Welcome to Scientific American’s Science Talk, posted on January 30, 2020. I’m Steve Mirsky.
On this episode:
[BRANNEN CLIP]
On supporting science journalism
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That’s Peter Brannen. On his Web site, he describes himself as a placental mammal. But he’s also an award-winning journalist and the author of the book The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions—a book that the journal Science called “[A] surprisingly lyrical investigation of Earth’s mass extinctions.” He was in New York City recently, and we sat down together to talk about the book. Midway through our discussion, we’ll take a break for a short segment sponsored by the Kavli Prize with Stanford neuroscientist Carla Shatz—which, perhaps surprisingly, has some connections with the discussion of mass extinctions. And now: Peter Brannen.
[BRANNEN 1]
We’ll return to Peter Brannen after this short break from the Kavli Prize.
[SHATZ SEGMENT]
And now back to Peter Brannen and the last three mass extinctions.
[BRANNEN 2]
That’s it for this episode. Get your science news at our Web site, www.ScientificAmerican.com, where you’ll also find a couple of dozen articles about past mass extinctions, as well as coverage about the possibility of the next one.
And follow us on Twitter, where you’ll get a tweet whenever a new item hits the Web site. Our twitter name is @sciam. For Scientific American’s Science Talk, I’m Steve Mirsky. Thanks for clicking on us.
