The 7th Avenue Project

Growing up as an aspiring marine scientist in Sri Lanka, Asha de Vos didn't have any local role models – other than sci-fi writer/scuba diver Arthur C. Clarke. At times she's had to make her own way with a combination of persistence, pig-headedness and duct tape. That hasn't stopped her from becoming an expert on a population of “unorthodox” blue whales and a noted ocean conservationist. We talked about Asha's path to ocean science, her defining moment (involving whale poop), the wonders of cetology, her efforts to protect whales from ship collisions, and how she's inspiring a new generation of marine biologists.

It took Meklit Hadero a while to realize she could be a singer, and a while longer to start recording, but man, has she made up the distance. Over the last few years she's released a series of impeccably produced albums showcasing her own craftily written songs as well as some pretty beguiling cover versions, moving seamlessly from jazz to soul to hip-hop, indie rock, folk and even a little country. Her supple, spirited vocals invite comparisons to Joni Mitchell, Nina Simone, Nora Jones and Joan Armatrading. But she has a sound all her own, drawing on musical influences in all the aforementioned genres as well as the Ethiopian pop she heard growing up and the North/East African music she's been exposed to in her work on The Nile Project, which she co-founded.

Meklit and I surveyed her discography, including her new album We Are Alive, while talking about her life and career, her exuberant approach to performance and the way creativity takes its own good time.

Fady Joudah is a doctor, a poet and the son of Palestinian refugees. And in so labeling him, I run the risk of doing exactly the sort of categorizing he and his writing resist. Fady is deeply suspicious of the way linguistic habits, packaged narratives and institutional norms buttress social inequities and occasional iniquity. So what's a practicing doctor and serious poet to do? We discussed how Fady responds to the challenge in both of his vocations. Including readings from Fady's books “The Earth in the Attic,” “Alight,” and “Textu.”

Rebecca Goldstein says some of her best friends are “philosophy jeerers,” convinced that anything philosophers can do, scientists can do better. She begs to differ, and offers the grandaddy of Western philosophy as exhibit A. 21st-century America has a surprising amount in common with Athens c. 400 BCE, Rebecca says, and Plato still has a thing or two to teach us moderns. She shows how well the 2,400-year-old-man has aged by transporting him to our own times in her new book “Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't go Away.” Rebecca and I talked about the world of the ancient Greeks, the death of Socrates, the relevance of Plato and what philosophy is good for. Plus a bonus segment: just how timely is Plato? Philosophical rapper Dr. Awkward makes the case in rhymes.

Big physics is on a roll. It seems like only yesterday we were applauding the discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider. And then this week came word that the BICEP2 microwave telescope at the South Pole had found evidence of gravitational waves from the inflationary epoch – a glimpse of the universe at the time of the Big Bang, or maybe even before. "Holy crap!" was my reaction, but I needed something more for a radio show, so I got in touch with Anthony Aguirre. Cosmic inflation is one of his specialties, and I thought he'd be a great person to explain the new findings. He was. And I stand by my initial assessment: holy crap!

Among those popping the champagne when the discovery of the Higgs boson was announced in July 2012 was Howard Haber. And deservedly so. He'd been studying and theorizing about the Higgs for decades, long before it became headline fodder. Howie wrote about the then-notional particle in his 1978 doctoral dissertation and co-authored a definitive text on how to find it, “The Higgs Hunter's Guide,” in 1989. Though we've touched on the Higgs in previous shows, we've never gone into detail on the backstory and theoretical significance. I thought it was high time we did, especially as a new documentary film on the Higgs search – “Particle Fever” – is opening around the country.

Cultural historian John Beckman says America's tradition of fun-loving isn't frivolous, it's fundamental to our democracy. Home-grown American fun, John contends, is one way we express our humanity, push back against elites and would-be autocrats, and make a more perfect union. John traces the history of rebellious fun in America from the Massachusetts colony of Merry Mount in the 1620s to the Merry Pranksters of the 1960s, and from the Sons of Liberty to flappers and jazzmen, b-boys and punks in his new book “American Fun: Four Centuries of Joyous Revolt.”

Harry Greene is a much-admired natural historian and herpetologist with a soft spot for black-tailed rattlesnakes. He's spent years in the field studying venomous serpents, when not in the classroom or lab (he's currently a prof at Cornell; before that he was at UC Berkeley, where he both taught and curated the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology). Harry's a very thoughtful guy and serious writer, as evidenced in his new memoir Tracks and Shadows: Field Biology as Art. We talked about his career, about field biology vs. theory and experiment, about the wonders of snakedom and some of his favorite rattlers (like “Superfemale 21”), and life and death in the natural and human worlds.

Sandra Faber loves telescopes. It's one of the reasons she became an astronomer. And if ‘scopes could speak, I suspect they'd have some loving words for her. She's helped bring major new telescopes into being, developed instruments that greatly enhance their power and saved one famous scope from an early demise. And she's put them to good use, too, participating in major astronomical discoveries and contributing to leading cosmological theories, like the cold dark matter theory of galaxy formation.

The thing that pleases her most, though, is being part of the 13.7-billion-year-old cosmic story going back to the big bang. Sandy and I talked about her career and accomplishments, her sense of the universe and our place in space.

Keeping a family together is hard enough. Now try adding a chimp. Over the decades, psychologists exploring the animal-human cognitive divide have launched a number of studies in which humans attempted to raise chimpanzees as children. With their often-sloppy science and often-sorry outcomes (see, for example, the documentary film “Project Nim”), most such experiments have done less to limn the inter-species boundary than to highlight our confusions about it.

These studies also trace the larger tale of familial dreams and disappointments in general, a point brought achingly to life in Karen Joy Fowler's latest novel, “We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.” It's the saga of one chimped-up family and its inevitable dissolution. Karen and I talked about the troubled history of chimp cross-fostering experiments, about the splintering of families, of siblings and selves, and storytelling as a source of self-knowledge, real or illusory.