Science for the People

Join the team of Science for the People for one last episode, where we interview... ourselves. We talk about our time as Skeptically Speaking and Science for the People, the rebranding, our favourite episodes, how the podcast has changed us, and what it's been like to be a science podcast from 2009 to 2023. To our listeners: thank you all for sticking with us all these years, for supporting us, and most importantly for listening. We hope you'll continue to ask questions, to support science, and to think critically about the world around you. It's been an honour and a...

Join the team of Science for the People for one last episode, where we interview... ourselves. We talk about our time as Skeptically Speaking and Science for the People, the rebranding, our favourite episodes, how the podcast has changed us, and what it's been like to be a science podcast from 2009 to 2023. To our listeners: thank you all for sticking with us all these years, for supporting us, and most importantly for listening. We hope you'll continue to ask questions, to support science, and to think critically about the world around you. It's been an honour and a...

For the last time, Bethany and Rachelle skip gleefully across the world wide web, plucking nerdy objects out of obscurity to shine a spotlight on in hopes a few of these fascinating, delightful things find their way into the right kind of geeky forever-home. Maybe there's someone in your life one of these things would be perfect for, and we've just solved your holiday gift-buying dilemma! Maybe there's something in this list you fall in love with and pass along as ideas to people looking to buy gifts for you. Or maybe, just maybe, you decide it's time to get...

For the last time, Joanne Manaster and John Dupuis talk us through their favourite science reads from the last year, and add a little "time travel" seasoning in to keep things interesting, harkening back to old favs as well as talking about the best of the best from 2023. As always, we've got our companion blog post ready with the full book list, including links to Amazon where you can find more information. Happy reading!

Period. Menstruation. For something that roughly half the human population does, we sure don't talk about it much. But it's a fascinating biological phenomenon with a really interesting history, and the potential for a better future. We're talking with anthropologist Kate Clancy about her book Period: The Real Story of Menstruation.

If you're plugged in to science news (and you, our listeners, definitely are) then you know that psychedelics like ketamine and LSD are having a moment in therapy. But what about Ecstasy (MDMA)? What makes it different, and what could it do? This week we talk with Rachel Nuwer about her new book I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World.

In the beginning, way, way back in 2008, this podcast was just a bunch of Canadians wanting to talk about science and skepticism. Nearly 15 years later, we've spread out all over the globe, spoken to famous writers and scientists the world over, and satisfied so many of our curiosities! We've talked about the things we want to talk about. Now, it's time for someone else to step into our shoes.

We might say climate change is coming for us. But really, it's here. Fires are worse in hotter, drier conditions. Hurricanes are powered up supersoaking storms. Even tides are now rising into the streets and the beautiful oceanfront property we always wanted isn't looking so good. It's easy to feel despair, because no one individual thing will solve this problem. But where individuals will collapse, communities can build. This week we're talking with Madeline Ostrander about her book, At Home on an Unruly Planet: Finding refuge on a changed earth.

In the book Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet, journalist Ben Goldfarb details how roads have transformed our world. On this week’s show, Ben shares insights from his reporting on the science of studying how roads interact with animals and ecosystems. He recounts tales of tallying roadkill, scooping up stranded frogs, and visiting the roadkill capital of the world. Along with discussing the problems wrought by roads, Ben shares how efforts to help animals, such as wildlife crossings, have fared. And we talk about what roads reveal about people and our societies.

We all know that climate change is coming for us. It's already here. But it's really, really hard to change people's actions, especially when those actions don't benefit the here and now, but matter most for the future. They require long views of time, the ability to not just imagine, but to care about people in the future. Why don't we do that now, and how do we get there? We're talking with Richard Fisher, author of The Long View: Why We Need to Transform How the World Sees Time.

Ice is one of those invisible little gears of the modern, westernized world. We don't notice it when we have it, and as soon as we can't get it we find ourselves desperate to get it back. It wasn't always like this: ice started as a luxury of more northern climates, and the story of how it became more ubiquitous -- including in southern climates where natural ice is rare to non-existant -- is a fascinating one. We speak to writer and author Amy Brady about her new book "Ice: From Mixed Drinks to Skating Rinks - a Cool History...

You are what you eat, right? Well then, who were the ancient Romans, and who were the people they colonized? And who are we? And why do we eat so much chicken? This week we're sitting down with Silvia Valenzuela Lamas to talk about how Roman colonization changed both the animals people raised and how people ate them. We're also talking with Richard Thomas about chickens, and how our taste for it may be one of the most enduring things we leave behind. Links: Richard Thomas: The Broiler Chicken as a signal of a human reconfigured biosphere. Silvia Valenzuela-Lamas:...

In his book Tenacious Beasts, philosopher and writer Christopher Preston explores creature comebacks. Some of these stories highlight the evolutionary advantages that animals have racked up over millennia, while others are marked by intensive human intervention. Along the way, Preston opens some big questions about conservation dilemmas, such as what to do when helping one species means harming another. Amidst the bad news about biodiversity loss, Tenacious Beasts brings snippets of hope and lessons learned from animals such as beavers, bison and humpback whales. On this week’s show, Christopher shares about these animal recoveries, insights collected from Indigenous communities and...

A lot of us learned basic ecology in primary school. Maybe we took a biology class in high school or secondary school and dug in a little more. We use terms like "niche" but do we really know what they mean? How much complexity does that little word cover, if you start to unpick it? We are joined by Tim Blackburn, Professor of Invasion Biology at University College London and author of the book "The Jewel Box: How Moths Illuminate Nature's Hidden Rules", where he combines his years of working in the field of ecology with his love for catching...

Birds carry out some of the most amazing feats of athleticism in the world. Hummingbirds cross the entire Gulf of Mexico, their tiny wings beating continuously for three days straight. A single bird will fly across the entire Pacific ocean in one go. What do we really know about bird migration, and how do we know it? This week we're talking with Rebecca Heisman about her new book: Flight Paths: How a Passionate and Quirky Group of Pioneering Scientists Solved the Mystery of Bird Migration.

In 1938, two botanists, Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter, made an ambitious voyage down the Colorado River driven by the desire to chronicle the plant life of the American Southwest. In her new book Brave the Wild River, science journalist Melissa Sevigny traces their expedition through the Grand Canyon, which led them through seething rapids and the occasional mishap. Journalists of the day gawked at their gender and the pair were forced to pick up chores labeled as “women’s work." Still, they managed to collect hundreds of plants that hadn't yet been catalogued by researchers. Their observations about desert ecosystems...

Humans are a roaming species. We've been traveling from continent to continent since our very earliest evolution. In fact, we've been doing it even before we were humans. This week, we're talking with archaeologist Radu Iovita about the ancient silk road, a travel network that was in use tens of thousands of years ago, and we speak with archaeologist Elroy White and anthropologist Alisha Gauvreau about what the oral histories of Indigenous people have to say about North American settlement and how archaeologists are working with First Nations to confirm those histories. REFERENCES Rodriguez A, Yanamandra K, Witek L, Wang...

Is there an insect more universally despised than the wasp? What have they done to incur so much of our ire? No one likes them. Well... almost no one. Seirian Sumner, Professor of Behavioural Ecology at University College London and cofounder of the Big Wasp Survey, is on a mission to improve the wasp's PR with her book "Endless Forms: Why We Should Love Wasps". She joins us to talk about the fascinating biology and behaviour of wasps and their societies, and how we can learn to better coexist with the wasp, thinking of it less as pest and more...

Do you believe there's something Out There? What do our ideas of aliens say about what life is, how life could look and act? And what does it say about us, about what we think life needs, wants, and should be? We're talking with Jaime Green about her new book: The Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination, and Our Quest for Kinship in the Cosmos.

With fertilizers that supply phosphorus–what Asimov called “life’s bottleneck”– people broke the circle of life. Dan Egan’s new book The Devil’s Element traces the history of this essential element from curiosity to crop miracle. Egan documents the mayhem unleashed by a flood of phosphorus, from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico and discusses how people can act to stop phosphorus-fueled blooms of algae that are closing beaches, killing animals and sickening people.

Thousands of years ago, people crossed a land bridge from Siberia to Western Alaska and dispersed southward into what we now call the Americas. The story of exactly when that was, how they did it, and who they were has fascinated us for a long time as excavations have uncovered pieces of those stories. University of Kansas Associate Professor of Anthropology Jennifer Raff joins us to talk about her book "Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas", digging into the ways modern genetics is being used to help us understand the history of people dispersing across the Americas. Along the...

Give a cluck about chickens. The most popular meat actually has a 3,500 year history of cockfighting, backyard keeping, incubation invention, and a lot of scrambled eggs. And now, people are keeping them in their backyards as pets. How did we get here, and what changes have we made to the bird formerly known as the Asian Jungle Fowl? We're talking with Tove Danovich, author of the new book Under the Henfluence: Inside the World of Backyard Chickens and the People Who Love Them. For more on the rise of the domestic chicken, make sure to check out our previous...

Sea creatures do so many things that astound us. They regrow and regenerate, they incubate eggs for years without ever eating a morsel. They can be one big individual one moment, and a multicelled colony the next. And writers like Sabrina Imbler don't see these differences from us as alien, but as jumping off points to explore selfhood, development, life and death in their new book; How Far The Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures.

In the past 120 years, physicists have revamped our understanding of matter — of everything that makes up the world. This week on the show, particle physicist Suzie Sheehy takes us on a tour through a cosmos of physics experiments that have revealed the nature of the atom and unveiled particles that exist outside of it. We’ll hear the tales of adventurous experiments and intrepid experimenters, including ones who didn’t receive their due. And along the way, we’ll learn about the ways that particle physics touches our everyday lives.

In January 2020 a race began to identify, control, and understand a novel coronavirus that quickly spread around the world creating a global pandemic. In his most recent book "Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus", writer David Quammen takes us back to those first days, weeks, months and years, putting us behind the shoulders of some of those first scientists as they try to reckon with the new Covid-19 virus. This week, we learn more about his experiencing of writing about the pandemic during the pandemic, how information about the virus spread through the scientific community, how...

Humans are musical. Really, really musical. But why? What is it for, how did it come about, and what do we get from it? Let's get between the science and the hype (Mozart is not going to make you smarter) with Adriana Barton and her book: Wired for Music: A search for Health and Joy through the Science of Sound.

On this week’s show, we’re getting emotional. Our guest, neuroscientist Dean Burnett, talks about his new book Emotional Ignorance. He shares how the experience of his father’s death during covid prompted him to take on his emotions by writing about them. We talk about the sad, such as why people cry, but also travel across a wide range of emotions including strange emotional experiences such as nightmares. And we dive into the complexity of emotions, from defining them to how they arise in the brain and connections with the body.

Let's talk about sex, baby. Let's talk about birds and bees. Let's talk about all the slime molds and the algae that can be, let's talk about sex. This week we are talking about the history of sex, where it came from, what it is, who has it, and why people are always trying to tell others they are not allowed to do it. We're getting down and dirty with Rachel Feltman and their new book, Been There, Done That: A Rousing History of Sex.

John Dupuis and Joanne Manaster join host Rachelle Saunders in what might be our most favourite and longest-running December tradition: science book recommendations! We've brought our book mavens back to talk about their 2022 science book highlights and give us a sneak peak at what they're looking forward to reading next year. As always, we've got our companion blog post ready with the full book list (plus some extras) with links to Amazon where you can find more information. Happy reading!

It's that time of year when Rachelle spends far too much time finding strange and wonderful new clocks, Bethany adds more mugs to her collection, and together we spend some time embracing our inner holiday-consumer and getting excited about lots of wonderful, delightful, charming and (sometimes) weird things you might get the geeks in your life. As always, you can find a blog post companion to this episode with links to everything we discussed in this episode. And if that's still not enough to satisfy your nerdy gift-giving needs, you can always check out our full Bookshelf here, or take...

We all know what a "pest" is. We can all point to creatures that are pests in our neighborhoods, those invasive hard-to-get-rid-of, disruptive animals that civilization seems to be in constant battle with. The rats, the racoons, the pigeons... But what makes them pests, really? Who decides? And what about other animals that are pests to some - cats, elephants, and deer for example - but not to others? Rachelle Saunders speaks with our very own Bethany Brookshire about her new book "Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains" and explore how our very human problem with pests is really more...

Number 2. Poop. Crap. Doodoo. It's something that a lot of people just want to flush and forget, but others want to talk about it. Do they poop too much? Not enough? Easily enough? Not only can poop tell us about ourselves and our health, though, it could also doo much more. Feces can fertilize our crops, and with the right processing, toilet water can be refreshing. All we need to do is rethink our relationship with poo. This week we sit down with Bryn Nelson to talk about his new book Flush: The Remarkable Science of an Unlikely Treasure....

Usually when we talk about electricity we're talking about the technology that runs the modern world, but electricity is a lot more integral to our existance than making our tech work. Without electricty our bodies don't know how to move, see or hear, and the history of how we came to understand what electricity is and what it can do is wrapped up in our exploration of biology. Rachelle Saunders speaks with Tim Jorgensen, author of the new book "Spark: The Life of Electricity and the Electricity of Life", about the intertwined nature of electricity and life and how we...

The word "poaching" conjures images of elephants, tigers and pangolins. But there's a multi-billion dollar industry in poaching...trees. It might seem ok at first, trees grow back right? But it's so much more complicated than that. Today we're talking with Lyndsie Bourgon about her new book Tree Thieves: Crime and Survival in North America's Woods.

It seems like no one vaccine is ever enough. COVID mutates and the vaccines fall short. A new flu vaccine every year, and each one different from the last. Wouldn't it be nice if we just could get one? One flu shot and call it done? One COVID vaccine and make everything better? Well, scientists are trying their best to develop universal vaccines--one vaccine for the flu, one for COVID, and some for...worms? Yes. Worms. This week, we chat with Kawsar Talaat, an infectious diseases researcher at Johns Hopkins University, and Maria Elena Bottozzi, co-director of the vaccine center at...

Television dramas make it seem like easy work for forensic investigators to determine when a person has died. But figuring out the time since death can be tricky for bodies that have weathered away to mere skeletons. This week we’re talking with forensic scientist and molecular biotechnologist Noemi Procopio about how proteins in bones could help. Procopio’s lab is looking for markers in bones that reveal a person’s age at death, how long it’s been since they died and the environment a body has been in. She also shares about her experience working on body farms scraping clues from bones....

Sharks are fascinating, often misunderstood creatures, and many of them are threatened or endangered, and they definitely deserve our conservation effort. But conservation effort takes time, money, and focused attention: all things that are limited resources, as much as we might wish they weren't. So how do we focus our conservation efforst to make the biggest real impact for sharks (and other creatures) in an evidence-based way? We speak with interdisciplinary marine conservation biologist and author David Shiffman about his new book "Why Sharks Matter: A Deep Dive with the World's Most Misunderstood Predator", and dig deep into the ins...

Even the luckiest and healthiest of us will interact with the medical systems we live in eventually, and navigating these systems can be frustrating, scary, and intimidating. In this labyrinth filled with jargon, bureaucracy, and opaque layers of expertise we often don't understand, we expect to have some control over what happens to our bodies and to get a say in opting in or out of what treatments are offered, in particular if they are experimental. But this assumption does not always hold true, and we are not always aware of when our ability consent to medical research has been...

There's no doubt that we humans have done some pretty awful things to our landscapes. Draining swamps, cutting down forests, shooting almost all the bison. Now, there are movements to preserve, conserve and bring those landscapes back. But for whom? Who benefits? This week we are talking to Laura Martin, author of the book Wild by Design: The Rise of Ecological Restoration about the often colonizing history of ecological restoration, and what that means for its future.

This week we’re zooming in on surfaces, where lots of action happens as things slip, grip, slide, and more. Our guest Laurie Winkless, author of the book "Sticky: The Secret Science of Surfaces", takes us on a tour of these in-between spaces, delving into what’s going on with atoms and molecules and how that plays out in nature and the engineered world.

In 2022 it seems surgery can perform miracles. Plastic surgery in particular can reshape noses, jaws, and even transplant entire faces. But not so long ago, plastic surgery as a field didn't even exist. This week, we're going back to the trenches of World War I to learn about the birth of plastic surgery in Lindsey Fitzharris' new book: The Facemaker: A Visionary Surgeon's Battle to Mend the Disfigured Faces of World War I. We'll go ahead and warn you not to listen while eating.

The thing about humans is that, as a social species, we work with other people. And this means we often, consciously or unconsciously, end up being awful to each other. If you are someone who is marginalized in the workplace--something that often happens to people of color, LGBTQIA+ people, people with disabilities and white women--how do you deal? The advice to lean in, put your head down and do the work, it's just not working. This week, we're talking with Alan Henry about his new guide to getting ahead as a marginalized person at work with his new book, Seen,...

Most people know how the age of dinosaurs ended. An asteroid hit and all the dinosaurs died out. But it's never quite that simple. In her newest book, The Last Days of the Dinosaurs: An Asteroid, Extinction, and the Beginning of Our World, Riley Black describes what the immediate post-impact world looked like, and what it would become.

Vagina. Clitoris. Uterus. Ovary. These are body parts that about half the population is born with. And yet, there are so many questions about them that scientists have never answered. But there's also more new science about the vagina than you've ever, ever dreamed. We're talking with Rachel Gross about her new book Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Journey.

Mental illness is being discussed openly and publicly more than it ever has been, but our understanding of what it is and its impacts are still a work-in-progress. What is mental illness and how do we distinguish it from the expected suffering that comes from being human? How has the public discussion around mental illness impacted our language, sometimes mixing together clinical language and colloquial language in complicated, confusing ways? We speak with academic psychologist Lucy Foulkes about her book "Losing Our Minds: What Mental Illness Really Is - And Isn't" and dig into the complexity of what mental illness...

I'm sure we've all heard the phrase 'supply chain disruption' by now. It might bring to mind ships floating outside LA or trucks jackknifed across a highway in the snow. But it's far, far more than that. Get ready for miles of conveyor belts and the largest robot in the world. Christopher Mims is here to talk about his book Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy.

Choosing a career path is a big decision. In the modern western world a career is practically synonymous with identity: whether we like it our not, what we do is a big part of who we are. And we are told to choose a career carefully, to find and follow our passion. But what is passion in this context? And why should we follow it? Does following passion into a career path leave us happier? Leave us on more sturdy footing in our life and career? Who gets ahead and who gets left behind when we all chase passion to...

Intent on improving your creativity or focus? Want to raise your IQ? What does that even mean? This week, we've got Emily Willingham back on the show to talk about tailoring the brain with science: The good, the bad, and the totally not proven. We're talking about her new book The Tailored Brain: From Ketamine, to Keto, to Companionship: A user's guide to feeling better and thinking smarter.

In Handmade: A Scientist’s Search for Meaning Through Making, author Anna Ploszajski takes her experience of materials science out of the lab and into the world of craftspeople. Ploszajski's quest to fashion a broader perspective on stuff surpasses the dry and academic. In her book, Anna brings readers along through an exploration of materials ancient and modern, bringing out the ways that matter intersects with society and identity. On the show, we’ll talk about matter from glass to human hair, and we'll hear about the entwined history of some materials and how they have shaped history.

2021 has vanished, sucked into the black hole created by 2020. But while the pandemic continues, we are steadily climbing our way out. And what better way to gain momentum than to look forward at where science might be going? We’ve looking from the tiniest parts of the human body to the vast expanse of space to find out where we are going. Related Links: Floods Have Swamped the US. The Next Health Problem: Mold Covid Protections Kept Other Viruses at Bay. Now They’re Back As Covid Cases Rise, So Do Hospital-Related Infections Another Global Pandemic is Spreading - Among...

We often think the practices of science and academics as a western-European invention, and while both science and the academy have created a lot of positive knowledge, it's important to take a step back and recognize the blind spots of science that come from European ways of thinking about the world, and to see how academics can disadvantage people who don't align with that worldview. We speak to Ray Pierotti, Associate Professor in the department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Kansas, about his book "Indigenous Knowledge, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology" to help us better understand how...