“The Joy of Why” is a Quanta Magazine podcast about curiosity and the pursuit of knowledge. The mathematician and author Steven Strogatz and the cosmologist and...
At first, life on Earth was simple. Cells existed, functioned and reproduced as free-living individuals. But then, something remarkable happened. Some cells joined forces, working together instead of being alone. This transition, known as multicellularity, was a pivotal event in the history of life on Earth. Multicellularity enabled greater biological complexity, which sparked an extraordinary diversity of organisms and structures.How life evolved from unicellular to multicellular organisms remains a mystery, though evidence indicates that this may have occurred multiple times independently. To understand what could have happened, Will Ratcliff at Georgia Tech has been conducting long-term evolution experiments on yeast in which multicellularity develops and emerges spontaneously.In this episode of The Joy of Why podcast, Ratcliff discusses what his “snowflake yeast” model could reveal about the origins of multicellularity, the surprising discoveries his team has made, and how he responds to skeptics who question his approach.
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S4 Preview: More Big Questions and No Sasquatches
How did complex life evolve? Where did space-time come from? Will computers ever understand language like we do? How did geometry create modern physics? These are just a few of the big and bold questions that we’ll be exploring in the latest season of Quanta’s interview podcast, “The Joy of Why,” starting March 20, and released every other Thursday.As ever, we will be talking to researchers and exploring the latest thinking on great scientific and mathematical questions of our time. But this season sees a new format, with the two of us — mathematician Steven Strogatz and physicist Janna Levin — together in conversation for the first time to offer our own thoughts and questions about each topic.As a preview, we discuss why we are particularly excited about the new season, and we reveal our favorite standout moments from the previous season.
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How Will We Know We’re Not Alone?
We have identified thousands of planets just in our neighborhood in the Milky Way, mostly from the way they impact their host stars. Basic calculations suggest that there are countless more across the galaxy, and that billions of them could potentially support life. But what kind of life they host, and how we would be able to detect the presence of those biological processes from Earth, remain big questions in the world of exoplanets and astrobiology. What technologies might lie ahead to help us answer the question of whether we are alone in the universe? Lisa Kaltenegger, an astrophysicist and astrobiologist at Cornell University, talks to Janna Levin about that search, the atmospheric fingerprints of life, and why an advanced alien civilization might decide not to talk to us.
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37:55
How Is Cell Death Essential to Life?
Death might seem like a pure loss, the disappearance of what makes a living thing distinct from everything else on our planet. But zoom in closer, to the cellular level, and death takes on a different, more nuanced meaning. There is a challenge in simply defining what makes an individual cell alive or dead. Scientists today are working to understand the various ways and reasons that cells disappear, and what these processes mean to biological systems. In this episode, cellular biologist Shai Shaham talks to Steven Strogatz about the different forms of cell death, their roles in evolution and disease, and why the right kinds and patterns of cell death are essential to our development and well-being.
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What Can Birdsong Teach Us About Human Language?
It’s fair to say that enjoyment of a podcast would be severely limited without the human capacity to create and understand speech. That capacity has often been cited as a defining characteristic of our species, and one that sets us apart in the long history of life on Earth. Yet we know that other species communicate in complex ways. Studies of the neurological foundations of language suggest that birdsong, or communication among bats or elephants, originates with brain structures similar to our own. So why do some species vocalize while others don’t? In this episode, Erich Jarvis, who studies behavior and neurogenetics at the Rockefeller University, chats with Janna Levin about the surprising connections between human speech, birdsong and dance.
“The Joy of Why” is a Quanta Magazine podcast about curiosity and the pursuit of knowledge. The mathematician and author Steven Strogatz and the cosmologist and author Janna Levin take turns interviewing leading researchers about the great scientific and mathematical questions of our time. New episodes are released every other Wednesday.
Quanta Magazine is a Pulitzer Prize–winning, editorially independent online publication launched and supported by the Simons Foundation to illuminate big ideas in science and math through public service journalism. Quanta’s reporters and editors focus on developments in mathematics, theoretical physics, theoretical computer science and the basic life sciences, emphasizing timely, accurate, in-depth and well-crafted articles for its broad discerning audience. In 2023, Steven Strogatz received a National Academies Eric and Wendy Schmidt Award for Excellence in Science Communications partly for his work on “The Joy of Why.”
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