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
Patrick Hennessey tells Jim Fleming about his war service in Iraq and Afghanistan and the role that books played in his life as a soldier.
She is "the Queen of Norwegian Crime" with a series of internationally best-selling stories of psychological suspense.
Mark Frauenfelder is co-creator of the weblog BoingBoing.net and the author of "Made by Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World."
Nicholson Baker's latest novel is called "The Anthologist." Baker tells Anne Strainchamps the book's about a writer who longs to be a poet.
The State Department used jazz musicians as a weapon in the cold war to win hearts and minds in the Third World. Louis Armstrong, Dizy Gillespie, Duke Ellington and Dave Brubek were among the so-called "jazz ambassadors."
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.
Physicist Joel Primack and Nancy Abrams tell Steve Paulson how humanity has moved back into the center of our myth-making.
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