The Story Collider

Obehi Janice's family struggles to understand a death their doctors can't explain. Obehi Janice is a writer, actress, and comedian. She is a graduate of Georgetown University and has trained with Shakespeare & Company and ImprovBoston. Her essays include "To Sasha, Malia, and Bo," which appeared in Kinfolks: a journal of Black expression. She is a performer of stage and screen and can also be heard as a voice actress on radio, TV, and video games. Obehi was recently named "Boston's Best Actress" by The Improper Bostonian. Her one-woman show, FUFU & OREOS, will receive a production in February 2015 with Bridge Rep Theater of Boston.

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Neuroscientist Indre Viskontas and her friends turn to science to find the right way to date. Indre Viskontas is a neuroscientist and opera singer. She is also the host of Inquiring Minds, an in-depth exploration of the place where science, politics, and society collide. http://www.motherjones.com/inquiringminds

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Sports writer David Epstein tracks down some surprising health claims circulating in the football world. David Epstein is author of the recent New York Times bestseller The Sports Gene, an exploration of the genetic basis of athleticism. He is currently an investigative reporter at the non-profit ProPublica. Up until September, he was a senior writer at Sports Illustrated. He has been a crime reporter at the New York Daily News, and an education reporter at Inside Higher Ed. In his past life, David was a geology grad student. He has lived in the Sonoran Desert, on a ship in the Pacific Ocean, in the Arctic in Alaska, and -- like every other writer -- in Brooklyn.

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The joys and dangers of getting pregnant for Tara Clancy and her wife. Tara Clancy is a writer and performer. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review and The Rumpus. She is also a winner of The Moth GrandSlam storytelling competition and was recently featured on their podcast. Originally from Queens, Tara now lives in Manhattan with her wife and two sons. More at www.taraclancy.com

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Suze Kundu is forced to abandon dancing for materials science, until materials science comes to the rescue. Suze Kundu is a Teaching Fellow at Imperial College London, where she shares her love of Materials Science and Engineering with anyone that will stand still for long enough. In addition she presents many Outreach and Public Engagement workshops and demo lectures, and pops up on TV fairly regularly, getting excited about everything from aerogel to zirconia. She is also fresh off the stage from Irreverent Dance's annual Showcase, where she danced as a zombie scientist, a Time Lord and a girl obsessed with the glitz and glamour of Strictly Come Dancing - #typecasting?

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Lost after arriving at grad school, Bethany Brookshire is happy to finally find a perfect mentor. Bethany Brookshire has a B.S. in Biology and a B.A. in Philosophy from The College of William and Mary, a Ph.D. in Physiology and Pharmacology from Wake Forest University School of Medicine. She is the guest Editor of the Open Laboratory Anthology of Science Blogging, 2009, and the winner of the Society for Neuroscience Next Generation Award and the Three Quarks Daily Science Writing Award, among others. She is currently the Science Education Writer for Science News for Students. She blogs at Eureka!Lab and at Scicurious. You can follow her on Twitter as @scicurious.

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Sword swallower Justin Cameron gets an unexpected lesson in anatomy and medicine. Justin is a product manager and mobile app designer who works on search engines and secure email products. Before that, he was an itinerant technical writer, hacker, and, very briefly, a sideshow performer. He lives in Brooklyn.

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Alex Bellos is surprised that people ask him what his favorite number is, so he decides to ask everyone what theirs is. Alex Bellos is the author of the popular science bestsellers The Grapes of Math and Here's Looking at Euclid. In a previous life he was the Guardian's South America correspondent, based in Rio, where he wrote Futebol: the Brazilian Way of Life, a book on Brazilian football. He also ghost-wrote Pele's autobiography. Alex blogs on maths for the Guardian and presents maths documentaries for BBC Radio 4. His YouTube clip on how to cut a cake has had more than 6.5 million views.

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Ed Yong is ecstatic to get an interview with his hero, Sir David Attenborough, but he's not prepared for a lesson in what having a science hero really means. Ed Yong is an award-winning science writer. His blog Not Exactly Rocket Science is hosted by National Geographic, and his work has also appeared in Wired, Nature, the BBC, New Scientist and more. His first book I CONTAIN MULTITUDES--about how microbes influence the lives of every animal, from humans to squid to wasps--will be published in 2016.

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Annalee Newitz comes to terms with grief while exploring the remains of a mysterious ancient city. Annalee Newitz is the editor of io9, and author most recently of Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction

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