If superconductors — materials that conduct electricity without any resistance — worked at temperatures and pressures close to what we would consider normal, they would be world-changing. They could dramatically amplify power grids, levitate high-speed trains and enable more affordable medical technologies. For more than a century, physicists have tinkered with different compounds and environmental conditions in pursuit of this elusive property, but while success has sometimes been claimed, the reports were always debunked or withdrawn. What makes this challenge so tricky?

In this episode, Siddharth Shanker Saxena, a condensed-matter physicist at the University of Cambridge, gives co-host Janna Levin the details about why high-temperature superconductors remain so stubbornly out of reach..

Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, TuneIn or your favorite podcasting app, or you can stream it from Quanta.

Milk is more than just a food for babies. Breast milk has evolved to deliver thousands of diverse molecules including growth factors, hormones and antibodies, as well as microbes.

Elizabeth Johnson, a molecular nutritionist at Cornell University, studies the effects of infants’ diet on the gut microbiome. These studies could hold clues to hard questions in public health for children and adults alike. In this episode of “The Joy of Why” podcast, co-host Steven Strogatz interviews Johnson about the microbial components that make breast milk one of the most wondrous biofluids found in nature.

Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, TuneIn or your favorite podcasting app, or you can stream it from Quanta.

Nothing escapes a black hole … or does it? In the 1970s, the physicist Stephen Hawking described a subtle process by which black holes can “evaporate,” with some particles evading gravitational oblivion. That phenomenon, now dubbed Hawking radiation, seems at odds with general relativity, and it raises an even weirder question: If particles can escape, do they preserve any information about the matter that was obliterated?

Leonard Susskind, a physicist at Stanford University, found himself at odds with Hawking over the answer. In this episode, co-host Janna Levin speaks with Susskind about the “black hole war” that ensued and the powerful scientific lessons to be drawn from one of the most famous paradoxes in physics.

Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, TuneIn or your favorite podcasting app, or you can stream it from Quanta.