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The Year in Biology

December 18, 2024

Biologists used artificial intelligence to make discoveries about molecules and the brain, and overturned long-held assumptions about the immune system and RNA.

How Is Cell Death Essential to Life?

December 5, 2024

Cells in our bodies are constantly dying — and these countless tiny deaths are essential to human health and multicellular life itself. In this episode, co-host Steven Strogatz speaks with cellular biologist Shai Shaham about what makes a cell “alive” and the latest developments in understanding how and why cells die.

Fish Have a Brain Microbiome. Could Humans Have One Too?

December 2, 2024

The discovery that other vertebrates have healthy, microbial brains is fueling the still controversial possibility that we might have them as well.

What Can Birdsong Teach Us About Human Language?

November 21, 2024

We often consider spoken language to be a feature that distinguishes humans from other forms of animal life. Brain research, however, suggests that other creatures — including certain birds — share some of our neural circuitry related to language. In this episode, co-host Janna Levin explores the origins and underlying mechanisms of human speech and birdsong with neurobiologist and geneticist Erich Jarvis.

All Life on Earth Today Descended From a Single Cell. Meet LUCA.

November 20, 2024

The clearest picture yet of our “last universal common ancestor” suggests it was a relatively complex organism living 4.2 billion years ago, a time long considered too harsh for life to flourish.

Q&A

He’s Gleaning the Design Rules of Life to Re-Create It

November 4, 2024

Yizhi “Patrick” Cai is coordinating a global effort to write a complete synthetic yeast genome. If he succeeds, the resulting cell will be the artificial life most closely related to humans to date.

Meet the Eukaryote, the First Cell to Get Organized

October 28, 2024

All modern multicellular life — all life that any of us regularly see — is made of cells with a knack for compartmentalization. Recent discoveries are revealing how the first eukaryote got its start.

Why Is It So Hard to Define a Species?

October 24, 2024

The idea of a species is fundamental to the way that many people understand the structure of life on Earth. But ask 10 specialists how they define the concept and you might get 10 answers. In this episode, co-host Janna Levin speaks with evolutionary biologist Kevin de Queiroz about what makes defining and delineating species such a slippery process, and why it matters to our understanding of both evolution and conservation.

How the Human Brain Contends With the Strangeness of Zero

October 18, 2024

Zero, which was invented late in history, is special among numbers. New studies are uncovering how the brain creates something out of nothing.

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