Curiosity Daily Podcast: Project Blue Book, Cooking Hacks Using Chemistry, and “Sea Nomads”

Host Luke Tipple is joined this week by renowned Harvard professor, Dr. Avi Loeb, who recently led a deep-sea expedition to discover if evidence for advanced alien life crash-landed off the coast of Papua New Guinea in 2014. They discuss the recent Congressional UFO hearings, how the last seventy years of research into extraterrestrial life has been potentially misguided, and the challenges of searching for tiny objects on the bottom of the ocean.

This week, we do things a little differently, as Shark Week’s Luke Tipple invites Adventure Aaron into the podcast studio to talk about his incredible near-death experience on the open water. Adventure Aaron gets into what it takes to circumnavigate the world in an ocean rowboat, what it’s like to stare eye-to-eye with an oceanic white tip that probably wants you for lunch, and everything else that happened to him when his boat was capsized, and he was lost by himself at sea.

Luke Tipple is joined by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of the Outlaw Ocean Ian Urbina, who has dedicated his life to chronicling crime on the high seas. They discuss the state of our world’s oceans, how nearly 20% of your seafood was likely caught illegally, and the surprising link between modern slavery and the killing of sharks.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Richard Thaler explains how “Nudge” has changed the world. Plus: squirrel-inspired robots!

Learn how to tap into your “gut feeling,” which knows more than you think it does; and why Earth's core is growing lopsided.

Learn about non-human animals that say hello and goodbye; life on Snowball Earth; and how to learn skills twice as fast.

Learn about why children write letters backward; how dogs know when you’re lying to them; and mountains on neutron stars.

Learn about the mystery of how Tibetan monks seem to keep meditating after death; and a woolly mammoth that walked VERY far.

Learn about how to avoid getting dragged down by “Sludge”; how hybrid fruit like plumcots are made; and pirate parlance.

Learn about why you eat more when you’re tired; a legendary submerged Egyptian city; and a trick for keeping the peace.