Which Animals Are Conscious?

It's the final episode of Season 3! And possibly our last episode for awhile. This week, our hosts discuss the podcast and science journalism with Undark editor-in-chief Tom Zeller Jr. and, for now anyway, bid adieu to listeners.

This week on Entanglements: Is there really a population crisis? To answer what seems like a simple question, our hosts talk to an economist and a demographer about the world population trends and fertility rates.

This week on Entanglements: Are octopuses conscious? What about lobsters? Or mosquitoes? Our hosts talk to two philosophers — one at the University of Southampton in the U.K, another is the director of the Critical Thinking Project at the University of Queensland in Australia — about which animals are sentient, and why.

This week on Entanglements: Is ADHD a disorder? The symptoms are certainly real, but scientists are not in agreement whether or not to call ADHD a true disorder. Our hosts dig in with a professor of molecular psychiatry at Radboud University in the Netherlands and a developmental psychologist and professor at King's College London.

We're back again! This week on Entanglements: Should we allow AI technology to be put in our brains? It sounds like something out of science fiction, but our hosts discuss the current research on neural implants with a professor of neurology and neuroethics at the University of British Columbia and a physician scientist and medical ethicist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York.

In the Season 2 finale, our hosts talk to Tom Zeller Jr., Undark’s editor-in-chief, about covering science under the Trump administration. While the podcast's topics are always politically charged, they have become even more so in the current political climate.

This week on Entanglements: Do we have enough scientific evidence to approve psychedelics as medicine? Our hosts unpack the data with Albert Garcia-Romeu, an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and Bertha Madras, a professor of psychobiology at Harvard Medical School.

This week on Entanglements: Should we live on Mars, and beyond? Our hosts talk to Tiffany Vora, a biologist and space advocate who has done three analog Mars simulations, and Kelly Weinersmith, a biologist and the co-author of the book “A City on Mars."

This week on Entanglements: Should tech companies — and the billionaires that often run them — decide for the rest of us how artificial intelligence is deployed? Our hosts dig into the topic with two book authors who have covered AI from essentially opposing perspectives: Greg Beato and Adam Becker.

This week on Entanglements: Should we switch all U.S. elections to ranked choice voting? Our hosts discuss the pros and cons with Deb Otis, director of research and policy for Fair Vote, a non-profit that works on election reform, and David McCune, a professor of mathematics at William Jewell College in Missouri.