TrueSciPhi

Podcast Profile: The Rest Is Science

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73 episodes
2025 to 2026
Median: 47 minutes
Collection: Science

Description (podcaster-provided):

Themes and summary (AI-generated based on podcaster-provided show and episode descriptions):

This podcast uses quirky, sometimes everyday prompts to explore how science and mathematics intersect with human perception, behaviour, and the physical universe. Hosted by mathematician Hannah Fry and science communicator Michael Stevens, conversations often begin with a simple question—about sound, colour, food, boredom, pain, or an object like a pen or sick bag—and expand into the underlying mechanisms that make the phenomenon possible. A recurring focus is the gap between reality and experience: how the brain edits sensory input, why reasoning can fail in abstract settings but succeed in social ones, and how memory, attention, and prediction shape what we think is “real.”

Across the episodes, the show moves fluidly between neuroscience and psychology (auditory illusions, smell, touch, sleep, boredom, cognitive “glitches”), biology and evolution (human feet, body topology, lying in animals, embryos and pattern formation, fossils and preservation), and physics and space science (gravity and orbit, re-entry heating, black holes, light as a record of the past, turbulence and flight, living in microgravity). Mathematical ideas are frequently used as explanatory tools, including probability and randomness, scale and very large numbers, and extended discussions of infinity and what it means to “prove” something.

The podcast also engages with ethical and societal questions raised by science and technology, such as privacy and biometric security, brain data and thought decoding, cloning and ownership of bodies and tissues, environmental trade-offs in resource extraction, and how scientific advances can have both constructive and destructive consequences. Episodes sometimes include listener questions and side explorations that connect disparate topics into broader themes about knowledge, uncertainty, and how we decide what to believe.