In Our Time

If you're looking for a meaty podcast experience, I recommend In Our Time, a program from BBC Radio 4.

It's an hour-long program hosted by Melvyn Bragg, usually with three guests, that has enough time to delve pretty deeply into a variety of topics. One of the things that is most impressive is the unbelievably wide breadth of topics, some of which are quite interesting, others things you just haven't heard of before.

Recent episode subjects include:

• Bismark
  
• Anaesthetics - from ether frolics to pain-free surgery
  
• The Opium Wars
  
• St. Hilda
  
• The History of Optics
  

They also have a cool subject cloud.

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Charting our health by the stars

Charting our health by the stars is a study conducted in Ontario to find correlations between Zodiacal signs and health, to illustrate how easy it can be for a study to produce false results.

Their conclusion:

“There is a danger in basing scientific decisions on the results of one study, particularly if the results were unanticipated or the association was one that we did not initially decide to examine,” says Austin. “But when several studies all arrive at similar conclusions, we reduce the risk of arriving at an incorrect outcome.”

I would note that most news stories about science are actually reports of one-time studies with surprising results. Is any wonder that the public can dismiss science as fickle 'first they said this, now they say that' flip-flopping given the nature of how it is reported. You're rarely going to see a breaking news flash that there is now large-scale scientific consensus on a particular topic. Instead, you're likely to hear that a single study shows Cocoa may improve brain blood flow, or something similarly biased towards small dietary changes saving your life. At least, when it isn't an out-and-out human interest story.

Zodiac study via Wired.

Nanobacteria

Every age thinks it's attained the ultimate understanding of how the
world works on some level. I can't find the quote right now from
1890, where a scientist declared that physics was a dead field. At
any rate, work on nanobacteria may prove interesting when it
plays out. Is it alive, or is it a crystal? They are implicated in
kidney stones and ovarian cancer.