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Transcript: >> Appreciation that learning should feel hard is something that I'm really understanding better. So teaching a neuroscience of learning class right now, the takeaway is that for your brain to learn, it should feel hard. >> Hi. Welcome to the Science Fair podcast. I'm your host, Susan Keatley. I'm a PhD chemist, writer, and I love talking to scientists. On the Science Fair podcast, I aim to bring you conversations with scientists doing fascinating, cutting edge wo

Transcript: How can we detect systems becoming biology? How can we detect the pathway from chemistry to life? Hi. Welcome to the Science Fair Podcast. I'm your host, Susan Keatley. I'm a PhD chemist, writer, and I love talking to scientists. On the Science Fair Podcast, I aim to bring you conversations with scientists doing fascinating, cutting-edge work on all kinds of interesting phenomena, ranging from physics to chemistry to biology, and even the nature of science itself.

Transcript: I always did have as a child an interest in wanting to understand how things work and that way that manifested was I took a lot of things apart and I made a lot of things. I do remember in elementary school really getting into the scientific methods for the investigative aspect of it trying to come up with how you thought something was going to turn out. Hi, welcome to the science fair podcast. I'm your host, Susan Keatley. I'm a PhD chemist, writer, and I love ta

Transcript: The other big surprise was that I would have never guessed this, but plants combine different pigments to make red. And the color rules don't follow what you would think, right? So for us when we're painting red is a primary color, right? You don't make red by mixing colors, you mix colors like you mix red and yellow to make orange, etc. Plants, I don't know how this works, but they mix orange crotenoids like the chemicals that are in carrots that make carrots ora

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Transcript: We can build buildings with different materials. We can build with concrete, we can build with bricks, we can build with wood. They will have different thermal properties. Most of you are talking about thermal mass and insulation or thermal resistance of the material. They really play a significant role in fighting this second law of thermodynamics. Hi. Welcome to the Science Fair podcast. I'm your host, Susan Keetley. I'm a PhD chemist, writer, and I love talking

Transcript: Hi, welcome to the Science Fair podcast. I'm your host, Susan Keatley. I'm a PhD chemist, writer, and I love talking to scientists. On the Science Fair podcast, I aim to bring you conversations with scientists doing fascinating, cutting-edge work on all kinds of interesting phenomena, ranging from physics to chemistry, to biology, and even the nature of science itself. Tune in every Monday for a new episode. For each scientist we interview, first we'll release a m

Transcript: What happens is one of the cells in the blood just by chance in the normal process of DNA replication a mistake is made and the wrong The wrong base pair ends up in the wrong place and that's what's that's a genetic mutation If that mutation if that change in base pairs happens in the flip 3 gene In a blood cell and specifically in that kinase domain and it affects the way the cells functioning so all four of those things have to be true Then suddenly that cells s

Transcript: Meet Sam and oncologist. The general sense of altruism and the feeling of doing something really cool and really cutting edge every day was the kind of thing that made medicine kind of a no-brainer for me. And meet Meg, a radiologist. I joke with the kids that it gives me this sort of assisted superpower of extra vision so I can see inside people and it's awesome. You know like all the different imaging what altruism we have. Megan Sam are married and they're the

Transcript: really what excites me I think is what has driven my work for a long time and it's what got me excited about archaeology as a kid which is understanding or trying to understand what people's lives were like in the past. Not the big picture work but what individual humans were experiencing. Hi, welcome to the Science Fair podcast. I'm your host, Susan Keatley. I'm a PhD chemist, writer, and I love talking to scientists. On the Science Fair podcast I aim to bring yo

Transcript: and thinking, oh hang on, maybe I could do things in a different way that retrieved the thing I used to think was lost. So that as a general idea is something I sort of say to all researchers, is can you think of ways that what you're doing is wasteful because those things you can get back for free, you don't have to pay for those things. Hi, welcome to the Science Fair Podcast. I'm your host, Susan Keatley. I'm a PhD chemist, writer, and I love talking to scienti

Transcript: So I started applying to programs for a PhD and ended up at Princeton for my PhD program between 2002-2008. Turns out I thought I was going to like some chemistry-oriented version of molecular biology, like biophysics or biochemistry. I absolutely fell in love once I was there with cell and developmental biology. And so in short, cell and developmental biology is the idea of how do we go from being one cell? The fertilized egg to being millions of cells. How do th

Transcript: the late 1700s, let's set the stage. We have many countries that are operating with different measurement systems, and sometimes even amongst cities. That was very frustrating, not only for trade and commerce, but for science and communication. So really, the metric system emerged out of this common goal. We need something that is universal. We need something that is simple. We need something that is based on nature, not royal artifacts. So that was really the pre

Transcript: It's about maintaining that institutional knowledge, right? When we think about like a lab, right? It's really its own, it's own unit, almost its own like small business or company within a larger organization, right? In particular in academia. And it's kind of amazing how much like Pia's postdocs, everyone is kind of like on their shoulders, right? For maintaining this living organism in a way, right? You know, don't forget that, make sure that manual for that, y

Link: https://open.spotify.com/episode/23CTVm0k09KeVzC57y2gwl Episode Description: Alan Lightman is a writer and physicist. Originally...