ENCORE It’s the perennial dream: build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door. We go to San Jose’s famed Tech Museum to learn what it takes to turn a good idea into a grand success.
Remember the Super Soaker squirt gun? Hear how its inventor is now changing the rules for solar energy.
Where do good ideas come from? A Eureka moment in the bathtub? We’ll find out that it doesn’t happen so quickly – or easily.
And finally, the life cycle of society-changing technologies, from the birth of radio to the future of the Internet.
Inventions, inventors and innovation: all part of the mix on “Better Mousetrap.”
Guests:
Steven Johnson – Author of Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation
Lonnie Johnson – Inventor and former NASA engineer; CEO of Johnson Research and Development Company
Tim Wu – Professor of Communication Law at Columbia University and author of The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (Borzoi Books)
Alana Connor – Vice President Content Development, The Tech Museum, San Jose
Descripción en español
Originally released February 7, 2011
You can remember yesterday, but not tomorrow. But why is that? We consider the arrow of time and why it all traces to the Big Bang. Also, artificial blood cells and life in a deep Antarctic lake.
You’ll hear how Stephen King thinks that humankind is metaphorically living under a big dome, and what reasons Neil Tyson gives for why we really want to go into space.
And … skeptical takes on faces in cheese sandwiches and the supposedly special powers of psychics.
All this and more on this special Big Picture Science podcast.
Guests:
Jeremy Bailenson – Director of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University and co-author of Infinite Reality: The Hidden Blueprint of Our Virtual Lives
Sean Carroll – Theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology, author of The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World
Helen Amanda Fricker – Glaciologist, Scripps Institution of Oceanography at University of California, San Diego
Jill Mikucki – Microbiologist at the University of Tennessee
Jennifer Heldmann – Research scientist at NASA Ames Research Center
Jonathan Coulton – Singer and songwriter
Joseph DeSimone – Professor of chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and chemical engineering at North Carolina State University
Stephen King – Novelist, author of Under the Dome: A Novel
Phil Plait – Astronomer, Skeptic, and author of Slate Magazine’s blog Bad Astronomy
Benjamin Radford – Deputy editor, Skeptical Inquirer magazine
Steven Novella – Physician at Yale University, host of the podcast, “Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe”
Neil deGrasse Tyson – Astrophysicst, American Museum of Natural History, and author of Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier
Jim Underdown – Executive Director, Center for Inquiry, Los Angeles
Not all conversation is appropriate for the dinner table – and that includes, strangely enough, the subject of eating. Yet what happens during the time that food enters our mouth and its grand exit is a model of efficiency and adaptation.
Author Mary Roach takes us on a tour of the alimentary canal, while a researcher describes his invention of an artificial stomach. Plus, a psychologist on why we find certain foods and smells disgusting. And, you don’t eat them but they could wiggle their way within nonetheless: surgical snakebots.
Guests:
Mary Roach – Author, most recently, of Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal
Martin Wickham – Head of Nutrition, Leatherhead Food Research, U.K.
Paul Rozin – Professor of psychology, University of Pennsylvania
Michael Gershon – Professor in the Department of Pathology and Cell Biology, Columbia University Medical Center
Howie Choset – Professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon University
Descripción en español
Maybe goodbye isn’t forever. Get ready to mingle with mammoths and gaze upon a ground sloth. Scientists want to give some animals a round-trip ticket back from oblivion. Learn how we might go from scraps of extinct DNA to creating live previously-extinct animals, and the man who claims it’s his mission to repopulate the skies with passenger pigeons.
But even if we have the tools to bring vanished animals back, should we?
Plus, the extinction of our own species: are we engineering the end of humans via our technology?
Guests:
Beth Shapiro – Associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, University of California, Santa Cruz
Ben Novak – Biologist, Revive and Restore project at the Long Now Foundation, visiting biologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz
Hank Greely – Lawyer working in bioethics, director of the Stanford Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford University
Melanie Challenger – Poet, writer, author of On Extinction: How We Became Estranged from Nature
Nick Bostrom – Director of the Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University
Descripción en español
Think back, way back. Beyond last week or last year … to what was happening on Earth 100,000 years ago. Or 100 million years ago. It’s hard to fathom such enormous stretches of time, yet to understand the evolution of the cosmos – and our place in it – your mind needs to grasp the deep meaning of eons. Discover techniques for thinking in units of billions of years, and how the events that unfold over such intervals have left their mark on you.
Plus: the slow-churning processes that turned four-footed creatures into the largest marine animals that ever graced the planet and using a new telescope to travel in time to the birth of the galaxies.
Guests:
Jim Rosenau – Artist, Berkeley, California
Robert Hazen – Senior staff scientist at the Geophysical Laboratory at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, executive director of the Deep Carbon Observatory and the author of The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet
Neil Shubin – Biologist, associate dean of biological sciences at the University of Chicago, and the author of The Universe Within: Discovering the Common History of Rocks, Planets, and People
Nicholas Pyenson – Curator of fossil marine mammals at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C.
Alison Peck – Scientist, National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Virginia
Descripción en español
ENCORE Just remember this: memory is like Swiss cheese. Even our recollection of dramatic events that seem to sear their images directly onto our brain turn out to be riddled with errors. Discover the reliability of these emotional “flashbulb” memories.
Also, a judge questions the utility of eyewitness testimony in court. And, don’t blame Google for destroying your powers of recall! Socrates thought the same thing about the written word.
Plus, Brains on Vacation!
Guests:
Phil Plait – Keeper of Discover Magazine’s badastronomy blog
Craig Stark – Neurobiologist, Director for the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at Univeristy of California, Irvine
Ronald Reinstein – Former judge on the Superior Court of Arizona and judicial consultant for the Arizona Supreme Court
Betsy Sparrow – Psychologist, Columbia University
Descripción en español
First released May 7, 2012
