Science Talk
544 episodes — Page 2 of 11
Where Is Everybody Else in the Universe?
Guest host W. Wayt Gibbs talks with Jason Wright, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Pennsylvania State University’s Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds, about what’s known as the Fermi paradox: In a universe of trillions of planets, where is everybody? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Why Exercise Is So Good For You
Health journalist Judy Foreman talks about her new book Exercise Is Medicine: How Physical Activity Boosts Health and Slows Aging. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
COVID-19: What the Autopsies Reveal
Pathologists are starting to get a closer look at the damage that COVID-19 does to the body by carefully examining the internal organs of people who have died from the novel coronavirus. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
COVID-19: The Need for Secure Labs--and Their Risks
Coronavirus research requires high-containment labs. Journalist Elisabeth Eaves talks with Scientific American contributing editor W. Wayt Gibbs about her article “The Risks of Building Too Many Bio Labs,” a joint project of the New Yorker and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Flat Earthers: What They Believe and Why
Michael Marshall, project director of the Good Thinking Society in the U.K., talks about flat earth belief and its relationship to conspiracy theories and other antiscience activities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
COVID-19: Predicting the Path and Analyzing Immunity
Scientific American contributing editor W. Wayt Gibbs continues to report on the coronavirus outbreak from his home in Kirkland, Wash., site of the first U.S. cases. In this installment, he talks with researchers about what their models show for the future of the pandemic and on research to create tests to see who has developed immunity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
COVID-19: How and Why the Virus Spreads Quickly
Scientific American contributing editor W. Wayt Gibbs reports from the original U.S. epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak: Kirkland, Wash. In this installment of our ongoing series, he talks with researchers about the properties of the virus and why it spreads so quickly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
COVID-19: The Wildlife Trade and Human Disease
Christian Walzer, executive director of global health at the Wildlife Conservation Society, talks about how the wildlife trade, especially for human consumption, can lead to disease outbreaks. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
David Quammen: How Animal Infections Spill Over to Humans
In this 2012 interview, David Quammen talks about his book Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, which is highly relevant to the emergence of the coronavirus that has changed our lives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
COVID-19: Dealing with Social Distancing
Judy Moskowitz, a professor of medical social sciences at Northwestern University, talks about ways to cope during this time of missing out on our usual diet of social interactions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Coronavirus Hot Zone: Research and Responses in the U.S. Epicenter
Scientific American contributing editor W. Wayt Gibbs reports from the U.S. epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak: Kirkland, Wash. In this installment of our ongoing series, he talks with researchers about the efforts to create vaccines and treatments and the challenges the outbreak poses to cancer patients and others who are immunocompromised. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Coronavirus Hot Zone: The View from the U.S. Epicenter
Scientific American contributing editor W. Wayt Gibbs reports from the U.S. epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak: Kirkland, Wash. In this first installment of an ongoing series, he looks at why children seem to weather this disease better than adults and the complicated issue of shuttering schools. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The New Cosmos: A Conversation with Ann Druyan
Emmy and Peabody Award–winning science writer, producer and director Ann Druyan talks about Cosmos: Possible Worlds, the next installment of the Cosmos series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Advancing Efforts in Disease Interception
Ben Wiegand, global head of the World without Disease Accelerator at Janssen, the Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson, talks about efforts to prevent a disease or to identify it in its earliest stages for more effective treatments. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Kirk, Spock and Darwin
Duke University evolutionary biologist Mohamed A. F. Noor talks about his book Live Long and Evolve: What Star Trek Can Teach Us about Evolution, Genetics, and Life on Other Worlds. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
How to Make a Mass Extinction
Journalist and author Peter Brannen talks about his book The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Air Pollution: An Unclear and Present Danger
Journalist and author Beth Gardiner talks about her new book Choked: Life and Breath in the Age of Air Pollution. And CRISPR pioneer Jennifer Doudna talks about gene editing. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
150 Years of the Journal Nature
Nature is arguably the world’s most prestigious scientific journal. Editor in chief Magdalena Skipper spoke with Scientific American’s acting editor in chief Curtis Brainard about her journal as it celebrates its 150th anniversary. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Lithium-Ion Battery Creators Win Chemistry Nobel Prize
John B. Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino share the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for the development of lithium-ion batteries” that have led to portable electronic devices that are rechargeable virtually anywhere on the planet. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
How Cells Sense Oxygen Levels: Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
William Kaelin, Jr., Peter Ratcliffe and Gregg Semenza share the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine “for their discoveries of how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability.” New therapies for cancer and conditions such as anemia are in the pipeline, based on these discoveries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Talking Health and Energy at U.N. Climate Action Summit
Scientific American senior editor Jen Schwartz talks with WHO officials Maria Neira and Agnès Soucat about climate and health and with Rachel Kyte, special representative to the U.N. secretary-general for, and CEO of, Sustainable Energy for All. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Kicking Climate Change: Wins for Health, the Economy and Security
Former EPA administrator Gina McCarthy talks with Scientific American’s Andrea Thompson about the widespread benefits of taking action against climate change. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Mathematical Language of Nature
Physics historian Graham Farmelo talks about his latest book, The Universe Speaks in Numbers: How Modern Math Reveals Nature's Deepest Secrets. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jacks-of-All-Trades Make the Grade
Journalist and author David Epstein talks about his new book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
It's Melting: Science on Ice
Glaciologist Elizabeth Case of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University’s Earth Institute takes us out near Juneau, Alaska, to study and live on the shifting ice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Joseph Lange's Campaign against HIV
Seema Yasmin, director of research and education at the Stanford Health Communication Initiative, talks about her book The Impatient Dr. Lange: One Man’s Fight to End the Global HIV Epidemic. Lange was killed five years ago today when flight MH17 was shot down. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Bone Up on What's Inside You
Author and self-described fossil fanatic Brian Switek talks about his new book Skeleton Keys: The Secret Life of Bone. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Solving Our Plastic Problem
At Scientific American's third Science on the Hill event, experts from academia and the private sector met at the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill to talk with Scientific American editor-in-chief Mariette DiChristina about solutions to our plethora-of-plastics problem. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Secrets of the Universe Revealed!
Cornell University applied mathematics professor Steven Strogatz talks about his new book Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
How the Black Hole Said Cheese
Scientific American's chief features editor Seth Fletcher talks about his book Einstein's Shadow, an account of the long effort to image a black hole that recently came to fruition. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
A Tree and Its People in a Warming Landscape
Conservation scientist Lauren Oakes discusses her book about Alaska ecology and sociology, In Search of the Canary Tree: The Story of a Scientist, a Cypress, and a Changing World. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Science Couple Phages Out Superbug
Medical researcher Steffanie Strathdee needed to save the life of her husband, researcher Tom Patterson, when he contracted one of the world's worst infections. She turned to phage therapy: using a virus to kill the bacteria. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Vaccine Rejection: Truth and Consequences
Kent State epidemiologist Tara Smith talks about vaccines, recent preventable measles outbreaks and her 2017 journal article on vaccine rejection. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
On the Origin of Darwin
On this 210th anniversary of Darwin's birth we hear evolution writer and historian Richard Milner perform a brief monologue as Charles Darwin, and former Scientific American editor in chief John Rennie and Darwin's great-great-grandson Matthew Chapman read excerpts from The Origin of Species. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Warming Arctic on Thin Ice
Scientific American collections editor Andrea Gawrylewski talks to managing editor Curtis Brainard about how warming in the Arctic affects us all. And glaciologist Elizabeth Case takes us out near Juneau to study and live on the shifting ice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Fake Whiskeys and Octo-Ecstasy
Scientific American assistant news editor, Tanya Lewis, and collections editor, Andrea Gawrylewski, take a deeper look at two short articles from the Advances news section of the December issue, on counterfeit whiskeys and the effect of real ecstasy...on octopuses. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Ultima Thule and the Apes of Earth
As the New Horizons mission approached Ultima Thule, Rowan University paleontologist Kenneth Lacovara put our close-up study of the Kuiper Belt object into a deep-time perspective. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Meet the Real Ravenmaster
Christopher Skaife talks about his new book The Ravenmaster: My Life with the Ravens at the Tower of London, in front of a live audience at Caveat, “the speakeasy bar for intelligent nightlife" in Lower Manhattan. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Crusade against Dangerous Food, Part 2
Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Deborah Blum talks about her book The Poison Squad: One Chemist’s Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the 20th Century, Part 2. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Crusade against Dangerous Food, Part 1
Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Deborah Blum talks about her book The Poison Squad: One Chemist’s Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the 20th Century, Part 1. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Bones and Stones: Cemetery Geology
A tour of Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, N.Y., focuses on the geology of the landscape and the mausoleums. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tinder for Cheetahs; and an Unusual Blindness
Scientific American assistant news editor, Tanya Lewis, and collections editor, Andrea Gawrylewski, host a new podcast that takes a deeper look at short articles from the Advances news section of the magazine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Better Living through Evolution: Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Frances Arnold, George Smith and Gregory Winter shared the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for using evolutionary principles to create highly efficient enzymes and antibodies, with numerous practical applications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Laser Advances That Changed Our Lives: Nobel Prize in Physics
Arthur Ashkin, Gérard Mourou and Donna Strickland shared the Nobel Prize for finding ways to control and enhance laser light, leading to numerous common applications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Unleashing Immunity against Cancer: Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
James P. Allison and and Tasuku Honjo shared the Nobel Prize for their discovery of inhibition of negative immune regulation, the basis of new drugs against cancer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Where There's a Wills There's a Way to Explain the Home Run Rise
Astrophysicist and sports data scientist Meredith Wills talks about why a subtle change in Major League baseballs may be behind the jump in home runs after 2014. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
More People, but Less Hardship?
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation CEO Sue Desmond-Hellmann talks about the just-issued Goalkeepers Report, tracking progress against poverty and disease even as the population keeps rising. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Here's Looking at Humanity, Kid
Senior Editor Gary Stix talks about the September special issue of Scientific American, devoted to the science of being human. And Brown University evolutionary biologist Ken Miller discusses human chromosome 2 and what it tells us about us. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Life at the Improv: The Power of Imagination
Stephen Asma, professor of philosophy at Columbia College Chicago, talks about his two latest books, The Evolution of Imagination and Why We Need Religion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Out with the Bad Science
NPR science journalist Richard Harris talks about his book, Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hope and Wastes Billions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices