The ocean takes up roughly 70% of the planet, but we still don’t know too much about everything that is out there. Most ocean life is very small, and tends to change based on the ocean’s conditions. So even if you took a sample of ocean water right now, there’s really no guarantee that it would resemble a sample taken later.A recent study by Sarah Tucker and her team offers some direction for filling in that gap.

Twenty years ago, Richard Louv helped us begin to think differently about childhood and nature.Now, he's asking a related but perhaps even more provocative question: what happens when we really notice the world around us? What do we experience in terms of attention, awe, loss, and what it means to love a very complex world?

It’s a question psychologists have been wrestling with for decades: What exactly is time?Not the time kept by clocks or calendars, but the time we actually experience. Why do some moments stretch and others collapse?Martin Wiener has spent much of his career trying to understand those questions. His work suggests that our experience of time is not fixed at all. Instead, it may be something the brain continuously constructs and reshapes according to the information it decides is worth remembering.

For years, comedy thrived on cynicism. The world was a mess, people were selfish, and anyone who believed otherwise was the punchline.But from Ted Lasso, to Paddington, to Come From Away, some of our most beloved stories are finding humor, heart, and even heroism in empathy, earnestness, and human decency.This summer, Lyric Repertory Company is producing Gutenberg! The Musical! It’s a delightfully ridiculous show about two aspiring theater makers who are convinced they have created a masterpiece. They haven't, but their unwavering enthusiasm is part of what makes the show so charming.And it's not the only production in Lyric's season that seems interested in the power of human decency.

In the United States, we tend to celebrate people who pick a destination, set a goal, believe in themselves, and refuse to quit until they get exactly where they always knew they’d be.But real life is messier than that. Dreams change. and sometimes careers stall — we get relegated to something less than what we dreamed of.That's what happened to Todd Smith, a part-time sports writer and full-time landscape supplier.Then he found himself watching an English football match between a billion-dollar giant and a club that most people, even in England, have never heard of, and he fell down a rabbit hole.

If one of the most important roles of science fiction is that it makes unfamiliar ideas emotionally legible, what are the ideas that we need to be reading about right now?

A few years back, we had David Sinclair on the program. David is one of the world’s top researchers working on the question of whether we can extend human lifespans.A couple years after that, Nate Price was with us. Nate is also looking at this question, though from a different angle: he wants to know how we can pack more healthy years into the lifespans we already have.But here on the program, we find ourselves returning to another version of that same question: what does it actually mean to lengthen a life?Brett Popplewell has been thinking about that too — about whether a life can feel longer not only through years added, but through attention, novelty, memory, movement, and the refusal to let the days become interchangeable.

There is no denying it: A.I. has changed higher education, and teachers are trying to catch up — to figure out how to live in this new world, and how to make learning meaningful.Stephen Aguilar studies how emerging technologies shape teaching, learning, and motivation. He’s also co-leading work at the USC center for generative A.I. and society, which just released a new report examining how students and teachers are actually using artificial intelligence in real classrooms.

Scott Simon has spent a lifetime telling other people’s stories on national public radio. But every now and then, along the way, he’s found reasons to tell the stories of the animals with whom we share this world, and he’s collected those stories, and more, in his latest book.

In workplaces everywhere, the most engaged employees often become the go-to for extra work. It feels logical, but management scholar Sangah Bae believes that instinct might be backfiring — a lot. Her recent work shows that intrinsically motivated workers are disproportionately assigned additional tasks, often at a cost to their performance, satisfaction, and long-term retention. The reason isn’t just that they’re capable—it’s that managers assume they’ll actually enjoy the extra work.