Jordi Soriano Fradera is a Spanish physicist and Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Barcelona, where he leads the Neurophysics Group and serves as vice-director of the university’s Institute of Complex Systems (UBICS). He earned his PhD in condensed matter physics at the University of Barcelona before completing postdoctoral research in developmental biology in Germany and in neuroscience at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. For more than fifteen years, his group has developed in vitro neuronal cultures and biophysical models to study how connectivity and collective dynamics give rise to brain function, and how they break down in neurological disease. He has collaborated closely with medical teams on Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, Sanfilippo, and Alzheimer’s disease, and coordinated research under the EU Horizon 2020 NEU-CHiP project on biological computing. In this InterDialogue, recorded in Soriano’s lab among live neuronal cultures and imaging equipment, we trace his path from studying fluid fronts in porous media as a condensed matter physicist to a twenty-year career in neurophysics. We discuss how his group engineers rat and human stem-cell-derived neuronal cultures to model the brain’s structural and functional connectivity and to serve as disease models for Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, Sanfilippo, and Alzheimer’s, the prospects and limits of cell transplantation and personalized medicine, and why Soriano estimates a twenty-year horizon before such approaches reach the clinic. We also discuss his work on network damage, resilience, and criticality in neuronal cultures, the NEU-CHiP project’s attempt to train living neurons to perform computation, neuromorphic chips that mimic neurons in silicon, and a striking experiment in which donated human brain tissue was made to play back a melody fed to it through a robotic piano. We close by considering the ethical stakes of coupling neuronal cultures with robots and augmented-human technologies, Soriano’s efforts to help build neuroscience...

Ashish Kothari is an Indian environmentalist, author, and founding member of Kalpavriksh, a non-profit working on environmental and social justice issues at local, national, and global scales. He has taught at the Indian Institute of Public Administration and the National Law School of India University in Bengaluru, coordinated India’s National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan process, and serves as a judge on the International Tribunal on the Rights of Nature. He also helps coordinate the Vikalp Sangam alternatives confluence, the Global Tapestry of Alternatives, and the Radical Ecological Democracy initiative. Over more than four decades, he has authored, co-authored, or edited more than 30 books, along with hundreds of articles. In this wide-ranging InterDialogue, Kothari traces his path from a childhood watching Delhi’s urban forests disappear into a lifetime of environmental and social justice work, and how that activism grew into Kalpavriksh and wider networks like the Vikalp Sangam, the ICCA Consortium, and the Global Tapestry of Alternatives. We discuss the biocultural and ideological diversity of the Indian subcontinent, his concept of “outscaling” as an alternative to conventional growth models, and how Adivasi and indigenous rights in India compare with frameworks in Latin America, shaped by very different histories of colonization and violence. Kothari also reflects on decades of writing—from a self-published newsletter in 1980 to the hundred-essay volume Pluriverse—and how it has supported grassroots movements and reached younger generations. We go on to explore the rights of nature movement in India—including the personhood granted to the Ganga and Yamuna rivers and the transboundary politics of South Asia’s rivers—before Kothari lays out earthy governance, his framework for moving beyond the legal limits of rights of nature toward a form of decision-making in which the rest of the natural world is already part of the process, illustrated through examples from a...

In this guest InterDialogue, folklorist and InterPlex content and operations strategist Rowan Glass converses with K. Brandon Barker, Associate Professor of Folklore at Indiana University Bloomington and editor of Children’s Folklore Review. Barker co-authored the book Folk Illusions with Claiborne Rice, introducing the term “folk illusions” to study children’s play forms in relation to the science of perception and cognition. He has also written on animal cognition and the folklore of science with comparative psychologist Daniel Povinelli, with whom he co-edited the book The Aesop’s Fable Paradigm. For several years, Barker led the Folklore and Science Section of the American Folklore Society, which he helped found. The conversation begins with two notoriously murky words: how to define both folklore and science when both terms carry so much baggage? Barker makes the case that “the folk” are far less naive than some scientists assume, and that folklore’s ethnographic methods can offer insights into problems like vaccine hesitancy and misinformation by taking seriously perspectives often overlooked by or inaccessible to scholars in other fields. Glass then addresses Barker’s research on folk illusions and what children’s play reveals about adultcentrism, body acquisition, and the science of perception. They probe the epistemological stakes of folklore scholarship in relation to the natural sciences, asking whether folklorists can or should advance universal claims and broad theoretical frameworks. They also talk about computation folklore and Barker’s work on the folklore of animal cognition. The conversation then turns toward humans’ seemingly inherent tendencies toward anthropomorphism and human exceptionalism—whether applied to animals or artificial intelligence. Barker asserts that our seemingly inherent penchant for projecting human qualities onto the non-human world might be more powerful, and perhaps more dangerous, than we realize. Timestamps 0:00 – Introduction 2:22 – Defining folklore 4:14 – Defining science and the “folk as naive” blind...

Earth’s Memory, Part One Abstract Every rock carries a fragment of Earth’s memory. Collectively, these fragments preserve an extraordinary geological record spanning more than 4.5 billion years of planetary evolution. This article traces that record through the deep-time history of our planet—from the formation of Earth’s earliest crust and the Great Oxidation Event, when microbial life transformed the planet’s atmosphere, to the five great mass extinctions that repeatedly reset the trajectory of life, and the Snowball Earth episodes, when our planet experienced its most extreme glaciation. Drawing on more than two decades of fieldwork across Himalaya and Peninsular India, among ancient rocks, minerals, and fossils that bear direct witness to these planetary transformations, it explores how geologists reconstruct Earth’s early history from evidence preserved in the geological archives. Taken together, these geological events reveal a recurring pattern: Earth is a dynamic system in which every major crisis has also created the conditions for new and often more complex forms of life to evolve. That pattern, written into rocks billions of years old, continues to shape the planet today.    I first learned to listen to rocks long before I had the words to describe what that meant.  It began in the Himalaya, the youngest mountain range on Earth, still rising, still deforming, and still recording the ongoing collision between continents. During my early fieldwork, I spent long days mapping folded strata, tracing fault scarps, and trying to understand how landscapes preserve evidence of processes operating across vastly different geological timescales. At that time, I often felt that the mountains were trying to say something in a language I had not yet learned. Over time, through fieldwork, mapping, and countless hours spent among rocks and sediments, I began to decipher that silent language.  The lesson deepened across many other landscapes of India....

Jaishri Sanwal Bhatt is an Indian geologist and paleoclimatologist based at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research in Bangalore, where she combines scientific research with a strong commitment to public outreach, advocacy, and science communication. For more than twenty years, Sanwal’s work has centered on reconstructing past climate change and active tectonic processes through the study of cave records and other geological proxies, especially paleolakes and speleothems. Her research has spanned the Indian and Nepalese Himalayas, the Andaman Islands, and both the eastern and western coasts of India, engaging major questions related to earth systems, water security, and natural hazards. In this wide-ranging and engaging InterDialogue, we discuss deep geological time, the proposed nuclear energy transition in India, the value of interdisciplinarity and clearer scientific communication, Sanwal’s efforts to organize science outreach initiatives in rural India, and much more. Timestamps 2:22 – Sanwal’s background and introduction to geology 8:43 – Big History and the evolution of the Earth through geology 14:25 – Sanwal’s research 16:45 – Tracking historical precipitation patterns through sediment 21:10 – Connecting paleoclimatology to contemporary climate science 25:53 – Tracking and analyzing extreme events through rocks 29:07 – Comparing chronological dating systems 32:52 – Sanwal’s work with lake cores 37:34 – Tracking tsunami episodes in the Andamans 44:09 – Evidence of tsunamis in mangrove forests 49:00 – Local knowledge and community collaborations 52:32 – Nuclear energy transition in India and waste disposal 57:18 – Risks of geological repositories for nuclear waste 1:00:16 – Sanwal’s rural science outreach and education initiatives

Investment in science is a pillar for any dynamic, equitable modern society, and promoting scientific literacy across all levels of society can help foster innovation, dialogue, and consensus that crosses disciplinary and cultural boundaries. Science also helps to uncover answers to foundational questions that have captivated, confounded, and divided our species for millennia. But what is “science,” and what kind of “evidence” ensures that an approach is scientific? If we take “science” to broadly mean, in its purest sense, a “dynamic search for the truth,” or more explicitly, “the pursuit and application of knowledge and understanding of the natural and social world following a systematic methodology based on evidence,” as the Science Council aptly defines it, then science extends beyond the established, highly specialized disciplines of reductionist natural sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, geoscience, and space science) that have been so successful in fostering our understanding of our planet and the cosmos. Under this definition, science also includes the rigorous data-driven (qualitative and quantitative) social sciences, the inherently non-reductionist “holistic” sciences such as ecological and Earth system sciences, and the budding interdisciplinary field of complex systems science, as well as robust traditional knowledge systems based on multi-generational experiences, observations, and reasoning. As with science, “evidence” can mean a lot of things as well, including primary research, pre-existing data, past and planned experiments, and the referencing of peer-reviewed publications and primary sources. It can also include local and traditional knowledge, thought experiments, theoretical proofs, contemplation, verifiable personal experience, and empirical observation. Broadening and weaving together these forms of scientific evidence holds the potential to address complex, interconnected global challenges and explain deep mysteries that could help unify our polarized societies around foundational understandings. Foundational Questions Foundational questions can transcend the divides of generations and cultures: Cosmology, physics, and evolutionary biology have shed...