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We have seen the future, and the future is mostly blue.
Or, put another way: in our representations of the future in science fiction movies, blue seems to be the dominant color of our interfaces with technology yet to come. And that is one of the many design lessons we can learn from sci-fi.
Designers and sci-fi aficionados Chris Noessel and Nathan Shedroff have spent years compiling real-world lessons that designers can, should, and already do take from science fiction. Their new book, Make It So: Interaction Design Lessons From Science Fiction is a comprehensive compendium of their findings.
All music (after pledge preamble) is by OK Ikumi. https://soundcloud.com/ok-ikumi

99% Invisible-95- Future Screens Are Mostly Blue

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

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

An accidental revelation causes Rabiah Mayas to question her identity.

Rabiah Mayas, PhD, is madly in love with science and driven by life’s questions, large and small. As Director of Science and Integrated Strategies at the Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago, her work is focused on supporting that same spirit in youth who face barriers to accessing quality science experiences. She leads a multidisciplinary department that develops, implements and researches programs that support youth in pursuit of their own scientific passions and pathways. She holds a doctorate in biochemistry and molecular biology and is passionate about exploring the intersections of science with art, health, and community.

Help keep us going! If you love the podcast, please donate here: http://www.patreon.com/thestorycollider

Rabiah Mayas: Identical Twins

After a terrible head injury, Amy Cuddy wakes up in the hospital to find she's a different person.

Amy Cuddy is a social psychologist and Harvard Business School Associate Professor who studies how snap judgments and nonverbal behavior affect people from the classroom to the boardroom. Amy Cuddy's fascinating work on "power posing" reveals how your physical posture affects not only how others see you, but also how you see yourself, your own hormone levels, and your performance and important life outcomes. Researching stereotypes, emotions, nonverbal behaviors, and hormone levels, Amy explains to audiences the role these variables play in shaping our emotions, intentions and behaviors in business and society. Amy's work has been featured on CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, The Financial Times, Scientific American Mind, The Wall Street Journal, and even as the theme of a Dilbert comic strip. Business Insider just named Amy as one of 2013's "50 Women Who are Changing the World." Her TED Talk is now the second most viewed of all time. She is also a classically trained (and still practicing) ballet dancer, which informs her research on nonverbal communication.

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

Amy Cuddy: Passing As Myself

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

Geneticist Chris Gunter worries about passing on a rare condition to her son.

Chris Gunter is a human geneticist by training, and a science communicator by choice. She earned her Ph.D. at Emory University and then moved up and down the east coast, ending up as a Senior Editor at the journal Nature. Currently she serves as the Associate Director for Research for the Marcus Autism Center, Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, and as an Associate Professor in Pediatrics for the Emory University School of Medicine. If she had any spare time, she would probably garden or bake.

Chris Gunter: My Prosthetic

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

Growing up on a cattle ranch, Amanda Stockton dreams of searching for life elsewhere in the universe.

Dr. Amanda Stockton is an assistant professor in the Chemistry and Biochemistry department at the Georgia Institute of Technology.  Her work walks the line between engineering and science to develop instrumentation capable of looking for organic molecules elsewhere in the solar system.  These molecules could be the feedstock for an emergence of life or the remnants of past life now extinct on places like Europa, Enceladus, and Mars.  Dr. Stockton grew up on a cattle ranch in Oklahoma, where she graduated from the Oklahoma School of Science and Mathematics.  At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she majored in Aerospace Engineering and Chemistry – seemingly unrelated topics but perfect for her “dream job,” i.e. the one she has now.  After obtaining a masters at Brown in chemistry, she earned her PhD with Dr. Richard Mathies at the University of California, Berkeley working on increasing the analytical chemistry capabilities of the Mars Organic Analyzer microchip capillary electrophoresis instrument platform.  She continued in this vein at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, by furthering the microfluidic engineering side of the technology as first a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow and then as a Technologist.  At Georgia Tech, her group’s work seeks to do both the engineering and the science to synergistically promote instrument capabilities and robustness.  Currently, the group’s main NASA-funded project is a version of the Mars Organic Analyzer that could fit on a kinetic impactor mission to an icy moon – a project for which testing involves a giant rail gun and a magnetic capture system to decelerate the instrument at 50,000 g or the equivalent of hitting a planet at 5 km/s.

Amanda Stockton: The Girl With The Big Nose

Brion Randolph's journey to becoming a doctor begins with a box full of kittens.

Dr. Brion Randolph is currently the Chief of Medical Oncology at Cancer Treatment Centers of America (CTCA) in Newnan, Georgia. He joined CTCA as a medical oncologist and hematologist when the hospital opened in August 2012 and is now Chief of Medical Oncology.  He also serves as Medical Director of Hematologic Oncology at the Newnan hospital.

Dr. Randolph earned his medical degree from the University of South Carolina in Columbia, and he is board certified in medical oncology, hematology and internal medicine. Dr. Randolph also earned a Master of Science in Nuclear Engineering from the University of Tennessee (UT) in Knoxville. He completed residency training in internal medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, where he also completed his fellowship training in hematology and oncology. 

While Dr. Randolph started his education in nuclear engineering, he switched to medicine when introduced to the field of hematology/oncology as a graduate student studying the physics of medical imaging and radiation therapy.

Dr. Randolph lives in Newnan with his wife and two children. He has a passion for music and the performing arts, and as a drum major he had the opportunity to lead the UT Band in the 1993 inaugural parade for President Bill Clinton. His hobbies also include tennis and running.

Brion Randolph: Curiosity Saves The Cats

Newborn and premature baby specialist Nitin Ron learns a surprising lesson from one of his young patients.

Nitin Ron is a neonatologist (baby doctor) and loves high altitude trekking and mountaineering. He is an associate professor of pediatrics at New York Methodist Hospital, and loves to use innovative methods to teach medical students. He is leading a research project in the Himalayas, including the Mt. Everest region, involving ultrasound of the eye and the body to predict mountain sickness. He also volunteers as an art guide at the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art in New York City, and this is a reminder that medicine is so much of an art as well as a science!

Nitin Ron: Babies and Mountains

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

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

Anna Rothschild tells the most adorably gross love story you'll ever hear.

Anna Rothschild: Feeling love in your gut

Her grandmother's death forces neuroscientist Heather Berlin to think hard about what she believes, and why.

Heather Berlin: Can a scientist believe in life after death?

Biologist Kelly Smith and comic artist Zach Weiner were having trouble dating, until they met online and realized what they each needed was another nerd. 

Kelly & Zach Weinersmith: Two nerds fall in love

A Remix from the Chrono Trigger OST.
Actually I'm planning to make a whole album filled with Chrono Trigger Remixes. 

Corridors Of Time (ochisuite Edit)

When he begins showing strange symptoms on a jog though the mountains, science writer Andrew Revkin discovers just how close to death he is.

Andrew Revkin: My lucky stroke

Neuroscientist Daniela Schiller studies the emotional components of memory. In her previous story her research helped her begin to understand her father, a holocaust survivor. But that story led to a whole new chapter in their relationship, and her understanding of memories.

Hear Daniela's first story here: http://storycollider.org/podcast/2011-10-09

Daniela Schiller: A new last memory

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!