Listening Guide

Your task is to listen to an entire episode of Big Biology and then to create a guide for future listeners that explores who the scientist is, what her work seeks to accomplish, and what she thinks the big open ideas are in her field. We’re focusing this episode on cosmologist Sara Walker, from Arizona State University.

Here's an example of what the listening guide should look like from our interview with Caltech entomologist Joe Parker. You can download a template here.

+ Example Listening Guide

You can download this example here.

Look at the questions below, then listen to this episode of Big Biology featuring Sara Walker. Take notes on the topics related to each question.

(HINT: Write down the time when you hear a useful piece of information on the podcast. That will make it easier to find it again when you are writing the listening guide.)

You can also download a transcript of our conversation here.

Now answer the following questions:

  1. Who is Sara Walker? Researching her on the web, write up a short biography of her, including her academic history, current position and collaborators, and main questions that motivate her work.

  2. Link to and summarize in three sentences or less three of her recent papers (since 2017). You can find these by searching for her on Google Scholar.

  3. Key term definitions. In the podcast episode, she uses a number of terms whose meanings may not be intuitively obvious. From the context of the conversation, and using your own research on these terms, what do these mean and why are they important?

    • Information

    • Astrobiology

    • Exoplanet

    • Stromatolite

    • Last universal common ancestor

    • Horizontal gene transfer

    • Digital Information vs. Analog Information

    • Von Neumann's universal constructors

    • Schrodinger’s aperiodic crystal

  4. Summary of major questions and theories involved. Please provide Wikipedia style description of the major ideas underlying the research that Art and Marty discussed with Sara. 

    • Origin of life

      • Genetics first

      • Metabolism first

    • Roles of information in living systems

    • Gaia hypothesis

    • Quantum mechanics

    • General relativity

    • Artificial Intelligence control problem

    • Bonus: Hard problem of consciousness