Unsung Science
CBS News
Hear the untold stories of mind-blowing achievements in science and tech. “CBS Sunday Morning” correspondent and six-time Emmy winner David Pogue takes you behind the scenes into the creation stories of the world’s greatest advances and the people behind them. From transportation, food, space, internet, and health, creators reveal their inspirations and roadblocks they encountered in bringing their breakthroughs to the public. Hear all-new episodes of the award-winning Unsung Science podcast every other Friday.
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Top 10 Unsung Science Episodes
Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best Unsung Science episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to Unsung Science for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite Unsung Science episode by adding your comments to the episode page.
Genetics, Votes, and Colin Firth
Unsung Science
11/10/23 • 37 min
The U.S. has fallen into polarized, partisan, political bickering. Online, liberals and conservatives seem to despise each other. But nobody seems to stop to ask: How did we get our liberal and conservative views in the first place? We formed our opinions by carefully weighing the issues and thoughtfully choosing a stance, right? Well, no; turns out over half of our political leanings are determined, incredibly, by our genes. In this episode: How we figured that out, and what it means for our future.
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NASA Redirects an Asteroid
Unsung Science
03/17/23 • 31 min
65 million years ago an asteroid struck the earth. In the ensuing planetary darkness, the dinosaurs went extinct. But the dinosaurs didn’t have a space program! Now we can spot incoming asteroids with steadily improving confidence. If we see one on a collision course with the Earth, we know from the movies that the solution is to nuke it...Right? Actually, NASA has a better idea. If you can just nudge an asteroid slightly off its current path, maybe 25 or 50 years before it hits us, it won’t hit the earth. It will sail harmlessly past us. In 2022, NASA put that idea to the test. It sent a tiny spacecraft 7 million miles into space, for the express purpose of crashing into a known asteroid—to see if we could bump it into a different path. We quickly found out. This is the story of the DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) mission.
Hear from Dr. Richard Binzel, MIT professor. Dr. Elena Adams, lead engineer for NASA’s DART mission, and Dr. Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s planetary science division.
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The Power of an Empty Metal Box
Unsung Science
05/26/23 • 36 min
We’ve been shipping stuff across oceans for centuries. But until 1956, we loaded our ships in the dumbest way possible: one at a time. Then Malcolm McClean came along. He envisioned lifting the big metal box part off a truck and setting it directly down onto a ship. Every one of these boxes would be identical and interchangeable, maximizing space and minimizing waste. The shipping container was born — an idea that was so powerful, it rejiggered the global economy, gutted cities, and turned China into the world’s manufacturer.
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Happiness 2.0: The Reset Button from Hidden Brain
Unsung Science
04/14/23 • 56 min
Understandably, there is a lot going on in our lives, and we feel pulled in every direction. But trying to get everything done can distract from the joy that surrounds us. Host Shankar Vedantam and psychologist Dacher Keltner discuss what it means to savor the beauty of the people, moments, and things in the world and the scientific reasoning behind the feeling of "awe."
This is an episode of Hidden Brain that originally aired in February 2023, and you can listen to new episodes of Hidden Brain wherever you get your podcasts.
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The Million-Dollar Toothpaste Tube
Unsung Science
04/28/23 • 37 min
We’re overrun with plastic. It’s in our oceans, our water, our food. Something has to be done—preferably by corporations, which churn out millions of tons of plastic every year.
Enter: the toothpaste tube. It might seem like a minor player in the plastic problem, but we throw 20 billion toothpaste tubes into the landfill every year. Recycling plants can’t take them, because they’re made of plastic and metal foil bonded together. They all end up in the landfill.
Colgate, the #1 toothpaste brand, decided to tackle the problem. It spent five years and millions of dollars to design a tube made of the same plastic milk jugs are made of—the easiest-to-recycle plastic in the world—with no metal foil. The new tube is indistinguishable from existing tubes—except the whole thing can go into the recycle bin.
And then—Colgate gave away the patent. Today, 90% of the world’s toothpaste makers are switching to recyclable toothpaste tubes. This is the uplifting, surprising, and slightly hilarious story.
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05/12/23 • 35 min
The first time you heard “Star Trek” characters speak Klingon, or the “Game of Thrones” characters speaking Dothraki and High Valyrian, you might have assumed that the actors were just speaking a few words of gibberish, created by some screenwriter to sound authentic. But these are complete languages, with vocabulary, syntax, grammar, and even made-up histories. There’s only one person on the planet whose full-time job is creating them—and these days, he’s swamped with requests. No doubt about it: Conlangs (constructed languages) are the new special effect. Me nem nesa!
Hear from David Peterson (author, linguist & full-time language maker), Mark Okrand (author, linguist & creator of Klingon), and Angela Carpenter, (linguistics professor at Wellesley College).
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The Rewilded Farm
Unsung Science
03/31/23 • 34 min
After 17 years of trying to prop up their failing farm outside of London, Charlie Burrell and Isabella Tree were stressed, exhausted, and $1.7 million in debt. They decided to stop farming—no more plowing, planting, irrigating, chemicals. They gave away the farm—to nature.
20 years later, their land has one of the most important biodiversity hotspots in the UK. These 3500 acres teem with species, many of which are endangered or hadn’t been seen in the UK for centuries. And the twist: Their land now generates more money than it ever did as a farm.
Similar rewilding experiments are under way in 30 countries. They offer protection for nearby farms, corridors of safety for animals—and buffers against climate disasters for us.
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How Doug Lindsay Invented His Own Surgery
Unsung Science
06/09/23 • 37 min
In his senior year of college, a monstrous ailment fell upon Doug Lindsay. His skin felt flayed. His heart raced. The room spun. He was so weak, he couldn’t sit up in bed, let alone walk. Worst of all, doctors had no idea what was wrong with him.
Only one person on earth had the time and motivation to figure out what was wrong with Doug Lindsay: Doug Lindsay. Over the next 14 years, he consumed medical textbooks and science journals. He attended medical conferences in his wheelchair. He wrote polite, well-informed letters to specialists all over the world. In the end, he not only figured out what was wrong with him—he invented a new surgery that he thought would fix it. He was right.
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Inside the Lost Titanic Sub: An Update
Unsung Science
06/23/23 • 44 min
The lost OceanGate submersible has captured the world’s attention. In the summer of 2022, “CBS News Sunday Morning” correspondent and "Unsung Science" host David Pogue was invited to join an expedition to visit the Titanic wreck with OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, as well as Titanic dive veteran P.H. Nargeolet, aboard the one-of-a-kind sub. David covered his adventure in a two-part episode in December 2022. Today, we know that the sub and its creator met a tragic end. Pogue looks back at the experience, with his commentary in the wake of the loss.
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How We Almost Blew the Vaccine
Unsung Science
10/22/21 • 38 min
It may seem as though we got the Pfizer and Moderna COVID vaccines incredibly quickly. But Hungarian biochemist Katalin Karikó had been trying to make mRNA vaccines work for 30 years while fighting scientific gatekeepers who thought her idea was absurd. Her grants were denied, her papers rejected, her speaking invitations withdrawn; eventually, the University of Pennsylvania demoted her. But she still refused to quit, and in 2005, she and collaborator Drew Weissman cracked the code. They figured out how mRNA could direct our own cells to manufacture medicines to order. Their breakthrough saved the world from the worst of the pandemic—and opened a new world of medicines and vaccines for a huge range of diseases.
Guests: Katalin Karikó, senior VP at BioNTech. Drew Weissman, Perelman School of Medicine, U Penn. Derek Rossi, co-founder of Moderna.
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FAQ
How many episodes does Unsung Science have?
Unsung Science currently has 48 episodes available.
What topics does Unsung Science cover?
The podcast is about Society & Culture, Podcasts, Technology, Science and Cbs.
What is the most popular episode on Unsung Science?
The episode title 'Genetics, Votes, and Colin Firth' is the most popular.
What is the average episode length on Unsung Science?
The average episode length on Unsung Science is 35 minutes.
How often are episodes of Unsung Science released?
Episodes of Unsung Science are typically released every 13 days, 16 hours.
When was the first episode of Unsung Science?
The first episode of Unsung Science was released on Sep 27, 2021.
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