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Darcy Burke's mother gave her a book on mountain lions, and it had the effect that every science writer wishes their book will have. Kind of.

Every week the Story Collider brings you a true, personal story about science. Find more and subscribe to our podcast (and see our celebration of a million downloads!) here: http://storycollider.org/

Darcy Burke: The mountain lion book

After he's named lab safety officer, John Rennie must recover a precious sample from the bottom of a vat of liquid nitrogen. So he reaches in.

John Rennie is a science writer, editor, and lecturer based in New York. Viewers of The Weather Channel know him as the host of the original series Hacking The Planet and as one of the hosts of  The Truth About… series of specials. He is also currently the editorial director of science for McGraw-Hill Professional, overseeing its highly respected AccessScience online reference and the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science & Technology.

Every week the Story Collider brings you a true, personal story about science. Find more and subscribe to our podcast (and see our celebration of a million downloads!) here: http://storycollider.org/

John Rennie: The lab safety officer

For her masters thesis in science writing, Aviva Hope Rutkin starts writing about sensory substitution -- a way of swapping in one sense for another. But her work leads to a mysterious Dr. Bach-y-Rita and a whole new way of knowing someone.

Aviva Hope Rutkin writes about science and technology for the MIT Technology Review and The Raptor Lab. She has previously interned at Nature Publishing Group, Time, NASA, Brookhaven National Laboratory, and the Marine Biological Laboratory. She studied neuroscience and Chinese at Union College, where she wrote her first thesis on interactive fiction. In the fall, she will graduate with a Master's in Science Writing from MIT.

Every week the Story Collider brings you a true, personal story about science. Find more and subscribe to our podcast at our website: http://storycollider.org/

Aviva Hope Rutkin: Sensory substitution

A wrong number to a friend in Sri Lanka leads Saswato Das to the final interview with a famous science fiction writer.

Saswato R. Das has written about science and technology for more than two decades for publications that include the Economist, Scientific American, New Scientist, the International Herald Tribune/ New York Times global edition, the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, the Times Literary Supplement (UK), the Times of India, IEEE Spectrum, the Bell Labs Technical Journal, etc. He has a background in astrophysics and has taught undergraduate astronomy within the CUNY system.

Every week the Story Collider brings you a true, personal story about science. Find more and subscribe to our podcast at our website: http://storycollider.org/

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Saswato R. Das: Wrong number

Pakistan-born physicist Saad Sarwana gets a visit from the FBI.

Saad Sarwana grew up in Pakistan, and moved first to Canada and then eventually to the US to attend graduate school in Physics. He's a professional physicist by day and an amateur standup comedian by night! As a Physicist, Saad has over 30 peer reviewed publications and two US patents. As a comedian Saad has performed at every major comedy club in the NYC area, and has been featured on an ABC 20/20 story about Muslim Standup Comedians. This winter you can see him in the US on the Discovery Science Channel show "You Have Been Warned."

Help keep us going! If you love the podcast, please donate here: http://www.patreon.com/thestorycollider

Saad Sarwana: A muslim, a physicist, and a comedian...

Jesse Dunietz wasn't thrilled to be the one assigned to the music portion of his high school science team -- the one part of the team that was definitely going to lose.

Jesse Dunietz is a Ph.D. student in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. Originally from New Jersey, Jesse's circuitous route to Pittsburgh has included residences in Israel, Cambridge (the Massachusetts one), Cambridge (the English one), and California (the only one). He teaches computers to understand language, coaxing them to stitch the pieces of a sentence into a coherent interpretation. He is also a founder and the current president of Carnegie Mellon's Public Communication for Researchers program, which helps graduate students learn and practice communicating science to people of all backgrounds. He is easily distracted by birds.

Jesse Dunietz: Star of the science team

Charles Van Rees desperately pursues a bird through the desert for the sake of data.

Charles van Rees is a conservation biologist and PhD student at Tufts University. His research in biology focuses on how ecological research can be used to integrate biodiversity conservation with economic development and create "win-win" situations for people and wildlife. He has worked throughout the United States, in Costa Rica, and Vietnam on a variety of zoological research topics and wildlife conservation issues. He has studied sea turtles, tropical bees and butterflies, and a number of bird species in seashores, tropical forests, farms, and deserts. He is an ardent believer in the need for public participation in wildlife conservation, and strives to integrate communication, outreach, and good old-fashioned story telling into his work.

Help keep us going! If you love the podcast, please donate here: http://www.patreon.com/thestorycollider

Charles van Rees: Suffering For Science

Can reading the mind allow us to use thought control to move artificial limbs?Neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis aims is to build a suit that a quadriplegic person can wear and control to kick a football at the opening of the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. Geoff Watts visits Nicolelis' laboratory to see just how near we are to achieving his aim on the football pitch. Published on November 28, 2012.

Frontiers: Brain Machine Interfaces

The hormone oxytocin is involved in mother and baby bonding and in creating trust. Linda Geddes finds out if taking oxytocin can help people with autism become more sociable Published on July 17, 2013.

Frontiers: Oxytocin

Suze Kundu is forced to abandon dancing for materials science, until materials science comes to the rescue.

Suze Kundu is a Teaching Fellow at Imperial College London, where she shares her love of Materials Science and Engineering with anyone that will stand still for long enough. In addition she presents many Outreach and Public Engagement workshops and demo lectures, and pops up on TV fairly regularly, getting excited about everything from aerogel to zirconia. She is also fresh off the stage from Irreverent Dance's annual Showcase, where she danced as a zombie scientist, a Time Lord and a girl obsessed with the glitz and glamour of Strictly Come Dancing - #typecasting?

Suze Kundu: A New Pair Of Shoes

The joys and dangers of getting pregnant for Tara Clancy and her wife.

Tara Clancy is a writer and performer. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review and The Rumpus. She is also a winner of The Moth GrandSlam storytelling competition and was recently featured on their podcast. Originally from Queens, Tara now lives in Manhattan with her wife and two sons. More at www.taraclancy.com

Tara Clancy: Adventures In Babymaking

Sports writer David Epstein tracks down some surprising health claims circulating in the football world.

David Epstein is author of the recent New York Times bestseller The Sports Gene, an exploration of the genetic basis of athleticism. He is currently an investigative reporter at the non-profit ProPublica. Up until September, he was a senior writer at Sports Illustrated. He has been a crime reporter at the New York Daily News, and an education reporter at Inside Higher Ed. In his past life, David was a geology grad student. He has lived in the Sonoran Desert, on a ship in the Pacific Ocean, in the Arctic in Alaska, and -- like every other writer -- in Brooklyn.

David Epstein: Holographic Supplements

Neuroscientist Indre Viskontas and her friends turn to science to find the right way to date.

Indre Viskontas is a neuroscientist and opera singer. She is also the host of Inquiring Minds, an in-depth exploration of the place where science, politics, and society collide. http://www.motherjones.com/inquiringminds

Indre Viskontas: The Man Chart

Ali Khademhosseini, MASc, Ph.D., is a Professor at Harvard-MIT's Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST), Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School.  He also directs a satellite laboratory at the World Premier International-Advanced Institute for Materials Research at Tohoku University, Japan. At the Wyss Institute, his laboratory is developing bioinspired approaches for generating tissue-like structures as well as fabricating combinatorial biomaterials for regenerative medicine applications.

More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Khademhosseini

Scientific Research and Publishing - Prof. Ali Khademhosseini

On Monday the London Design Museum announced it’s “Design of the Year” award, and for the first time it went to a Medical design. The Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University’s “Organs-on-chips” was the overall winner. The chips mimic the functions of human organs for the purpose of medical testing. 

Guest: Tony Bahinski, Lead Senior Staff Scientist at Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard.

jonmccombshow

Join the Jon McComb Show 5:30a-10a (Mon-Fri) on CKNW AM980 or online at www.cknw.com.

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Science, Your Body, And Testing - The Jon McComb Show - June 25

Ecologist Jessica Henkel finds the keys to her research truck missing, as it's parked on a remote beach with one of the biggest tides of the season about to come in.

Jessica is a Christine Mirzayan Science and Technology Policy Fellow with the National Academy of Sciences and a PhD candidate in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Tulane University. She has a B.A. in English from Stony Brook University and a M.S. in Conservation Biology from the University of New Orleans. Jessica is interested in how environmental and anthropogenic change and habitat degradation are impacting the coastal habitats of the U.S. Gulf of Mexico and the communities that rely on them. Her dissertation research investigates the migration ecology and physiology of near-arctic breeding shorebirds that stopover in coastal habitats on the Gulf of Mexico. When not wearing mud boots or waders, Jessica can be found advocating for coastal issues or marching in the Mardi Gras parades of her adopted city of New Orleans.

Jessica Henkel: Stuck

Audio from sessions at the 2016 Convergence Forum, held in Chatham, Mass. on May 12 and 13, 2016. For more details, visit http://convergenceforum.com

Fireside Chat with George Church of the Wyss Institute

Why do we use mice for medical research? As I-Hub’s Caroline Lester found out, it all started with fancy mice.

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4'33" - Discovery Download

The Modest Mouse: Why We Use Mice in Medicine

Deborah Berebichez was told she couldn't study physics because it wasn't for girls -- until she got assistance for an unexpected reason.

(En Español: http://soundcloud.com/the-story-collider/deborah-berebichez)

Deborah Berebichez: Passing on the gift

As a young man Tom Levenson tries to follow his deceased father's advice, and takes a wide detour that leads him to contemplate life at the base of Newton's tree.

Tom Levenson: Wide open spaces and the long road home

While hunting for fossils of some of Earth's oldest organisms, paleontologist Phoebe Cohen and her geologist friend encounter a problem with one of Earth's more recently evolved organisms.

Phoebe Cohen: Chasing rocks and bears

In 2007, Matt Danzico engages in a massive project to show that strangers on the internet can be trusted -- and finds himself in the middle of nowhere with a broken-down bus and a stranger with a gun.

Matt Danzico: Strangers on the Internet

When science writer David Dobbs is suddenly unable to remember how to drive his kids to school, he sets off on a quest to understand his own brain, and makes a shocking discovery.

David Dobbs: Lost in your brain

Maija Niemisto is a director of education on the Clearwater, America’s environmental flagship. But when a stranger comes to the side of the ship, it heralds a discovery about her city and herself.

“He’s giving me a mission. I love missions. I’m so excited, it’s like CSI: Yonkers.”

Maija was born to a family of musicians in the heartland, far from the sea. Minnesota was her first hailing port. School, university and adventures took her to Finland, Wisconsin and Lebanon. After receiving her B.A. in International Relations and Environmental studies, she followed the smell of sweet salt air and ran away to see the sea aboard her 28-foot sloop. In 2008, the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater appeared on the horizon and she jumped at the chance to combine her interests in music, sailing, teaching, science, water ecology, environmental advocacy and pumping the bilge.

Every week the Story Collider brings you a true, personal story about science. Find more and subscribe to our podcast here: http://storycollider.org/

Maija Niemisto: A step off the boat

At ten years old, David Gelles finds himself abandoned and swimming in an ocean with a storm coming. Alone. Except for the pod of dolphins.

“I had this little disposable plastic camera and I’d put it up to my eye and look through the lens, and a whole dolphin head would fill the frame.”

David Gelles: Have fun, be safe... in an ocean

In a high-stakes race in high school, Jim O'Grady draws from his mother's Bronx background for inspiration.

“Why am I a pussy? Is it nature? Is it nurture? I need to know.”

Jim O'Grady: Running from the Bronx

In the IBM pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair, Jamy Ian Swiss encounters a computer that reveals a piece in personality, although maybe not in the way it's inventor intended.

"I was outraged, with all the moral outrage an 11 year old can muster."

Jamy Ian Swiss: The universal personality reading machine

Erin Barker struggles with a disease that only makes her give up four things; they just happen to be the four things worth living for.

Re-issued specially for our Women In Science magazine issue. Check it out at magazine.storycollider.org

Erin Barker: Oh, just those four things?

Having fallen in love with the ability of chemists' to learn about elements by separating them down to their essence, Eli Kintisch has just two obstacles to becoming a scientist: a machine, and another intern.

"I would go to the fridge, and there was this bottle of mustard. And I don't even like mustard, but I would spread it on bread. And that was my snack."

Eli Kintisch: Separating chemistry

A physicist decides that the best way to make progress on his robotics project is to go to Namibia to study termites.

Every week the Story Collider brings you a true, personal story about science. Find more here: http://storycollider.org/

Justin Werfel is a research scientist at Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. He received his PhD at MIT and did postdoctoral work at Harvard and the New England Complex Systems Institute. He works on topics including swarm robotics, evolutionary theory, DNA self-assembly, and cancer modeling, and recently published an invited book chapter about the ecology of Fraggle Rock. He's a two-time MassMouth Big Mouth Off finalist and Audience Choice winner.

Justin Werfel: Robotics lessons from termites

Whether we wear a lab coat or haven't seen a test tube since grade school, science is shaping all of our lives. And that means we all have science stories to tell. Every year, we host dozens of live shows all over the country, featuring all kinds of storytellers - researchers, doctors, and engineers of course, but also patients, poets, comedians, cops, and more. Some of our stories are heartbreaking, others are hilarious, but they're all true and all very personal. Welcome to The Story Collider!