Knowable

Speech interjections aren't throwaway lines

Bonus episode: Knowable Magazine Podcast co-host Adam Levy talks with linguists Mark Dingemanse and Martina Wiltschko about the importance of the little "throwaway" utter

Quantum entanglement's long journey from 'spooky' to law of nature

Quantum mechanics has always included mind-bending ideas. But the concept of quantum entanglement, famously termed "spooky at a distance" by Albert Einstein in a 1947 let

How the placebo effect went mainstream

Sloppy by modern standards — and maybe even those back then — a 1955 article on the placebo effect by Harvard anesthesiologist Henry K. Beecher was nonetheless remarkable

The fossil that launched a dinosaur revolution

The fossil Archaeopteryx forever changed our understanding of dinosaurs and the origin of birds, but it took a century after its discovery and a one-page paper to shift s

Scientists warned about climate change in 1965. Nothing was done.

A key report to President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965 warned that humankind was "unwittingly conducting a vast geophysical experiment" through the burning of fossil fuels a

How antidepressants changed ideas about depression

Serendipitous discoveries led to drugs like Prozac and to new insights into the physical basis of this debilitating disorder. But scientists continue to search for deeper

How particle accelerators came to be

PODCAST: They started out so small, one could fit on the palm of your hand, but to make groundbreaking discoveries, physicists had to think really big — as in, vast machi

The history of climate change offers clues to Earth's future

Digging — quite literally — into our planet's past to study its paleoclimate has shed light on bygone ice ages and hints at trouble ahead for our now-warming planet.

Structural biology: How proteins got their close-up

The journey to understanding these critically important molecules, in their thousands of different flavors, began with a chance discovery. Today, after decades of painsta

The search for exoplanets

Not that long ago, scientists found evidence that our Sun wasn't unique — other stars have their own orbiting bodies. It was a discovery centuries in the making. What doe

The science of dreams

Freud thought that dreams were the gateway to our unconscious mind. Today, many scientists think the opposite: that the dreaming brain is quite similar to our awake, cons

Season two trailer

What are the limits to what's knowable — and how has our thinking about big questions in science and technology has evolved over time? Knowable Magazine's science history

Memory, the mystery

Memory, the mystery: Just in the past half-century, our understanding of how exactly our brains remember has taken huge leaps. Amazingly, this is just the beginning. Th

The dazzling history of solar power

The dazzling history of solar power: Once fringe and futuristic, this renewable energy shines brightly today as a cheap and efficient source of energy. Still, it remains

The heart of invention

Replacing or assisting the human heart with a machine would save countless lives. But the quest to build an artificial heart has had many gruesome missteps and caused res

How black holes morphed from theory to reality

Black holes, from theory to reality: Physicists were mostly skeptical when the idea of black holes emerged a century ago from Einstein's work. This podcast episode tells