This article originally appeared at my Scientific American blog.
Today, the 44th anniversary of the first moon landing with Neil Armstrong’s and Buzz Aldrin’s first steps on the moon, I present to you some great books to read about space travel, each with their own video, whether it is a trailer for a movie made based on the book or a proper book trailer, a more recent phenomenon.
In this episode we have a lively discussion about the genetic roots of cancer, how carcinogens get involved, how to communicate that to the public, and how the public can arm themselves against those who try to manipulate science to suit their own ends.
Today’s conversation was all about biotechnology, clones, research ethics, and mad scientists. What didn’t we talk about!
Our guests were Emily Anthes, author of “Frankenstein’s Cat”, and Terry Johnson and Kyle Kurpinski, authors of “How To Defeat Your Own Clone”.
In this episode, we talk to wildlife photographer Suzi Eszterhas about combining science and art in her series of books with stories and images about the life of animal families on the African Savanna, as well as her keen interest in conservation and lending her support to small conservation groups doing big jobs around the world.
In this RS! episode we talked with famed moon-walker and space visionary, Buzz Aldrin, about his book, “Mission to Mars”, and his vision for establishing a permanent human presence on Mars. Later in the episode we were joined by Leonard David, Buzz’s co-author on the book, to talk some about their experiences with spreading the idea and engaging the public with the excitement of space exploration.
We teamed up with award-winning filmmaker — and secret evolutionary biologist — Lucy Cooke, for a high-energy discussion about sloths, and frogs, and many other down-trodden and unloved species of animals; making films that entertain and educate; and all sorts of other stuff, including some insider talk about Richard Dawkins & David Attenborough. We also were briefly reminded of the limits of technology and laptop battery lives.
They physicists gang up on Joanne, when we’re joined by Mario Livio, whose most recent book is “Brilliant Blunders : From Darwin to Einstein – Colossal Mistakes by Great Scientists That Changed Our Understanding of Life and the Universe”, and Michael Brooks, whose most recent book is “Free Radicals : The Secret Anarchy of Science”, as we discuss the audacious idea that scientists are actually people, too, and that science is a human enterprise and mistakes regularly happen.
For this discussion of “Poop & Pipes” (as guest Scott Huler put it) we were joined by Rose George, whose most recent book is “The Big Necessity : The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why it Matters”, and Scott Huler, whose book is “On the Grid : A Plot of Land, an Average Neighborhood, and the Systems that Make our World Work”. I’ll avoid all puns involving the word “sh*t” and merely say: Who knew sewers & sanitation could be so interesting!
Our very first Read Science! episode featured Mary Roach, author of the books “Stiff”, “Spook”, “Bonk”, “Packing for Mars” and her latest, “Gulp”. We conversed about how she writes her science to engage the audience. We discovered that she is “a gateway drug to science” and enjoys the idea of limiting yourself to one idea or concept and seeing how far you can take that topic in writing.
Read Science! Episode 10 : Genomics Edition
Human genomics since the time of the Human Genome Project and the first sequencing of the human genome was our twenty-first century topic, and we covered a lot of ground with three well-informed and interesting interlocutors: Misha Angrist, author of “Here is a Human Being”, Kevin Davies, author of “The $1,000 Dollar Genome”, and Matthew Herper, science & medicine writer at Forbes Magazine.
11 years ago Read Science!, Video • Tags: $1000 Genome, genomics, Google Hangout on Air, Here is a Human Being, Jeff Shaumeyer, Joanne Manaster, Kevin Davies, Matthew Herper, Misha Angrist, Read Science!, video