Read Science!

Streamed live on 20 September 2017. Industrial chicken farming, antiobiotic resistance, and the future of both were on our minds, and in our conversation, today when we talk with Maryn McKenna, author of Big Chicken: The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats. The word “incredible” seems […]

Streamed live on 5 September 2017. Oh, those crafty politicians! Are they all the same? In this episode, Joanne and Jeff speak with journalist Dave Levitan about his book, Not a Scientist: How Politicians Mistake, Misrepresent, and Utterly Mangle Science. Lots of current topics (with quite a bit of climate change represented) flash by as […]

Streamed live on 9 August 2017. Curiosity is something we value here at “Read Science”, and today we talked about it with Mario Livio, author of Why? What Makes Us Curious. We heard stories about Richard Feynman, learned about theories of curiosity, what it is and how it happens in the brain, talked about exciting […]

Streamed live on 4 August 2017. NASA’s robotic exploration mission were our topic today as we talked with writer-about-all-things-space and editor of “Universe Today” Nancy Atkinson about her book, Incredible Stories from Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos. Martian rovers, a Pluto flyby, photos from Jupiter, voyages to […]

Streamed live on 27 July 2017.

We haven't talked much about math so far on "Read Science!", but with this episode we got down to serious business and went directly to Big Numbers and Infinity -- and beyond!

Our guest was mathematician Richard Evan Schwartz, author of Gallery of the Infinite, Really Big Numbers, and You Can Count on Monsters, his remarkably informative yet playful graphical books about numbers, big numbers, and lots and lots of numbers. We discussed numbers and art and his penchant for making drawings to explain these ideas. We also learned more about the "Infinite Chicken" and "Rational Crocodile". It's good to be reminded that math can be this much fun.

Look for his books at your library or at the American Mathematical Society's bookstore:

http://bookstore.ams.org/#search?schwartz?page=0

For more about "Inkscape", the vector-drawing program Rich uses to create his images, or to download a free copy, visit their official website: https://inkscape.org/en/.

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Streamed live 10 May 2017.

We finally got to talk again about science books for children, this time about the "Living Sunlight" series of books by award-winning children's book author and illustrator, Molly Bang, and Dr. Penny Chisholm, a biological oceanographer at MIT.

We had a fun and lively time looking at pictures, talking about how kids look at pictures, the importance of cyanobacteria, and who is that kid that keeps showing up in the books' illustrations. There are four books (so far) in this delightful and informative series: Living Sunlight (about photosynthesis), Ocean Sunlight (phytoplankton), Buried Sunlight (fossil fuels), and Rivers of Sunlight (ocean currents). And we'll let you in on a secret: they make good reading for adults, too.

For more information about the series, visit their website: https://thesunlightseries.com/ .

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Streamed live 28 April 2017.

"Read Science!" began its fifth year with guest Dr. Barbara Oakley, the leader of one of the largest online classes (MOOCs), "Learning How to Learn", and author of "A Mind for Numbers" and her latest, Mindshift: Break Through Obstacles to Learning and Discover Your Hidden Potential.

While Mindshift was the centerpiece of our discussion, we covered a lot of ideas related to learning, how to learn, and the benefits of being a life-long learner.

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Streamed live on 5 April 2017.

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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Streamed live on 15 February 2017.

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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Streamed live on 23 November 2016.

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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