Best Mike Breault Podcasts (2025)

1
Wrangel to the Steppe: The Woolly Mammoth's Adaptations and Extinction 5:54

Play Pause

6h ago5:54

5:54

We explore Mammuthus primigenius, the woolly mammoth, from its cold-weather adaptations—thick fat, a double coat, tiny ears, and gigantic spiraled tusks—to the complex end of the Ice Age. The debate over whether climate change, habitat loss, or human hunting drove the final extinction on the mainland, and how isolated island populations on Wrangel …

1
Pterodactylus Antiquus: The First Pterosaur, From Sea Monster to Winged Finger 6:01

6h ago6:01

6:01

Discover the tale of Pterodactylus antiquus, the first pterosaur named in 1809, and how a tiny fossil sparked a centuries-long puzzle. Meet Calini, Hermann, and Cuvier as we trace the birth of pterosaur science, the chaos of wastebasket taxa, and what the skeleton reveals about a daytime, generalist hunter with a 1-meter wingspan. We’ll explore how…

1
Four Balls, Three Strikes: The Chaotic Path to Baseball's Modern Plate Rules 5:19

5h ago5:19

5:19

From the 1845 Knickerbocker Rules to 1888’s four-ball standard, we trace how baseball finally balanced offense and pace. Explore why it’s three strikes and four balls, how the intentional walk evolved, and the 2017 change that ended the four-pitch ritual—with Hank Aaron’s patient mastery as the lasting reminder of what a walk can mean. Note: This p…

1
Time on Trial: The Rise of Temporal Logic 8:09

5h ago8:09

8:09

From Aristotle’s future contingents to modern verification, we explore how temporal logic handles statements whose truth evolves over time. We trace the journey from Pryor’s tense logic to branching time with CTL and linear time with LTL, and unpack core operators like F, P, G, H, until, and release. Learn how these ideas power precise guarantees i…

1
World Lines: Tracing Time and Space in Minkowski's Spacetime 5:40

5h ago5:40

5:40

A lay-friendly tour of world lines—the four-dimensional paths that track every event in the universe. We explore time-like, light-like, and space-like paths, the light cone that governs causality, the mysterious elsewhere, and why your life is a single unbroken thread through spacetime. Note: This podcast was AI-generated, and sometimes AI can make…

1
Infinity in a Finite World: Sequences, Series, and the Power of Convergence 4:54

5h ago4:54

4:54

In this episode, we untangle the difference between sequences and infinite sums, explore how partial sums reveal convergence or divergence, and uncover why rearranging terms can change the outcome for certain series. We connect Zeno’s paradox to modern math and discuss what these ideas imply for modeling motion and complex systems. Note: This podca…

1
Nanotyrannus Unmasked: Bloody Mary and the Tale of Two Tyrannosaurs 5:08

21h ago5:08

5:08

In this deep dive, we unpack the 2025 study arguing Nanotyrannus is a distinct tyrannosaur, not a juvenile T. rex. Using the extraordinary NCSM 4000 specimen, Bloody Mary, along with osteohistology, spinal fusion data, and tooth counts, we explore what this means for tyrannosaur growth and ecology in the Hell Creek ecosystem—including the tantalizi…

1
Halloween by the Numbers: From Trick-or-Treat Optimization to Zombie Doomsdays 5:54

1d ago5:54

5:54

A Halloween math tour—from optimizing trick-or-treat routes and predicting candy haul to the cognitive biases that inflate fear and the doomsday forecasts of zombie epidemics. We link suspense in film to real-world risk, show how simple counting underpins sharing candy, and explain why fast, decisive action often wins in these dynamic systems. Note…

1
Warping Reality: The Alcubierre Drive and the Quest for FTL Travel 6:46

1d ago6:46

6:46

Join us as we unpack the Alcubierre warp drive, a concept born in general relativity that lets a ship ride a bubble of flat space while spacetime itself moves. We'll trace how geometry could slash energy requirements, the thorny problem of exotic matter, and the practical hazards of deceleration and high-energy fronts. We discuss time-travel quirks…

1
Einstein and the Cosmic Speed Limit 5:28

1d ago5:28

5:28

Dive into Einstein's cosmic speed limit. We'll unpack why the speed of light is invariant for all observers, why massive objects can never reach it, and how this bound protects the sequence of cause and effect in spacetime. Along the way we separate local motion from cosmic expansion, and explain why quantum entanglement can't be used for faster-th…

1
Armorial Odyssey: The Book of Knowledge of All Kingdoms 6:08

1d ago6:08

6:08

In 14th-century Castile, a nameless mendicant friar pens a travel diary that doubles as a world catalog of rulers and their coats of arms. The Libro del Conocimiento de Todos los Reinos blends real voyages with imaginative heraldry to map power—signaling distant, non-Christian realms with symbolic devices rather than precise facts. This episode sho…

1
Orbifolds: Folding Space, Revealing Hidden Symmetry 6:01

1d ago6:01

6:01

We explore orbifolds—the spaces locally modeled on quotients by finite group actions. From Thurston’s origin story to fixed points and isotropy subgroups, we see how the quotient hides rich information beyond the underlying shape. The journey sweeps through physics, including Calabi–Yau compactifications in string theory, and even into music theory…

1
Kissing Numbers: How Many Spheres Can Touch a Central One? 5:32

1d ago5:32

5:32

From a 1D line to the mind-bending worlds of 8D and 24D, this episode unpacks the kissing number problem—the maximum number of identical spheres that can touch a central sphere without overlap. We'll trace the Newton-Gregory debate in 3D, celebrate Musin's 2003 proof, and reveal the magic of the E8 and Leech lattices that pin down exact numbers in …

1
Roboflow: A Multimodal AI Pipeline for NBA Player ID 6:53

1d ago6:53

6:53

Join us as we unpack a dense, multimodal AI stack designed to detect, track, and identify players in chaotic basketball footage. We explore RFDETR-based detection, SAM2 with a temporal memory bank for re-identification after occlusions, and team clustering via SigLep, UMA, and K-means. Then we dive into jersey-number extraction—comparing a fine-tun…

1
Proof Assistants, AI, and the Quest for Mathematical Certainty 6:19

2d ago6:19

6:19

We explore how formal proof systems like Lean enforce every logical step, turning hundreds-of-page proofs into machine-checked certainty. See how this is sparking open, collaborative math—modular, dependency-driven work where AI must first produce formal proofs to avoid hallucinations. We discuss the role of dependency graphs, specialization, and H…

1
The Search Gap: Teaching AI to Create Counterintuitive Chess Puzzles 5:07

2d ago5:07

5:07

We unpack a DeepMind study on training an AI to generate genuinely creative chess puzzles, using reinforcement learning and a three-part creativity framework: uniqueness, novelty, and counterintuitiveness via a 'search gap' between shallow and deep engine evaluations. Stockfish ensures a unique solution; Levenshtein distance enforces novelty in bot…

1
Stegosaurus: Roof Lizard, Thagomizer, and the Real Story Behind the Plates 6:49

3d ago6:49

6:49

Take a deep dive into the iconic Stegosaurus: how Marsh first imagined a slow, turtle-like herbivore, why S. stenops became the standard, and what the plates really reveal about display, thermoregulation, and their keratin sheath. We explore the zigzag plate arrangement, the evidence behind the thagomizer as a defensive weapon, and the long-running…

1
3I/ATLAS: The Third Interstellar Visitor from an Ancient Galaxy 4:31

3d ago4:31

4:31

A quick dive into the latest interstellar visitor—its speed, origin, and chemistry. 3I/Atlas arrived on a hyperbolic path with eccentricity 6.137 and a hyperbolic excess velocity of 58 km/s, likely originating from the Milky Way’s thick disk and possibly 7.6–14 billion years old. JWST and SPHERICS reveal a CO2-rich, comet-like composition (with wat…

1
Zero-Player Games: AI-Run Worlds and the Science of Mind 6:14

3d ago6:14

6:14

A deep dive into zero-player games (ZPGs): self-running simulations that remove the human player. We map four archetypes—from setup-only models like Life to AI-vs-AI battles, solved games, and generative agents—and explore what they reveal about AI, autonomy, and simulating minds. Drawing on Stanford HAI’s work, Thermodome’s Markov NPC, real-time h…

1
Sustainable Memory from Shiitake Mycelium: Growing Brain‑Like Chips from Mushrooms 4:58

4d ago4:58

4:58

We unpack a 2025 study by LaRocco et al. that proposes memristor‑based memory built from shiitake mycelium. Explore how edible fungi grown on hay and wheat germ with a simple nutrient mix can be dried, preserved, and used as memory with switching speeds around 5.85 kHz and roughly 90% accuracy. We’ll discuss why this bridges bioelectronics with sus…

1
Group 7 and the Science of Viral Influence 9:01

4d ago9:01

9:01

Trace the Group 7 phenomenon—from Sophia James’s seven-video experiment to a global meme—and unpack how TikTok’s For You Page and human psychology fuse to shape belief, not just clicks. We connect her volume-over-quality strategy to Amir Hamza et al.’s April 2025 study, which uses the Theory of Planned Behavior to show the algorithm’s influence on …

1
When Quantum Rules Meet Gravity: The Frontiers of Modern Physics 5:55

4d ago5:55

5:55

A concise tour of physics' deepest puzzles: the clash between quantum mechanics and general relativity, the mysteries of the dark sector (dark matter, dark energy, and the cosmological constant problem), the Hubble tension, the black hole information paradox, the neutron lifetime puzzle, and the arrow of time. We explore how these frontiers push us…

1
KL Divergence Demystified: Measuring the Gap Between Beliefs and Reality 6:05

4d ago6:05

6:05

Join us as we unpack KL divergence (also called relative entropy or I-divergence), the precise, always non-negative measure of how far your model Q is from the true distribution P. We explain its interpretation as the expected excess surprisal, how it shows up in data compression and cross-entropy, and why, unlike a true distance, KL divergence is …

1
Permian Basin: How an Ancient Sea Built Today’s Oil Giant 7:19

4d ago7:19

7:19

A deep dive into the Permian Basin's 400-million-year saga—from the Tobosa passive margin and two tectonic upheavals to the Capitan Reef’s fossil-fuel legacy. We trace how a thick Castile evaporite seal trapped hydrocarbons, how modern horizontal drilling and fracking unlocked them, and why the basin’s vast scale still shapes today’s energy landsca…

1
Time Loops and Causality: The World of Closed Timelike Curves 7:07

5d ago7:07

7:07

We tour how general relativity can tilt the light cone and create closed timelike curves—paths that loop back to where and when you started. From Gödel’s rotating universe to Kerr black holes and Hawking’s chronology protection, we explore the physics, the paradoxes, and the ideas meant to keep causality safe. A brain-bending dive into the possibil…

1
The TikTok Chair Challenge Demystified: Center of Gravity, Leverage, and Balance 5:25

5d ago5:25

5:25

We unpack the viral TikTok chair challenge to reveal how center of gravity, base of support, and body proportions determine whether you can stand up with a chair tucked to your chest. Through simple physics and kinesiology, we explain why averages differ between men and women, how starting position and foot size affect the outcome, and why these id…

1
Rainbow Triangles and Fixed Points: Sperner's Lemma Unveiled 6:25

5d ago6:25

6:25

We explore how a simple coloring rule on a triangulated triangle guarantees a rainbow triangle and how that snapshot ties to Brouwer's fixed point theorem. From the 1D parity intuition to the 2D guarantee of a rainbow simplex, we see how coloring, topology, and computation intersect. Along the way we touch on fair division, Minsky's theorem, and th…

1
The Bone Wars: Cope vs Marsh and the Dinosaur Rush 5:21

5d ago5:21

5:21

A gripping look at how the late 19th‑century ‘Bone Wars’ transformed American paleontology. Rivalry between Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh sparked a feverish westward fossil hunt, espionage, and public humiliations, as the two men raced to name new dinosaurs—nearly 142 species—while sometimes destroying rivals’ work and bankrupting t…

1
Parallelized Telecom Quantum Networking with a Ytterbium-171 Atom Array 6:53

5d ago6:53

6:53

An in-depth look at how a one-dimensional array of Yb-171 nuclear-spin qubits enables scalable quantum networking. We explore direct generation of photons at 1389 nm (telecom band) to achieve high entanglement fidelity (~0.95) without frequency conversion, and how spatial multiplexing across multiple atom–fiber channels yields parallel entanglement…

1
Geometric Counting in Claude 3.5 Haiku: How LLMs Learn to Line Break 6:21

5d ago6:21

6:21

We pull back the curtain on how Haiku doesn’t simply “count” characters but builds a multi‑dimensional geometry: a curved count map (feature manifold) in high‑dimensional space, boundary heads that twist to align with the line width, and orthogonal representations that turn the fit decision into a simple linear separation. We also examine a surpris…

1
The Hamstring Paradox: Evolution, Biomechanics, and Building Resilient Muscles 5:34

5d ago5:34

5:34

We untangle Lombard’s paradox, biarticular hamstrings, and the brutal reality of eccentric braking during sprinting. Explore how human evolution favors endurance running at the cost of peak power, why modern sedentary life tightens the nervous system’s “short length” guard, and how eccentric training—like Nordic curls—can remodel muscle by adding s…

1
Lie Groups Unfolded: Continuity, Symmetry, and the Geometry of Change 6:29

7d ago6:29

6:29

Explore how continuous change led Sophus Lie to fuse geometry and algebra into Lie groups and Lie algebras. We’ll build intuition from circles and matrices, explain the tangent-space Lie algebra, the Lie bracket, and the exponential map, and show why local linearization captures almost all the physics and geometry—yet global topology can still surp…

1
Beyond Bosons and Fermions: The Quest for Parastatistics in 3D 7:05

7d ago7:05

7:05

From the DHR no-go theorems to the revival of 3D parastatistics by Wang and Hazard, this episode surveys the possibility of finite occupancy per quantum state in three dimensions. We trace Miller’s critique of indistinguishability, the idea that pair particles could emerge as emergent phenomena in exotic quantum systems like Rydberg simulators, and…

1
MCS Unpacked: The Storm Clustering That Shapes Rain, Winds, and Hurricanes 6:44

7d ago6:44

6:44

From a single thunderstorm to a region-spanning rainfall system, mesoscale convective systems organize storms for hours by tapping moisture and vertical wind shear. We unpack what MCS are, their two main flavors—MCCs and squall lines—and the surprising afterlives of MCVs, which can drift hundreds of miles and even seed tropical cyclones such as Hur…

1
Bog Bodies: Peat-Preserved People and the Secrets of Iron Age Death 6:20

7d ago6:20

6:20

A deep dive into peat bog mummies—how acidic, cold, and oxygen-poor conditions preserve skin and soft tissues while dissolving bones—and the dark histories behind famous finds like Tollund Man and Lindow Man. We explore the science behind the preservation, from skin tanning to bone dissolution, and then examine the competing theories—ritual sacrifi…

1
The Galton Board: Chance, Order, and the Normal Curve 6:30

7d ago6:30

6:30

A visual tour of Francis Galton's bean machine and the birth of the normal curve. We explain how countless random left-right bounces produce a bell curve via the binomial distribution and the central limit theorem, with a nod to Pascal's triangle and the idea of regression to the mean. We also explore how changing the pins reveals other distributio…

1
Faraday Waves: Patterns from a Shaken Liquid 5:04

7d ago5:04

5:04

A layperson-friendly dive into Faraday waves—the standing surface patterns that emerge when a liquid is vibrated vertically. We unpack the parametric-oscillator physics behind subharmonic resonance (waves at half the drive frequency), and how the frequency, amplitude, and fluid properties—viscosity, density, and surface tension—shape thresholds and…

1
TOI-2267: Earth-sized Worlds in a Tight Binary — A New Benchmark for Planet Formation 6:22

8d ago6:22

6:22

Join us as we explore TOI-2267, a 190-light-year system where two cool M-dwarfs orbit incredibly close (about 8 AU apart) and host three Earth-sized worlds. The two confirmed planets, TOI-2267 b and c (≈1.0 and ≈1.14 Earth radii) orbit the primary in a delicate 3:2 resonance, surviving in a chaotic gravitational environment, while a third candidate…

1
Time Delay Cosmography: A New Lens on the Hubble Tension 6:29

9d ago6:29

6:29

Brought to you by embersilk.com. A deep dive into how strong gravitational lensing time delays offer an independent route to measuring the Hubble constant. We'll unpack the mass-sheet degeneracy, the role of stellar kinematics and line-of-sight mass, and the latest results from the TDCOSMO collaboration. Simple lens models tend to yield H0 around 7…

1
The Free Transformer: Latent Planning, Explicit Reasoning, and a New Path for AI 5:36

10d ago5:36

5:36

We dissect Francois Fleuret's Free Transformer, which injects a learned latent variable Z into autoregressive generation via a tiny CVAE-like encoder. With only one extra non-causal block, it introduces minimal overhead yet unlocks high-level planning that improves reasoning on benchmarks. We compare latent planning to explicit chain-of-thought and…

1
Quantum Echoes: Verifiable Advantage on Google's Willow Chip 4:58

10d ago4:58

4:58

We dive into Google's Quantum Echoes algorithm and its claim of a verifiable quantum speedup on real hardware using the Willow chip. Learn how Out-of-Time-Order Correlators map information scrambling, and how time-reversal echoes create a repeatable, benchmarkable signal. From 28-atom molecular rulers to potential breakthroughs in drug discovery an…

1
Seeing the Invisible: The Geostationary Lightning Mapper and the New Era of Severe Storm Forecasting 6:00

10d ago6:00

6:00

Lightning isn’t just the flash we see at the surface—it's the electrical heartbeat inside a storm. In this episode, we explore the GOES-16 Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM), a near-infrared camera that watches total lightning continuously from space, updating every 20 seconds with roughly 10-km resolution. Learn how GLM’s intra-cloud flashes rev…

1
Diagenesis Decoded: From Sediment to Stone, Oil, and Bone 6:02

10d ago6:02

6:02

Diagenesis is the hidden engine that reshapes sediments after deposition, turning loose grains into rock and setting the stage for oil and gas, while also altering ancient bones. We unpack the core processes—compaction, water–rock interactions, and microbial activity—and dive into replacement (permineralization), the oil window, and the stages of d…

1
What's new in Next.js 16? Performance, Caching, and the New Architecture 6:10

11d ago6:10

6:10

We unpack Next.js 16’s foundational shifts—from performance becoming the default (TurboPack bundling and React compiler integration) to explicit caching with useCache and the renamed middleware proxy.ts. We explore routing advances (layout deduplication and incremental prefetching), DX improvements via the Model Context Protocol for AI-assisted deb…

1
Brontosaurus Rises Again: The Century-Long Comeback of the Thunder Lizard 5:56

11d ago5:56

5:56

A deep dive into the Brontosaurus saga—from Marsh’s 1879 naming and the 1903 ruling that Brontosaurus was a junior synonym of Apatosaurus, through skull-mismatch displays, to the 2015 study that resurrected Brontosaurus excelsus as a distinct genus. We’ll unpack the anatomical differences that sparked the comeback—especially the robust neck and the…

1
The Large Magellanic Cloud: Our Chaotic Galactic Neighbor 5:12

11d ago5:12

5:12

A deep dive into the Large Magellanic Cloud, the Milky Way’s close galactic neighbor. We explore its impressive size, warped disk and tidal tug‑of‑war with the Milky Way and SMC, the Tarantula Nebula, and SN 1987A. We also examine the surprising evidence for a central black hole (~600,000 solar masses), how it may eject hypervelocity stars, and the…

1
Memory Matters: Unpacking Drepper's Memory Rules for Modern Code 7:06

12d ago7:06

7:06

A deep dive into Ulrich Drepper's seminal 2007 paper, What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory. We explore the memory bottleneck, cache hierarchies, latency shocks, and the costs of cache misses and coherence (RFOs), then translate those ideas into practical patterns—maximizing spatial locality, smart data layout, and real-world gains like ma…

1
ChatGPT Atlas: The Browser Becomes a Super Assistant 5:20

12d ago5:20

5:20

A deep dive into Atlas, the macOS browser built around ChatGPT. We unpack memory features, optional browser memories for long-term context, and the agent mode that can act on your behalf—while layered safeguards keep you in control. We explore real-world use cases, like learning in lectures and crafting briefs from old documents, and we discuss sec…

1
Physics of Fugitive Food: Spin, Skids, and Kitchen Chaos 4:52

12d ago4:52

4:52

Why does a dropped olive sprint to the far corner? This episode breaks down the physics of everyday food escapes. We'll cover how rotational energy from the drop turns into sideways motion, how shape creates ramps and pivots (the lever and spoon effects), why some items bounce on dry surfaces while slick surfaces make them hydroplane, and how floor…

1
Bak–Sneppen and the Ring of Change: Self-Organized Criticality in Evolution 5:49

13d ago5:49

5:49

We unpack the Bak-Sneppen model—an ultra-simple, ring-shaped ecosystem where the least-fit species and its neighbors are refreshed at each step, triggering cascades of change. The result is a self-organized critical state with avalanches, a devil’s staircase of activity, and power-law patterns that mirror earthquakes, sandpiles, and other complex s…