The Story Collider

While studying bioengineering, Craig Lehocky discovers he's different from the other students. Craig Lehocky's tinkering runs deep. He currently develops surgical robots as an M.D. / Ph.D. student at CMU and University of Pittsburgh. Before that, he worked on prosthetic limbs controlled by the brain at the University of Pittsburgh. And even before that, he restored cars, houses, and guitar amplifiers at the University of his Dad. He doesn't know what tinkering his future holds, but hopes it unfolds in Pittsburgh. Every week the Story Collider brings you a true, personal story about science. Find more and subscribe to our podcast at our website: http://storycollider.org/ Help keep us going! If you love the podcast, please donate here: http://www.patreon.com/thestorycollider

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The Story Collider needs your help! Our initial funding is coming to an end, and we need your help to keep going. It doesn't take a lot, $1/podcast will go a long way. As a thanks if you donate, we'll give you a special podcast with some of the storylets we tell in the live shows between the main stories. Here's a sample of those. If you'd like to contribute or for more info, head to http://www.patreon.com/thestorycollider. Thanks!

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A wrong number to a friend in Sri Lanka leads Saswato Das to the final interview with a famous science fiction writer. Saswato R. Das has written about science and technology for more than two decades for publications that include the Economist, Scientific American, New Scientist, the International Herald Tribune/ New York Times global edition, the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, the Times Literary Supplement (UK), the Times of India, IEEE Spectrum, the Bell Labs Technical Journal, etc. He has a background in astrophysics and has taught undergraduate astronomy within the CUNY system. Every week the Story Collider brings you a true, personal story about science. Find more and subscribe to our podcast at our website: http://storycollider.org/

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Jim O'Grady's attempts to woo his housemate are stymied by the monkey she's training to help quadriplegics. Jim O'Grady is a reporter for WNYC Radio and a Moth GrandSLAM champ. He has worked as a reporter for The New York Times, a professor of journalism at NYU and research director at The Center for an Urban Future. That's a policy think tank for whom he co-wrote this science-y report: http://bit.ly/7vx5Ei. He is the author of two biographies, Dorothy Day: With Love for the Poor and Disarmed & Dangerous: The Radical Lives and Times of Daniel and Philip Berrigan. Ask him how his high school science teacher, who was a nut job, pronounced "mitochondria." Every week the Story Collider brings you a true, personal story about science. Find more and subscribe to our podcast at our website: storycollider.org/

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At age 7, Deborah Blum starts a mystery when she interrupts her parent's dinner party. So their guest, famed biologist E.O. Wilson, investigates. Deborah Blum, a Pulitzer prize-winning science journalist, author and blogger, is the Helen Firstbrook Franklin Professor of Journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Author of five books and a popular guide to science writing, her most recent publication, The Poisoner's Handbook, was a 2011 New York Times best seller and will be the subject of an American Experience documentary on PBS in January. She writes a monthly environmental chemistry column for The New York Times called Poison Pen. She also blogs about toxic compounds at Wired; her blog Elemental was named one of the top 25 blogs of 2013 by Time magazine. She has written for a wide range of other publications including Scientific American , Slate, Tin House, The Atavist, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Los Angeles Times and Discover. Before joining the university in 1997, she was a science writer for The Sacramento Bee, where she won the Pulitzer in 1992 for her reporting on ethical issues in primate research. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Science Writing, Best American Nature Writing, and The Open Laboratory: Best Science OnLine. Every week the Story Collider brings you a true, personal story about science. Find more and subscribe to our podcast at our website: http://storycollider.org/

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What's the worst that can happen when you let a recent college grad command a $330 million spacecraft? Victor Hwang is a New England born nerd. After graduating from Tufts, he helped build ground telescopes, fly spacecrafts, and chased a dream to become a circus acrobat. Now he's a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute trying to make humanoid robots a little bit smarter. Every week the Story Collider brings you a true, personal story about science. Find more and subscribe to our podcast at our website: http://storycollider.org/

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Science writer Eliza Strickland discovers that in the race to the bottom of the Mariana Trench the most important thing is what they leave behind. Eliza Strickland is an editor for the magazine IEEE Spectrum, where she was assigned the daunting beat of covering technology across the Asian continent. On her third day on the job a tsunami flooded the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, causing the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. She spent the next two years writing about the catastrophe, its human cost, and the future of energy. And this one time, in Seoul, she rode the world's fastest elevator. Every week the Story Collider brings you a true, personal story about science. Find more and subscribe to our podcast at our website: http://storycollider.org/

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How does a landscape artist become the host of a popular science show on YouTube? For Emily Graslie it started with pictures of a wolf head on Facebook. Emily Graslie graduated from The University of Montana with a BFA in painting in 2011. Her relationship with science began as an internship with The University of Montana Zoological Museum during her senior year. What started off as a means to practice scientific illustration gradually developed into a love of skeletal preparation and an interest in the inner workings of natural history museums. In January of 2013, with the help of YouTube educator Hank Green and producer Michael Aranda, Emily and co. launched a YouTube channel about science museums and research collections. 'The Brain Scoop' aims to share the wonderful inner and outer workings of natural history museums by discussing all aspects of science, biology, and the joys of discovery. Every week the Story Collider brings you a true, personal story about science. Find more and subscribe to our podcast at our website: http://storycollider.org/

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From a (mostly) successful model rocket launch to a missed opportunity by Richard Feynman, Alan Lightman learns that the equations aren't the whole story. Alan Lightman is a physicist, novelist, and essayist. He has served on the faculties of Harvard and MIT and was the first person at MIT to receive dual appointments in science and in the humanities. His scientific work has been in the area of theoretical astrophysics. His literary work has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, Harper's, and other publications. Lightman's novel Einstein's Dreams was an international bestseller and his novel The Diagnosis was a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction. Lightman's latest novel is Mr g, a story of the creation as told by God. Every week the Story Collider brings you a true, personal story about science. Find more and subscribe to our podcast at our website: http://storycollider.org/

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