Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary, this episode is a Winter Olympics deep dive from first principles—physics, neuroscience, and climate science in one ride.

• Why ice is slippery: the “water layer” story is incomplete—new nanoscale measurements suggest a far more viscous, thicker interfacial film than textbook intuition.
• Choking under pressure: how high stakes can disrupt neural control—reward signals can push brain states out of the “optimal zone.”
• Climate change vs winter sports: why artificial snow has limits, why some legacy venues may become unreliable, and what “snow farming” is trying to solve.
• Rundown: AI doing physics proofs, cat vocalizations, immune epigenetics, origin-of-life genetics, and an “impossible” exoplanet system.

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00:00 Intro
00:32 Episode setup
02:15 Why is ice slippery?
33:23 Rundown + housekeeping + donate
01:09:11 Choking under pressure (neuroscience)
01:32:32 Climate change & the Winter Olympics + potpourri
01:43:47 Wrap-up + closing

Summary BeatsChapters

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary, this episode jumps from plant biochemistry to quantum metrology to cancer evolution. We start with a University of York breakthrough that solves a ~50-year mystery in alkaloid biosynthesis—identifying the “missing” enzyme behind a key asymmetric step plants use to build powerful defensive (and pharmaceutically useful) molecules. Then we go deep on quantum sensing with entangled atomic clouds, showing how correlated measurements can beat the standard quantum limit. Finally, we close with ALFA-K, a new tool that maps local fitness landscapes to predict how aneuploid cancers may evolve under pressure from therapy.

Summary

• Plants making medicines — the “phantom enzyme” in alkaloid biosynthesis and why solving this pathway matters for scalable drug production.
• Quantum measurements with entangled atom clouds — squeezed/entangled states, noise reduction, and why correlations unlock better sensing.
• Predicting cancer evolution — ALFA-K and measurable fitness landscapes for aneuploidy-driven trajectories under treatment.

Show Notes

• Story 1 — Plant alkaloid biosynthesis (University of York)
• Paper — New Phytologist
• Story 2 — Quantum measurements with entangled atomic clouds (University of Basel)
• Paper — Science
• Story 3 — Alpha-K (Moffitt Cancer Center)
• Paper — Nature Communications

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary, this episode is a full-spectrum moonshot: why Artemis II matters, how the mission actually works (SLS, Orion, translunar injection, free-return trajectories), and a first-principles teardown of the most common Apollo “hoax” claims—Van Allen belts, waving flags, shadows, and “why aren’t there stars?”

We also run a quick Rundown of wild science headlines (ancient cave art, elevation-dependent warming, dogs and vocabulary, and peptide bonds in deep space), before coming back to the core question: what it takes to send humans safely around the Moon—again.

Summary

• Artemis II mission profile — what “free return” means, why TLI timing matters, and what Orion is doing in high Earth orbit before the Moon.

• SLS vs Saturn V — the engineering and risk trade-offs behind modern human-rated heavy lift.

• Apollo myths, explained — radiation belts, camera exposure physics, and why the “flag,” “shadows,” and “no stars” arguments don’t survive basic mechanics and optics.

• Proof Apollo happened — retroreflectors, orbital imagery, and the reality that the world was watching.

Show Notes

• NASA Artemis Program
• NASA Orion Spacecraft
• NASA Space Launch System (SLS)
• NASA Apollo 11 Mission Overview