Science Talk

At the second Science on the Hill event, AI, Robotics and Your Health, experts from academia and the private sector talked with Scientific American Editor in Chief Mariette DiChristina about the future of AI and robotics in medicine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Edinburgh University paleontologist Steve Brusatte talks about his May 2018 Scientific American article, "The Unlikely Triumph of the Dinosaurs," and his new book, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Brown University biologist and author Ken Miller talks about his new book The Human Instinct: How We Evolved to Have Reason, Consciousness and Free Will. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michael Lemonick, opinion editor at Scientific American, talks about his most recent book, The Perpetual Now: A Story of Amnesia, Memory and Love, about Lonni Sue Johnson, who suffered a specific kind of brain damage that robbed her of much of her memory and her ability to form new memories, and what she has revealed to neuroscientists about memory and the brain. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Freelance science journalist Kevin Begos reports from the U.S. Power and Renewable Summit in Austin, Texas, on the use of blockchain technology to make more efficient energy markets and distribution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David N. Schwartz talks about his latest book, The Last Man Who Knew Everything: The Life and Times of Enrico Fermi, Father of the Nuclear Age. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At the first Science Meets Congress event, Energy Solutions for a Sustainable Future, energy and innovation experts from academia, government and the private sector talked with Scientific American Editor in Chief Mariette DiChristina about American's energy future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Biochemist Sylvia Tara talks about her book The Secret Life of Fat: The Science behind the Body's Least-Understood Organ and What It Means for You. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Journalist Erik Vance talks about his first book, Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain’s Ability to Deceive, Transform and Heal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Caleb Scharf, director of Columbia University’s Astrobiology Center talks about his latest book, The Zoomable Universe: An Epic Tour through Cosmic Scale, from Almost Everything to Almost Nothing, and the OSIRIS-REx space mission. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stephen Asma, professor of philosophy at Columbia College Chicago and author of On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears, talks about our enduring fascination with monsters. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Award-winning journalist Maryn McKenna talks about her latest book, Big Chicken: The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats. (Part 2 of 2) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Award-winning journalist Maryn McKenna talks about her latest book, Big Chicken: The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats. (Part 1 of 2) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded jointly to Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson for developing cryo-electron microscopy that can determine high-resolution structures of biomolecules in solution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded today to Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish and Kip Thorne for their contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded today to Jeffrey Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael Young for discoveries of molecular mechanisms controlling circadian rhythms. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jonathan Losos, biology professor at Harvard and curator of herpetology at the university’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, talks about his latest book, Improbable Destinies: Fate, Chance and the Future of Evolution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In advance of the big solar eclipse on August 21, author and journalist David Baron talks about his new book American Eclipse: A Nation's Epic Race to Catch the Shadow of the Moon and Win the Glory of the World. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Astrophysicist and author Mario Livio ventures deep into the human mind in his new book, Why? What Makes Us Curious. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Journalist and author Susan Ewing talks about her new book Resurrecting the Shark: A Scientific Obsession and the Mavericks Who Solved the Mystery of a 270-Million-Year-Old Fossil. (And we'll discuss how Helicoprion is not technically a shark, but it's really close!) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Scott Kraus, vice president and senior science advisor at the Anderson Cabot Center for Ocean Life at the New England Aquarium in Boston, talks about the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, created last year and already under threat. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Journalist Craig Pittman of the Tampa Bay Times talks about his book, Oh, Florida! How America’s Weirdest State Influences the Rest of the Country. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Journalist Bonnie Rochman talks about her new Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux book, The Gene Machine: How Genetic Technologies Are Changing the Way We Have Kids—and the Kids We Have. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Verizon’s director of network planning, Sanyogita Shamsunder, talks with Scientific American's Larry Greenemeier about the coming 5G and EM-spectrum-based communications in general. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Emory University paleontologist, geologist and ichnologist Anthony J. Martin talks about his new book, The Evolution Underground: Burrows, Bunkers and the Marvelous Subterranean World beneath Our Feet. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Conservation biologist Peter Marra talks with journalist Rene Ebersole about the threat of outdoor cats to wild animals and to human health. Marra is the co-author, with writer Chris Santella, of the book Cat Wars: The Devastating Consequences of a Cuddly Killer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Evolutionary biologist and science historian Lee Dugatkin talks about the legendary six-decade Siberian experiment in fox domestication run by Lyudmila Trut, his co-author of a new book and Scientific American article about the research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Scientific American technology editor Larry Greenemeier talks with Ken Washington, vice president of Research and Advanced Engineering at Ford, about self-driving cars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Martin K. Reeves and Simon Levin talk about their Scientific American essay "Building a Resilient Business Inspired by Biology." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Astrophysicist and author Mario Livio writes in the journal Nature and talks to Scientific American about the recently rediscovered essay by Winston Churchill that analyzed with impressive scientific accuracy the conditions under which extraterrestrial life might exist. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Trevor Mundel, president of global health at the Gates Foundation, talks to Scientific American editor-in-chief Mariette DiChristina about the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) and the efforts to create vaccine platforms for rapid responses to epidemics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Scientific American executive editor Fred Guterl talks with Pres. Obama’s science advisor, John Holdren, about climate science, space travel, the issue of reproducibility in science, the brain initiative and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Pulitzer Prize–winning N.Y.U. historian David Oshinsky, director of the Division of Medical Humanities at the N.Y.U. Langone Medical Center, talks about his latest book, Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America’s Most Storied Hospital. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Barbara Kiser, books and arts editor at Nature, talks about her favorite science books of 2016, especially three works about the little-known history of women mathematicians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gordon Briggs, a postdoc at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, talks about the article he and Matthias Scheutz, director of the Human Robot Interaction Laboratory at Tufts University, wrote in the January Scientific American titled "The Case for Robot Disobedience." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Julien d’Huy, of the Pantheon–Sorbonne University in Paris, talks about the use of evolutionary theory and computer modeling in the comparative analysis of myths and folktales, the subject of his article in the December 2016 Scientific American. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Paul Rosenzweig, former deputy assistant secretary for policy in the Department of Homeland Security and founder of Red Branch Consulting, PLLC, talks about the October 21 attack on internet service in the U.S. that left millions without connectivity for hours. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The University of Michigan's Paul Mohai, a leading researcher of issues related to environmental justice, talked about the Flint water crisis at a workshop sponsored by the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources, attended by Scientific American contributing editor Robin Lloyd. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded today to Jean-Pierre Sauvage, Sir James Fraser Stoddart and Bernard L. Feringa for the design and synthesis of molecular machines. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded today to David J. Thouless, F. Duncan Haldane and J. Michael Kosterlitz for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded today to Yoshinori Ohsumi of Japan for his discoveries concerning autophagy. Following the announcement, journalist Lotta Fredholm spoke to Juleen Zierath, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine, about the research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Carin Bondar talks about her new book Wild Sex, which covers the strange, surreal and sometimes scary sex lives of our animal cousins. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David Epstein talks about his 2013 bestseller The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance and his recent Scientific American article "Magic Blood and Carbon-Fiber Legs at the Brave New Olympics." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Each summer, the National Center for Science Education organizes a boat trip down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon to bring visitors face to wall-face with striking examples of geologic and evolutionary processes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Best-selling science writer Mary Roach talks about her latest book, Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kenneth Catania of Vanderbilt University talks to Cynthia Graber about electric eel research that led him to accept 19th-century naturalist Alexander von Humboldt's account of electric eels attacking horses. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Wildlife Conservation Society researcher Ullas Karanth talks about his July, 2016, Scientific American article on state-of-the-art techniques for tracking tigers and estimating their populations and habitat health. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Caltech’s Kip Thorne and Ronald Drever and MIT’s Rainer Weiss were the founders of the LIGO experiment that detected gravitational waves. They were just awarded the Kavli Prize in Astrophysics and two of them spoke with Scientific American's Clara Moskowitz about LIGO and the public's reaction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Caltech theoretical physicist Sean M. Carroll talks about his new book The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself. (Dutton, 2016) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Former Scientific American editor Mark Alpert talks about his latest science fiction thriller, The Orion Plan, featuring the method whereby aliens most likely really would colonize our planet. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices