Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary, this episode has three main stories: interactive dream engineering (yes, two-way “communication” during lucid dreaming), the proton radius puzzle finally getting resolved by a precision lab measurement, and a sobering but hopeful look at ALS—including a breakthrough “ALS-in-a-dish” model that could finally make drug screening translate to humans.

Summary

• Dream engineering — targeted cues + induced lucidity → dream-content biasing and measurable next-day performance gains.
• Proton radius puzzle — precision hydrogen spectroscopy resolves the decade-long discrepancy; normal hydrogen agrees with muonic hydrogen.
• ALS — a predictive iPSC motor-neuron model that correlates with patient survival and reveals a promising multi-drug synergy.
• Rundown — pulsar near the Milky Way center, AI decoding a Roman board game, hormones + evolution signals, and AI-in-the-loop protein engineering.

Support the show
Donate: FFPod.com/donate
Follow: @FFPod (X / Instagram / TikTok / Facebook)

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary, this episode is a Winter Olympics deep dive from first principles—physics, neuroscience, and climate science in one ride.

• Why ice is slippery: the “water layer” story is incomplete—new nanoscale measurements suggest a far more viscous, thicker interfacial film than textbook intuition.
• Choking under pressure: how high stakes can disrupt neural control—reward signals can push brain states out of the “optimal zone.”
• Climate change vs winter sports: why artificial snow has limits, why some legacy venues may become unreliable, and what “snow farming” is trying to solve.
• Rundown: AI doing physics proofs, cat vocalizations, immune epigenetics, origin-of-life genetics, and an “impossible” exoplanet system.

Support the show: FFPpod.com/donate
Follow: @FFPod (X / Instagram / TikTok / Facebook)

00:00 Intro
00:32 Episode setup
02:15 Why is ice slippery?
33:23 Rundown + housekeeping + donate
01:09:11 Choking under pressure (neuroscience)
01:32:32 Climate change & the Winter Olympics + potpourri
01:43:47 Wrap-up + closing

Hosted by Lester Nare and Krishna Choudhary, this episode jumps from plant biochemistry to quantum metrology to cancer evolution. We start with a University of York breakthrough that solves a ~50-year mystery in alkaloid biosynthesis—identifying the “missing” enzyme behind a key asymmetric step plants use to build powerful defensive (and pharmaceutically useful) molecules. Then we go deep on quantum sensing with entangled atomic clouds, showing how correlated measurements can beat the standard quantum limit. Finally, we close with ALFA-K, a new tool that maps local fitness landscapes to predict how aneuploid cancers may evolve under pressure from therapy.

Summary

• Plants making medicines — the “phantom enzyme” in alkaloid biosynthesis and why solving this pathway matters for scalable drug production.
• Quantum measurements with entangled atom clouds — squeezed/entangled states, noise reduction, and why correlations unlock better sensing.
• Predicting cancer evolution — ALFA-K and measurable fitness landscapes for aneuploidy-driven trajectories under treatment.

Show Notes

• Story 1 — Plant alkaloid biosynthesis (University of York)
• Paper — New Phytologist
• Story 2 — Quantum measurements with entangled atomic clouds (University of Basel)
• Paper — Science
• Story 3 — Alpha-K (Moffitt Cancer Center)
• Paper — Nature Communications