Lulu Miller, co-founder of NPR’s “Invisibilia,” joins us to talk about her study of the first president of Stanford University, a taxonomist obsessed with fish, and how his discoveries — and ultimately his intellectual myopia — helped her to make sense of her own world.
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Daniel Levitin is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at McGill University, and he joins us to talk about what he calls human life’s two stages: “healthspan” and “diseasespan,” and explain how brain science can promote the former.
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Dr. Barbara Natterson-Horowitz, visiting professor in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard and president of the International Society for Evolution, Medicine and Public Health, joins us to talk about how all animals — humans included — transition into adulthood.
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Bloomberg News technology reporter Sarah Frier joins us to talk about the fierce Silicon Valley competition to create a dominant social media platform and the ways Instagram has changed our lives in an unexpected way.
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Rob Rapley joins us to talk about Norman E. Borlaug, who won praise for his work on disease resistance crops – which also came with unintended consequences.
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Julie Packard, executive director of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, joins us to talk about how aquariums foster ocean life and contribute to a healthy environment.
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Mike Massimino, a NASA astronaut, joins us to talk about how he learned to adapt to a confined space while in space.
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Medical historian Mark Honigsbaum joins us to talk about why bacterial and viral disasters continue to take us by surprise.
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On today’s show, experts explain some of the more mysterious elements of the coronavirus, including what it will take to develop a vaccine, how epidemiological models work and why black and Latino patients are disproportionately affected.
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Aaron W. Gordon, senior writer for Motherboard, joins us to talk about why public transportation is broken and how, especially now, it’s time to rethink how people get places.
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Jack Hartnell, lecturer in art history at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, joins us to talk about the physical body in the medieval worldview and the fantastical tales created to justify medicinal practices.
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Science writer David Quammen joins us to talk about why an animal-to-human zoonotic transmission happens and what the risk is, now and in the future.
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