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Spotify.

University of Chicago alumnus Bill Browder’s story sounds like the plot of a Hollywood thriller—except it’s all true. He just wanted to be a businessman, but his experience as a foreign investor in Russia would push him to become an international activist.

Today, Browder, AB’85, travels the globe trying to convince countries to adopt a law called the Magnitsky Act, which he says is the future of how we fight human rights abuse. The law is revolutionary in the way it targets these individuals where it hurts: their money.

Subscribe to Big Brains on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Spotify.

University of Chicago economist Luigi Zingales often says that only an immigrant like himself can really appreciate American capitalism. In his native Italy, Zingales says what you know and what you do are far less important that who you know and what you do for them. 

But in the last decade, Zingales says the United States has started to look more and more like the country he left. Now, he’s trying to save American capitalism from itself—and big businesses including Amazon, Facebook and Google.

Subscribe to Big Brains on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Spotify.

In October of 2019, Google announced their supercomputer had reached quantum supremacy. With that announcement, and as we take a short break for the holidays, we thought we should replay a prior Big Brains episode for you with David Awschalom, one of the world's leading quantum scientists.

Awschalom is turning what was once in the realm of science fiction into reality—which could offer revolutionary breakthroughs in communications, digital encryption, sensor technology and even medicine.

Subscribe to Big Brains on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, and Soundcloud.

Every election year, poll after poll tries to predict where millennials stand politically. As we head into 2020, we'd like to replay this episode with Prof. Cathy Cohen who says some of our assumptions about what issues matter to young people are all wrong.

Cohen’s innovative survey of millennials, GenForward, is a first of its kind. By oversampling young people of color, they investigate differences in responses by race and ethnicity. The data she’s collected gives us a unique window into what millennials are thinking and what they might do in the 2020 election.

Subscribe to Big Brains on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, and Soundcloud.

It’s a simple question to ask, but seems impossible to answer: What causes one nation to succeed and another to fail? What exactly are the origins of global inequality?

There are few people who have spent more time trying to answer this question than Prof. James Robinson. Robinson’ first book, Why Nations Fail, was an international best-seller. It laid out in clear and stark terms what the origins of prosperity and poverty really are. Now, he’s written a sequel, The Narrow Corridor, which further explains what ingredients you need to create a prosperous nation.

Subscribe to Big Brains on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Spotify.

Since the beginning of human history, we’ve looked up at the stars and wondered: Are we alone? No other generation has been able to find an answer, but David Charbonneau thinks we may be the first. He’s an astronomer at Harvard University and a recipient of an honorary degree from the University of Chicago this year.

Charbonneau has made it his life’s goal to search the stars for habitable planets and alien life. On this episode, he tells his fascinating story about the history of exoplanetary research, his journey as a planet hunter and the stunning discoveries he’s made along the way.

Subscribe to Big Brains on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Spotify.

For most Americans, the driving force in their personal and public life is a desire to attain the “good life”. But what if our attachment to that desire is the very thing holding us back? Lauren Berlant is a theorist and English professor at the University of Chicago and the author of “Cruel Optimism” a book about when you're attached to forms of life that fundamentally get in the way of the attachment you brought to them.

Berlant has been writing about finding attachment and belonging in America her entire career. But she says the Presidency of Donald Trump has completely shattered our understanding of what it means to have a public and a shared connection as citizens. But she wants to try and reshape things.

• Lauren Berlant episode show notes and full transcript
• Read more about Berlant's literary works

Talk to Big Brains on Twitter: @BigBrainsUC

Find more Big Brains transcript and show notes here: https://news.uchicago.edu/podcasts/big-brains

Subscribe to Big Brains on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Spotify.

In the last decade, there has been a mass migration of people into urban areas across the globe. This rapid urbanization has been increasingly unsustainable for our cities and it’s projected to get worse in the next decade. 

University of Chicago scholar Luis Bettencourt is tackling this global crisis by researching the underlying processes that dictate our cities. If you can understand the numbers, you can create models for the sustainable cities our planet needs. He’s starting by mapping a million neighborhoods.

Subscribe to Big Brains on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Spotify.

If you could have any superpower, what would it be? Most people say they’d want to read minds. But Prof. Nicholas Epley of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business says you already have that power: You just need to use it.

Epley’s research has focused on the ways our minds understand, or fail to understand each other. Now, he’s expanded that research to look into why talking to strangers may be the key to better well-being, even if it’s difficult.

Subscribe to Big Brains on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Spotify.

It’s been a historic week, with news that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has officially opened an impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump.

There’s no better expert to examine the recent events in Washington than Prof. William Howell, one of the leading scholars on the power of the American presidency. In this episode, he discusses the historical context of impeachment, the Republicans’ response, the inquiry’s effect on the Trump presidency and its potential impact on the 2020 election.

Subscribe to Big Brains on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Spotify.

The looting of the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad became one of the defining moments of the second Iraq War. Christopher Woods, the director of the Oriental Institute, one of the world’s foremost research centers on the ancient Near East, says that in moments like these when archaeology and politics intersect, archaeology becomes a kind of statecraft.

Since the Gulf Wars, archaeologists have been unable to work in Iraq. But, under Woods leadership, the Oriental Institute is returning to excavations in the region. If the looting of the Baghdad museum is on one end of the archaeology as statecraft spectrum, this historic return to Iraq is on the other.

Subscribe to Big Brains on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Spotify.

One of the incredible perks of making a podcast at a place like the University of Chicago is the opportunity to feature some of the incredible guests who speak on our campus. 

This week, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was here for a conversation hosted by Katherine Baicker, dean of the Harris School of Public Policy. On this episode of the Big Brains podcast, please enjoy Justice Ginsburg discussing her history and role on the Supreme Court.

Is it possible that having lunch with your friends is just as important in keeping you alive as exercising? That’s what University of Chicago professor Linda Waite is arguing. Her first of its kind research into social well-being has provided key insights into how our social lives affect our physical health.

The data from Waite’s studies have changed our understanding of what it means to be healthy. Now, she’s insisting that our health care and medical industries need to incorporate social well-being into their practice when treating patients.

If you’ve played Candy Crush, flown on United Airlines, or taken an Uber or Lyft, you’ve been in one of Prof. John List’s experiments without even knowing it. List has revolutionized economics research through his pioneering use of field experiments. A field experiment is conducted in the real world instead of in a lab, testing theories on people in their day-to-day lives.

List’s experiments have changed the world by equipping policymakers with real-world data to address issues like climate change, the gender pay gap, and why inner-city schools fail. But now, he’s warning of a crisis that’s threatening the impact of scientific research: Many studies that claim to tell us something about the world fall apart when you test them on a larger scale. It’s something he calls ‘the scale-up problem.’

We're taking a summer break during July, but we'll be back in August with new episodes telling the stories of leading research with some of the world's greatest minds. During the break, we'll be bringing you updated versions of prior episodes.

The revelation for historian Kathleen Belew came while researching a 1979 anti-Ku Klux Klan rally in Greensboro, North Carolina that turned deadly when five members were murdered by a group of Klansmen and neo-Nazis. 

Belew was struck by the reflection of the killers, some of them Vietnam War veterans.

“They kept saying, ‘Well I shot communists in Vietnam, why wouldn’t I shoot communists in the United States?’” Belew says.

From those comments, Belew’s research has revealed a surprising history of how the Vietnam War created the modern white power movement, a thesis she details in her book, Brining the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America.

On this episode of Big Brains, Belew shares the previously unknown history of the social movement of the white power movement, from the 1970’s through the Oklahoma City bombing, and explains the tools she uses as an historian to better understand the present.  

Subscribe to Big Brains on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, and rate and review the podcast.

Evolutionary biologist Neil Shubin spent six years in the Arctic searching for a fossil that could be a missing link between sea and land animals. Shubin shares the story behind his discovery of Tiktaalik, what it has meant for the understanding of human evolution, and how it has impacted the future of genetic research.

• Neil Shubin episode show notes and full transcript
• Read more about Shubin's discovery of Tiktaalik

Talk to Big Brains on Twitter: @BigBrainsUC

Find more Big Brains transcript and show notes here: https://news.uchicago.edu/podcasts/big-brains

We're taking a summer break during July, but we'll be back in August with new episodes telling the stories of leading research with some of the world's greatest minds. During the break, we'll be bringing you updated versions of prior episodes.

We're taking a summer break during July, but we'll be back in August with new episodes telling the stories of leading research with some of the world's greatest minds. During the break, we'll be bringing you updated versions of prior episodes.

This week, we have a guest episode of the No Jargon podcast. The show is produced by the Scholars Strategy Network and features interviews with America's top researchers on the nation's toughest policy problems. This episode highlights the struggles of working mothers in the US.

If you want to better understand how Trump has forever changed the American presidency, the history of impeachment, or how to fix the dysfunction in our government, it’s best to go to an expert. Prof. William Howell is one of the leading scholars on presidential powers.

On this episode, Howell explains how Trump’s era fits into the larger narratives of the presidency, how the debate around impeachment compares to the past, and he argues why giving more powers to the office could actually make our government more effective.

Subscribe to Big Brains on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Spotify.

UChicago economist Raghuram Rajan became infamous for predicting the 2008 financial collapse three years before it happened.

Rajan says that there are three pillars in our society: the state, the markets and the community. In his new book, he traces the history of how the state and markets have grown, while the community has weakened. He says these pillars need to be brought back to an equilibrium in order to address many of the global issues we face today.

Subscribe to Big Brains on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Spotify.

The “birthers”, “Pizzagate”, anti-vaxxers. Since the election of Donald Trump, it’s seemed that belief in conspiracy theories is on the rise. At the same time, our polarization is worse than ever. People can hardly even maintain a conversation across political or cultural lines. Could the underlying force driving conspiracy theories also be the same one that’s dividing our country?

University of Chicago Political Science Professor Eric Oliver, who’s been studying conspiracy theories for over a decade, says his research shows how one basic tension explains both belief in conspiracy theories and our political divide. Deeper than red or blue, liberal or conservative, we’re actually divided by intuitionists and rationalists.

Subscribe to Big Brains on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Spotify.

Doctor Valluvan Jeevanandam says that transplantation is a “spiritual journey.” One person’s tragic loss leads to the another’s second chance at life. But not all transplants are the same.

In 2018, patients Daru Smith and Sarah McPharlin were both waiting on the donor list for not one but three organs. They were to be only the 16th and 17th triple organ transplant patients. But a shocking coincidence would push their doctors to attempt a medical feat no one has ever attempted.

Subscribe to Big Brains on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Spotify.

When dinosaur hunter and paleontologist Paul Sereno discovered an ancient mass gravesite in the sands of the Sahara, he knew he had to excavate and save that history and heritage.

Sereno has always said paleontology and archeology are adventures with a purpose. If the discovery of that ancient society is his greatest adventures, his new project to bring it back to the people it belongs to could be his greatest purpose.

Subscribe to Big Brains on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Spotify.

Since the late 1800s, if you were serious about studying biology you went to the Marine Biological Laboratory. The discoveries made there have led to world-changing applications in biology, medicine and neurology.

The newly appointed MBL director, Nipam Patel, knows a lot about studying organisms. As one of the world’s leading evolutionary and developmental biologists, his work has help us better understand why it matters to study a diversity of life.

Subscribe to Big Brains on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Spotify.

The development of artificial intelligence has begun to feel inevitable and promising. But University of Chicago computer scientist, Ben Zhao, has spent much of his career testing how the security of these systems can break down.

Zhao’s study involving Yelp reviews generated by A.I. show how these system could be used to distort our perceptions of reality, especially in this era of fake news. And his latest investigation into “backdoors” demonstrates how they could be used to hack crucial systems in dangerous and even deadly ways.

Music used in this episode: BurrowBurrow, Lumber Down, House of Grendel, Tralaga, and Cicle DR Valga by Blue Dot Sessions

Subscribe to Big Brains on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Spotify.

In her book Ghosts In The Schoolyard, University of Chicago scholar Eve Ewing asks a central question about the 2013 mass closings of Chicago Public Schools: If the schools were so bad, why did people fight so hard to save them?

Her investigation is a deep and nuanced investigation of the public school system that reveals important lessons about how we conduct education policy. The conclusions from her work reverberate beyond Chicago.

Subscribe to Big Brains on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Spotify.

Music used in this episode: Building The Sled, Gaddy,Are We Loose Yet, Roundpine,Thoothless Slope, and Children of Lemuelby Blue Dot Sessions

University of Chicago Professor Harold Pollack may be famous for his “financial index card”, but it’s his application of simple solutions to complex issues that’s reshaping how we tackle crime and healthcare.

What can be done to reduce the number of people who end up in jail for failing to appear in court? How can we build a healthcare system that works for everyone? With the Crime Lab and Center for Health Administration Studies, Pollack is developing social impacts through science. 

Every election year, poll after poll tries to predict where millennials stand politically. But Prof. Cathy Cohen of the University of Chicago says some of our assumptions about what issues matter to young people are all wrong.

Cohen’s innovative survey of millennials, GenForward, is a first of its kind. By oversampling young people of color, they investigate differences in responses by race and ethnicity. The data she’s collected gives us a unique window into what millennials are thinking and what they might do in the 2020 election.

Subscribe to Big Brains on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, and Soundcloud.

(Music used in this episode: Baltiby Blue Dot Sessions.)

All around us in the universe, stars and black holes are smashing into each other with tremendous force. These events are so powerful that they literally ripple the fabric of space-time—and these ripples, called gravitational waves, travel hundreds of millions of light-years across the universe.

Prof. Daniel Holz and fellow scientists at LIGO knew that these waves would take us closer to figuring out multiple mysteries about the universe, like its size and age. They were certain that they would be able to build an instrument so sensitive that they could pick up these signals—but not everyone was.

In this time-and-space-bending episode of Big Brains, the UChicago cosmologist talks black holes, proving Einstein’s predictions and the threat of nuclear annihilation.

Subscribe to Big Brains on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, and rate and review the podcast.

Music used in this episode: Cat's Eye by Blue Dot Sessions

The revelation for historian Kathleen Belew came while researching a 1979 anti-Ku Klux Klan rally in Greensboro, North Carolina that turned deadly when five members were murdered by a group of Klansmen and neo-Nazis. 

Belew was struck by the reflection of the killers, some of them Vietnam War veterans.

“They kept saying, ‘Well I shot communists in Vietnam, why wouldn’t I shoot communists in the United States?’” Belew says.

From those comments, Belew’s research has revealed a surprising history of how the Vietnam War created the modern white power movement, a thesis she details in her book, Brining the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America.

On this episode of Big Brains, Belew shares the previously unknown history of the social movement of the white power movement, from the 1970’s through the Oklahoma City bombing, and explains the tools she uses as an historian to better understand the present.  

Subscribe to Big Brains on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, and rate and review the podcast.

Seasons Greetings! Big Brains will return in January 2019 with some very exciting guests.

Until that time, we encourage you to go back and listen to some of our previous episodes — especially if you missed our first six episodes from Season One this summer.

If you're feeling generous this holiday season, we would greatly appreciate your ratings and reviews of the Big Brains podcast on iTunes.

As climate change continues to stir concern and debate around the world, Prof. Michael Greenstone knows the importance of using his research to better explain the connection between the environment, health and global energy. The challenge for he and his colleagues at the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC) is waiting for others to put that information into action.   “I’m in charge of my research, and I’m not in charge of the world,” Greenstone said of Big Brains. “What we can do as scientists is make sure that the information is being articulated as clearly and in an accessible way as possible. It’s ultimately up to societies to judge what they’re going to do with it.”   Greenstone’s work has already had global impact. He and his EPIC colleagues developed a new pollution index that found air pollution cuts the global life expectancy by nearly two years. The Air Quality Life Index establishes air particulate pollution as the single greatest threat to human health globally.   On this episode of Big Brains, the environmental economist discusses how the global energy challenge is one of society’s most important problems and something he calls “the social cost of carbon”—the most important number you’ve never heard of when it comes to climate change.   Subscribe to Big Brains on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Spotify, and rate and review the podcast.

David Axelrod departed Washington, D.C. because he knew it’d be hard to top his role in helping Barack Obama make history.

But when the president’s former senior adviser began the next chapter in his illustrious career, he looked to his alma mater to make an impact.

Axelrod, AB’76, founded the non-partisan Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago in 2012. In the years since, Axelrod has helped build upon the University’s tradition of wide-ranging debate by welcoming guests ranging from Senator Bernie Sanders to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to UN Ambassador Nikki Haley. He’s also interviewed hundreds of celebrities and politicians—most recently, President Obama—as host of the “Axe Files” podcast.

But as he said on Big Brains, Axelrod takes the most satisfaction in helping inspire UChicago students to get involved in public service and politics.

“I go home feeling optimistic every day. These are trying times, and there are a lot of reasons to be concerned about the future,” Axelrod said, “I feel much better about the future having spent all this time with these young people who are skeptical but they’re not cynical, and they believe they have a role to play in the world.”

On this episode of Big Brains, Axelrod discusses the 2018 midterms, how seeing JFK at age 5 inspired a career in politics, and how today’s divisive political climate emerged following Obama’s 2008 election.

When Prof. Dana Suskind first began implanting devices called cochlear implants on babies who couldn’t hear, she quickly noticed something about her patients.

“The cochlear implant would allow sound to go to a child’s brain, but something else was needed to make those sounds have meaning.”

Suskind observed that many of her patients struggled to develop language because their parents didn’t talk to them as much. It was a revelation that inspired her to found the Thirty Million Words Initiative, which aims to narrow that achievement gap. The program has since led to a best-selling book and most recently, a community partnership that will test these innovative ideas on a national scale.

On this episode of Big Brains, Suskind discusses her transformation from surgeon to social scientist, how auditing a UChicago class shaped her work, and simple advice for parents and care-givers to teach kids from day one.

Neuroscientist Bobby Kasthuri wants to do the near impossible: map the entire human brain.

That means identifying each of the trillions of neural connections that exist inside the mind—a number bigger than the stars in the Milky Way galaxy. His success could mean understanding ourselves unlike ever before.

“I want to turn anatomy of the structure of the brain into what we did for the genome,” Kasthuri says. A scientist at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory, he believes a map of neurons could tell us everything that makes a human being unique—from an individual’s memories and dreams, to a more intricate understanding of mental illness.

On this episode of Big Brains, Kasthuri explains how high-powered microscopes and supercomputers help him study the brains of mice, what makes humans distinct from all other living creatures and why the term “dim bulb” is more accurate than you think.     

Subscribe to Big Brains on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, and rate and review the podcast.

David Awschalom is one of the world’s leading scientists studying the growing field of quantum engineering, turning what was once in the realm of science fiction into reality—which could offer revolutionary breakthroughs in communications, digital encryption, sensor technology and even medicine.

Studying the smallest elements in the universe is challenging on a number of levels, since quantum particles defy the laws of traditional physics.

“The behavior of these tiny pieces is unlike anything we see in our world,” Awschalom said. “If I pull a wagon, you know how it’s going to move. But at the atomic world, things don’t work that way. Wagons can go through walls; wagons can be entangled and share information that is hard to separate.”

On this episode of Big Brains, Awschalom shares how these unusual rules are leading to new technologies, why government and business are so interested in these breakthroughs, and how he’s helping to train a new generation of quantum engineers.

Subscribe to Big Brains on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, and rate and review the podcast.

As president of the University of Chicago, Robert J. Zimmer has a unique view to the challenges and opportunities facing higher education, and one of the biggest obstacles he sees is access for all students. While private institutions continue to offer greater financial support, Zimmer believes government and public institutions now need to do their part. 

“Is the country going to invest in the future of young people, or is it not? And is it going to provide access to higher education for people from all sorts of financial backgrounds? I think this is so important to the future of the country,” says Zimmer, who is also one of the leading champions of free expression on college campuses.

On this episode of Big Brains, Zimmer how a scholarly career in mathematics fostered his deep ties to the University; his efforts to expand the sciences (including engineering) and arts and humanities; and developments for UChicago around the world, including a new center in Hong Kong.

Subscribe to Big Brains on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and Spotify, and rate and review the podcast.

UChicago Law professor Claudia Flores has spent a career advocating for human rights of vulnerable populations around the world, from East Timor to Mexico.

But her latest work revealed the hidden abuse of migrant children detained at the U.S. border and separated from their parents in a report titled, “I’m going to take you back to the river so you can die.”

Flores discusses her report produced in partnership with the ACLU, the history and future of immigration policy in the U.S., and her career as a human rights advocate.

UChicago Law professor Geoffrey Stone has an intimate knowledge of the Supreme Court.

From his time as a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan where he witnessed the decision Roe v. Wade firsthand, to his decades writing on issues of free speech, to helping shape the University of Chicago’s own policy on free expression, Stone is an expert when it comes to the First Amendment.

But in all his years studying the highest court in the United States, Stone says he has never been more pessimistic for where the judiciary branch is headed.

Stone discusses the current state of the court, the forgotten history of Roe v. Wade, and free speech on college campuses on this episode of Big Brains.

A special Convocation edition podcast from the UChicago Podcast Network, featuring the full speeches given by Class Day speaker Valerie Jarrett, distinguished senior fellow in the University of Chicago Law School former senior adviser to President Obama; and Marianne Bertrand, the Chris P. Dialynas Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.   

A special Convocation edition podcast from the UChicago Podcast Network, featuring an interview with student speaker Andrea Popova, followed by the complete speeches from Andrea and fellow graduates Mark Meyer and Priscilla Daboni.

Richard Thaler has been dubbed one of the "founding fathers" of behavioral economics, bridging the gap between psychology and economics, and in 2017 he received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his work. 

It has been a long and unusual journey for Thaler, who has made a career out of disrupting economic assumptions, as well as writing two best-selling books and appearing in the 2015 Oscar-nominated film "The Big Short."

On this episode of Big Brains, Thaler discusses how a bowl of cashews inspired his early research, how psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky influenced his career, and what it’s like to get (and miss) a 4 a.m. Nobel wake-up call from Sweden.  

Subscribe to Big Brains on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and learn more at news.uchicago.edu.

When UChicago alumnus Michael Polsky first ventured into the field of renewable energy in 2003 with his company Invenergy, he thought they had missed the boat.

“When we got into renewables in earnest, I thought we were too late,” said Polsky, MBA’87, believing people were well ahead of him in building clean energy projects. Today, he said we’re barely in “the third inning” of the renewables game.

The founder and CEO of Invenergy, one of the largest renewables company in North America, Polsky, believes it’s not a question of if but when the United States becomes completely energy independent of fossil fuels.

It’s a seemingly unexpected turn for the former power plant engineer who arrived in the U.S. from the Soviet Ukraine in the 1970s and began his career designing power plants.

On this episode of Big Brains, Polsky discusses his early days in the energy field, his current project to build one of the largest wind farms in the world, and why he believes in the power of innovation.   

Subscribe to Big Brains on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and Google Play, and learn more at news.uchicago.edu.

Wendy Freedman spent part of her career measuring the age of the universe. Now she’s working on a project that may very well give scientists a chance to glimpse into its birth.  

Freedman, the John & Marion Sullivan University Professor of Astronomy & Astrophysics, works in the field of observational cosmology, measuring the expansion rate of the universe. In 2001, she and a team of scientists found that the universe is around 13.7 billion years old—far more precise than the previous estimate in the 10- to 20-billion-year-old range.

Freedman was the founding leader from 2003 until 2015 of an international consortium of researchers and universities (including UChicago) to build the world’s largest telescope high in the mountains of Chile. The Giant Magellan Telescope will be as tall as the Statue of Liberty when complete, and ten times more powerful than the Hubble Space Telescope—with the ability to look back at the dawn of the cosmos.

On this episode of Big Brains, Freedman discusses her research on measuring the age of the universe, her leadership of the Giant Magellan Telescope and the search for life outside our solar system.   

Subscribe to Big Brains on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and Google Play, and learn more at news.uchicago.edu

From the smallest proteins of cells to entire ecosystems, nature might be the most sophisticated engineer on earth.

Researchers like UChicago molecular biologist Rama Ranganathan are trying to uncover the basic design principles that govern biology and apply them to human engineering. He calls the field “evolutionary physics,” and the goal is to unlock the secrets of evolutionary history.      

On this episode of Big Brains, Ranganathan shares his pioneering research on evolutionary physics, and explains why he believes biology is at a similar point today as engineering was two centuries ago during the Industrial Revolution. 

Subscribe to Big Brains on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and RadioPublic. Learn more at news.uchicago.edu

To say Augusta Read Thomas is prolific is an understatement.

A past Grammy Award winner and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Music, Thomas has been hailed as “a true virtuoso composer” by The New Yorker, and her work has been performed more than almost any other living composer.

Thomas, the University Professor of Composition in the Department of Music and the College, champions classical music as co-curator of the Chicago Ear Taxi Festival and works with new musicians as founder and director of the UChicago Center for Contemporary Composition.    

On this episode of Big Brains, Thomas gives a glimpse into the creative process of a world-class composer, discusses the state of classical music today and how she helps train the next generation of composers.  

Subscribe to Big Brains on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and RadioPublic, and learn more at news.uchicago.edu

Health care expansion. It's one of the most contentious issues in American politics. Katherine Baicker is Dean of the Harris School at the University of Chicago and one of the leading scholars on the economics of health care. Her research from the groundbreaking Oregon Medicaid Experiment has helped uncover the true costs and benefits of health care expansion.

On this episode of Big Brains, Baicker shares the findings from the Oregon Experiment, and provides insights into how to improve health care for all. 

Big Brains is available on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and Google Play. Learn more at news.uchicago.edu

Evolutionary biologist Neil Shubin spent six years in the Arctic searching for a fossil that could be a missing link between sea and land animals. In 2004, Shubin discovered Tiktaalik roseae, a 375-million-year old creature that was part fish, part land-living animal.

On this episode of Big Brains, Shubin shares the story behind his discovery of Tiktaalik, what it has meant for the understanding of human evolution, and how it has impacted the future of genetic research.

Subscribe to Big Brains on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and Google Play, and learn more at news.uchicago.edu.

Big Brains tells the stories behind the pioneering research and breakthroughs reshaping our world. The show is produced out of the University of Chicago and hosted by Paul Rand.