On this episode of “Read Science!”, Jeff and Joanne welcomed two authors of recent books to talk about genetics and genomics as they relate to our families of origin and our children. Bonnie Rochman is the author of The Gene Machine: How Genetic Technologies Are Changing the Way We Have Kids–and the Kids We Have, and Joselin Linder is the author of The Family Gene: A Mission to Turn My Deadly Inheritance Into a Hopeful Future. We tackle some of the big questions about the future of genetic engineering when it comes to humans, and we learn about what it’s like to be part of a family with its own genetic mutation.
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For this stimulating episode of “Read Science!” we welcomed Nathalia Holt, author of Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars.
We talked about the days when “calculators” were people who calculated, the early days of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the “Suicide Squad”, the race to launch the first satellite for the US, and the extraordinary story of how the team of calculators at JPL came to be mostly women.
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For this stimulating episode of “Read Science!” we welcomed Nathalia Holt, author of Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars.
We talked about the days when “calculators” were people who calculated, the early days of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the “Suicide Squad”, the race to launch the first satellite for the US, and the extraordinary story of how the team of calculators at JPL came to be mostly women.
Like “Read Science!” on Facebook to hear about upcoming programs, easy links to the archive, and news about RS! guests: https://www.facebook.com/ReadScience/.
Hope Jahren’s splendid book, Lab Girl, is already on most every list of notable books for 2016. Told in the form of a memoir, it’s an amazing tour of an adventurous and eventful career (so far), the surprising lives of plants, and what the frustrations and joys of scientific investigation and discovery really feel like. It’s not really possible to capture in this tiny space the wealth of information and insight that Hope’s book offers its readers. We talked about as much as we could fit into our hour and it felt like we barely got started. We also got to wave our arms around a couple of times when the lights went out.
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Hope Jahren’s splendid book, Lab Girl, is already on most every list of notable books for 2016. Told in the form of a memoir, it’s an amazing tour of an adventurous and eventful career (so far), the surprising lives of plants, and what the frustrations and joys of scientific investigation and discovery really feel like. It’s not really possible to capture in this tiny space the wealth of information and insight that Hope’s book offers its readers. We talked about as much as we could fit into our hour and it felt like we barely got started. We also got to wave our arms around a couple of times when the lights went out.
Like “Read Science!” on Facebook to hear about upcoming programs, easy links to the archive, and news about RS! guests: https://www.facebook.com/ReadScience/.
NASA was created when the US Congress passed the “National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958” and it was signed by President Eisenhower. It was the time of the Cold War, nuclear anxiety, and Sputnik, and American felt like it had “lost the space race” already. Soon enough the US launched its first satellite, Explorer 1, built by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
But before that happened, there was an interesting and exciting few decades of rocket research that made it all possible. In this episode of RS, Amy Shira Teitel, science historian and author of Breaking the Chains of Gravity : The Story of Spaceflight Before NASA, talked to us all about it. The stories were nearly ballistic and our time was over almost before we got launched.
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NASA was created when the US Congress passed the “National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958” and it was signed by President Eisenhower. It was the time of the Cold War, nuclear anxiety, and Sputnik, and American felt like it had “lost the space race” already. Soon enough the US launched its first satellite, Explorer 1, built by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
But before that happened, there was an interesting and exciting few decades of rocket research that made it all possible. In this episode of RS, Amy Shira Teitel, science historian and author of Breaking the Chains of Gravity : The Story of Spaceflight Before NASA, talked to us all about it. The stories were nearly ballistic and our time was over almost before we got launched.
Like “Read Science!” on Facebook to hear about upcoming programs, easy links to the archive, and news about RS! guests: https://www.facebook.com/ReadScience/.
There are a lot of venomous creatures on Earth, way more species than most of us realize, and they’ve invented an amazing and vast array of venoms and technique for injecting it into their enemies, and their dinners. Still, scientists are learning interesting and wondrous things from venomous animals, and also using their knowledge to create new drugs that work in marvelous ways.
In this episode we talked about all these things with Christie Wilcox, author of Venomous : How Earth’s Deadliest Creatures Mastered Biochemistry and enthusiastic scientist who studies venomous creatures. We even learned what “sodium channels” are, what they have to do with nerve cells and pain, and how they can be blocked. It was another fascinating hour that went by much too quickly.
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There are a lot of venomous creatures on Earth, way more species than most of us realize, and they’ve invented an amazing and vast array of venoms and technique for injecting it into their enemies, and their dinners. Still, scientists are learning interesting and wondrous things from venomous animals, and also using their knowledge to create new drugs that work in marvelous ways.
In this episode we talked about all these things with Christie Wilcox, author of Venomous : How Earth’s Deadliest Creatures Mastered Biochemistry and enthusiastic scientist who studies venomous creatures. We even learned what “sodium channels” are, what they have to do with nerve cells and pain, and how they can be blocked. It was another fascinating hour that went by much too quickly.
Like “Read Science!” on Facebook to hear about upcoming programs, easy links to the archive, and news about RS! guests: https://www.facebook.com/ReadScience/.
Sex! Sex! Sex! That’s all we talked about with Carin Bondar, author of Wild Sex: The Science Behind Mating in the Animal Kingdom. Topics included sexual selection among blue-footed boobies (i.e., the birds), the human preoccupation with NOT talking about sex while thinking about it all the time, and the bizarre sexual practices of some slugs kept coming up, too. Natural selection gave Carin a great deal to write about in her book, and we did our best to fit it all in to one suddenly short episode.
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Sex! Sex! Sex! That’s all we talked about with Carin Bondar, author of Wild Sex: The Science Behind Mating in the Animal Kingdom. Topics included sexual selection among blue-footed boobies (i.e., the birds), the human preoccupation with NOT talking about sex while thinking about it all the time, and the bizarre sexual practices of some slugs kept coming up, too. Natural selection gave Carin a great deal to write about in her book, and we did our best to fit it all in to one suddenly short episode.
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Our guest for today’s program about all the tiniest creatures in the world was Ed Yong, with whom we talk about his highly praised new book, I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life. The multitudes within gave us a multitude of things to talk about, from bad microbes to good microbes and everything in between, but our hour was just too short to cover it all, so reading Ed’s book is a must. We guarantee that you will come away with a “grander view of life”.
Like “Read Science!” on Facebook to hear about upcoming programs, easy links to the archive, and news about RS! guests: https://www.facebook.com/ReadScience/.
Our guest for today’s program about all the tiniest creatures in the world was Ed Yong, with whom we talk about his highly praised new book, I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life. The multitudes within gave us a multitude of things to talk about, from bad microbes to good microbes and everything in between, but our hour was just too short to cover it all, so reading Ed’s book is a must. We guarantee that you will come away with a “grander view of life”.
Like “Read Science!” on Facebook to hear about upcoming programs, easy links to the archive, and news about RS! guests: https://www.facebook.com/ReadScience/.
Acclaimed science writer Mary Roach has a special place in our pantheon here at “Read Science!”, because she was our guest for our first episode ever. Imagine how delighted we were to welcome her back to talk about her latest book, Grunt : The Curious Science of Humans at War. Despite some technical difficulties with the internet, we still managed a lively discussion about the book, the technology of warfare, the excellent help that researchers get from human cadavers willed to science, and plenty of behind-the-scenes tidbits.
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Acclaimed science writer Mary Roach has a special place in our pantheon here at “Read Science!”, because she was our guest for our first episode ever. Imagine how delighted we were to welcome her back to talk about her latest book, Grunt : The Curious Science of Humans at War. Despite some technical difficulties with the internet, we still managed a lively discussion about the book, the technology of warfare, the excellent help that researchers get from human cadavers willed to science, and plenty of behind-the-scenes tidbits.
Like “Read Science!” on Facebook to hear about upcoming programs, easy links to the archive, and news about RS! guests: https://www.facebook.com/ReadScience/.