Science Talk

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded today to Yoshinori Ohsumi of Japan for his discoveries concerning autophagy. Following the announcement, journalist Lotta Fredholm spoke to Juleen Zierath, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine, about the research.     Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Carin Bondar talks about her new book Wild Sex, which covers the strange, surreal and sometimes scary sex lives of our animal cousins.     Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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."   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Best-selling science writer Mary Roach talks about her latest book, Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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.     Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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)   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices