In the 1850s, there were a lot of things we didn’t know yet: how to create an airplane, how to split an atom, or how to control the spread of a common but deadly disease: cholera.
When a cholera outbreak in London killed scores of people, a doctor named John Snow used it as a chance to study whether the cause might be very small organisms that were spread ... Show More
Apr 27
ReAct and Tool Usage (The Agents Season, Episode 2)
Before 2022, there was a wall between AI and the real world — models could reason impressively, but couldn't look anything up, run code, or check whether anything they said was actually true. This episode traces the moment that wall came down, through two landmark papers: ReAct, ... Show More
23m 41s
Jul 2020
The doctor who discovered how cholera spread
In the 1800s cholera was a mysterious disease killing millions around the world. No-one knew how to stop it till an English doctor, John Snow, began investigating the outbreak of 1854. At a time before germ theory was properly understood, many public health experts thought diseas ... Show More
9m 33s
Mar 2020
#6: Coronavirus special - the spread of covid-19, fatality rates, and the importance of hand washing
Governments globally are taking serious measures to halt the spread of the covid-19 coronavirus, from shutting schools to cancelling major events. On the panel for this special episode dedicated to the disease are New Scientist journalists Rowan Hooper, Penny Sarchet and Donna Lu ... Show More
33m 12s
Mar 2020
The Deadliest Pandemic in Modern History
April 5, 1918. The first mention of a new influenza outbreak in Kansas appears in a public health report. That strain, later called the Spanish Flu, would go on to kill at least 50 million people worldwide. In a time before widespread global travel, how did this disease spread so ... Show More
21m 24s
Mar 2021
Solving Medical Mysteries in the World of Rare Disease
In this conversation, Stanford Professor Euan Ashley—geneticist, cardiologist, author of the new book, The Genome Odyssey, and first co-chair of the Undiagnosed Diseases Network—talks with Bio Eats World host Hanne Winarsky about one of the first places that genomic sequencing be ... Show More
38m 40s
May 2020
Coronavirus R number, genome study of Covid-19 survivors and using aircraft messages to assess aviation
R seems to have found its way into the newspapers and on Radio 4 as if it’s a word, or a letter, that we should all be familiar with and understand. As part of the government’s briefing on Sunday, it appeared in a pseudo-equation, the infographic - 'COVID alert level = R + number ... Show More
32m 35s
Feb 2022
Identifying a more infectious HIV variant
We’re 40 years into the AIDS pandemic, and even with massive public health campaigns, still, 1 ½ million become infected with HIV each year; about half that number die of its ravages. And a study just out shows that this well-understood virus can still take on more worrying forms ... Show More
1h 3m