Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
UnDisciplined
Thursdays at 10:30 a.m.

Each week, UnDisciplined takes a fun, fascinating and accessible dive into the lives of researchers and explorers working across a wide variety of scientific fields.

Ways To Subscribe
Stay Connected
Latest Episodes
  • The UnDisciplined logo features a microphone surrounded by an atom.
    UnDisciplined: How do you land on an asteroid?
    In The Asteroid Hunter, Dante Lauretta chronicles the quest to retrieve a sample from Bennu, which is one of the large asteroids that is most likely to collide with the Earth.
  • The UnDisciplined logo features a microphone surrounded by an atom.
    UnDisciplined: Can a personal creed help young people connect in a rapidly changing world?
    The young adults who comprise Generation Z live in a world of far less violent crime relative to the generation before them. So, why are so many of them struggling? Educator John Creger thinks he has part of the answer: They often need help understanding who they are in this world.
  • The UnDisciplined logo features a microphone surrounded by an atom.
    UnDisciplined: Why do people police language?
    Anne Curzan might seem like a strange sort of English teacher. The veteran professor doesn’t believe in “right” and wrong” when it comes to grammar. Rather, she wants people to be able to make informed choices about language.
  • The UnDisciplined logo features a microphone surrounded by an atom.
    UnDisciplined: How long can apes remember each other’s faces?
    Laura Lewis met a bonobo named Louise as part of a study on the capacity of bonobos to remember the faces of apes they’d spent time with decades earlier. And Louise remembered.
  • The UnDisciplined logo features a microphone surrounded by an atom.
    UnDisciplined: What is it like to leave an evangelical church?
    Like many Americans, Sarah McCammon grew up in a deeply evangelical family, where she was plagued by fears and deep questions about her belief system, but scared to leave.
  • The UnDisciplined logo features a microphone surrounded by an atom.
    UnDisciplined: Is there more undiscovered life in the Great Salt Lake?
    Until recently, nematodes weren’t known to live in the Great Salt Lake. And, in fact, very little lives there — because the lake’s salinity makes most life untenable. But, as it turns out, these tiny worms were doing just fine.
  • The UnDisciplined logo features a microphone surrounded by an atom.
    UnDisciplined: What’s ‘fair’ when it comes to climate action?
    When humans debate climate policy, the questions asked are often posed in terms of what will work best. Fairness isn’t always, or even often, taken into account. But Stacia Ryder thinks that needs to change.
  • UnDisciplined: Are food companies responsible for the epidemic in diabetes, cancer and dementia?
    Ultra-processed food and the companies that produce them contribute significantly to the epidemic in diabetes, cancer, dementia, and other chronic disease. Is it time to regulate these products like tobacco? And will it take a class action suit to make that happen? Erik Peper believes so.
  • Memory is not a rigid, static picture of what came before. Rather, it’s a nebulous, ever-changing conceptualization of who we were, what we believed, what happened to us, and what was happening around us.
  • There is precedent for humans connecting with other living things, like getting attention, love, and companionship from dogs and cats and a few other animals that have been domesticated to provide partnership. Now, there’s a new option for meeting this need — social robots — who may end up being even better at fulfilling the human desire for connection.