Quanta Magazine — Season 2016

Aired 29 January 2016

Leslie Valiant explains the term "ecorithm."

Aired 4 February 2016

David Kaplan explores the best ways to search for alien life on distant planets.

Aired 4 March 2016

Michael Atiyah discusses beauty in mathematics.

Aired 17 March 2016

David Deamer explains how his laboratory mimics the extreme conditions found on volcanoes in the early Earth.

Aired 14 April 2016

David Kaplan explains how a curious signal in the Large Hadron Collider's latest data could upset the Standard Model of physics — or mean nothing at all.

Aired 4 May 2016

David Moore explains why we might expect to find strange things when we study gravity at small scales.

Aired 5 May 2016

Stanford University physicist David Moore explains how his team’s tabletop experiment uses lasers and tiny glass spheres to test gravity.

Aired 6 May 2016

Janna Levin talks about her roles as scientific director at a “center for art and innovation” in Brooklyn and as a physicist and writer.

Aired 23 May 2016

Ken Ono explains how Ramanujan has served as his “guardian angel” throughout his life and career.

Aired 10 June 2016

Suchitra Sebastian talks about how extreme conditions can create unexpected quantum behavior.

Aired 30 June 2016

David Kaplan explains how the law of increasing entropy could drive random bits of matter into the stable, orderly structures of life.

Aired 4 August 2016

Miranda Cheng explains what umbral moonshine is and how it might illuminate string theory.

Aired 1 September 2016

Tracy Slatyer explains why she’s not disappointed when a mysterious cosmic signal turns out to be something other than dark matter.

Aired 22 September 2016

Peter and Rosemary Grant explain how our understanding of evolution has changed in their lifetimes.

Aired 11 October 2016

What can we learn from the best teachers on the front lines? To shine a spotlight on this linchpin of our education system, Quanta Magazine followed four master science and math teachers into their classrooms.

Aired 11 October 2016

Channa Comer teaches 6th-grade science. She focuses on engagement so kids will want to keep learning.

Aired 11 October 2016

Michael Zitolo is turning the way science is approached in the classroom upside down.

Aired 11 October 2016

In school or in life, Soni Midha wants her math students to be able to prove why something is correct.

Aired 11 October 2016

Students need a chance to fail at science to learn about its process, says Aaron Mathieu.

Aired 11 October 2016

What's a control? Channa Comer challenges her students to explain and work things out for themselves.

Aired 18 October 2016

A Wormhole Between Physics and Education

Aired 26 October 2016

Michael Costanzo, a biologist at the University of Toronto and a lead author on the new study, explains why it’s important to understand how genes interact.

Aired 3 November 2016

Richard Lenski discusses how he has been surprised by evolution.

Aired 23 November 2016

Cynthia Dwork explains how to conduct a survey that asks people if they do embarrassing — or even illicit — things.

Aired 29 November 2016

Erik Verlinde describes how emergent gravity and dark energy can explain away dark matter.

Aired 8 December 2016

Janet Conrad explains how sterile neutrinos might help physicists move past the Standard Model.

Aired 20 December 2016

Elena Aprile explains how she hunts for dark matter in the world’s largest underground laboratory.