Building a Mass Market Robot Jeff Cardenas is the co-founder and CEO of Apptronik. Jeff’s problem is this: Can you make a safe, reliable humanoid robot – for les […]

Solving Solar’s Biggest Problem We need better, cheaper ways to store solar and wind energy when it’s dark out and the wind isn’t blowing. One option: Com […]

How Bubbles Power Breakthroughs There are moments in history when people make huge technological advances all of a sudden. Think of the Manhattan Project, the […]

Teaching AI to Build Stuff in the Physical World AI works well in the virtual world. That’s partly because the internet provides so much data to train AI models. B […]

NVIDIA: At the Heart of the AI Boom In the past few years,  NVIDIA has become one of the most valuable and important companies in the world by making GPUs, the c […]

What Claude Shannon Figured Out  Claude Shannon is a major figure in the history of technology. Known as the father of information theory, Shannon spent decades a […]

Measles: The Cancer Killer?… from Incubation We thought we knew everything there was to know about measles. But in recent years, new research has revealed that the […]

RoboPod and the Perpetual Money Machine – Cautionary Questions 2… from Cautionary Tales What really drove the 2008 financial crash? What’s a shadow bank? And w […]

Turning Solar Energy Into Fuel (The Solar Era, Part 3) Solar power and batteries are becoming cheap and ubiquitous. Great. But there are problems batteries can’t s […]

Can Hot Bricks Save the World? (The Solar Era, Part 2) This is the second of three episodes about the solar-power revolution. Last week, we talked about how solar […]

How the Sun Won (The Solar Era, Part 1) In the past 20 years, the price of solar panels has fallen by more than 97 percent. This extraordinary decline is good news […]

Drugs in Space Paul Reichert is a research scientist at Merck, working on improvements to how we administer drugs to patients. Paul’s problem is this: How can y […]

The World Is Getting Better (Really) Hannah Ritchie is a data scientist and the deputy editor of Our World in Data. She is also the author of Not the End of the […]

Rabies: When Monsters are Real…from Incubation Why has rabies invaded our nightmares for centuries? Author and veterinarian Monica Murphy tells us about the cultural […]

Using Gene Therapy to Help the Blind See After decades of research, gene therapy is starting to work. Shannon Boye is a professor of cellular and molecular […]

Bringing Back Mammoths and Dodos* *Or at least, sort of bringing back mammoths and dodos. Beth Shapiro is the chief scientific officer at Colossal Biosciences and […]

What Elevators Teach Us About Technology, Design, and Human Behavior The elevator made the modern city possible: No elevators, no skyscrapers. Today, people are […]

Can the Plant Microbiome Revolutionize Farming? The invention of synthetic fertilizer was one of the key breakthroughs of the 20th century. It’s the reason we can g […]

Turning Pollution into Jet Fuel Jennifer Holmgren is the CEO of LanzaTech. Her problem is this: How do you capture pollution from factories, feed it to bacteria, […]

Reinventing Mining to Power the World Moving from fossil fuels to renewable energy will require huge amounts of copper, lithium, and other metals. Kurt House is […]