Making Sense of Science Upworthy Science

Today’s podcast guest is Rosalind Picard, a researcher, inventor named on over 100 patents, entrepreneur, author, professor and engineer. When it comes to the science related to endowing computer software with emotional intelligence, she wrote the book. It’s published by MIT Press and called Affective Computing.Dr. Picard is founder and director of the MIT Media Lab’s Affective Computing Research Group. Her research and engineering contributions have been recognized internationally, for examp...

On today’s episode of Making Sense of Science, I’m honored to be joined by Dr. Paul Song, a physician, oncologist, progressive activist and biotech chief medical officer. Through his company, NKGen Biotech, Dr. Song is leveraging the power of patients’ own immune systems by supercharging the body’s natural killer cells to make new treatments for Alzheimer’s and cancer. Whereas other treatments for Alzheimer’s focus directly on reducing the build-up of proteins in the brain such as amyloi...

A new competition by the XPRIZE Foundation is offering $101 million to researchers if they discover therapies that allow seniors to perform like when they were 10 to 20 years younger. For today’s episode, I talked with Dr. Peter Diamandis, XPRIZE’s founder and executive chairman. Under Peter’s leadership, XPRIZE has launched 27 previous competitions with over $300 million in prize purses. The lastest contest aims to enhance healthspan, or the period of life when older people can pla...

A promising development in science in recent years has been the advance of technologies that take something natural and use technology to optimize it. This episode features a fascinating example: using tech to optimize psychedelic mushrooms.These mushrooms have been used for religious, spiritual and medicinal purposes for thousands of years but only in the past several decades have scientists brought psychedelics into the lab to enhance them and maximize their therapeutic value.Today’s podcas...

You’ve probably heard about intermittent fasting, where you don’t eat for about 16 hours each day and limit the window where you’re taking in food to the remaining 8 hours.But there’s another type of fasting, called fasting-mimicking diet, with studies pointing to important benefits for health and longevity. For today’s episode, I chatted with Dr. Valter Longo, a biogerontologist at the University of Southern California about all kinds of fasting, and particularly the fasting-mimicking diet, ...

In recent years, researchers of Alzheimer’s have made progress in figuring out the complex factors that lead to the disease. Yet, the root cause, or causes, of Alzheimer’s are still pretty much a mystery.In fact, many people get Alzheimer’s even though they lack the gene variant we know can play a role in the disease. This is a critical knowledge gap for research to address because the vast majority of Alzheimer’s patients don’t have this gene variant.A new study provides key insights into wh...