Stories by Steve Mirsky

The author discovers his similarities to a great 18th-century astronomer

A discussion of massive men and tiny tools

Daniel Chamovitz, director of the Manna Center for Plant Biosciences at Tel Aviv University, talks about his new book What a Plant Knows.

Dimitar Sasselov, professor of astronomy at Harvard University and the founder and director of the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative, talks about his new book The Life of Super-Earths: How the Hunt for Alien Worlds and Artificial Cells Will Revolutionize Life on Our Planet

When it comes to athletic performance, it's not how you start—it's how you Finnish

Mark Anderson, author of the book The Day The World Discovered the Sun, talks about the transit of Venus coming up on June 5th or 6th in different parts of the world and how it will be of use to astronomers searching for exoplanets

With a transit of Venus coming up on June 5th or 6th in different parts of the world, Mark Anderson, author of the book The Day The World Discovered the Sun, talks about the great efforts to track the transits of Venus in the 1760s and the science they would produce

Bruce Walker, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and director of the Ragon Institute of Massachusetts General Hospital, M.I.T. and Harvard, talks about his article in the July issue of Scientific American magazine called "Controlling HIV," about rare individuals who never develop AIDS after being infected by the virus

NFL Hall of Famer Harry Carson joins former NBC anchor Stone Phillips and pathologist Bennet Omalu for a discussion of chronic traumatic encephalopathy among football players. Recorded May 12th at the Ensemblestudiotheatre.org, site of the new play Headstrong about the brain injury issue

Some equations touch all our lives--whereas others, well, not so much

Scientific American editor Kate Wong talks about the recent conference of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in Portland, Ore., where subjects included killer chimps, unprecedented fossil sharing among researchers and divergent hominid foot forms

Scientific American editor Christine Gorman talks about the recent conference of the Association of Health Care Journalists, including Jimmy Carter's efforts against guinea worm and trachoma, and Rosalynn Carter's mental health initiatives

Scientific American Science of Health columnist Maryn McKenna talks about the new understanding that food poisoning can have long-lasting negative health effects

An amateur examination of one shrink's noodle

Scientific American editor David Biello takes us through newly released audio from the first week of the nuclear meltdown crisis at Fukushima Daiichi

Scientific American editors Mark Fischetti and Michael Moyer discuss some of the sessions they attended at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Subjects covered include fracking, cetacean rights, the Higgs boson and Twitter's truthiness

Social scientist Roly Russell, of the Sandhill Institute in British Columbia, talked with Scientific American's Mark Fischetti at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science about potentially better measures than GDP of a nation's well-being

Digital innovators Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, and Danny Hillis, co-founder of the Long Now Foundation, talk with Scientific American Executive Editor Fred Guterl about the technological "Entanglement" and the attempts to build the other, hardier Internet

In part 2 of our conversation with journalist and author Maryn McKenna, she talks about antibiotic resistance in agriculture and human health, MRSA, and offers a brief coda on the subject of fecal transplants

Every so often a critter takes a shot at making headlines

Journalist and author Maryn McKenna talks about fecal transplants, which have proved to be exceptionally effective at restoring a healthy intestinal microbiome and curing C. diff infections, yet remain in regulatory limbo

About six minutes of President Obama's State of the Union address dealt with research, technology and energy

Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, long the nation's leading defender of evolution education, discusses the NCSE's new initiative to help climate science education

Actor, playwright and journalist Anna Deavere Smith talks about the health care crisis and her play about people dealing with illness, health and the health care system, Let Me Down Easy