Intellectually Curious
Intellectually Curious is a podcast by Mike Breault featuring over 1,800 AI-powered explorations across science, mathematics, philosophy, and personal growth. Each short-form episode is generated, refined, and published with the help of large language models—turning curiosity into an ongoing audio encyclopedia. Designed for anyone who loves learning, it offers quick dives into everything from combinatorics and cryptography to systems thinking and psychology.
Inspiration for this podcast:
"Muad'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It's shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad'Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson."
― Frank Herbert, Dune
Note: These podcasts were made with NotebookLM. AI can make mistakes. Please double-check any critical information.
Episodes
1895 episodes
Black Mass: Turning Spent EV Batteries into a Circular Economy
We dive into how the industry converts dead EV batteries into 'black mass,' a concentrated mix of lithium, nickel, cobalt, and manganese. From safe disassembly and inert shredding to hydrometallurgy that recovers 95–99% of metals with far less ...
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5:25
The Silicon Geologist: Mapping Alien Worlds with AI
A dive into a hybrid AI architecture that maps exoplanet minerals by linking atmospheric chemistry and host-star composition to surface geology. Learn how millions of synthetic planetary systems train proactive AI agents to generate a prospecti...
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5:54
Spacetime Bounds on Consciousness: Chords, Arpeggios, and the BCI Frontier
We unpack Michael Timothy Bennett’s Spacetime Bounds on Consciousness, asking whether a unified mind is a simultaneous chord or a sequential arpeggio. Using the piano-lag metaphor, we explore how the speed of information and integration windows...
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4:48
From Local News to GroundSource: AI That Predicts Floods 24 Hours Ahead
This episode explains how satellites miss localized weather and how GroundSource uses 20+ years of local journalism to train an AI that converts unstructured headlines into precise, actionable flood forecasts. Through a strict four-step prompt—...
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5:13
Two Realities, One Team: Trust and Cooperation in Mixed Reality
A 2026 study investigates what happens when mixed reality introduces digital curveballs. In 104 participants paired to memorize nine virtual objects, researchers secretly swap the positions of one or two objects for one member. The invisible di...
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4:28
AI to the Rescue: Rosie the Dog's Cancer Cure
A Sydney tech entrepreneur treats a terminal cancer diagnosis as a data problem, sequencing his dog Rosie’s DNA, modeling cancer proteins with AlphaFold, and using AI to generate a bespoke mRNA vaccine. After months of ethics approvals and lab ...
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5:36
Crystal Shadowing at CERN: AI-Driven Beams and the Quest for Higher Proton Power
A deep dive into how bent silicon crystals create a protective shadow to stop a dangerous high-speed beam leak in CERN's SPS, cutting losses by 50%, and how a three-crystal, AI-controlled system keeps alignment as protons ramp up fourfold for f...
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4:59
Grounded Navigation: Google's Gemini Turns Maps into a Local Concierge
We dissect Google's March 2026 Gemini update, which makes navigation a conversational, ground-truth experience with 3D lane views, landmark-based turns, and hands-free Ask Maps. We explore how the system stays firmly grounded by cross-checking ...
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5:20
CHMV2: Mapping the World’s Forest Canopies at 1-Meter Resolution
We explore how the World Resources Institute and Meta built CHMV2, a global canopy height map at 1-meter resolution. Using a self-supervised AI that predicts 3D depth from 2D satellite imagery, anchored by independent tree detection and aligned...
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5:27
The Secret Twist: How Cats Land on Their Feet
From Marey’s 1894 high‑speed footage to a 2026 Anatomical Record study, we unpack how cats reorient in free fall without net spin. We explore why a uniform spine can’t explain the tuck‑and‑turn, how front‑loaded spinal flexibility and asymmetri...
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5:01
GigaTime: Translating the Tumor’s Language with Open-Source AI
We explore Microsoft Research’s GigaTime, an open-source AI that translates cheap H&E slides into virtual 21-channel maps of the tumor microenvironment. Learn how 40 million cells were learned, 14,000 patient validations, and 1,200+ immune–...
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6:04
Thermophotovoltaic Energy Conversion: From Heat to Electricity via Photons
We unpack thermophotovoltaic energy conversion—how MIT and NREL bypass turbines to convert infrared heat directly to electricity. Learn why gallium antimonide and silicon carbide heat storage pushed efficiency from 41% in 2022 to 44% in 2024, t...
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4:47
Borromean Rings: From Tangled Cords to Topological Quantum Computing
We explore the elegant Borromean rings—three loops interlocked so that no two are linked, yet all three are inseparably bound. Delving from a medieval heraldry symbol to quantum physics, we unpack Efimov states, discrete scale invariance, and h...
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6:14
NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Super: Powering High-Throughput Agentic AI
Today we unpack NVIDIA's brand-new blog post on the Nemotron 3 Supermodel and how it powers high-throughput agentic AI. We break down a 1,000,000-token context window, a hybrid mixture-of-experts architecture that routes tasks to subnetworks to...
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4:09
Why AI Agents Prefer Bitcoin
Can autonomous AI agents negotiate, pay, and transact with machine-level speed? We unpack a Bitcoin Policy Institute study that tested 36 frontier AI models to see what money they prefer when managing a treasury and executing daily transactions...
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4:54
Agent Harness: Turning AI Models into Proactive Co-Workers
Discover how the Agent = Model + Harness framework turns a raw AI model into a proactive co-worker. We dive into a foundational workspace for persistent memory, a safe sandbox for code execution, and context-management with compaction, plus the...
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3:57
How Bumblebee Queens Survive a Week Underwater
A serendipitous fridge incident inspired a breakthrough study: researchers submerged 143 diapauseing common eastern bumblebee queens for seven days. About 81% survived underwater, with long-term winter survival essentially unchanged. The secret...
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4:09
Habitability of Rogue Planet Moons
We explore how moons stay bound to their planet during violent ejections into interstellar space, and how tides, radiogenic heat, and a dense CO2 atmosphere could keep oceans liquid—and life—alive without sunlight. Chemotrophic ecosystems at hy...
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4:50
Calculus in the Kitchen: The Perfect Beef Stew
A playful, science-driven exploration of a quantitative optimization framework for beef stew. From diffusion-driven salt timing and Maillard-seared surfaces to half-submerged simmering, acid-catalyzed collagen hydrolysis, and Arrhenius-based te...
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5:29
Quipu: Knotted Codes of the Inca Empire
Discover how the Inca Empire kept a vast civilization together using quipu—cotton and camelid fiber cords whose knots and spacings counted people, taxes, and languages. We unpack how a base-10 system works without a single written word: long kn...
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5:28
Recursive Self-Improvement in Large Language Models
In this deep dive, we unpack recursive self-improvement (RSI) in large language models. Learn how models critique and refine their own reasoning at the prompt level, architect smarter toolchains at the tool level, and even train on self-generat...
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4:27
Strawberries: A Thousand-Year Tale of DNA, Domestication, and Delight
We trace the remarkably optimistic, multi-continent story behind the modern strawberry: indigenous Mapuche cultivation of the wild Chilean strawberry for a thousand years, a chance 18th‑century Brittany cross with the Virginia strawberry, and t...
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5:21
The Al Dente Code: How Pasta Gets That Perfect Chew
Join us as we pull back the curtain on pasta's signature bite. We trace how durum wheat proteins—glutenins and gliadins—form a resilient cage, how extrusion aligns strands, and why high-temperature drying welds them together. We'll see how this...
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5:05
