Science and Technology

Where Heather and the bees converse

A single empty yellow chair sits next to Heather Swan’s tall, buzzing beehive in her backyard in Madison, Wisconsin. Swan keeps it there to sit next to the bees — some 60,000 insects —and talk with them.More

Opening the hive

Heather Swan is a beekeeper and author — she tells Steve Paulson about what it's meant for her to be "chosen by the bees."More

Magic mushrooms and our primate ancestors

Magic mushrooms go way back in human history. Some people even believe psychedelic mushrooms helped create human consciousness. We examine the "Stoned Ape Theory."More

Mushrooms on a tree

Paul Stamets may be the most passionate mycologist on the planet. He tells Steve why new medicines and technologies derived from mushrooms might save life as we know it.More

child getting vaccinated

Producer Charles Monroe-Kane's son goes to a school with a 13.8% non-vaccination rate. So why aren't his neighbors vaccinating their kids? Charles went out searching for the answer.More

Stanislav Grof

Long before Timothy Leary's study of LSD, psychiatrist Stanislav Grof launched his own investigation of psychedelics.  Since then he's devoted his life to exploring non-ordinary states of consciousness.More

Created in 1976, this historic photograph showed an adult female receiving a vaccination that was administered by a public health clinician, by way of a jet injector, also known as a “Ped-O-Jet®”, during the nationwide Swine Flu vaccination campaign

Why have some parents started second guessing their pediatrician’s advice, to the point that measles is showing up in Disneyland? Historian Arthur Allen explains how we got here.More

Desert at Joshua Tree

Losing yourself in wilderness can also be a way of finding yourself, and one place you can do that is in our national parks. Renowned nature writer Terry Tempest Williams reflects on her love for these parks — especially those with desert landscapes.More

Birdwatching gear

Mark Obmascik tells Anne Strainchamps about the biggest competition in North American bird-watching and how he got drawn into the quest.More

Rachel Carson and Bob Hines researching off the Atlantic coast in 1952

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Rachel Carson, a pioneer of the environmental movement. Rob Nixon holds the Rachel Carson chair in English at the UW-Wisconsin.  He says she was something of a reluctant activist. More

electrode

Richard Holmes talks with Steve Paulson about how art and science influenced each other during the Romantic period.More

 Marcel Proust (seated), Robert de Flers (left) and Lucien Daudet (right), ca. 1894

Jonah Lehrer says that the great French writer Proust described insights into the way the mind processes memory long before the scientists could prove how the brain worked.More

DNA

Ray Kurzweil tells Steve Paulson humans will merge with new technology and vastly improve their intelligence.More

wheat

Nature is more than pristine meadows and eroded canyons. There's also a history of how people have shaped and sometimes fought over the land. Lauret Savoy uncovers this shadow history and the racism that's embedded in the American landscape.More

The male Ivory-Bill leaves as the female returns.

The story of finding and recording the rarest bird in America: the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker.More

brain light

Psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist says most neuroscientists have downplayed the differences between the left and right sides of the brain. He says he thinks the left hemisphere has become so dominant in Western culture that we're losing the sense of what makes us human.More

a night sky

James Gardner is the author of “Biocosm: The New Scientific Theory of Evolution: Intelligent Life Is the Architect of the Universe.”More

tree roots

Biologist David George Haskell spent a year making weekly visits to the same one-square-meter patch of old-growth forest near his home in Tennessee.  His writes about his experiment in "contemplative science" in a series of gorgeous essays, called "The Forest Unseen".More

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