The Quanta Podcast

In the 60s, an eccentric behavioral psychologist pureed a bunch of planarian worms and fed them to other ones. For years after, he claimed that the cannibal worms learned the ground-up worms’ memories. Could he have been… right? On this episode of The Quanta Podcast, host Samir Patel and columnist Claire L. Evans discuss the weird history of memory transfer experiments, and their recent resurgence — and some them appear to be working.  This topic was covered in a recent story for Quanta Magazine.  
Each week on The Quanta Podcast, Quanta Magazine editor in chief Samir Patel speaks with the people behind the award-winning publication to navigate through some of the most important and mind-expanding questions in science and math.
At the end of the episode is a clip from a 1966 Sound Seminars lecture by Dr. James V. McConnell called Cannibals, Chemicals and Memory, where he describes how his experimental work led to the conclusion that flatworms can learn. 
Audio coda credit: The Drs. Nicholas and Dorothy Cummings Center for the History of Psychology, The University of Akron, Ohio.

How many pieces are there in the Standard Model of particle physics? 17, 30, 37, 61, 118? Or is the true answer much larger — and not even an integer? It depends on your taste for complexity — and mystery. On this episode of The Quanta Podcast, host Samir Patel and columnist Natalie Wolchover plummet down another rabbit hole, and this one goes down to the very building blocks of our reality. This topic was covered in a recent story for Quanta Magazine.  
Each week on The Quanta Podcast, Quanta Magazine editor in chief Samir Patel speaks with the people behind the award-winning publication to navigate through some of the most important and mind-expanding questions in science and math.

Amid the chaos of revolutionary France, one man’s mathematical obsession gave way to a calculation that now underpins much of mathematics and physics. The calculation, called the Fourier transform, decomposes any function into its parts. 
The story What Is the Fourier Transform? first appeared on Quanta Magazine.

The groundbreaking proof assistant Lean acts as a sort of automatic quality control. It’s gaining ground in the math world — in part because it can interact with AI to open new avenues of inquiry. But there are concerns, too. On this episode of The Quanta Podcast, host Samir Patel speaks with author Kevin Harnett about his new book, the first release from Quanta Books, “The Proof in the Code.” It was featured in a recent excerpt for Quanta Magazine.  
Each week on The Quanta Podcast, Quanta Magazine editor in chief Samir Patel speaks with the people behind the award-winning publication to navigate through some of the most important and mind-expanding questions in science and math.

How do you define a species? The question has been controversial since the days of Darwin. On this episode of The Quanta Podcast, host Samir Patel speaks with writer Marlowe Starling about how recent advances in genomics have both clarified and complicated the picture. This topic was covered in a recent story for Quanta Magazine.  
Each week on The Quanta Podcast, Quanta Magazine editor in chief Samir Patel speaks with the people behind the award-winning publication to navigate through some of the most important and mind-expanding questions in science and math.