Unsung Science
Hear the untold stories of mind-blowing achievements in science and tech. “CBS Sunday Morning” correspondent and six-time Emmy winner David Pogue takes you behind the scenes into the creation stories of the world’s greatest advances and the people behind them. From transportation, food, space, internet, and health, creators reveal their inspirations and roadblocks they encountered in bringing their breakthroughs to the public. Hear all-new episodes of the award-winning Unsung Science podcast every other Friday.
Episodes
December 8, 2023 • 52 mins
In the days of old, creating a song required a composer, a lyricist, an arranger, a recording engineer, a band or orchestra. Today, in the pop world, a single person often handles those jobs in a single studio. In this extraordinary episode, you’ll hear two-time Grammy winner Oak Felder create a new song, in real time, start to finish—and you’ll gain incredible insight into how technology and talent team up to produce art.
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November 24, 2023 • 40 mins
Planes contribute 9% of the world’s carbon pollution, but electrifying them has always seemed impossible; batteries have never been powerful or light enough to carry themselves. But in 2023, batteries reached a tipping point in power and weight. Beta Technologies, based in Vermont, is flying its six-passenger vertical-takeoff airplanes every day. David Pogue was there at takeoff.
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November 10, 2023 • 41 mins
The U.S. has fallen into polarized, partisan, political bickering. Online, liberals and conservatives seem to despise each other. But nobody seems to stop to ask: How did we get our liberal and conservative views in the first place? We formed our opinions by carefully weighing the issues and thoughtfully choosing a stance, right? Well, no; turns out over half of our political leanings are determined, incredibly, by our genes. In th...
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October 26, 2023 • 32 mins
Every month, over a billion people open their phones and fire up Google Maps. Its original function—offering driving directions, with real-time traffic tracking—was disruptive enough in 2008, when most people had to pay $10 a month for traffic data. But since that time, it’s become a global business directory, a transit timetable, crowdedness monitor, a Street View miracle—and now, in its newest release, an augmented-reality viewer...
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October 13, 2023 • 40 mins
For the most part, we don’t hunt whales anymore, but we’re still killing them—mostly by driving ships into them. One species, the North Atlantic right whale, is now extinct in most parts of the world; only 340 are left. But it may not be too late. An extraordinary coalition of nonprofits, research institutions, foundations, and even megalithic shipping corporations are teaming up to develop technology, prove the science, and, yes, ...
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September 29, 2023 • 43 mins
On Christmas Day, 2021, NASA launched the James Webb Space Telescope into orbit a million miles from Earth—a huge and insanely ambitious machine, billions of dollars over budget and 14 years past deadline. Now, as the telescope completes its first year of capturing astonishing images of the universe as it was just after the Big Bang, its creators discuss why so many things went right.
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September 16, 2023 • 39 mins
People use all kinds of words to describe Elon Musk, from “genius” to “megalomaniac,” from “visionary” to “erratic”—but now there’s less reason to call him “enigmatic,” thanks to Walter Isaacson’s new 688-page biography. Isaacson hung out with Musk for two years, attending meetings, witnessing meltdowns, taking Musk’s 3 a.m. phone calls. In this special “Unsung Science” episode, Isaacson describes the man behind Tesla, SpaceX, ...
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September 1, 2023 • 41 mins
In April 1978, MIT professor Amar Bose was flying home to Boston from Switzerland. But when he tried to listen to music through the airline’s headphones, he couldn’t hear a darned thing. He spent the rest of the flight doing acoustical math—and sketching out an idea for headphones that literally subtracted background noise from what you hear. Today, noise-canceling headphones are everywhere. But the revolution began with Amar Bose’...
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August 18, 2023 • 44 mins
There’s a new kind of jack in town—well, new as of 2014—called USB-C. This single, tiny connector can carry power, video, audio, and data between electronic gadgets—simultaneously. It can replace a laptop’s power cord, USB jacks, video output jack, and headphone jack. The connector is symmetrical, so you can’t insert it upside-down. It’s identical end for end, too, so it doesn’t matter which end you grab first. USB-C has the potent...
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August 4, 2023 • 43 mins
Genealogy has been around a while. So has DNA evidence. But what if you combined the two? What if you could use DNA from a crime scene, compare the unknown killer’s genetics with public databases of other people’s DNA, figure out who his relatives are, and thereby determine his identity? That’s the system that CeCe Moore invented five years ago. So far, she’s cracked over 270 cold cases using this method—and brought closure to hund...
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July 21, 2023 • 34 mins
We’ve known about the placebo effects for over 200 years. That’s where doctors give you a pill containing no actual medicine, but you still get better. Recent studies have uncovered a broader range of benefits from the including alleviated pain, nausea, heart rate, hay fever, allergies, insomnia, depression, anxiety, fatigue, and even symptoms of Parkinson’s. Weirder yet, the characteristics of the pill — color, size, and shape — i...
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July 7, 2023 • 37 mins
In 1994, Masahiro Hara got tired of having to scan six or seven barcodes on every box of Toyota car-parts that zoomed past him on the assembly line. He wondered why the standard barcode from the 70s was still used...Why couldn’t someone invent a barcode that used two dimensions instead of one that could work from any angle or distance, even even if it got smudged or torn?
And so, studying a game of "Go", he dreamed up what we now k...
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June 23, 2023 • 46 mins
The lost OceanGate submersible has captured the world’s attention. In the summer of 2022, “CBS News Sunday Morning” correspondent and "Unsung Science" host David Pogue was invited to join an expedition to visit the Titanic wreck with OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, as well as Titanic dive veteran P.H. Nargeolet, aboard the one-of-a-kind sub. David covered his adventure in a two-part episode in December 2022. Today, we know that the su...
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June 9, 2023 • 41 mins
In his senior year of college, a monstrous ailment fell upon Doug Lindsay. His skin felt flayed. His heart raced. The room spun. He was so weak, he couldn’t sit up in bed, let alone walk. Worst of all, doctors had no idea what was wrong with him.
Only one person on earth had the time and motivation to figure out what was wrong with Doug Lindsay: Doug Lindsay. Over the next 14 years, he consumed medical textbooks and science journal...
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May 26, 2023 • 39 mins
We’ve been shipping stuff across oceans for centuries. But until 1956, we loaded our ships in the dumbest way possible: one at a time. Then Malcolm McClean came along. He envisioned lifting the big metal box part off a truck and setting it directly down onto a ship. Every one of these boxes would be identical and interchangeable, maximizing space and minimizing waste. The shipping container was born — an idea that was so powerful, ...
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May 12, 2023 • 39 mins
The first time you heard “Star Trek” characters speak Klingon, or the “Game of Thrones” characters speaking Dothraki and High Valyrian, you might have assumed that the actors were just speaking a few words of gibberish, created by some screenwriter to sound authentic. But these are complete languages, with vocabulary, syntax, grammar, and even made-up histories. There’s only one person on the planet whose full-time job is creating ...
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April 28, 2023 • 41 mins
We’re overrun with plastic. It’s in our oceans, our water, our food. Something has to be done—preferably by corporations, which churn out millions of tons of plastic every year.
Enter: the toothpaste tube. It might seem like a minor player in the plastic problem, but we throw 20 billion toothpaste tubes into the landfill every year. Recycling plants can’t take them, because they’re made of plastic and metal foil bonded together. Th...
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March 31, 2023 • 37 mins
After 17 years of trying to prop up their failing farm outside of London, Charlie Burrell and Isabella Tree were stressed, exhausted, and $1.7 million in debt. They decided to stop farming—no more plowing, planting, irrigating, chemicals. They gave away the farm—to nature.
20 years later, their land has one of the most important biodiversity hotspots in the UK. These 3500 acres teem with species, many of which are endangered or ha...
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March 17, 2023 • 35 mins
65 million years ago an asteroid struck the earth. In the ensuing planetary darkness, the dinosaurs went extinct. But the dinosaurs didn’t have a space program! Now we can spot incoming asteroids with steadily improving confidence. If we see one on a collision course with the Earth, we know from the movies that the solution is to nuke it...Right? Actually, NASA has a better idea. If you can just nudge an asteroid slightly off its c...
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March 3, 2023 • 43 mins
In 1915, British explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton’s historic expedition to Antarctica stalled when floating ice trapped, crushed, and finally sank his ship, Endurance. Shackleton’s men survived 21 months on the ice, alone and freezing, and became one of the most incredible adventure stories ever recorded. The ship itself, Endurance, was not seen again for 106 years. Every attempt to find it wound up thwarted by exactly the same enemy...
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