Can there be a single solution to all of the following problems: malnutrition, climate change, biodiversity loss, and animal suffering?

Varun Deshpande thinks so. In this podcast, he makes a compelling case that alternative proteins (such as those derived from plants, fungi, or those that are cultivated in labs) can fix all these problems in one go.

== What we talk about =...

The tastiest food hasn't yet been invented.

With the diversity of ingredients available to us for making dishes, the number of possible recipes is gigantic. Human chefs have only explored a fraction of this food-space. Perhaps computers can step in here. I talk to Ganesh Bagler who's pioneering a new field called computational gastronomy that aims to utilize machine learni...

Can you crowdsource your way to discovering a new drug?

Alpha Lee's startup PostEra launched a crowdsourced effort (called Covid Moonshot) to discover drugs that are effective in treating covid-19. This was the first of its kind effort that combined research efforts from several groups across the world to design a drug that treats covid-19, is free from patents and can be ...

How do our bodies know what to become?

There are no instructions in our genes that code for the exact 3D structure of our bodies. There's no tiny human contained in our DNA. So, what powers the transformation of the first cell in the embryo to a full-blown organism?

Dr Michael Levin is attacking this problem and, in the process of answering it, his lab is uncovering an ent...