Read Science!

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. 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/.

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. Like “Read Science!” on Facebook to hear about upcoming programs, easy links to the archive, and […]

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 […]

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 […]

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? […]

Streamed live on 20 March 2019. Sports recovery–making the most of your workouts with less pain and/or more gain–was the topic in this episode of “Read Science!” when our guest was Christie Aschwanden, a science journalist and elite athlete herself, and author of Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn […]

Streamed live on 11 February 2019. Theoretical physicists often will talk about their favorite theories as “beautiful”, and many will use criteria of what they call “beauty” to judge the likely veracity of competing theories, as well as the success of their own work. Most physicists are aware of this–but where does this idea come […]

Streamed live on 15 November 2018. The details of just how our Solar System came to be, starting with a large, rotating solar nebula and ending with our Sun, our planetary companions, and moons and asteroids and comets, have been vague up until recent decades when scientists turned their deductive attention toward those unassuming asteroids […]

Streamed live on 8 November 2018. Probability, statistics, and math–oh my! For some, it’s the stuff of nightmares, but reading Ben’s book makes it all more of a dream. Who ever thought math could be such fun! Our guest in this episode was Ben Orlin, mathematician, bad artist, and author of Math with Bad Drawings: […]

Streamed live on 4 October 2018. By the end of nineteenth century, buying food in American was dangerous–sometimes deadly. “Milk” might contain formaldehyde, most often used to embalm corpses. Decaying meat was preserved with both salicylic acid, a pharmaceutical chemical, and borax, a compound first identified as a cleaning product. This didn’t happen by accident; […]