Brave New World -- hosted by Vasant Dhar

Smell is the most mysterious of our senses and we've been getting it wrong. Biophysicist Luca Turin joins Vasant Dhar to reveal why and how our noses detect vibrations and what that could mean for disease diagnosis, security, and the future of AI.

Useful Resources:

1. Luca Turin.
2. Perfumes: The A-Z Guide - Luca Turin, Tania Sanchez.
3. The Secret of Scent: Adventures in Perfume and the Science of Smell - Luca Turin.
4. Perfumes: The Guide, 2018 - Luca Turin, Tania Sanchez.
5. A Spectroscopic Mechanism for Primary Olfactory Reception - Luca Turin.
6. Laying a controversial smell theory to rest - Leslie B. Vosshall.
7. Status of the Vibrational Theory of Olfaction - Ross D. Hoehn, David E. Nichols, Hartmut Neven, Sabre Kais.
8. Implausibility Of The Vibrational Theory Of Olfaction - Eric Block, Seogjoo Jang, Hiroki Matsunami, Hanyi Zuhang.
9. A Psychophysical Test Of The Vibration Theory Of Olfaction - Andreas Keller and Leslie B. Vosshall.
10. A Novel Multigene Family May Encode Odorant Receptors: A Molecular Basis For Odour Recognition - Linda Buck, Richard Axel.
11. A Principal Odour Map Unifies Diverse Tasks In Olfactory Perception - Brian K. Lee, Emily J. Mayhew, Benjamin Sanchez-Lengeling, Jennifer N. Wei, Wesley W. Qian, Kelsie A. Little, Matthew Andres, Britney B. Nguyen, Theresa Moloy and Alexander B. Wiltschko.
12. Luca Turin On Substack.
13. Episode 81 of Brave New World: Alex Wiltschko on the Sense of Smell
14. Episode 97 Of Brave New World: Alex Wiltschko on Digitising Scent


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Your networks shape you more than you know. Nicholas Christakis joins Vasant Dhar to reveal how machines inserted into human groups quietly rewire the way people cooperate, coordinate, and trust — and why a little artificial noise might be exactly what we need.

Useful Resources:

1. Nicholas Christakis
2. Human Nature Lab
3. The spread of obesity in a large social network over 32 years - Nicholas Christakis and  James H Fowler
4. Widowhood Effect
5. The Effect of Widowhood on Mortality by the Causes of Death of Both Spouses- Felix Elwert and Nicholas Christakis
6. Locally Noisy Autonomous Agents Improve Global Human Coordination in Network Experiments - Hirokazu Shirado and Nicholas Christakis
7. ETH Global Lecture, Social Artificial Intelligence
8. Graph Colouring
9. Vulnerable robots positively shape human conversational dynamics in a human–robot team - Margaret L. Traeger,  Sarah Strohkorb Sebo, Malte Jung and Nicholas Christakis
10. Hirokazu Shirado
11. Chicken, The Game
12. Emergence and collapse of reciprocity in semiautomatic driving coordination experiments with humans - Shunichi Kasahara, Hirokazu Shirado and Nicholas Christakis
13. Traffic Patterns in Seattle and Hyderabad: Immediate and Mediate Transactions - Paul G. Hiebert
14. Brian Scassellati
15. Iyad Rahwan
16. Machine Behaviour - Iyad Rahwan
17. A Randomised Controlled Trial of Social Network Targeting to Maximise Population Behaviour Change - David A Kim, Alison R Hwong, Derek Stafford, D Alex Hughes, A James O'Malley, Nicholas Christakis, James H Fowler
18. Induction of social contagion for diverse outcomes in structured experiments in isolated villages - Edoardo M. Airoldi, Nicholas Christakis
19. Algorithms for seeding social networks can enhance the adoption of a public health intervention in urban India - Marcus Alexander, Laura Forastiere, Swati Gupta, Nicholas Christakis
20. Friendship paradox
21. Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society - Nicholas Christakis
22. Friendship and Natural Selection - James H Fowler and Nicholas Christakis
23. Kin Selection
24. Social Network Biology and Human Chemosignaling
25. For The Love Of Science


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Your nose knows more than you think. Professor Leslie M. Kay joins Vasant Dhar to reveal how smell is wired directly into the brain's emotional core — and how every breath you take is quietly synchronising your mind.


Useful Resources:

1. Leslie Kay
2. GenBank
3. National Library of Medicine
4. Walter Jackson Freeman III
5. Dynamical Systems
6. Linda B. Buck and Richard Axel
7. Dmitry Rinberg, Rinberg Lab
8. S. Murray Sherman
9. John Hopfield
10. Christof Koch
11. Joy Milne
12. Aromha test
13. Lucia F. Jacobs
14. From chemotaxis to the cognitive map: The function of olfaction - Lucia F Jacobs
15. Patricia Churchland
16. Andrew Sheriff, Northwestern Human Olfaction Lab
17. Long-Range Respiratory and Theta Oscillation Networks Depend on Spatial Sensory Context - Andrew Sheriff, Guinevere Pandolfi,  Vivian S Nguyen and Leslie M. Kay
18. Evidence for a Chromatographic Model of Olfaction - Maxwell Mozell
19. COVID-19 and olfactory dysfunction: a looming wave of dementia? - Leslie M. Kay
20. SARS-CoV-2 is associated with changes in brain structure - UK Biobank
21. Asifa Majid
22. Human Olfaction at the Intersection of Language, Culture, and Biology - Asifa Majid

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What separates fluency from understanding? Léon Bottou joins Vasant Dhar in Episode 103, Brave New World, to explore the deep question at the heart of AI.
Useful Resources:

1. Léon Bottou
2. Léon Bottou - The Fiction Machine
3. Hopfield Network in AI
4. Yann LeCun
5. J. L. McClelland, D.E. Rumelhart and G.E. Hinton - The Appeal of Parallel Distributed Processing
6. Claude Shannon - Entropy and Redundancy in English
7. Marvin Minsky - Music, Mind and Meaning
8. Stafford Beer
9. Navier-Stokes Equations
10. Terry Sejnowski - Parallel Networks that Learn to Pronounce English Text
11. Christopher D. Manning
12. Brave New World Episode 58: Sam Bowman on ChatGPT & Controlling AI
13. De Morgan's laws
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AI is reshaping national power and governance. Drawing on India's digital public infrastructure, Jayant Sinha and Vasant Dhar discuss innovation and sovereignty over compute, data consent and privacy by design in Episode 103 of Brave New World.

Useful Resources:

1. Jayant Sinha
2. Eversource Capital
3. India's Green Startups: Jayant Sinha and Sandeep Bhammer
4. Nandan Nilekani
5. Brave New World Episode 15: Nandan Nilekani on an Egalitarian Internet
6. Brave New World Episode 50: Pramod Varma on India's Digital Empowerment
7. iSpirit
8. Unique Identification Authority Of India
9. Unified Payments Interface
10. M-Pesa
11. DigiYatra.
12. Australia has banned social media for kids under 16.
13. Data Empowerment and Protection Architecture, DEPA
14. Paul Gruenwald, Global Chief Economist, S&P Global
15. Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, James A. Robinson.
16. Neeraj Chopra
17. Thinking with Machines, The Brave New World of AI: Vasant Dhar
18. Battery Smart
19. Nutrifresh
20. Zero Cow
21. RevFin
22. Upside Foods
23. Brave New World Episode 93: Uma Valeti on Cultivating Meat
24. Brave New World Episode 101: Deepak Chopra On Consciousness and Reality
25. Geoffrey Hinton
26. Asimov's Laws
27. Jonathan Haidt
28. The Anxious Generation: Jonathan Haidt
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