Clear+Vivid with Alan Alda

His far-reaching career acting, writing and producing on television and film spans voicing a sloth in the movie Ice Age to hosting a PBS series on the untold history of Latinos in the US. He’s fast talking, funny, outspoken and possesses a rare quality in his acting – on display in his new movie Bob Trevino Likes It.

Alan and Clear and Vivid’s executive producer Graham Chedd chat about and play clips from some of the shows coming up in season 29. Guests include actor John Leguizamo, science writer Carl Zimmer, and astrophysicist Mario Livio.

A chat with an actor who does it all. After recovering from a near fatal fall on stage as his career was beginning, Bill Pullman has not only had a busy and award-winning career on stage, screen and television, he’s also getting into science communication  – while working on a one-man play and making hard cider for his friends and neighbors.

How the letters in the acronym TALK can have a profound effect on the next conversation you have.

A psychiatrist, engineer and neuroscientist, Kaf Dzirasa is researching ways to reengineer the brain to make it better able to cope with stress and so improve mental health.

Artificial intelligence is poised to reshape our world, in many ways for the better. But the gains come with great risks – above all that its seductive appeal lulls us into believing that AI machines know better than we do.

His new book Revenge of The Tipping Point takes a fresh look at the tipping points of social change he opened our eyes to 25 years ago  –­ and unearths unexpected explanations for such new questions as: what really drove the opioid crisis, why diversity matters, and why Harvard University has a women’s rugby team.

In a remarkable and illuminating tour de force, the novelist recently took a fresh look at her best-known book, going through it line by line and annotating it with handwritten notes in the margins – notes on things she both loved and hated. “It shows,” she says, “a lot about how to write a novel.”

The answer, regrettably, is unbelievable. That is, unbelievable to most of us, because we cannot imagine a universe – including ourselves – made of waves. Quantum physicist Matt Strassler braves the task of convincing Alan he is a collection of waves, and in doing so helps Alan answer a question that’s haunted him for more than a decade.

Her new book, Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love is an ode to the power of language to both shape us and be shaped by us. It’s informed by her own experience with languages: she spoke five before learning English as an immigrant to Canada as a child.

The 500 feet of wiring packed into fruit fly’s brain has been fully mapped – giving insights into how the more that 300,000 miles of wiring packed into your brain generates your thoughts, feelings, perceptions and actions. These insights could also lead to novel treatments for the diseases caused when the wiring goes wrong.

In 1925, a trial in a small town in Tennessee riveted the nation. In the dock was a young man named John Scopes, charged with violating a state law outlawing the teaching of evolution. The trial exposed fault lines in society that are opening again today, a century later.

Music can lift our spirits, bring us to tears, spark our creativity, pace our workouts. Neuroscientist and musician Daniel Levitin explores all these benefits of music – and adds the recent scientific evidence that in some chronic medical conditions, music is medicinal.

Alan and Clear and Vivid’s executive producer Graham Chedd chat about and play clips from some of the shows coming up in season 28. A major theme of the season is language –from babies picking up clues about  their mother’s language while still in the womb, to male fruit flies singing courtship songs to female fruit flies, to a best-selling novelist second guessing some of the language she used in her best known novel. 

Offsprings of the Earth – Earthlings – we are most of us ignorant of the 3.5 billion years of experiments our planet has been through to produce us. Yet the story is there in the rocks all around us – if only we can decipher what they have to say.

So much of our communication is spontaneous and yet we never really learn or are taught how to do it well – we’re just expected to do it. How to avoid being tongue-tied, whether when called upon to give an impromptu speech or when sitting next to a stranger at a dinner party.

Eliciting the story behind a patient’s visit to the hospital can lead to better diagnosis and treatment than medical tests alone – and also reveals much of what needs fixing in health care today.

Alan’s fleeting thought while chasing a spider around the floor sparked a conversation with an animal minds expert who argues that many more creatures than we imagine are conscious. What could this mean for our relationship with the rest of the animal kingdom – including those that annoy us and those we eat?

Good analogies led to cheaper cars and Apple computers; bad ones to lives wasted and lost. And while puns might not always make you smile (or grimace), they helped pave the way for written language.