Ed Boyden, a researcher at MIT, is at the forefront of a new science that aims to map and even heal the brain with light. It’s called optogenetics, and the journal Science has called it one of the great insights of the 21st century. It’s in its early days, but the goal is to one day be able to take a disease like depression, PTSD, or epilepsy and, using bursts of light, just turn it off -- the same way you’d fix a software glitch in a computer.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
Singer and pianist Marcia Ball talks about the various kinds of Blues and how they differ from what she usually plays.
Journalist Kevin Krajick's book tells the story of geologists Chuck Fipke and Stew Blusson, a couple of small-time prospectors who went looking for diamonds in the Canadian tundra.
Jonathan Lethem's new novel is "Chronic City." The book has been described as a cross between the famous borough-centric New Yorker cartoon and the darkest episode of "Seinfeld."
Mark Kurlansky, author of “1968: The Year That Rocked the World” talks about why that year was so significant.
Physicist Joel Primack and Nancy Abrams tell Steve Paulson how humanity has moved back into the center of our myth-making.
Julian Barnes' novel "The Sense of an Ending" won the 2011 Man Booker Prize. Barnes talks with Steve Paulson about the complications of memory, aging and moral reckoning.
Harvard Law’s Randall Kennedy (who is African American) is the author of the notoriously titled “Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word.” He talks with Steve Paulson about how the N-word has been used historically in America.
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