Uncertain

In Science Book Talk, a new four-part podcast miniseries, host Deboki Chakravarti acts as literary guide to two science books that share a beautiful and sometimes deeply resonant entanglement.

In this week’s show: Entangled Life, by Merlin Sheldrake, and Gathering Moss, by Robin Wall Kimmerer.

In Science Book Talk, a new four-part podcast miniseries, host Deboki Chakravarti acts as literary guide to two science books that share a beautiful and sometimes deeply resonant entanglement.

In this week’s show: Why Fish Don’t Exist, by Lulu Miller, and The Book of Eels, by Patrik Svensson.

Here is our next installment of a new pop-up podcast miniseries that takes your ears into the deep sound of nature. Host Jacob Job, an ecologist and audiophile, brings you inches away from a multitude of creatures, great and small, amid the sonic grandeur of nature. You may not be easily able to access these places amid the pandemic, but after you take this acoustic journey, you will be longing to get back outside.

Strap on some headphones, find a quiet place and prepare to experience a the alien sounds of the yearly elk rut inside of Rocky Mountain National Park.

Catch additional episodes in the series here.

Here is our next installment of a new pop-up podcast miniseries that takes your ears into the deep sound of nature. Host Jacob Job, an ecologist and audiophile, brings you inches away from a multitude of creatures, great and small, amid the sonic grandeur of nature. You may not be easily able to access these places amid the pandemic, but after you take this acoustic journey, you will be longing to get back outside.

Strap on some headphones, find a quiet place and prepare to experience a humid, salty morning full of birdsong inside the Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge in Louisiana. 

Catch additional episodes in the series here. 

Here is our next installment of a new pop-up podcast miniseries that takes your ears into the deep sound of nature. Host Jacob Job, an ecologist and audiophile, brings you inches away from a multitude of creatures, great and small, amid the sonic grandeur of nature. You may not be easily able to access these places amid the pandemic, but after you take this acoustic journey, you will be longing to get back outside.

Strap on some headphones, find a quiet place and prepare to experience an evanescent like no other: the blue oak woodlands in Sequoia National Park in California.

Catch additional episodes in the series here. 

Here is our next installment of a new pop-up podcast miniseries that takes your ears into the deep sound of nature. Host Jacob Job, an ecologist and audiophile, brings you inches away from a multitude of creatures, great and small, amid the sonic grandeur of nature. You may not be easily able to access these places amid the pandemic, but after you take this acoustic journey, you will be longing to get back outside.

Strap on some headphones, find a quiet place and prepare to experience a thunderstorm—and a lazy day of waiting that storm out—inside the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northern Minnesota.

Catch additional episodes in the series here. 

Here is our next installment of a new pop-up podcast miniseries that takes your ears into the deep sound of nature. Host Jacob Job, an ecologist and audiophile, brings you inches away from a multitude of creatures, great and small, amid the sonic grandeur of nature. You may not be easily able to access these places amid the pandemic, but after you take this acoustic journey, you will be longing to get back outside.

Strap on some headphones, find a quiet place, and prepare to experience sunrise on a Yellowstone marsh and then relax—if you can—close enough to a bison to hear it eat its lunch.

You can catch more episodes in the series here.

On Earth Day, Scientific American sits down with National Geographic underwater photographer Brian Skerry to talk about free diving with whales and filming the giant mammals within five meters or less.

“We have to get within a few meters of our subject to get good pictures,” Skerry says. “I can't use a 1,000-millimeter lens underwater. Also, the sun has to be out because I can’t light a whale underwater; they're too big.”

Skerry has been tracking whales, their hidden lives, their feeding rituals and hunting practices—strategies that differ dramatically from one whale pod to another—for nearly four decades. Both his new book Secrets of the Whales, released on April 6, and Disney+ series with the same title, a four-episode documentary that is narrated by Sigourney Weaver and premieres today, boast jaw-dropping moments.

A visual feast of magnificent scenery, the book and streaming series show humpback whales breaching the water surface to catch herring, orcas trailing ancient pathways, narwhals flicking their giant tusks to sting their prey and ghost-white beluga whales frolicking in shallow waters with their young—some of them only a few days old and still dragging around their umbilical cord.

The footage that Skerry filmed takes the audience on a tour of whale cultures across Antarctica, Norway, New Zealand, the Cook Islands, Alaska and other places. It tells stories of resilience, familial bonding and intimacy, generational knowledge sharing and deadly encounters—along with rich lives and complex behaviors that are reminiscent of humans and that were sometimes captured on camera for the first time.

“If we look at the ocean, through the lens of culture, these animals are doing so many things in many ways that mirror human culture,” Skerry says.

The Disney+ series, however, doesn’t only dwell on the magic and wonder of this world. It also warns against the effects of pollution and the ongoing climate emergency on a very delicate and interconnected marine ecosystem.

Secrets of the Whales was a perfect story to showcase both aspects, Skerry says, because it lives at the confluence of cutting-edge science and conservation. “I like to say, ‘It's not a conservation story,’” he adds. “And yet it could be the most important conservation story ever because if we can see these animals through that lens of culture, it changes how we perceive nature and our relation to it.”

Here is our next installment of a new pop-up podcast miniseries that takes your ears into the deep sound of nature. Host Jacob Job, an ecologist and audiophile, brings you inches away from a multitude of creatures, great and small, amid the sonic grandeur of nature. You may not be easily able to access these places amid the pandemic, but after you take this acoustic journey, you will be longing to get back outside.

Strap on some headphones, find a quiet place, and prepare to experience true solitude inside Voyageurs National Park. 

You can catch more episodes in the series here.

It’s been 60 years, to the day, since Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was the first human to travel to space in a tiny capsule attached to an R-7 ballistic missile, a powerful rocket originally designed to carry a three- to five-megaton nuclear warhead. In this new episode marking the 60th anniversary of this historic space flight—the first of its kind—Scientific American talks to Stephen Walker, an award-winning filmmaker, director and book author, about the daring launch that changed the course of human history and charted a map to the skies and beyond.

Walker discusses his new book Beyond: The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey into Space, out today, and how Gagarin’s journey—an enormous mission that was fraught with danger and planned in complete secrecy—happened on the heels of a cold war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union and sparked a relentless space race between a rising superpower and an ailing one, respectively.

Walker, whose films have won an Emmy and a BAFTA, revisits the complex politics and pioneering science of this era from a fresh perspective. He talks about his hunt for eyewitnesses, decades after the event; how he uncovered never-before-seen footage of the space mission; and, most importantly, how he still managed to put the human story at the heart of a tale at the intersection of political rivalry, cutting-edge technology, and humankind’s ambition to conquer space and explore new frontiers.

Here is our next installment of a new pop-up podcast miniseries that takes your ears into the deep sound of nature. Host Jacob Job, an ecologist and audiophile, brings you inches away from a multitude of creatures, great and small, amid the sonic grandeur of nature. You may not be easily able to access these places amid the pandemic, but after you take this acoustic journey, you will be longing to get back outside.

Strap on some headphones, find a quiet place and prepare to experience a riot of bird song inside the Tensas River National Wildlife Refuge that will stay with you long after the episode ends.

You can catch more episodes in the series here.

Here is our next installment of a new pop-up podcast miniseries that takes your ears into the deep sound of nature. Host Jacob Job, an ecologist and audiophile, brings you inches away from a multitude of creatures, great and small, amid the sonic grandeur of nature. You may not be easily able to access these places amid the pandemic, but after you take this acoustic journey, you will be longing to get back outside.

Strap on some headphones, find a quiet place and prepare to experience the transcendence that explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark must have felt at the end of their journey—inside a park that bears their names.

You can catch more episodes in the series here.