Stories by Steve Mirsky

Biological oceanography expert Miriam Goldstein talks about issues facing the oceans. Reporter Adam Levy discusses air pollution info available because of the pandemic. And astrophysicist Andrew Fabian chats about black holes.

For the fourth Science on the Hill event, Future Climate: What We Know, What We Don’t, experts talked with Scientific American senior editor Mark Fischetti about what goes into modeling our climate—and how such models are used in addition to long-term climate prediction.

COVID-19 has turned many of us into homebodies with one eye always on the outbreak 

Stanford University neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky talks about human behavior, the penal system and the question of free will.

Physicist Brian Keating talks about his book Losing the Nobel Prize: A Story of Cosmology, Ambition, and the Perils of Science’s Highest Honor.

President Trump pointed out yesterday that if we didn't do any testing for the virus we would have very few cases, which forces us to confront the issues posed by testing in general.

Astrophysicist and author Mario Livio talks about his latest book, Galileo: And the Science Deniers, and how the legendary scientist’s battles are still relevant today.

Those who doubt the planet is spherical often wind up subscribing to a host of other nonsensical notions

Health journalist Judy Foreman talks about her new book Exercise Is Medicine: How Physical Activity Boosts Health and Slows Aging.

Pathologists are starting to get a closer look at the damage that COVID-19 does to the body by carefully examining the internal organs of people who have died from the novel coronavirus.

In a teleconference promoting her participation in Earth Day events on the National Geographic Channel, Goodall talked about what gives her hope during the pandemic and what she hopes we all learn from it.

Here are some “highlights” from the past 13.5 years of this podcast.

As he endorsed Joe Biden today, former president Barack Obama touched on some environmental, economic and science matters.

Pulitzer-winning Laurie Garrett, author of The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance, talks about the dangers of politicians offering coronavirus misinformation.

Coronavirus research requires high-containment labs. Journalist Elisabeth Eaves talks with Scientific American contributing editor W. Wayt Gibbs about her article “The Risks of Building Too Many Bio Labs,” a joint project of the New Yorker and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.  

Unconcerned about climate change on Earth, senator wants to create atmospheres on other planets

Michael Marshall, project director of the Good Thinking Society in the U.K., talks about flat earth belief and its relationship to conspiracy theories and other antiscience activities.

Listen in as I use two calculators to track the difference in numbers of infections over a short period of time, depending on how many people each infected individual infects on average.

Scientific American contributing editor W. Wayt Gibbs continues to report on the coronavirus outbreak from his home in Kirkland, Wash., site of the first U.S. cases. In this installment, he talks with researchers about what their models show for the future of the pandemic and on research to create tests to see who has developed immunity.

Scientific American contributing editor W. Wayt Gibbs reports from the original U.S. epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak: Kirkland, Wash. In this installment of our ongoing series, he talks with researchers about the properties of the virus and why it spreads so quickly.

Christian Walzer, executive director of global health at the Wildlife Conservation Society, talks about how the wildlife trade, especially for human consumption, can lead to disease outbreaks.

In this 2012 interview, David Quammen talks about his book Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, which is highly relevant to the emergence of the coronavirus that has changed our lives.

Judy Moskowitz, a professor of medical social sciences at Northwestern University, talks about ways to cope during this time of missing out on our usual diet of social interactions.

Scientific American contributing editor W. Wayt Gibbs reports from the U.S. epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak: Kirkland, Wash. In this installment of our ongoing series, he talks with researchers about the efforts to create vaccines and treatments and the challenges the outbreak poses to cancer patients and others who are immunocompromised.