Studio 360 - Science and Creativity
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Finding Beauty in the Search for Dark Matter
Right now, one of the biggest races in science is the search for dark matter. “It's really very very scary to know that after all these years of civilization we still don't know 95% of our universe,” says experimental physicist Elena Aprile. “It makes you feel very small.” Aprile heads a research team at Columbia University trying to get one step closer to finding it.
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Why Is Pop Music So Sad?
Pop music's not what it used to be. That’s what every generation of no-longer-kids says about what the kids are listening to, but fogey clichés aren’t necessarily wrong. Astudypublished in theJournal of Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Artstracked the mood of pop songs over five decades ofBillboardcharts, and it confirms that pop has changed in substantial ways. Far more of today’s hits are now in minor keys (which most of us hear as sadder or more complex) — more than half, as...
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Our Computers, Our Viruses, Our Selves
Computer viruses have evolved from an annoyance to a national security threat. Recently the Department of Homeland Security told Americans to disable Java on our home computers (a thing that few of us knew how to do) because of flaws that left it vulnerable to viruses. And by most accounts, the US has used viral programs like Stuxnet and Flame in cyberwar against Iran. Why do we call these programs viruses? Maneesh Agrawala is a computer scientist, MacArthur “genius” fellow, and an advisor...
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The Flame Alphabet
William S. Burroughs famously said that “language is a virus.” NovelistBen Marcustook Burrough's line as inspiration forThe Flame Alphabet. In the book, the language of children has become literally poisonous to adults, and a married couple with a teenage daughter is faced with terrible choices.
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Reconstructing Viruses
Vincent Racaniello of Columbia University did groundbreaking research on reconstructing the DNA of viruses (sort of like microbial Jurassic Park). The method was used to re-create the spectacularly lethal influenza behind the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, which killed between 50 and 100 million people. Why re-create such a monster? "Influenza is a particularly thorny virus that comes back over and over again. There's always the possibility that a particular strain may come back," he tells Kurt...
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Playing Against the Virus
In recent years, epidemics have become a hot topic in gaming. In the online video gamePandemic 2, you play the virus, aiming to wipe out humanity. InThe Great Flu, you control a world health organization and make decisions about face masks and airport closures.
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Does Your Zombie Have Rabies?
Wasik and co-author Monica Murphy, a public health veterinarian, trace our responses to rabies over millennia inRabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus. They note that Homer used the medical term for rabies to describe animalistic rage on the battlefield, and that old Eastern European legends of vampires became more contagious, more animal-like, in the modern novels that first appeared in England.
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Viruses at the Movies
Carl Zimmer, a science writer, andLarry Madoff, an infectious disease public health expert, pick out a few classics of the virus cinema. The 1971 movieThe Andromeda Strainspurred Madoff’s interest in epidemiology. He notes that "they had to invent a pathogen that came from outer space” because many scientists believed the conquest of a known infectious disease — through antibiotics and vaccines — was around the corner. “It's interesting to think about that time now because they were so...
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Listener Challenge: Remixing Spring
The Cornell Lab of Ornithology has just finished digitizing its entire collection of 150,000 animal sounds — including its especially vast collection of bird songs. We want you to use some of those bird songs to create your own composition on the theme of Spring. Use as many sounds as you like (but at least one), manipulate them however you want, and add any of your own musical elements.
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Darci: A Computer with Great Taste
To make art, a computer first needs to understand what art is. A group of computer scientists at Brigham Young University is attempting this by feeding their program images by the thousands and describing those images. Digital Artist Communicating Intent (she goes byDARCI) recognizes about 2,000 adjectives so far, including terms like peaceful, scary, and dark. The goal is to teach DARCI to pick out those visual qualities in artwork — and ultimately, to write algorithms modeling creativity...
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Caught in Tomas Saraceno's Web
Last year, MIT established aCenter for Art, Science & Technologyto integrate arts into its engineering-centered curriculum. As the first artist in residence at the center, MIT pickedTomas Saraceno, whose works resemble strange, epically large science fair projects. (In fact, they have sometimes been criticized as experiments rather than art). Saraceno was born in Argentina, raised in Italy, but prefers to say he’s from Planet Earth, floating above national boundaries like the clouds.
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Making Portraits Out of DNA
Everywhere we go, we leave a trail of personal information — in the stray hairs that land on park benches, or saliva on the edges of coffee cups. And artistHeather Dewey-Hagborgmay be collecting that information, whether you like it or not. Using equipment and procedures now easily available, she extracts the DNA from strangers’ hair or fingernail clippings, and uses it to makes life-like models of people’s faces — people she’s never met or seen. She calls the projectStranger Visions.
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Down and Dirty at the Museum of Math?
For a long time, just about the only serious math museum in America was in New Hyde Park, New York — a Long Island suburban town you’ve probably never heard of. Then it closed in 2006, leaving no serious math museum. Did we need one to begin with?Glen Whitney thought so. Whitney, a math professor turned hedge fund algorithms manager, raised $23 million to bankroll theNational Museum of Mathematics(MoMath), which just opened its doors in New York.
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True Story: Keeping Memories Safe
On Yom HaShoah, Israel’s Holocaust Memorial Day, the entire country stands at attention to observe a moment of silence. Everyone, that is, except forDaniela Schiller’s father, who sips coffee and reads the paper. Schiller’s attempts to talk with her father about his experiences in the Holocaust were rebuffed, and it wasn’t until years later that she came to understand him better.
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The Where, The Why, and The How
The Where, the Why, and the How is a sort of text book for grown-ups that addresses science’s enduring mysteries. The book pairs artists and scientists to answer a range of weird questions: from “What is antimatter?” to “Why do we yawn?”
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How America Fell for the Mars Rover
NASA has used animation to explain missions since the 1960s, but it outdid itself forCuriosity, hiring an animation studio to produce a Hollywood-grade video of the spacecraft’s journey. The animators,Bohemian Grey, borrowed a few tips from Pixar’sWALL-Eto make a robot loveable. Can YouTube mint NASA a new generation of space buffs?
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Jaron Lanier: You Are Not a Network
Jaron Lanier is a pioneering computer scientist, a creator of virtual reality, a musician, and the author of You Are Not a Gadget, which takes a skeptical view of the role we have given technology in our lives. Contrary to a view that the internet encourages creativity (with its infinite possibilities to share content), Lanier worries that it discourages originality and uniqueness in the generation that’s grown up with social media and broadband.
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Imaginary Friends Forever
Lots of kids have imaginary friends. (A young Kurt Andersen had a gaggle including Robbie Dobbie, Crackerpin, Jimmy the Cat, a poodle called Genevieve — which he pronounced in the French manner.)Marjorie Taylor, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon, has been looking at imaginary friends and the children who have them. “They tend to be more social, less shy, and do better on tasks which require you to take the perspective of another person in real life. We have found that they...
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Gary Marcus: Enhancing Creativity
Gary Marcus, who directs New York University’s Center for Language and Music, talks with Kurt Andersen about scientific efforts to find and describe creativity. They discuss recent experiments that produce images of musicians’ brains doing different kinds of musical tasks. “This is pioneering research,” Marcus says, “but by no means the last word.” Studies of individuals using fMRI tend to be variable, he says, and difficult to replicate.
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The Neuroscience of Jazz
Charles Limb is a professor of otolaryngology at Johns Hopkins Medicine who has a sideline in brain research; he’s also on the faculty at the Peabody Conservatory of Music. He wants to know what happens in our brains when we play piano. Simple: stick a musician in an fMRI machine, and see what happens. Not so simple, actually. The machines are magnetic, so Limb had a special keyboard made using no magnetic metal parts. “You’re laying on your back and he’s got a double mirror,” says Mike...
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Gary Marcus: Defining Creativity
Kurt Andersen talks withGary Marcusabout what science knows, and doesn’t know, about creativity. Marcus is the director of New York University’sCenter for Language and Music, and the author ofGuitar Zero, a book about how the brain learns.
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How Creative Are You?
The man nicknamed “the father of creativity” was psychologist E. Paul Torrance. In the 1940s he began researching creativity order to improve American education. In order to encourage creativity, we needed to define it — to measure and analyze. We measured intelligence with an IQ score; why not measure creativity? Torrance drew on contemporary research that related creativity to divergent thinking — the characteristic of coming up with more answers, or more original answers, rather than...
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Faking It: Photoshop Dissolves Reality
Right after “Superstorm” Sandy, aphotomade the rounds online: a shark swimming through the floodwaters of suburban New Jersey. A few people retweeted it in a panic, but most of us shrugged. Shark swimming down the street, ha, ha. Professional photographers have always tweaked their images, in ways obvious or subtle, but the ubiquity of image manipulation tools like Photoshop has brought us to a new place: for the first time, we no longer assume that a photograph documents real life. Kurt...
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Big Eyes
Big eyes are appealing on anything -- babies, cartoon characters, Jake Gyllenhaal. But our fondness for big eyes is the work of nature, not Disney. Studio 360’s Eric Molinsky found out how evolutionary psychology muscled its way into pop culture.
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Your Brain on Videogames
American kids spend an average of seven hours a week gaming. But what about the grown-ups inside the industry, who play eight to ten hours -– and then leave the office and go home to play some more? Jonathan Mitchell asked game producer Marc Nesbitt about living almost full-time in the simulated world.
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Lydia Millet
Lydia Millet's first short story collection,Love in Infant Monkeys, is filled with fictionalized tales of celebrities' real-life confrontations with exotic species. She reads from her story "Sir Henry" about David Hasselhoff's dachshund and tells Kurt why she's not afraid of lawyers.
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DJ Scientific
Marc Branchworks at NASAas an aerospace engineer testing instruments used on outer-space telescopes. When he's off the clock, Branch is one of the most sought after hip-hop DJs around the country. Leading a double life as "DJ Scientific" he hopes to attract young hip-hop fans to math and science. Produced byJocelyn Gonzales.
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Turn On. Tune In. Drop Out.
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Physics for Poets
Astrophysicist Michael Salamon, who works at NASA's Universe Division, says Walt Whitman - and a lot of other poets -- misunderstood the beauty of the heavens. Give him a few minutes with Whitman, Salamon says, and the poet would have some revising to do.
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Library of Dust
For over twenty years the Oregon State Psychiatric Hospital stored the cremated remains of patients in copper containers. Photographer David Maisel found them, and shows the beautiful and bizarre chemical reactions that took place as the canisters corroded in his exhibit.
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Understanding Creative Savants
We all know the Thomas Edison line: genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. But there are those who don't seem to perspire at all. Their extraordinary gifts seem to come from no where. We often call those people savants. And some neuroscientists are trying to understand where their talents come from. Sometimes their talents confound the savants the
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Nano-Photography
Felice Frankel spent the last 20 years photographing objects that only the most powerful microscopes can see. In her book No Small Matter, which she wrote with the Harvard chemist George Whitesides, Frankel shows what life on the nanoscale looks like. Produced by Studio 360's Sarah Lilley.
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Object Breast Cancer
The pink ribbon has been an incredibly successful piece of marketing for breast cancer research. For cancer survivor Leonor Caraballo, though, it's supremely annoying. "I've always hated the color pink," she says. "I don't like the association between the infantilization of pink and women." Caraballo is a new media artist who collaborates with her husb
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Turn On. Tune In. Drop Out.
"If I were at work right now, I'd be paid to have these thoughts." With that thought, Zack Booth Simpson dropped out of high school then started reading biology textbooks and designing video games. Now he's at a university not as a student, but as a researcher, combining living organisms with computer programming. Produced by Lindsay Patterson.
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Green Rockers
Corn-based shrink wrap on the CDs, biofuel buses, recycling riders, organic hair spray: this is the greening of rock n' roll. Sarah Lemanczyk talked to the indie rock band Cloud Cult, which manages its carbon footprint and has fun at the same time.
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Eco Art
Photographer Brandon Ballenge spends his days hunting for frogs with extra legs and missing eyes. He's an eco artist, and by seeking out these mutant anomalies, he hopes to bring environmentalism to new audiences. Produced by Studio 360's Trey Kay. (Originally aired: April 18, 2008)
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Neon
Neon signage has been around for exactly a century, but today the glowing lights face competition from cheaper LED technology. Physics professor Eric Schiff and Jeff Friedman, of New York's Let There Be Neon studio, explain what's behind neon's everlasting glow. Produced by Jordan Sayle.
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Walking Art: Bespoke Prosthetic Limbs
Today's artificial limbs function better than they ever did, but from an aesthetic standpoint something is lacking. A standard prosthetic leg is a jointed metal pole with a plastic foot at the end. "There's nothing wrong with the design," says industrial designer Scott Summit. "It simply looks to me like a job that's half complete."
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Aimee Bender's "Origin Lessons"
Studio 360 came to the writer Aimee Bender with a commission for a short story on a giant topic: the Big Bang. Before she started writing, Bender decided to bone up on her science: she spoke with Nick Warner, a professor of physics, astronomy, and mathematics at the University of Southern California. "Origin Lessons" is read by Kevin Pariseau.
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Robot as Connoisseur
Sparky is four feet tall and has a TV monitor for a head. He can see, he can talk, and he likes sculpture by Louise Bourgeois. He's the invention of the artist Marque Cornblatt, who controls Sparky from his laptop and he wants you to have a Sparky of your own. Lisa Katayama takes Sparky on a spin through the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
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Playing Doctor
Television drama has created the impression of an ideal world where decisions in hospitals are made quickly and cost is never an issue. It directly affects our expectations for treatment, according to Billy Goldberg, an emergency-room physician, and Joseph Turow, the author of Playing Doctor: Television, Storytelling and Medical Power. (Originally air
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Hackers Try to Save the Music Industry
Hackers became anathema to the music labels at the dawn of digital file sharing, but now are key players in the industry. At the Rethink Music conference in Boston last month, programmers, developers, and tinkerers showed up for a 24-hour coding frenzy.
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Diagnosing Literature
Was Bartleby the Scrivener depressed? Did Clarissa Dalloway need lithium? Today's English lit students seem to want to medicate away the problems of classic literary characters. Studio 360's Eric Molinsky explores this phenomenon with help from NYU professor Elayne Tobin and novelist Michael Cunningham.
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Helms and Stein
Remember the Saturday Night Live skit that asked, "What if Eleanor Roosevelt Could Fly?" Sound artist Jane Philbrick asked a question just as unlikely: "What if retired Senator Jesse Helms could recite a lesbian love poem by Gertrude Stein?" Andrew Adam Newman found out how Philbrick's project took her to the cutting edge of voice-synthesis technology.
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Windows to the Soul
Science is looking for ways to better understand an autistic person's perception of the world. Using laser technology, Ami Klin and Warren Jones of the Yale School of Medicine screened "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" and tracked the gazes of autistic viewers precisely, to study how they perceive social interactions. Biologist David Gruber visited their
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Magic on the Brain
Magicians wow us on stage with sleight of hand and misdirection. But it turns out there's also a lot magic can tell us about how our brains work. Produced by Michael May.
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Not Losing His Religion
Sir Thomas Browne's exacting observations and gorgeous prose anticipated modern science writers like Rachel Carson, Stephen Jay Gould, and Oliver Sacks. But Browne lived in the 1600s, and his way of reconciling the scriptures with science looks surprisingly like what we call "intelligent design." Produced by Sarah Montague
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Taste Test
Kurt sits down for our meal du jour with two eating experts: biopsychologist Marci Pelchat, of the Monell Chemical Senses Center, and John Willoughby, the Executive Editor of Gourmet Magazine. Dr. Pelchat identifies secret ingredients of Dufresne's dishes: emotion, memory and nostalgia.
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Symmetry & Sex Appeal
Are supermodels more symmetrical? Beauty expert Kelley Quan joins Kurt and Mario Livio to talk about how symmetry affects human attraction. Quan is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of the online fashion magazine ZooZOOM.com, and she explains how symmetry -- or the lack of it -- can make people more attractive.
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METHOD IN THE MADNESS
In the standard Hollywood formula, you pretty much can't be a genius without also being nuts. Is there really a connection between great creativity and mental illness? Tamar Brott speaks with Kaye Redfield Jamison and other experts and tries to separate the truth from the myth.
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Constructal Law: A Theory of Everything
Over the last 16 years, the mechanical engineer Adrian Bejan, now a professor at Duke University, has been working on a theory for how the world works. It's a theory of everything: how living creatures are shaped, how lava flows down mountains, how snowflakes form, how people organize our societies. It's called the constructal law.
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AHA MOMENT: GRAVITY'S RAINBOW
Gerald Joyce is a professor of biochemistry at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. In the 1970s, he was studying biochemistry at The University of Chicago, when he discovered Gravity's Rainbow, the sprawling World War II novel by Thomas Pynchon.
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Tale of Two Brains
Right-brained people are supposed to be artistic and spontaneous, while left-brainers are analytical; in other words, Captain Kirk and Spock. This ubiquitous bit of pop science wisdom came out of Nobel Prize-winning neurology. But does the story of the two brains stand up in the age of the MRI? Produced by Dave Johns.
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Photoshop Detective
He's officially in digital forensics, but Hany Farid is really a Photoshop detective, inventing software to catch what the eye can't. Farid gives Douglas McGray, an Irvine fellow at the New America Foundation, a glimpse at his current caseload from fraud in cancer research to white supremacists in prison.
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Tesla vs. Edison
Tesla's biggest innovation was introducing alternating current as the standard for modern electric power, breaking Thomas Edison's monopoly on DC power. Author and monologist Mike Daisey performs a one-man show about Tesla. In this segment he describes the inventor's obsession with electricity. "He literally had visions," Daisey says. "He could create
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Smell You Later
Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez are not your average fragrance writers; in Perfumes: The Guide, they called Paris Hilton's scent "barfbag floral." Turin is a biophysicist; Sanchez is a perfume critic. Kurt brought them to a nearby drugstore to unlock the mysteries of body spray, handiwipes, and crayons.
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Brain Music
We are always listening to our own silent thoughts, but we never think of those thoughts having a sound we could actually hear. Apostolos Georgopoulos is a neuroscientist at the University of Minnesota who has come up with a way to translate the electrical activity of the brain into music.
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Phonautogram
Did you know there are audio recordings that predate Thomas Edison's phonograph by almost 20 years? The phonautogram was invented by a Frenchman named duoard Lon-Scott and patented in 1857, translating sound waves (shakily) onto sheets of paper. But for the last century, no one had been able to decode the information on Lon-Scott's sheets and listen,
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Robopainter
AARON is the world's first cybernetic artist: an artificially intelligent system that composes its own paintings. Incredibly, the system is the work of one man, Harold Cohen, who had no background in computing when he began the effort. Cohen was a prominent painter; he represented Great Britain in the Venice Biennale of 1966. After settling in San Die
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THE CARSTEN H?LLER EXPERIENCE
Don't stand too close, hands away from the art, don't talk too loud you know the etiquette. But right now at the New Museum in New York there's a huge exhibition that breaks all those rules. There are pieces you can climb on, ride on, stick your head into, smell. Even swallow. Carsten Hller took an unorthodox path to the art world. A Belgian now liv
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The Posthuman Future
Everything we're able to do today to enhance humans from genetic engineering to artificial limbs simply improves on the base model we were born with. But for some people, that doesn't go far enough. They think we shouldn't be stuck with the factory-installed settings in our DNA. And they're not satisfied with a lifespan that tops out at 100 years.
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Greg Stock: Redesigning Humans
Nearly a decade after the human genome was decoded, scientists are only now beginning to understand its implications. One of the leading thinkers in this field is the biotech entrepreneur Gregory Stock. A biophysicist by training, his 2002 book Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future makes the case that full-scale genetic engineering is on the
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AHA MOMENT: FROM PROTO-PUNK TO PERCEPTION
Larry Rosenblum is a professor of psychology with a focus on perception he's written a book about the senses called See What I'm Saying. Rosenblum credits a musical revelation with leading him down that path. Growing up with 1970s prog-rock, he thought that virtuosity and spectacular showmanship were the hallmarks of great music cascades of notes,
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Making Memories with a Microchip
Ted Berger is trying to build a microchip that can remember things for us. He teaches biomedical engineering at the University of Southern California, and his goal is to create a device that can take over for the hippocampus of the brain, translating thoughts into long-term memories. But that's a complicated task. "If they're not transformed the way the
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Becoming the Bionic Man
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Animal Artists
What separates humans from animals? It used to be tools - and then we found out some animals are pretty handy. But what about art? There may be nothing prettier than birdsong, but each species sings pretty much the same tune. Are animals ever really creative? WBUR's Sean Cole went looking for animal artists and found a dog painter and an orchestra of el
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Science Tattoos
Tattoos are the defining fashion statement of the present generation. A few years ago, the writer Carl Zimmer was at a pool party and found that a young scientist friend of his, a neurobiologist, had a double helix printed on his back a little strand of DNA. Zimmer blogged about it, and before he knew it, dozens of scientists, mathematicians, and o
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Understanding Creative Savants
We all know the Thomas Edison line: genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. But there are those who don't seem to perspire at all. Their extraordinary gifts seem to come from no where. We often call those people savants. And some neuroscientists are trying to understand where their talents come from.
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Music Heals
After piano music helped him recover from brain surgery, Dr. Richard Fratianne became a true believer in music therapy. In the burn unit at the Cleveland MetroHealth Medical Center, Fratianne is measuring patients' stress hormones during procedures to try to prove that music therapy reduces pain and anxiety. Produced by Kerrie Hillman.
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Foldit
Biochemist David Baker helped create a computer game called "Foldit" that thousands are playing around the world. But it's not about commercial success. Baker wants to analyze the structure of proteins, and it turns out that humans are a lot smarter at this than supercomputers. The game? It's an incentive. As Studio 360's Sarah Lilley discovered, it's a
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Proust Was A Neuroscientist
Science writer Jonah Lehrer is just 26, but he's already worked as a line cook at Le Cirque and in the lab of a Nobel Prize-winning scientist. In Proust Was a Neuroscientist, Lehrer looks at the surprising ways artists like Paul Cezanne and Walt Whitman had insights into neurological concepts that scientists have taken years to prove. Produced by Sarah
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Music In Space
When NASA launches the space shuttle, mission control wakes up the astronauts every morning with a song. But that's not the only music heard in outer space. The astronauts often bring instruments with them to play. We asked Richard Paul to find out what it's like to rock out in space.
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Biophony
Biologist Bernie Krause believes animals communicate with each other on their own frequencies, and when you put all those frequencies together, they interact in a way not unlike a symphony orchestra. He calls it "biophony." Jill DuBoff talked to Krause about his research in the wild.
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Novelist Chris Adrian
Chris Adrian's novels tell dark, fantastical stories that draw on his experience working as a pediatric oncologist. Adrian tells Kurt how writing helps him deal with the emotional burden of the medicine he practices. Anne Marie Nest reads selections from Adrian's forthcoming novel, The Great Night.
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Arctic In Residence
A little over a year ago, an international group of scientists and artists set sail for the Arctic. They were bound for a group of frozen Norwegian islands halfway between the top of continental Europe and the North Pole. KCRW's Matt Holzman joined the adventure.
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Nip & Tuck At The Gallery
"I Am Art" is a daring show at New York City's Apex Art. It presents the work of four different plastic surgeons. On display are photos and videos of all types of procedures, from cleft palate reconstruction to cosmetic nose jobs. Produced by Studio 360's Sarah Lilley.
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Homo-Thespian
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Narrative Medicine
Medical students spend hours studying information on charts and graphs, but when was the last time they studied the meaning behind a good story? We visited a group of OB/GYN residents taking a narrative medicine class to see how embracing fiction can improve patient care. Produced by Erin Davis.
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Symmetry: Mario Livio
Mario Livio is Senior Astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, headquarters of the Hubble Telescope. Kurt and Mario talk about how science and human expression find common ground in the language of symmetry.
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Microbial Videogames
Ingmar Riedel-Kruse runs a biophysics lab at Stanford University, but he spends about half his time tinkering with videogames. He's not playing World of Warcraft. Riedel-Kruse creates his own videogames using living microbes.
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The Afterlife of Sum
David Eagleman, author of Sum: 40 Tales from the Afterlives, is a neuroscience researcher at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. When he can't test his ideas with experiments, he just writes them as fiction. Produced by Mark Anderson.
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David Freedberg
Kurt talks to David Freedberg about what mirror neurons do for us when we look at art. Freedberg is an art historian at Columbia University, but much of his work in recent years has focused on the connection between art and neuroscience.
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David Leavitt's Spy Tale
David Leavitt agreed to write an original short story for Studio 360's Science Creativity series, and said he wanted to write about book codes, a venerable, low-tech way of encrypting secrets using any printed book. We put him in touch with cryptographer Steve Bellovin, a professor at Columbia University and a major figure in internet encryption. Afte
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The Blind Astrophysicist
Astronomers used to believe in something called "the music of the spheres" -- they thought that planets and stars created harmonies as they traveled through the skies. These days, astronomy is mostly a matter of visual data expressed in charts and graphs. That won't work for Wanda Diaz, a blind astrophysicist from Puerto Rico.
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Adventures in 3D Sound!
Edgar Choueiri knows how things work; he's a rocket scientist officially, the Director of Princeton University's Electric Propulsion and Plasma Dynamics Laboratory. If NASA ever sends a person to Mars, Choueiri's research probably will have played a role. But Kurt Andersen visited his lab recently to get a taste of the future right now.
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Joni Mitchell: Paved Paradise
Joni Mitchell's song "Big Yellow Taxi," from 1970, is the closest thing we've ever had to an environmental anthem. Mitchell told us how she's bothered by green hypocrisy. Interviewed by Reese Ehrlich.
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Super Mario Clouds
magine walking through an art gallery and finding a single wall of digital clouds lifted from the classic 80s Nintendo game Super Mario Brothers. The artist Cory Arcangel tells Rebecca Cascade why reprogramming video game software comes as naturally to him as wielding a paintbrush.
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Origin Lessons
Studio 360 commissioned this short story from writer Aimee Bender. It has a modest subject: the Big Bang. To bone up on her science, Bender spoke with Nick Warner, a professor of Physics, Astronomy, and Mathematics at the University of Southern California. "Origin Lessons" is read for us by Kevin Pariseau.
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Green Rockers
Corn-based shrink wrap on the CDs, biofuel buses, recycling riders, organic hair spray: this is the greening of rock n' roll. Sarah Lemanczyk talked to the indie rock band Cloud Cult, which manages its carbon footprint and has fun at the same time.
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Aquarium Poet
Jeffrey Yang spends a lot of time studying marine life. But he's not a biologist working on the beach. He's a poet who loves visiting his local aquarium. In his new book, An Aquarium, killer whales, eels, and fish become symbols of politics and mythology. Produced by Ari Daniel Shapiro.
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Eco Art
Photographer Brandon Ballenge hunts for frogs with extra legs and missing eyes. Andrea Polli translates hurricane data into soundscapes. By seeking out these (sometimes bizarre) ecological phenomena, they hope to bring environmentalism to new audiences. Produced by Studio 360's Trey Kay.
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Playing Doctor
Television drama has created the impression of an ideal world where decisions in hospitals are made quickly and cost is never an issue. It directly affects our expectations for treatment, according to Billy Goldberg, an emergency-room physician, and Joseph Turow, the author of Playing Doctor: Television, Storytelling and Medical Power. Produced by Eric
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Biomimicry
Biomimicry
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Jill Sonke
Can the arts actually improve health care? Kurt gets some answers from Jill Sonke, director of the Center for the Arts in Healthcare at the University of Florida. She explains how the arts have been carving out a place in the healing process.
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The Category is...Man vs. Machine
It's the ultimate matchup of human vs. machine: IBM developed a supercomputer named Watson, and to prove the processor's mettle, it's going to compete against human champions on Jeopardy.
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Amusia
When surrounded by harmonious caroling during the holiday season, do you ever secretly wonder whether you're tone deaf? You can take heart, because true tone deafness, otherwise known as "congenital amusia," is actually quite rare. Jeff Lunden talked with scientists trying to unlock the mystery of this discordant condition.
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Frankfurt Kitchen
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About Face
Science and Creativity from PRI's Studio 360: stories about the art of discovery and innovation. A Columbia University professor explains why the gold standard of facial recognition is still a long way off. Exploring science as a creative act since 2005. Produced by PRI and WNYC, and supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
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Symmetry: Mario Livio
Science and Creativity from PRI's Studio 360: stories about the art of discovery and innovation. A Senior Astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute describes the relationship between science and art. Produced by PRI and WNYC, and supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
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Improvising the 12th Dimension
Wrapping your brain around the nature of time and the existence of multiple dimensions is a challenge, but comedian-musician Reggie Watts doesn't blink: he takes on mind-wrenching questions of theoretical physics in a fully-improvised song. Reggie joins Kurt and astrophysicist Janna Levin onstage to puzzle out how the universe works. Recorded live at th
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The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics
When science fiction was just catching on in the early 20th century, writers looked to the field of quantum mechanics for ideas. They sensationalized scientific advancements and sparked public fear. Physics professor James Kakalios author of The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics tells Kurt about the real science behind death rays and atomic radiati
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Human Intelligence: A Holiday Tale
This is what Kurt Andersen considers a holiday tale... melting ice caps and extraterrestrial spies? Kurt's story, "Human Intelligence," was produced for radio by Jonathan Mitchell, and stars Melanie Hoopes, John Ottavino, and Ed Herbstman. The unabridged version was published this year in Stories: All New Tales, an anthology edited by Neil Gaiman and Al
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Microbial Art
In 1928 the Scottish biologist Alexander Fleming discovered the fungus from which penicillin is derived. Fleming made the discovery while trying an unusual experiment: painting with strains of bacteria. Lindsay Patterson talked with a team that's taking bacterial painting to a new level.
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Surveillance
This week in Studio 360, the new culture of surveillance. Kurt Andersen talks to technologist and philosopher Jaron Lanier about why we have to watch the watchers. An artist meticulously tracks government spy satellites crossing the night sky. A computer scientist explains what goes into building a facial recognition system. And sitting silently in her
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Art as Medicine
This week in Studio 360, art is changing medicine. Music helps patients recover in a burn unit, a children's cancer doctor turns to fiction writing, and medical students learn how honing their narrative skills will make them better doctors.
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Neon
Neon signage has been around for exactly a century, but today the glowing lights face competition from cheaper LED technology. Physics professor Eric Schiff and Jeff Friedman, of New York's Let There Be Neon studio, explain what's behind neon's everlasting glow. Produced by Jordan Sayle.
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DJ Scientific
Marc Branch works at NASA as an aerospace engineer testing instruments used on outer-space telescopes. When he's off the clock, Branch is one of the most sought after hip-hop DJs around the country. Leading a double life as "DJ Scientific" he hopes to attract young hip-hop fans to math and science. Produced by Jocelyn Gonzales.
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The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics
When science fiction was just catching on in the early 20th century, writers looked to the field of quantum mechanics for ideas. They sensationalized scientific advancements and sparked public fear. Physics professor James Kakalios author of The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics tells Kurt about the science behind death rays and atomic radiation.
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Crochet, Geometry, and the Coral Reef
Until recently, mathematicians believed you couldn't represent hyperbolic geometry in real space, but a Latvian math professor discovered a way using crochet. Some science educators realized those same hyperbolic shapes mimicked the forms in coral reefs. And now their Crochet Coral Reef Project has landed at the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History
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William Gibson: The Future Is Now
In William Gibson's first novel, 1984's Neuromancer, he coined the term "cyber-space" and introduced us to the concept of a computer-generated reality that became the movie "The Matrix." Now Gibson is back with another sci-fi tale set in the future-- except the future is now.
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Animal Artists
What separates humans from animals? It used to be tools - and then we found out some animals are pretty handy. But what about art? There may be nothing prettier than birdsong, but each species sings pretty much the same tune. Are animals ever really creative? WBUR's Sean Cole went looking for animal artists and found a dog painter and an orchestra of el
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Magic Eye Paintings
As part of Studio 360's series on science and creativity, Sarah Lilley talks with scientists who admire the impressionist painter Claude Monet not just for his color choices, but for his ability to trick the human eye and brain.
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Photoshop Detective
He's officially in digital forensics, but Hany Farid is really a Photoshop detective, inventing software to catch what the eye can't. Farid gives Douglas McGray, an Irvine fellow at the New America Foundation, a glimpse at his current caseload from fraud in cancer research to white supremacists in prison.
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Helms and Stein
Remember the old Saturday Night Live skit that asked, "What if Eleanor Roosevelt Could Fly?" Sound artist Jane Philbrick asked a question just as unlikely: "What if retired Senator Jesse Helms could recite a lesbian love poem by Gertrude Stein?" Andrew Adam Newman found out how Philbrick's quixotic project took her to the cutting edge of voice-synthesis
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The Death Ray
Mike Daisey completes his life story of Tesla with this tale about the scientist's real Dr. Strangelove moment: inventing the ultimate superweapon. But did it work? The government thought it might, and the Cold War got hotter.
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Plastics
Did you ever wonder who decides the color of your shampoo bottle? As part of our on-going series about creativity and science, Lu Olkowski talks with a polymer chemist who creates pigment formulas for plastics at the Engelhard Corporation.
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Biomimicry
Natural historian Janine Benyus believes that imitating nature's best ideas can provide solutions to human problems. Could we store electricity like an electric eel to build a nontoxic battery? Benyus told Studio 360's Sarah Lilley how copying nature's design is the key to our own sustainability.
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Robot as Connoisseur
Sparky is four feet tall and has a TV monitor for a head. He can see, he can talk, and he likes sculpture by Louise Bourgeois. He's the invention of the artist Marque Cornblatt, who controls Sparky from his laptop and he wants you to have a Sparky of your own. Lisa Katayama takes Sparky on a spin through the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
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Music In Space
When NASA launches the space shuttle, mission control wakes up the astronauts every morning with a song. But that's not the only music heard in outer space. The astronauts often bring instruments with them to play. Richard Paul discovers what it's like to rock out in space.
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BLOWIN' IN THE PHONE
An app for the iPhone called Ocarina lets you play music by blowing into the phone. It was a blockbuster, and its maker recently released a follow-up trombone app. Its inventor, Ge Wang, thinks that the more people playing music, the better; but even he is a little nervous about the impact of technology on people's lives. Produced by Angela Frucci.
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Cal-Earth
In Hesperia, California, architect Nader Khalili created a housing movement for the future. Khalili, who passed away in March, prototyped his dome-shaped adobes on a commission from NASA for a lunar colony. Then he realized that his "superadobes" could take root on Earth. Studio 360's Eric Molinsky visited Cal-Earth with some friends who dream of living
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Quest of the Snow Leopard
When Studio 360 listener John Simmons was a kid, he loved insects and reptiles and even turned his parents' basement into a natural science museum. He recently retired as a museum collections manager in Lawrence, Kansas, and he says his life-long passion for science and exploration all began with one book. Produced by Jenny Lawton.
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Forgive Me Father
The Vatican recently called pollution of the environment a modern-day sin. Kurt calls Father Jim Martin, a Jesuit priest, to ask what kind of penance polluters are in for.
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Method in the Madness
In the official Hollywood template, you pretty much can't be a genius without also being nuts. Is there a connection between great creativity and mental illness? Tamar Brott speaks with Kaye Redfield Jamison and other psychiatrists to separate the truth from the myth.
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Science and Creativity from PRI's Studio 360: stories about the art of discovery and innovation. A sculpture unlocks the secret of cell structure, a tornado forms in a can, and a child's toy gets sent into orbit. Exploring science as a creative act since 2005. Produced by PRI and WNYC, and supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
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Saul Griffith
In an age of hyperspecialization, Saul Griffith is an old-school inventor. A MacArthur "genius," his work includes a new way to manufacture eyeglasses, kites that generate power, and rope that knows how much weight it carries. Griffith explains how to get kids excited about inventing our future: send them to school on zip lines.
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Nikola Tesla
Part visionary, part mad scientist, and absolute genius, Tesla should be as famous as Edison but he's been largely forgotten. Kurt talks with Samantha Hunt about her novel The Invention of Everything Else. Tesla is the protagonist, and despite the outlandish biographical details all through the book, there was very little she had to make up.
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The Largest Machine on the Planet
In a 17-mile long tunnel underneath the Swiss-French border, a particle accelerator called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) recently fired its first proton beams. In a few months, it's due to start smashing particles together. Scientists hope these experiments might solve some of the mysteries of the universe, like how particles acquire mass. Studio 360'
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Hidden Worlds
Theoretical physicist Lisa Randall believes there are more dimensions to space - possibly 13 more -- than the three we experience. She's faced the challenge of describing a world that no one can see. Produced by Sarah Lilley.
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Tendues and Torque
Ken Laws was in his early 40s when he decided he wanted to study ballet. Laws taught college physics, and when he had to shift his center of gravity to perform a simple pose at the barre, he immediately connected the dots between physical principles and dance movements. Produced by Hillary Frank.
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Tale of Two Brains
Right-brained people are supposed to be artistic and spontaneous, while left-brainers are literal and analytical; in other words, Captain Kirk and Spock. This ubiquitous bit of pop science wisdom came out of Nobel Prize-winning neurology, and it spawned the bestseller Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. But does the story of the two brains stand up
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Bionic Hearing
Michael Chorost was born with a severe hearing impairment, the result of a rubella epidemic in the 1960s. He used hearing aids, learned to speak, went to regular schools and got his Ph.D. in English. Then, a few years ago, Michael's residual hearing abruptly gave out. His world went silent. Jocelyn Gonzales has the story of how Chorost replaced his lost
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Cell Tower
Don Ingber is a cell biologist from Harvard Medical School, Children's Hospital. One day he saw a piece of modern sculpture andEureka!-he was inspired to make a major breakthrough in biology. Lu Olkowski reports on the unlikely epiphany.
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The Canon
Trent Wolbe talks with contemporary composer Steve Reich about the various symmetrical techniques that animate the music that inspires him as well as his own works. Produced by Trent Wolbe.
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Science and Creativity from PRI's Studio 360: stories about the art of discovery and innovation. A sculpture unlocks a secret of cell structure, a tornado forms in a can, and a child's toy gets sent into orbit. Exploring science as a creative act since 2005. Produced by PRI and WNYC, and supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
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Nip & Tuck at the Gallery
"I Am Art" is a daring show at New York City's Apex Art. It presents the work of four different plastic surgeons. On display are photos and videos of all types of procedures, from cleft palate reconstruction to cosmetic nose jobs. Produced by Studio 360's Sarah Lilley.
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The Soundtrack of Science
Biology professor Hazel Sive teaches at MIT. She thinks science could benefit from showing a little more emotion, so she started scoring her classroom presentations with Pink Floyd and The Who. Produced by Ari Daniel Shapiro.
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Coney Island Sunshine
The New York subway system has one of the best environmental designs of recent years: Coney Island's Stillwell Avenue terminal, one block from the Atlantic Ocean, is topped by a state-of-the-art photovoltaic glass roof. Kurt checked it out with architect Greg Kiss.
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Cheetah Legs
South African Oscar Pistorius runner failed to qualify for the Olympic games by just 7/10 of a second. Pretty good - especially for a man without legs. But his state-of-the-art prosthetics, called "Cheetah legs," have caused controversy in the world of sports: for some, they raise questions about what it means to be human. Produced by Ave Carrillo.
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Proust was a Neuroscientist
Science writer Jonah Lehrer is just 26, but he's already worked as a line cook at Le Cirque and in the lab of a Nobel Prize-winning scientist. In Proust Was a Neuroscientist, Lehrer looks at the surprising ways artists like Paul Cezanne and Walt Whitman had insights into concepts that scientists have taken years to prove. Produced by Sarah Lilley.
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Foldit
Biochemist David Baker helped create a computer game called "Foldit" that thousands are playing around the world. Baker wants to analyze the structure of proteins, and it turns out that humans are a lot smarter at this than supercomputers. As Studio 360's Sarah Lilley discovered, it's more fun than it sounds. Originally aired March 20, 2009.
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Studio 360
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NY, NY 10013646-829-4000 -
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