The Pulse Episode Archive

We’ve all heard the saying: “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” The problem is that’s not how the world works. Just about everyt ...

Who are you? There are dozens of ways to answer that question, from your name and nationality, to your relationships and job, all the way ...

Every time you go to see a new doctor, you have to fill out forms that ask your name, your age, your family history — and your race and ...

Language is how we connect — to each other, to the past, to the future — how we create culture, communicate ideas, and make decisions ...

It seems like every week, we hear about new breakthroughs in cancer treatment — new discoveries, new medications, new hopes for a cure. ...

Left to their own devices, viruses are pretty much helpless. They need cells to infect in order to replicate. But they’re sneaky — ma ...

Humans have been obsessed with Mars for thousands of years, but it wasn’t until the mid-20th century that we began to have actual break ...

For thousands of years, humans have obsessed over Mars from afar. At first, maybe it was the fact that Mars stands out in the night sky b ...

Anxiety can feel like a buzzing electric current that fuels our thoughts and behaviors. There are the well-known symptoms — chest pains ...

Our sense of smell can bring us quick bursts of joy, like a whiff of bread baking, that freshly brewed cup of coffee, or your favorite pe ...

Plastic gets a bad rap — over the years, it’s become synonymous with environmental destruction, cheap fakery, needless consumption, a ...

The United States spends more on health care than any other country in the world — and that spending is going up every year. In some re ...

Artificial intelligence has seen huge advances in the last decade, very notably in the technology of natural language processing. NLP has ...

Intelligent machines will play a much larger role in the future than they do now, and we’re trying to imagine that future as we’re ra ...

In a lot of ways, artificial intelligence acts as our personal butlers — it filters our email, manages the temperature in our homes, fi ...