Babbage from The Economist

The remarkable recent test flight of SpaceX’s Starship brought the world one step closer to a host of new possibilities beyond Earth (not least the colonisation of Mars). But as well as reducing the cost of sending stuff into space and opening up new business opportunities in Earth orbit, Starship will also play an important role in NASA’s plans to return to the Moon. Meanwhile, China has its own lunar ambitions, and a much simpler plan than America’s. Who will win this new space race?Host: Alok Jha, The Economist’s science and technology editor. Contributors: Kari Bingen of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies; The Economist’s Tim Cross, Oliver Morton and Paddy Stephens.For more on this topic, listen to our podcasts on who owns the Moon, the new space economy, and the lunar South Pole.Transcripts of our podcasts are available via economist.com/podcasts.Listen to what matters most, from global politics and business to science and technology—subscribe to Economist Podcasts+.For more information about how to access Economist Podcasts+, please visit our FAQs page or watch our video explaining how to link your account.

It’s been a big year for artificial intelligence—sealed by winning the highest accolades in the scientific world: the Nobel prizes. The innovations that underlie machine learning were recognised in the physics prize. And one of the most important scientific applications of machine learning won the chemistry prize. In the award for physiology or medicine, meanwhile, the discovery of micro-RNAs offers hope for a new generation of therapeutics. In this episode, we examine the winning discoveries and investigate how they could transform the world.Host: Alok Jha, The Economist’s science and technology editor. Contributors: The Economist’s Natasha Loder, Geoff Carr and Emilie Steinmark.Transcripts of our podcasts are available via economist.com/podcasts.Listen to what matters most, from global politics and business to science and technology—subscribe to Economist Podcasts+.For more information about how to access Economist Podcasts+, please visit our FAQs page or watch our video explaining how to link your account.

The world can be an unpredictable and uncertain place. While some people relish those uncertainties, others become crippled by anxiety. Our guest has a way to help: mathematics. Specifically, statistics. Get better at spotting patterns and you’ll gain an understanding of the real nature of risk, chance and luck. Used properly, the surprising science of statistics can provide a sense of order to the risks of everyday life and could even help us make wiser decisions. Alok Jha, The Economist’s science and technology editor, speaks to Sir David Spiegelhater, a professor of statistics at the University of Cambridge and the author of “The Art of Uncertainty”.Transcripts of our podcasts are available via economist.com/podcasts.Listen to what matters most, from global politics and business to science and technology—subscribe to Economist Podcasts+.For more information about how to access Economist Podcasts+, please visit our FAQs page or watch our video explaining how to link your account.

For half a century, the exponential increases in computing performance have powered the digital age. These gains were achieved by shrinking the components on computer chips, meaning that each new generation of semiconductor technology has been faster and more efficient than the last. But, with engineers now facing limits to how much further silicon chips can shrink, and ever-increasing demand thanks to the AI boom, chipmakers are having to get creative. What are the technical innovations they hope will keep the world’s AI ambitions on track?Host: Alok Jha, The Economist’s science and technology editor. Contributors: Shailesh Chitnis, The Economist’s global business correspondent; Eric Pop of Stanford University; David Patterson, professor emeritus of the University of California, Berkeley; and The Economist’s Rachana Shanbhogue.Transcripts of our podcasts are available via economist.com/podcasts.Listen to what matters most, from global politics and business to science and technology—subscribe to Economist Podcasts+.For more information about how to access Economist Podcasts+, please visit our FAQs page or watch our video explaining how to link your account.

Seeing, smelling and being in nature can directly improve your physical and mental health. We may know this intuitively but it is now also backed up by an emerging body of scientific  research. What are the benefits of a walk in the woods? Why does the scent from certain trees enhance cancer-fighting cells in the immune system? What does birdsong have to do with pain management? And what exactly are your houseplants doing for your microbiome?Alok Jha, The Economist’s science and technology editor, speaks to Kathy Willis, professor of biodiversity at the University of Oxford and author of “Good Nature: The New Science of How Nature Improves Our Health”.Transcripts of our podcasts are available via economist.com/podcasts.Listen to what matters most, from global politics and business to science and technology—subscribe to Economist Podcasts+.For more information about how to access Economist Podcasts+, please visit our FAQs page or watch our video explaining how to link your account.

Scientists and tech companies are on a quest to build AI with something closer to the general intelligence of humans. Large language models (LLMs), which power the likes of ChatGPT, can seem human-like, but they work in very different ways to the beings that created them. In order to create a superintelligent world, how can modern AI models be improved to make them better at reasoning and understanding the world? Are LLMs the right type of technology to pursue? Or do scientists need to get more creative?This is the final episode in our two-part series on artificial general intelligence. Last week, we sought to define what is a slippery concept. This week: the technological and ethical challenges that need to be solved in building the truly human-like AI models.Host: Alok Jha, The Economist’s science and technology editor. Contributors: Steven Pinker of Harvard University; Gary Marcus, professor emeritus at New York University; Yoshua Bengio of the University of Montréal; and The Economist’s Abby Bertics.Transcripts of our podcasts are available via economist.com/podcasts.Listen to what matters most, from global politics and business to science and technology—subscribe to Economist Podcasts+.For more information about how to access Economist Podcasts+, please visit our FAQs page or watch our video explaining how to link your account.

For those who think about the future of AI, one of the biggest buzzwords is artificial general intelligence, or AGI. Many of the biggest tech companies in the world point to AGI as their ultimate goal when building intelligent machines. But what does that really mean, and how useful is the concept for understanding how AI is progressing? In the first of two episodes, we explore how philosophers and scientists define AGI and what companies are doing to try to build it.Host: Alok Jha, The Economist’s science and technology editor. Contributors: Melanie Mitchell of the Santa Fe Institute; Susan Schneider of Florida Atlantic University; Blaise Aguera y Arcas, CTO of Technology & Society at Google; and The Economist’s Tom Standage, Kenneth Cukier and Abby Bertics.Over the last five weeks, “The Intelligence”, our daily news podcast, has been answering your questions about AI. Go back and listen here.You can find The Economist’s “Schools Brief” series of articles on artificial intelligence here. Transcripts of our podcasts are available via economist.com/podcasts.Listen to what matters most, from global politics and business to science and technology—subscribe to Economist Podcasts+.For more information about how to access Economist Podcasts+, please visit our FAQs page or watch our video explaining how to link your account.

In the early 20th century, sound locators were dreamed up to provide early warning of incoming enemy aircraft. After the invention of radar, the technology was cast aside. But now, innovators in Ukraine have revived the idea of acoustic detection with surprising success. In this episode, we explore the history of the technology and the reasons it has recently proved so effective at helping Ukraine foil Russian aerial attacks. Will other countries follow suit?Host: Kenneth Cukier, The Economist's deputy executive editor. Contributors: Gascia Ouzounian of the University of Oxford; Tom Withington of RUSI; Ben Sutherland of The Economist; Kunal Patel, producer of “Babbage”.Transcripts of our podcasts are available via economist.com/podcasts.Listen to what matters most, from global politics and business to science and technology—subscribe to Economist Podcasts+.For more information about how to access Economist Podcasts+, please visit our FAQs page or watch our video explaining how to link your account.

There are a growing number of hints that the universe might not have evolved in the way that cosmologists thought. If those hints are confirmed by new sky surveys, it might turn out that dark matter and dark energy are more mysterious than anyone ever conceived before. In that case, how should scientists reformulate their standard model of the universe?This is the second of two episodes that explore a looming crisis in cosmology. We examine what cracks in the standard model of cosmology could mean for the quest to understand dark matter and dark energy.Host: Alok Jha, The Economist’s science and technology editor. Contributors: Michael Brown, Nathan Adams, Dan Thomas, Rebecca Bowler and Erik Rosenberg of the University of Manchester; Don Lincoln of Fermilab; Subir Sarkar of the University of Oxford; Nathalie Palanque-Delabrouille of DESI; and Emilie Steinmark, The Economist’s science correspondent. Listen to part one of the series, “Cosmology in crisis, part one: how to build a universe”.To learn more about how physicists are searching for dark matter, listen to our episode “Babbage: The hunt for dark matter”.Transcripts of our podcasts are available via economist.com/podcasts.Listen to what matters most, from global politics and business to science and technology—subscribe to Economist Podcasts+.For more information about how to access Economist Podcasts+, please visit our FAQs page or watch our video explaining how to link your account.