The Best Popular Science Books

15 Popular Science Books

Reading is exactly like getting into another person's brain pool and swimming around in their knowledge. You can stay in there as long as you want, and there is only one rule. DON'T PEE IN THE POOL.

Best Lex Fridman Podcast Episodes

Best Lex Fridman Episodes

Lex Fridman hosts a popular science podcast in which he digs into the minds of world-class experts and extracts intellectual treasures.

How Does ChatGPT Work?

How Does ChatGPT Work?

ChatGPT is an AI language model that can debate moral philosophy, write short stories, and explain how to do your taxes. Here's how it works.

Viruses: Genes Gone Rogue

Viruses: Genes Gone Rogue

Viruses are devious wretches that meddle with our biology. You might call them intracellular parasites, mobile genetic elements, or freeloading gits.

16 Giant Leaps in Animal Evolution

16 Giant Leaps in Animal Evolution

Here we visualise the course of animal evolution, cutting a path from the first clumps of cells wobbling about in the ocean to the hairy bipeds we are today.

What is Schrodinger's Cat?

What is Schrodinger's Cat?

Schrodinger's Cat is a hypothetical thought experiment created in 1935 by a man who loved physics and hated cats. Here's how it holds up today.

How Does DNA Work? A Guide to Genes, Chromosomes, and DNA Expression

How Does DNA Work?

DNA isn't just a blueprint for foetal growth—you're expressing DNA right now to produce life-sustaining proteins like insulin, cortisol, and oxytocin.

How Does Gene Therapy Work?

How Does Gene Therapy Work?

Gene therapy delivers snippets of DNA into cells to restore their normal function. Like genetic vaccines, it uses viruses or nanoparticles to deliver the payload.

Where Do Cells Come From? A Dip in a Primordial Soup

Where Do Cells Come From?

Once upon a time, about 3.8 billion years ago, there was a primordial soup. It was a tad watery and flavourless, but it did contain some promising ingredients.

The State of Climate Change

The State of Climate Change

Here's a snapshot of what we know about man-made climate change in 2022, including past, present, and forecast data on global temperatures and sea levels.

Can We Live on Mars?

Can We Live on Mars?

SpaceX wants to put the first humans on Mars this decade. But can we really survive the radiation, pressure, and gravity posed by the Red Planet?

Are We More Than Biological Machines? The Illusion of Free Will

Are We More Than Biological Machines?

If memories and sensations are cities spread across a country, then consciousness is the interconnected network of highways that connect them.

Neuralink and You: A Human-AI Symbiosis

Neuralink and You

Take a coin-sized panel of microchips, a battery, and 3,000+ electrodes distributed along neural threads thinner than human hair. This is a Link. And it goes inside your skull.

A man walks into a teleporter

A Man Walks into a Teleporter

It scans every last molecule in his body and, with a digital backup made, proceeds to annihilates him.

The Origins of Language

The Origins of Language

For 300,000 years, our species lived in hunter-gatherer societies; a highly social lifestyle that explains the origins of language.

How Does Evolution Work?

How Does Evolution Work?

Evolution connects all life on Earth. Whether you're a marine worm or a marmoset, the same genetic code proliferates your DNA.

How Do Jellyfish Have Sex? The Jelly Lifecycle Illustrated

How Do Jellyfish Have Sex?

Jellies are ancient animals who mastered sexual reproduction long before us. Frankly, we're the ones odd-balling it with our penises, vaginas, and miserable childbirth.

Helium Could Save Our Planet: Cold Fusion and Moon Mining

Helium Could Save Our Planet

Huge helium reserves just beneath the Moon's surface could supply nuclear fusion reactors on Earth, offering a clean energy source for the 21st century.

The Life of Elon Musk

The Life of Elon Musk

So you have this dream of changing the world? For Elon Musk, this isn't enough. His ambitions are multiplanetary.

How Does Classical Conditioning Work?

How Does Classical Conditioning Work?

This is my friend Sutton, who volunteered for a harmless classical conditioning experiment. Let's start by poking him in the eye.

Dogs Are Smarter Than You Think

Dogs Are Smarter Than You Think

In meaningful ways, dogs are actually smarter than our closest primate cousins—bonobos, orangutans, and chimpanzees—thanks to living side-by-side with humans for 40,000 years.

The Evolution of SARS-CoV-2

The Evolution of SARS-CoV-2

As the youngest of the coronavirus family, SARS-CoV-2 did his parents proud. Here's where the novel virus came from and how antigenic drift has seen it evolve.

Who Owns Your Organs When You Die? The Ethics of Organ Donation

Who Owns Your Organs When You Die?

It's not you—it's me. Besides being your favourite pseudo-compassionate breakup line, this is also the answer to an ethical minefield of a question.

Meet a Real Life Body-Snatching Parasite: Curtuteria Australis

Meet a Real Life Body-Snatching Parasite

This is Curtuteria australis: a parasitic flatworm who takes over three separate hosts during his convoluted lifecycle.

What Does COVID Do To Your Body?

What Does COVID Do To Your Body?

As the SARS-CoV-2 virus has evolved, so too has the pathology of COVID-19. It's now classed as a vascular disease, potentially causing multi-system dysfunction.

Nanomedicine is Here

Nanomedicine is Here

Nanomedicine is shaping our experience of being human. There are already 50+ nanomedicines in use, including lipid nanoparticles in COVID-19 vaccines.

Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life Illustrated

Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life

A psychology-based manifesto from a man who's making a giant existential omelette and breaking more than a few eggs in the process.

The Life of Nikola Tesla

The Life of Nikola Tesla

Despite his extraordinary inventions, the media labelled Tesla a lunatic and a con-man, and at one low point, he even saw his private New York lab burned to the ground.

The Biology of Depression

The Biology of Depression

Biology is a major driver of depression, with neurochemical processes inducing a permanent stress response in the face of life's challenges.

The Life of Isaac Asimov

The Life of Isaac Asimov

Asimov described his short story, Nightfall, as an archetypal social science fiction, moving away from gadgets and toward exploration of the human condition.

How Was Stonehenge Built? Techniques of Neolithic Builders

How Was Stonehenge Built?

In the 5,000 years since it was built, Stonehenge has been eroded by weather, sunken by earthworms, and picked at by handsy tourists.