Big Picture Science

Hi ho, hi ho … it’s out with work we go! As you relax this holiday weekend, step into our labor-atory and imagine a world with no work allowed. Soft robots help us with tasks at home and at the office, while driverless cars allow us to catch ZZZZs in the front seat.Plus, the Internet of Everything interconnects all your devices, from your toaster to your roaster to … you. So there’s no need to ever get off the couch. But is a machine-ruled world a true utopia?And, the invention that got us into our 24/7 rat race: Edison’s electric light.Guests: Barry Trimmer – Professor of biology, neuroscience, and biomedical engineering at Tufts University, and editor-in-chief, Soft Robotics Red Whittaker – Roboticist at Carnegie Mellon University Ernest Freeberg – Historian, University of Tennessee, and author of The Age of Edison: Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America Rob Chandhok – Computer scientist, president of Qualcomm Interactive Platforms Andre Bormanis – Television writer, producer, screenwriter and science advisor to Star Trek and Cosmos Descripción en españolFirst released August 26, 2013. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We’ve all hit the snooze button when the alarm goes off, but why do we crave sleep in the first place? We explore the evolutionary origins of sleep … the study of narcolepsy in dogs … and could novel drugs and technologies cut down on our need for those zzzzs.Plus, ditch your dream journal: a brain scanner may let you record – and play back – your dreams.And, branch out with the latest development in artificial light: bioluminescent trees. How gene tinkering may make your houseplants both grow and glow.Guests: Emmanuel Mignot – Professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, and director of the Stanford Center for Sleep Sciences and Medicine, Stanford University Kyle Taylor – Molecular biologist at Glowing Plant Jerry Siegel – Neuroscientist and professor of psychiatry, the University of California, Los Angeles Jack Gallant – Professor of psychology and neuroscience, University of California, Berkeley Descripción en españolFirst released May 27, 2013. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Maybe goodbye isn’t forever. Get ready to mingle with mammoths and gaze upon a ground sloth. Scientists want to give some animals a round-trip ticket back from oblivion. Learn how we might go from scraps of extinct DNA to creating live previously-extinct animals, and the man who claims it’s his mission to repopulate the skies with passenger pigeons.But even if we have the tools to bring vanished animals back, should we?Plus, the extinction of our own species: are we engineering the end of humans via our technology?Guests: Beth Shapiro – Associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, University of California, Santa Cruz Ben Novak – Biologist, Revive and Restore project at the Long Now Foundation, visiting biologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz Hank Greely – Lawyer working in bioethics, director of the Stanford Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford University Melanie Challenger – Poet, writer, author of On Extinction: How We Became Estranged from Nature Nick Bostrom – Director of the Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University Descripción en españolFirst released April 29, 2013. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Who’s watching you? Could be anyone, really. Social media sites, webcams, CCTV cameras and smartphones have made keeping tabs on you as easy as tapping “refresh” on a tablet. And who knows what your cell phone records are telling the NSA?Surveillance technology has privacy on the run, as we navigate between big data benefits and Big Brother intrusion.Find out why wearing Google Glass could make everything you see the property of its creator, and which Orwellian technologies are with us today. But just how worried should we be? A cyber security expert weighs in.Also, the benefits of an eye in the sky. A startup company claims that their suite of microsatellites will help protect Earth’s fragile environment.And Gary catches a cat burglar!Guests: Robert Gehl – Professor in the Department of Communication, University of Utah. His article, “A Mind Meld with the Surveillance State” appeared in an online issue of The Week. Hal Rappaport – Technology consultant for businesses, author of the paranormal thriller Hath No Fury: The Lesson of Three Book One. His article, “7 Sinister Technologies from Orwell’s 1984", appeared on the SyFy Channel’s online magazine. Susan Landau – Professor of cyber security policy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, author of Surveillance or Security?: The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies and Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption. William Marshall – Physicist, Planet Labs Descripción en español Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Face it – humans are pattern-seeking animals. We identify eyes, nose and mouth where there are none. Martian rock takes on a visage and the silhouette of Elvis appears in our burrito. Discover the roots of our face-tracking tendency – pareidolia – and why it sometimes leads us astray.Plus, why some brains can’t recognize faces at all … how computer programs exhibit their own pareidolia … and why it’s so difficult to replicate human vision in a machineGuests: Phil Plait – Astronomer, Skeptic, and author of Slate Magazine’s blog Bad Astronomy Josef Parvizi – Associate professor, Stanford University, and clinical neurologist and epilepsy specialist at Stanford Medical Center Nancy Kanwisher – Cognitive neuroscientist, at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT Greg Borenstein – Artist, creative technologist who teaches at New York University Pietro Perona – Professor of electrical engineering, computation and neural systems, California Institute of Technology Descripción en españolFirst released February 25, 2013. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Think back, way back. Beyond last week or last year … to what was happening on Earth 100,000 years ago. Or 100 million years ago. It’s hard to fathom such enormous stretches of time, yet to understand the evolution of the cosmos – and our place in it – your mind needs to grasp the deep meaning of eons. Discover techniques for thinking in units of billions of years, and how the events that unfold over such intervals have left their mark on you.Plus: the slow-churning processes that turned four-footed creatures into the largest marine animals that ever graced the planet and using a new telescope to travel in time to the birth of the galaxies.Guests: Jim Rosenau – Artist, Berkeley, California Robert Hazen – Senior staff scientist at the Geophysical Laboratory at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, executive director of the Deep Carbon Observatory and the author of The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet Neil Shubin – Biologist, associate dean of biological sciences at the University of Chicago, and the author of The Universe Within: Discovering the Common History of Rocks, Planets, and People Nicholas Pyenson – Curator of fossil marine mammals at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C. Alison Peck – Scientist, National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Virginia Descripción en españolFirst released April 22, 2013. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s hard to get lost these days. GPS pinpoints your location to within a few feet. Discover how our need to get from A to B holds clues about what makes us human, and what we lose now that every digital map puts us at the center.Plus, stories of animal navigation: how a cat found her way home across Florida, and the magnetic navigation systems used by salmon and sea turtles.Also, why you’ll soon be riding in driverless cars. And, how to map our universe.Guests: John Bradshaw – Director of the University of Bristol’s Anthrozoology Institute, author of Dog Sense: How the New Science of Dog Behavior Can Make You A Better Friend to Your Pet and, most recently, Cat Sense Kenneth Lohmann – Biologist at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill Simon Garfield – Author of On the Map: A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks William “Red” Whittaker – Roboticist at Carnegie Mellon University James Trefil – Physicist at George Mason University, author of Space Atlas: Mapping the Universe and Beyond Descripción en españolFirst released March 18, 2013. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You are surrounded by products. Most of them, factory-made. Yet there was a time when building things by hand was commonplace, and if something stopped working, well, you jumped into the garage and fixed it, rather than tossing it into the circular file.Participants at the Maker Faire are bringing back the age of tinkering, one soldering iron and circuit board at a time. Meet the 12-year old who built a robot to solve his Rubik’s Cube, and learn how to print shoes at home. Yes, “print.”Plus, the woman who started Science Hack Day … the creation of a beard-slash-cosmic-ray detector … the history of the transistor … and new materials that come with nervous systems: get ready for self-healing concrete.(Photo is a model of the first transistor built in 1947 at the Bell Telephone Labs in New Jersey that led to a Nobel Prize. Today’s computers contain many million transistors … but they’re a lot smaller than this one, which is about the size of a quarter. Credit: Seth Shostak.)Guests: Lucy Beard – Founder of Feetz Mark Miodownik – Materials scientist, director of the Institute of Making, University College, London, and author of Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World Steve Nelson – Team K.I.S.S. Robotics, maker of Beer2D2 Dan Lankford – Managing director, Wavepoint Ventures Ariel Waldman – Founder, Spacehack.org, global instigator of Science Hack Day Saurabh Narain – 12 year-old participant in Maker Faire Descripción en español Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alien life. A flurry of recent discoveries has shifted the odds of finding it. Scientists use the Kepler telescope to spot a planet the same size and temperature as Earth … and announce that there could be tens of billions of similar worlds, just in our galaxy!Plus, new gravity data suggests a mammoth reservoir of water beneath the icy skin of Saturn’s moon Enceladus … and engineers are already in a race to design drills that can access the subsurface ocean of another moon, Jupiter’s Europa.Meanwhile, Congress holds hearings to assess the value of looking for life in space. Seth Shostak goes to Washington to testify. Hear what he said and whether the exciting discoveries in astrobiology have stimulated equal enthusiasm among those who hold the purse strings.Guests: Elisa Quintana – Research scientist at the SETI Institute and NASA Ames Research Center Christopher McKay – Planetary scientist, NASA Ames Research Center Victoria Siegel – Autonomous systems engineer for Stone Aerospace Inc. Cynthia Phillips – Planetary geologist, SETI Institute Descripción en español Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What goes up must come down. But it’s human nature to want to put things back together again. It can even be a matter of survival in the wake of some natural or manmade disasters.First, a portrait of disaster: the eruption of Tambora in 1815 is the biggest volcanic explosion in 5,000 years. It changed the course of history, although few people have heard of it.Then, stories of reconstruction: assembling, disassembling, moving and reassembling one of the nation’s largest T. Rex skeletons, and what we learn about dinos in the process.Also, the reanimation of Gorongosa National Park in Africa, after years of civil war destroyed nearly all the wildlife.And a handbook for rebuilding civilization itself from scratch.Guests: Gillen D’Arcy Wood – Professor of English, University of Illinois, author of Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World Patrick Leiggi – Museum of the Rockies, Bozeman, Montana Matt Carrano – Curator of dinosauria, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution Greg Carr – Entrepreneur and philanthropist, president of Gorongosa National Park, in Mozambique Lewis Dartnell – Astrobiologist, University of Leicester, author of The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World from Scratch Descripción en español Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices