Streamed live on 4 August 2021.
Joanne and Jeff talked with historian Lucy Jane Santos about her new book, Half Lives: The Unlikely History of Radium.
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Joanne and Jeff talked with returning “Read Science!” guest, Cynthia Barnett about her book, The Sound of the Sea: Seashells and the Fate of the Oceans.
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Recorded on 1 July for release on 6 July 2021.
Joanne and Jeff talked with marine biologist & author Helen Scales about her new book, The Brilliant Abyss : Exploring the Majestic Hidden Life of the Deep Ocean and the Looming Threat that Imperils It.
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Streamed live on 18 June 2021.
Joanne and Jeff welcomed back Liz Lee Heinecke as guest to talk about her new experiment and learning book for kids, Biology for Kids : Science Experiments and Science Activities Inspired by Awesome Biologists, Past and Present.
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Streamed live on 28 May 2021.
Joanne and Jeff talked with Dr. David Robert Grimes about his book, Good Thinking: Why Flawed Logic Puts Us All at Risk and How Critical Thinking Can Save the World.
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Streamed live on 28 April 2021.
Joanne and Jeff spoke with physicist, author, and ailurophile extraordinaire, Greg Gbur about his book, Falling Felines and Fundamental Physics: A Headlong Dive into the Science of How Cats Land on Their Feet.
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Streamed live on 13 July 2020.
Joanne and Jeff talked with Marta Zaraska, author of Growing Young: How Friendship, Optimism and Kindness Can Help You Live to 100.
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Streamed live on 29 June 2020.
Joanne and Jeff talked with returning guest, Emily Anthes about her new book, The Great Indoors: The Surprising Science of How Buildings Shape Our Behavior, Health and Happiness.
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Streamed live on 7 May 2020.
Joanne and Jeff spoke with author Mario Livio about his latest book, Galileo and the Science Deniers.
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Streamed live on 9 April 2020.
Joanne and Jeff spoke with Dr. Ainissa Ramirez about her new book, The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another.
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Streamed live on 12 March 2020.
Joanne and Jeff spoke with Mara Hvistendahl, author of The Scientist and the Spy : A True Story of China, the FBI, and Industrial Espionage.
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Streamed live no 28 February 2020.
Joanne and Jeff spoke with Darlene Cavalier, Catherine Hoffman, and Caren Cooper about their book, The Field Guide to Citizen Science : How You Can Contribute to Scientific Research and Make a Difference.
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Streamed live on 30 July 2019.
Since forever, it seems, people have been trying to decide what unique characteristic separates mammals from all other animals–and what unique characteristic separates humans from all other mammals. And yet, no one seems to have a definitive answer.
Liam Drew, in his book I, Mammal: The Story of What Makes Us Mammals, takes a different tack, and looks instead at the characteristics that humans have in common with other mammals, and at how evolution has created a number of shared characteristics. Which came first: the milk or the mammary glands? How did animals that give live birth to their young evolve from animals who lay eggs, and where do marsupials fit into that evolutionary picture? What makes the mammalian placenta the extraordinary organ that it is, and how did that come about? And, in discussing why we owe the entire book to an unfortunate encounter that the author had with a soccer ball, why in the world do so many mammalian males wear their testicles outside their body?
Author Drew weaves a remarkable number of fascinating facts into fun, informative stories about mammals and how we evolved, and we had a great deal of fun trying to mention all our favorites as our very short hour allowed. Put it all together and we find out that mammals are less a collection of traits, and more a parallel collection of histories of how we came to be.
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Streamed live on 11 July 2019.
From Egyptology to satellites in space, from archaeological sites in Peru to remote sensing, we found an abundance of fascinating and exciting topics of discussion with our guest, archaeologist Sarah Parcak, author of Archaeology from Space: How the Future Shapes Our Past. While she writes about projects that she has worked on, we not only learn more about Sarah, but about what archaeology is, what its main concerns are, how archaeologists actually go about their business, what taking pictures of the Earth from space has to do with archaeology–and, as often happens, so much more crowded into our all-too-brief hour’s discussion.
But, we also found a few minutes to discuss the citizen-science/crowdsourcing archaeological project Sarah’s involved with known as GlobalXplorer: https://www.globalxplorer.org/ .
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Streamed live on 18 June 2019.
Our guest today takes on some big ideas in his book, but the biggest may be the conundrum that has confounded physicists ever since Newton wrote down his Law of Universal Gravitation: why does mathematics seem to work so well at describing the universe that physicists try to explain? It keeps happening over and over again that when new ideas are needed for new theories, mathematics is there to provide the means of description that physicists were looking for. Just as often, then, the mathematics extends the ideas and shows physicists where to look for new experimental discoveries.
In this edition of “Read Science!” we talked to Graham Farmelo about the ideas in his book The Universe Speaks in Numbers: How Modern Math Reveals Nature’s Deepest Secrets. We recapped lots of the history of physics and mathematics working together, and talked about a whole lot of great ideas from Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, Einstein, and Dirac along the way, all part of pondering the reasons that math and physics seem to get along so well together.
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