Making Sense of Science Upworthy Science

Today’s podcast guest is Rosalind Picard, a researcher, inventor named on over 100 patents, entrepreneur, author, professor and engineer. When it comes to the science related to endowing computer software with emotional intelligence, she wrote the book. It’s published by MIT Press and called Affective Computing.

Dr. Picard is founder and director of the MIT Media Lab’s Affective Computing Research Group. Her research and engineering contributions have been recognized internationally, for example she received  the 2022 International Lombardy Prize for Computer Science Research, considered by many to be the Nobel prize in computer science.

Through her research and companies, Dr. Picard has developed wearable sensors, algorithms and systems for sensing, recognizing and responding to information about human emotion. Her products are focused on using fitness trackers to advance clinical quality treatments for a range of conditions.

Meanwhile, in just the past few years, numerous fitness tracking companies have released products with their own stress sensors and systems. You may have heard about Fitbit’s Stress Management Score, or Whoop’s Stress Monitor – these features and apps measure things like your heart rhythm and a certain type of invisible sweat to identify stress. They’re designed to raise your awareness about forms of stress like anxieties and anger, and suggest strategies like meditation to relax in real time when stress occurs.

But how well do these off-the-shelf gadgets work? There’s no one more knowledgeable and experienced than Rosalind Picard to explain the science behind these stress features, what they do exactly, how they might be able to help us, and their current shortcomings.

Dr. Picard is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, and a popular speaker who’s given over a hundred invited keynote talks and a TED talk with over 2 million views. She holds a Bachelors in Electrical Engineering from Georgia Tech, and Masters and Doctorate degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT. She lives in Newton, Massachusetts with her husband, where they’ve raised three sons.

In our conversation, we discuss stress scores on fitness trackers to improve well-being. She carefully describes the difference between commercial products that might help people become more mindful of their health and products that are FDA approved and really capable of advancing the science. We also discuss several fascinating findings and concepts discovered in Dr. Picard’s lab including the multiple arousal theory, a phenomenon you’ll want to hear about. And we talk about the complexity of stress, one reason it’s so tough to measure. For example, many forms of stress are actually good for us. Can fitness trackers tell the difference between stress that’s healthy and unhealthy?
Making Sense of Science features interviews with leading medical and scientific experts about the latest developments in health innovation and the big ethical and social questions they raise. The podcast is hosted by science journalist Matt Fuchs

On today’s episode of Making Sense of Science, I’m honored to be joined by Dr. Paul Song, a physician, oncologist, progressive activist and biotech chief medical officer. Through his company, NKGen Biotech, Dr. Song is leveraging the power of patients’ own immune systems by supercharging the body’s natural killer cells to make new treatments for Alzheimer’s and cancer. 
Whereas other treatments for Alzheimer’s focus directly on reducing the build-up of proteins in the brain such as amyloid and tau in patients will mild cognitive impairment, NKGen is seeking to help patients that much of the rest of the medical community has written off as hopeless cases, those with late stage Alzheimer’s. And in small studies, NKGen has shown remarkable results, even improvement in the symptoms of people with these very progressed forms of Alzheimer’s, above and beyond slowing down the disease.
In the realm of cancer, Dr. Song is similarly setting his sights on another group of patients for whom treatment options are few and far between: people with solid tumors. Whereas some gradual progress has been made in treating blood cancers such as certain leukemias in past few decades, solid tumors have been even more of a challenge. But Dr. Song’s approach of using natural killer cells to treat solid tumors is promising. You may have heard of CAR-T, which uses genetic engineering to introduce cells into the body that have a particular function to help treat a disease. NKGen focuses on other means to enhance the 40 plus receptors of natural killer cells, making them more receptive and sensitive to picking out cancer cells. 
Dr. Song is the grandson of the late Sang Don Kim, who was the first popularly elected Mayor of Seoul, South Korea. Dr. Song serves as the co-chair for a Campaign for a Healthy California. In 2013, he was named and served as the very first visiting fellow on healthcare policy in the California Department of Insurance. In addition, Dr. Song serves on the executive board of Physicians for a National Health Program California, People for the American Way, Progressive Democrats of America, Healthcare NOW, The Eisner Pediatric and Women's Center, and the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies. Dr. Song graduated with honors from the University of Chicago, received his M.D. from George Washington University and completed his residency in radiation oncology at the University of Chicago. He sees Medicaid and uninsured patients at Dignity California Hospital.
With Dr. Song’s leadership, NKGen’s work on natural killer cells represents cutting-edge science that’s resulting in key findings about two of humanity’s most intractable diseases – contributing important pieces of the puzzle for treating them.



Making Sense of Science features interviews with leading medical and scientific experts about the latest developments in health innovation and the big ethical and social questions they raise. The podcast is hosted by science journalist Matt Fuchs

A new competition by the XPRIZE Foundation is offering $101 million to researchers if they discover therapies that allow seniors to perform like when they were 10 to 20 years younger. 
For today’s episode, I talked with Dr. Peter Diamandis, XPRIZE’s founder and executive chairman. Under Peter’s leadership, XPRIZE has launched 27 previous competitions with over $300 million in prize purses. 

The lastest contest aims to enhance healthspan, or the period of life when older people can play with their grandkids without any restriction, disability or disease. The biggest prize for this competition, called XPRIZE Healthspan, is $81 million for improvements that restore cognition, muscle and immunity by two decades. Sponsors include Hevolution Foundation, a nonprofit, and Chip Wilson, the founder of Lululemon and the nonprofit SOLVE FSHD.
In our conversation, Peter explains why exponential technologies make the current era the most exciting time in human history. We discuss the best mental outlook for becoming truly innovative; how to overcome the negativity bias in ourselves and in mainstream media; how Peter has shifted his own mindset to become more positive; his personal recommendations for healthy lifestyle; the future of education; and the importance of democratizing tech and innovation, among many other topics.
In addition to Peter’s role with XPRIZE, he's the Executive Founder of Singularity University. In 2014, Fortune named him one of the “World’s 50 Greatest Leaders.” He has started over 25 companies in health-tech, space, venture capital and education. Peter is the author of multiple New York Times bestselling books, linked below, and holds degrees in molecular genetics and aerospace engineering from MIT, as well as an M.D. from Harvard University.

Show links
New XPRIZE Healthspan

Peter Diamandis bio 
27 XPRIZE competitions and counting
Peter Diamandis books 
Singularity University
Life Force by Peter Diamandis and Tony Robbins

Peter Diamandis Twitter
Longevity Insider newsletter – AI identifies the news
Peter Diamandis Longevity Handbook
Making Sense of Science features interviews with leading medical and scientific experts about the latest developments in health innovation and the big ethical and social questions they raise. The podcast is hosted by science journalist Matt Fuchs

A promising development in science in recent years has been the advance of technologies that take something natural and use technology to optimize it. This episode features a fascinating example: using tech to optimize psychedelic mushrooms.

These mushrooms have been used for religious, spiritual and medicinal purposes for thousands of years but only in the past several decades have scientists brought psychedelics into the lab to enhance them and maximize their therapeutic value.
Today’s podcast guest, Doug Drysdale, is doing important work to lead this effort. Drysdale is the CEO of a company called Cybin that has figured out how to make psilocybin more potent, so it can be administered in smaller doses without side effects.
Cybin isn’t Drysdale’s first go around at this. He has over 30 years of experience in the healthcare sector. During this time he’s raised around $4 billion of both public and private capital, and has been named Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year. Before Cybin, he was the founding CEO of a pharmaceutical company called Alvogen, leading it from inception to around $500 million in revenues, across 35 countries. Drysdale has also been the head of mergers and acquisitions at Actavis Group, leading 15 corporate acquisitions across three continents.
In this episode, Drysdale walks us through the promising research of his current company, Cybin, and the different therapies he’s developing for anxiety and depression based not just on psilocybin but another psychedelic compound found in plants called DMT. He explains how they seem to have such powerful effects on the brain, as well as the potential for psychedelics to eventually support other use cases, including helping us strive toward higher levels of well-being. He goes on to discuss his views on mindfulness and lifestyle factors - such as optimal nutrition - that could help bring out the best in psychedelics.

Show links:

Doug Drysdale full bio
Doug Drysdale twitter
Cybin website
Cybin development pipeline
Cybin's promising phase 2 research on depression
Johns Hopkins psychedelics research and psilocybin research
Mets owner Steve Cohen invests in psychedelic therapies




Making Sense of Science features interviews with leading medical and scientific experts about the latest developments in health innovation and the big ethical and social questions they raise. The podcast is hosted by science journalist Matt Fuchs

You’ve probably heard about intermittent fasting, where you don’t eat for about 16 hours each day and limit the window where you’re taking in food to the remaining 8 hours.
But there’s another type of fasting, called fasting-mimicking diet, with studies pointing to important benefits for health and longevity. For today’s episode, I chatted with Dr. Valter Longo, a biogerontologist at the University of Southern California about all kinds of fasting, and particularly the fasting-mimicking diet, and strategies for making these approaches especially beneficial while minimizing really bad hunger as much as possible.
If you’ve ever spent more than a few minutes looking into fasting, you’ve almost certainly come upon the name Valter Longo. Dr. Longo is the author of the bestselling book, The Longevity Diet, and he is the best known researcher of how to do a fasting-mimicking diet, as well as researching the benefits.

A quick primer is helpful background for listening to this episode: with intermittent fasting, your body might begin to switch up its fuel type. Your body’s usually running on carbs you get from food, which gets turned into glucose, but without food, your liver starts making something called ketones, which are these molecules that are more efficient than glucose and good for the body in various other ways.
But in addition to intermittent fasting, there’s an alternative that could offer more benefits to your health and boost your longevity. This is the fasting-mimicking diet, the one researched by Dr. Longo, where you go for several days eating only the types of food that, in a way, keep themselves secret from your body. So at the level of your cells, the body still thinks that it’s fasting. This is the best of both worlds – you’re not completely starving because you do get to have some food, and you’re getting some of the amazing benefits that come with letting a fast run longer than you’d have with intermittent fasting.
This episode really explores the science of fasting. Dr. Longo talks about his extensive research on why this might be one of the best things you can do for health. He’s the director of the Longevity Institute in USC’s Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, and the director of the Longevity and Cancer program at the IFOM Institute of Molecular Oncology in Milan. In addition, Dr. Longo is the founder and president of the Create Cures Foundation in L.A., which focuses on nutrition for the prevention and treatment of major chronic illnesses. He authored the bestelling book, The Longevity Diet. v2 In 2016, he received the Glenn Award for Research on Aging, which was based on the discovery of both genes and dietary interventions able to regulate aging and prevent diseases, among many other awards. Dr. Longo received his PhD in biochemistry from UCLA and completed his postdoc in the neurobiology of aging and Alzheimer’s at USC.

Check out the episode page to see the show links - www.leaps.org/heart-healthy-diet/
Making Sense of Science features interviews with leading medical and scientific experts about the latest developments in health innovation and the big ethical and social questions they raise. The podcast is hosted by science journalist Matt Fuchs

In recent years, researchers of Alzheimer’s have made progress in figuring out the complex factors that lead to the disease. Yet, the root cause, or causes, of Alzheimer’s are still pretty much a mystery.
In fact, many people get Alzheimer’s even though they lack the gene variant we know can play a role in the disease. This is a critical knowledge gap for research to address because the vast majority of Alzheimer’s patients don’t have this gene variant.
A new study provides key insights into what’s causing the disease. The research, published in Nature Communications, points to a breakdown over time in the brain’s system for clearing waste, an issue that seems to happen in some people as they get older.
I asked Michael Glickman, a biologist at Technion University in Israel, who helped lead this research, to tell me about his approach to studying how this breakdown occurs in the brain, and how he tested a treatment that has potential to fix the problem at its earliest stages.


Altered ubiquitin signaling induces Alzheimer’s disease-like hallmarks in a three-dimensional human neural cell culture model - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41545-7Making Sense of Science features interviews with leading medical and scientific experts about the latest developments in health innovation and the big ethical and social questions they raise. The podcast is hosted by science journalist Matt Fuchs