Stories by Steve Mirsky

David Epstein talks about his 2013 bestseller The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance and his recent Scientific American article "Magic Blood and Carbon-Fiber Legs at the Brave New Olympics."

Each summer, the National Center for Science Education organizes a boat trip down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon to bring visitors face to wall-face with striking examples of geologic and evolutionary processes.

Best-selling science writer Mary Roach talks about her latest book, Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War.

Military science goes way beyond missile trajectories

As was widely reported on social media, the U.S. is indeed going to use aerial drones to spread vaccine-laced pellets among prairie dogs to save endangered ferrets, although, contrary to some reports, no M&Ms will be involved.

The National Center for Science Education's annual Colorado River trip through the Grand Canyon highlights the differences between the scientific and creationist outlooks.

The world is brimming with brainy beings

Charles Czeisler, director of the Division of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School, talked about the dangers of drowsy driving at a recent Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health Forum called Asleep at the Wheel.    

Kenneth Catania of Vanderbilt University talks to Cynthia Graber about electric eel research that led him to accept 19th-century naturalist Alexander von Humboldt's account of electric eels attacking horses.  
 

Wildlife Conservation Society researcher Ullas Karanth talks about his July, 2016, Scientific American article on state-of-the-art techniques for tracking tigers and estimating their populations and habitat health.
 

Caltech’s Kip Thorne and Ronald Drever and MIT’s Rainer Weiss were the founders of the LIGO experiment that detected gravitational waves. They were just awarded the Kavli Prize in Astrophysics and two of them spoke with Scientific American's Clara Moskowitz about LIGO and the public's reaction.

Wildlife researcher Joel Berger dons a polar bear outfit to study the reactions of musk oxen to the threat of bears increasingly driven onto the land for food.

A movie about baseball's primary pitch is a hit

Caltech theoretical physicist Sean M. Carroll talks about his new book The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself. (Dutton, 2016)

Caltech theoretical physicist Sean M. Carroll talks about the necessary connections among the various ways we have of describing the universe.

Hydrofoiling boats competing in the America's Cup World Series came to New York City to show off the cutting edge of sailing technology.

Former Scientific American editor Mark Alpert talks about his latest science fiction thriller, The Orion Plan, featuring the method whereby aliens most likely really would colonize our planet.
 

Our gorilla cousins sing as they supper

Primatologist Frans de Waal discusses his latest book, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (Norton, 2016).

The development of statistics, probability theory, game theory and chaos theory owes a lot to people trying to figure out various games of chance.  

Mathematician and author Adam Kucharski talks about his new book The Perfect Bet: How Science and Math Are Taking the Luck Out of Gambling (Basic Books, 2016).

English lacks some felicitous words it could really use

The new movie Fastball dissects the pitch from the perspective of pitchers, hitters, umpires—and scientists, who talk about everything from the physics governing the trajectory of the ball to the neuroscience of the batter’s perception and reaction—including how the ball can appear to vanish.  

Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology researcher Eduardo Inigo-Elias, a veteran of efforts to work with Cuban researchers, talks about what improved relations between the U.S. and Cuba could mean for science and conservation.