Science Podcasts to Listen To This Year

You could say that I’m a little bit into podcasts. Recently I found out that I spent a whole month of the last seven months just listening to podcasts. That’s an average of 3.4 hours listening to podcasts per day. (Honestly, that sounds about right.) Also taking into account that I listen to all my podcasts at 1.1x speed or faster, that’s a lot of podcasts.  An overview of what my podcast app looks like:

Podcasts Subscribed To: 55
Completely Up to Date: 24
Total Unlistened To Episodes: 5656
Time Spent Listening to Podcasts: 32 days 15 hours (and counting)

It’s a little overwhelming, but in a good way. A good percentage of these are not surprisingly science related.

When I first started listening to podcasts, I knew I wanted to listen to sciencey things, but wasn’t sure where to turn. I turned to Google and was led to the main few science podcasts that go around that are great! But not for everyone necessarily, either because they’re too long or too broad, etc. (Shout out to SciFri which I love, but it’s very long.)

So for the start of 2018, here’s a list of some of my personal favorite science shows to start listening to!

Science in Action by the BBC

 Science in Action is without a doubt my favorite science news podcast. Each week, BBC covers new science news and it’s always interesting and easy to understand. It’s also only about half an hour long usually, so it’s not a huge commitment if you’re not looking to spend hours of your day listening to the newest science news.

Data Skeptic

Data Skeptic is a podcast that I’m a bit of a latecomer to and I’m not entirely caught up on it (but I’m getting there). Each week, Data Skeptic covers topics surrounding artificial intelligence, statistics, and other data science topics. If you’ve ever wanted to learn more about quantum computing or where numbers and statistics such as Zillow’s Zestimate comes from, this is a great podcast to pick up and start listening to.

Every Little Thing

Every Little Thing by Gimlet media is one of my absolute favorite podcasts to listen to. The host, Flora Lichtman, is always so excited to talk about all these cool little topics that you may never have thought of – or maybe you have. Episode titles and topics include things such as “Dewey Decimal Drama”, “Chair, Misunderstood”, and “The Case of the Missing Armadillos” and many others. I really could go on and on about this podcast. Flora is an amazing host and ELT covers some immensely interesting little bits.

Holy F**king Science

HFS is a little more on the comedy side of science podcasts but nevertheless educational and entertaining. Each week, various friends get together and try to amaze each other with cool science facts. There’s always interesting research brought to the table and shenanigans to be had with this show. Caution: Swears and will also make you laugh out loud to yourself in public more than is within the socially acceptable range.

Moonshot

Moonshot is a podcast that still has a smaller audience compared to many podcasts that get the spotlight, but it’s one of my favorites – especially when it comes to tackling new, big ideas in technology. Each episode covers a big idea in technology and science and looks forward to the future. Topics include driverless cities and robot ethics.

Ologies

 Ologies is another smaller science podcast that I absolutely adore and want to share with the world. Self described as a “science-adjacent” podcast, each week Alie Ward talks to various -ologists, asks questions you might have always wondered and learns what scientists do in their jobs and all those ins and outs. It’s definitely a little more informal than some podcasts, but in the best way. Alie makes each episode feel like a real time telling of her talking about the interview.

Science… Sort of

This is certainly one of the more technical podcasts on this list, but still worth a listen if you’re looking to learn more about all  kinds of science. Each episode features various hosts and guests that have a wide range of fields of expertise. They all discuss topics they’re currently researching and answer listener questions (and discuss beer sometimes also).

STEM-Talk

STEM-Talk is a great way to learn about scientists around the world and what they do. Twice a month, they release an interview with a scientist discussing what they do and why they do it. Many of their episodes focus on human based science and research, like diets and exercise, but they also delve into space and oceans and many other things. This is much more of a straightforward research and science based podcast, but you’ll learn so much about such a broad range of topics.

Terrestrial

I debated whether or not to include Terrestrial in this list, but it definitely touches on science more than anything else – just with a more anthropocentric and sociological view than any of the other podcasts listed. Terrestrial discusses humans and our new rolls in an ever changing planet. From topics such as wilderness conservation and restoration and how climate change affects our health, it’s definitely worth a listen and some serious thought.

That’s all I’m going to cover today! The biggest thing I’ve realized listening to podcasts is that there’s so much amazing content out there and it’s hard to just find it all, so I hope this was helpful in your quest for more science and more pods!

Do you have a favorite science podcast? Let me know down in the comments and maybe there will be a part two for this in the future!

 

 

An Introduction to Reading Science Books

I’m going to guess you’re here because you want to start reading science books! (Or because you’re curious about what other science books to read or because you just want to support me.) That’s really great, but if you haven’t started reading any science yet I completely understand. Getting into reading nonfiction books can be daunting on its own and science nonfiction books can sometimes be even more daunting due to the possibility of technical jargon basically making the book unreadable.

I’m here to help. (I hope.) I am an avid science reader and it’s almost all I read this year. When I go to the library or bookstore I go straight to the science section and usually stay there. I even have some favorite Dewey decimal numbers (shout out to the 570s) to go check out at the library – because let me tell you, science books are not the most organized via good old Dewey. They tried though.

So here are some recommendations about getting into reading science nonfiction books and also some of my own personal recommendations for books to get into.

First off, it’s important to understand that, at least in my opinion, reading science books is not like any other genre (I guess most genres aren’t like any other genres. That’s why they’re separate genres.) But science is extra different for a couple of reasons.

One, a good number of science books are not usually plot or conflict driven. Some books are better at this than others. Scientific based memoirs can be relatively plot based, but the overwhelming driving factor is not going to be conflict or problem resolution like in a fiction book or even a historical nonfiction book. When you’re picking a science book to read, make sure you pick a topic you’re going to be interested in enough to keep reading it.

Secondly, there’s a much higher chance of the writing being just ridiculously technical and impossible to understand unless you’re already an expert in the field. Most of these books are published by scientists or other people immersed in the science world. If you find yourself looking up a couple of words every paragraph, it’s going to get really tedious. And it’s okay to not read those books. There are most likely other ways to learn about the topic besides reading next to a dictionary. This is one problem that gets easier to get by a) as you just learn more about different authors and who has what kind of writing style and b) you learn more and are able to understand more technical words! (Though sometimes it’s just not exciting and you just gotta find something else).

Thirdly, books go out of date really fast when science is discovering new things all the time. Physics and astronomy books especially. If you pick up a book from the early 2000s there’s a good chance of outdated information or just “we don’t know yet”s when in fact, we do know now.

So, it can be really hard to browse the science genre. If you go to the romance section or the YA section or the scifi section of a book acquiring place, you have a good general idea of what you’re getting into. Science section? Not so much.

So here’s some of my recommendations on books to start out with when you want to start reading science books:

The first book is actually the first science nonfiction book I ever read and I love it. It’s called How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming by Michael Brown and it came out in 2012. It might have a little bit of outdated statistics in terms of number of objects in our solar system, but I still think this is a great introduction to science and science-y memoirs. This book is essentially about the astronomer Mike Brown’s discovery of a tenth planet, named Eris, in our solar system and how that ended up leading to the demotion of Pluto as a planet, instead of giving us 10 planets. It’s really well written and easy to understand. It’s also pretty short as far as science books go so not too hard to get all the way through.

The next book on my list is one of my absolute favorites. You may have heard of it or seen it floating around as it’s gotten pretty popular since its publishing. That is The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery, published in 2015. Really any book by Sy Montgomery is good, but this one is especially interesting. Sy is a naturalist and writes scripts and documentaries so her books are especially good at engaging the public reader. In this book, Sy immerses herself in the world of octopuses from aquariums to in the wild and chronicles the journey and experience with the creatures’ intelligence. It’s amazing and I really recommend picking this up.

And then there’s The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee. I absolutely loved this book and some of it might have to do with my love of genetics. It goes super in depth into the history of genetics and how genetics works. However, it’s a pretty big book at almost 600 pages and it goes a lot more in depth into the actual science than everything else I mention in this post, but if you are interested in genetics at all, I highly recommend picking up this book and at least giving it a shot.

The final two things I’m going to recommend are actually authors because I’ve read so many of their books and I have a lot of faith in their writing and ability to communicate and hold an audience:

The first one is Mary Roach. I’m sort of a late comer to Mary Roach’s writings. She’s a popular science author who goes in depth into the weird and fascinating aspects of science not always thought about. Her books aren’t necessarily as in depth technically as other science books, but they’re compelling and funny and still educational about the weird things around us. Of her books, I have read Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War, published in 2017, which goes over science you may not have thought about that must be thought about for soldiers such as heat and exhaustion management and how submarines are just ridiculous things. Also Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, published in 2010 so it’s a little old. Packing for Mars goes over weird space science which makes you question everything you’ve ever taken for granted. Like you can’t burp in space unless you do it very, very carefully. Mary Roach has also written Stiff about cadavers, Spook about death, Gulp about the human digestive process, and many others.

Finally, and probably my favorite of what’s on this list is author Sam Kean. He is very understandable, has great footnotes, and finds some really interesting stories he digs up from the past about each topic he covers. So far he has 4 books: The Disappearing Spoon about the wild and wacky history about the periodic table of elements, The Violinist’s Thumb which is about various stories around the discovery of genetics as the science we know it as today, The Tale of Dueling Neurosurgeons which is about the history of neuroscience which, as far as I know, doesn’t have a lot of easy science reading available, and finally, Caesar’s Last Breath which is also about the periodic table but in relation to the air we breathe, which sounds a bit weird but also really interesting. I haven’t actually read the last one yet, but I’m willing to bet it’s good.

I hope that this was helpful in you deciding what to start reading in science books.  If you have any other science book recommendations please put them in the comments so I can check them out. If you’d like more posts introducing you to the many ways of learning about science, let me know!