So, there’s a serious proposal on the table. Should we genetically engineer disease-carrying species of mosquitoes out of existence? The technology exists and some pretty prominent scientists think we should.
Let’s check in with Sonia Shah. She’s a science journalist who writes about pandemics and pathogens and the social history of disease. She wrote one of the best histories of malaria – a book called “The Fever”, and she has a pretty different perspective on the kill or be killed debate.
Listen to some of the voices from the Occupy Wall Street protest at 60 Wall Street in New York.
Harriet Tubman will soon be gracing our twenty dollar bill. Most of us know only one image of her. It's an iconic image taken later in her life in which her hair's covered in a dark cloth and she has a stern expression. But there are other images of Harriet Tubman as well, including a wood cut of her carrying a musket.
Law professor Nicholas Johnson says the image of Harriet Tubman carrying a rifle doesn’t fit with how most Americans view abolitionists and civil rights leaders. After all, weren’t they supposed to be peaceful? But as Johnson tells Steve Paulson, there's a rich tradition of Black Americans owning guns for self-defense.
In the mid-80's the metal band Winger topped the charts with hits like "Seventeen." Then Grunge came along and left bands like Winger in the dust. Now, Kip Winger is back on top with a new CD that debuted at #1 on the music charts. Only this time, he's rocking the classical charts. His new album is "Conversations with Nijinsky"-- orchestral compositions performed by the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra.
If there’s one writer who’s identified with the Mississippi River, it’s Mark Twain. He grew up in Hannibal, Missouri — on the river’s edge — and as a young man, he worked as a steamboat pilot. And then he wrote the “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” the novel that turned the Mississippi into myth. But it also created one of the most enduring controversies in American literary history: how to depict race relations in America's past. In this interview, Andrew Levy says that "Huckleberry Finn" is actually anti-racist — and when it was first published, the big controversy was about Twain’s depiction of wild children.
This week, we're remembering the British mystery writer P.D. James, who died recently at the age of 94. James wrote some of the most widely admired literary crime fiction of the last century, and was the creator of one of the most beloved fictional detectives, Scotland Yard investigator Adam Dalgliesh. Steve Paulson spoke with P.D. James about her life of writing crime fiction in 2000.
K.C. Cole is working on a book about her friend Frank Oppenheimer. Frank was barred from practicing physics during the McCarthy era, and was deeply troubled by the devastation of the bomb.
How did non-life become life? University of Wisconsin geochemist Nita Sahai talks with Anne Strainchamps about how life might have begun on Earth.
