Guest: Dr. Shi En Kim 

Mike and Kim take a closer look at DSC: "Jinaal." What do they make of the Trill's test? And why was Stamets so bubbly about isotope half-lives?

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Mike: twitter.com/miquai
Kim: twitter.com/goes_by_kim

DSC 503: Half-Life

Guest: Dr. Shi En Kim 

Mike and Kim unpack DSC: "Face the Strange" and "Mirrors." Can you use relativity to defeat a temporal shield? What do they make of Moll and L'ak's backstory?

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Mike: twitter.com/miquai
Kim: twitter.com/goes_by_kim

DSC 504 & 505: Temporal Bug

Guest: Dr. Shi En Kim 

Mike and Kim chat about themes in DSC: "Whistlespeak" and "Erigah." Is cloud seeding a real thing, how do you create ultra-distilled water, and what are some contaminants that plague our waterways here on Earth?

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Mike: twitter.com/miquai
Kim: twitter.com/goes_by_kim

DSC 506 & 507: Distilled

Guest: Dr. Shi En Kim 

Science journalist Shi En Kim joins Mike to reflect on the last three episodes of Star Trek: Discovery's fifth and final season, DSC: "Labyrinths," "Lagrange Point," and "Life, Itself." How do Mike and Kim process their fears? What is a Lagrange point? And what do they make of the Progenitor's technology?

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DSC 508–510: Lagrange Points

Guest: Prof. Mary-Jane Rubenstein 

Professor Mary-Jane Rubenstein joins us to talk about her book "Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race," which explores the religious narratives that underpin commercial space exploration, and its connections to Star Trek.

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Episode 171: Astrotopia

Guests: Prof. Jason A. Kaufman & Prof. Aaron M. Peterson 

Professors Jason A. Kaufman and Aaron M. Peterson join us to discuss their sweeping book "Leadership in Star Trek: Lessons from the Captain's Chair." Learn how communication, patience, and relationship underpin every good leader, from Burnham to Picard.

Book: https://mcfarlandbooks.com/product/leadership-in-star-trek/

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Jason: twitter.com/vagabondkaufman

Episode 172: Leadership in Star Trek

Guest: Dr. Erin Macdonald 

Dr. Erin Macdonald, the official science advisor for the Star Trek universe, joins us to discuss the science behind Season 5 of Star Trek: Discovery and Season 2 of Star Trek: Prodigy.

"Chromatin remodeling in tribbles in Star Trek: Prodigy" by Prof. Mohamed Noor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2PePbR3FPk

Erin's Nerd Nite talk, "Faster-Than-Light Travel in Science Fiction": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Lw7JOgQ_MI

Mike's Nerd Nite talk, "The Astrobiology of Star Trek": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtgcaVg7puM

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Mike: twitter.com/miquai
Erin: twitter.com/drerinmac

Episode 173: Temporal Mechanics 101

On this short solo episode, Mike shares his TEDxNewEngland experience.

Mike's paper, "On the roles of function and selection in evolving systems":  https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2310223120

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Episode 174: #TEDxNE Reflections

Guest: Prof. Amitai Shenhav 

On this episode, Mike is joined by his fellow TEDxNewEngland speaker Amitai Shenhav, a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley who is known for his work on decision making. How does Prof. Shenhav use Star Trek (or attempt to, at least) in his psychology classes? And what does his research reveal about how to make tough decisions?

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Mike: twitter.com/miquai
Amitai: twitter.com/amitaishenhav

Episode 175: Decisions, Decisions

Guest: Dr. Shi En Kim

Mike and science journalist Shi En Kim discuss the first half of Star Trek: Lower Decks' fifth season. Is solar sailing a real thing? When is it advantageous to play dead?

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Mike: https://bsky.app/profile/miquai.bsky.social
Kim: https://bsky.app/profile/goesbykim.bsky.social

LD 501–505: Solar Sailing & Playing Dead

When their crops are plagued by caterpillars, farmers often turn to wasps for help. These wasps are hardened parasites: they lay their eggs inside the caterpillars, and once these eggs hatch the baby wasps eat the caterpillar from inside out. But the wasps themselves are parasitized by organisms that manipulate their host's reproduction! Is this Nature's way of enacting poetic justice in response to the wasps' cruelty? Join the conversation to find out! 

Speaking of poetry, Aditi, John, Julian, and Lev also discuss what they read for inspiration. For some, the amount of reading done for work pulls them away from reading for pleasure, but for others it brings out their appreciation of genres like science fiction. Listen in to hear more about the writing that inspires us.

Find more examples of the wasps’ weird reproduction, called parthenogenesis, or virgin births, here: http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141219-spectacular-real-virgin-births 

Find the scientific paper demonstrating the link between bacterial infections and parthenogenesis in parasitic wasps here: https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/87/7/2424.full.pdf

You can also check out the books and show we mention: I Contain Multitudes by Ed Yong, Intuition by Allegra Goodman, Solaris by Stanisław Lem, and “Planet Earth” by BBC America.

Find us at https://caltechletters.org/podcasts/
Contact us at biospherepodcast@gmail.com
Tweet Lev @LMT_spoon
Upgoer5 editor: https://splasho.com/upgoer5/

*** The cover image is from the 1910 book “Annual report, including a report of the insects of New Jersey, 1909,” accessed via the Internet Archive Book Images: https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/18405644036/. It shows an insect egg parasite, Trichogramma pretiosa, very much enlarged.

Biosphere 2: Poetic Justice

What would it sound like if the scientists producing some of the latest research also produced podcasts about their work? Listen to Caltech Letters Podcasts to find out!

In all our shows, you'll hear Caltech researchers blending science and storytelling to bring you the latest findings in their fields as well as a window into how science works, breaks, and moves forward. We believe communicating our research honestly reveals how scientists view their own work, and helps us all understand how to consume science with the right amount of passion, skepticism, and confidence.

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Caltech Letters is not a publication of the California Institute of Technology.