The Story Collider

Psychologist Pete Etchells' father inspired him -- to hate neurons. Pete Etchells is a lecturer in biological psychology at Bath Spa University, UK, and a science blogger for the Guardian's psychology blog, Head Quarters. When he was growing up though, he really wanted to be a dinosaur. His research interests cover everything from how the human visual system works, to understanding how modern technology (particularly video games) affects behaviour and development. Every week the Story Collider brings you a true, personal story about science. Find more and subscribe to our podcast at our website: http://storycollider.org/ Help keep us going! If you love the podcast, please donate here: http://www.patreon.com/thestorycollider Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

While studying bioengineering, Craig Lehocky discovers he's different from the other students. Craig Lehocky's tinkering runs deep. He currently develops surgical robots as an M.D. / Ph.D. student at CMU and University of Pittsburgh. Before that, he worked on prosthetic limbs controlled by the brain at the University of Pittsburgh. And even before that, he restored cars, houses, and guitar amplifiers at the University of his Dad. He doesn't know what tinkering his future holds, but hopes it unfolds in Pittsburgh. Every week the Story Collider brings you a true, personal story about science. Find more and subscribe to our podcast at our website: http://storycollider.org/ Help keep us going! If you love the podcast, please donate here: http://www.patreon.com/thestorycollider Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Story Collider needs your help! Our initial funding is coming to an end, and we need your help to keep going. It doesn't take a lot, $1/podcast will go a long way. As a thanks if you donate, we'll give you a special podcast with some of the storylets we tell in the live shows between the main stories. Here's a sample of those. If you'd like to contribute or for more info, head to http://www.patreon.com/thestorycollider. Thanks! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A wrong number to a friend in Sri Lanka leads Saswato Das to the final interview with a famous science fiction writer. Saswato R. Das has written about science and technology for more than two decades for publications that include the Economist, Scientific American, New Scientist, the International Herald Tribune/ New York Times global edition, the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, the Times Literary Supplement (UK), the Times of India, IEEE Spectrum, the Bell Labs Technical Journal, etc. He has a background in astrophysics and has taught undergraduate astronomy within the CUNY system. Every week the Story Collider brings you a true, personal story about science. Find more and subscribe to our podcast at our website: http://storycollider.org/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Jim O'Grady's attempts to woo his housemate are stymied by the monkey she's training to help quadriplegics. Jim O'Grady is a reporter for WNYC Radio and a Moth GrandSLAM champ. He has worked as a reporter for The New York Times, a professor of journalism at NYU and research director at The Center for an Urban Future. That's a policy think tank for whom he co-wrote this science-y report: http://bit.ly/7vx5Ei. He is the author of two biographies, Dorothy Day: With Love for the Poor and Disarmed & Dangerous: The Radical Lives and Times of Daniel and Philip Berrigan. Ask him how his high school science teacher, who was a nut job, pronounced "mitochondria." Every week the Story Collider brings you a true, personal story about science. Find more and subscribe to our podcast at our website: storycollider.org/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

At age 7, Deborah Blum starts a mystery when she interrupts her parent's dinner party. So their guest, famed biologist E.O. Wilson, investigates. Deborah Blum, a Pulitzer prize-winning science journalist, author and blogger, is the Helen Firstbrook Franklin Professor of Journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Author of five books and a popular guide to science writing, her most recent publication, The Poisoner's Handbook, was a 2011 New York Times best seller and will be the subject of an American Experience documentary on PBS in January. She writes a monthly environmental chemistry column for The New York Times called Poison Pen. She also blogs about toxic compounds at Wired; her blog Elemental was named one of the top 25 blogs of 2013 by Time magazine. She has written for a wide range of other publications including Scientific American , Slate, Tin House, The Atavist, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Los Angeles Times and Discover. Before joining the university in 1997, she was a science writer for The Sacramento Bee, where she won the Pulitzer in 1992 for her reporting on ethical issues in primate research. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Science Writing, Best American Nature Writing, and The Open Laboratory: Best Science OnLine. Every week the Story Collider brings you a true, personal story about science. Find more and subscribe to our podcast at our website: http://storycollider.org/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's the worst that can happen when you let a recent college grad command a $330 million spacecraft? Victor Hwang is a New England born nerd. After graduating from Tufts, he helped build ground telescopes, fly spacecrafts, and chased a dream to become a circus acrobat. Now he's a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute trying to make humanoid robots a little bit smarter. Every week the Story Collider brings you a true, personal story about science. Find more and subscribe to our podcast at our website: http://storycollider.org/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Science writer Eliza Strickland discovers that in the race to the bottom of the Mariana Trench the most important thing is what they leave behind. Eliza Strickland is an editor for the magazine IEEE Spectrum, where she was assigned the daunting beat of covering technology across the Asian continent. On her third day on the job a tsunami flooded the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, causing the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. She spent the next two years writing about the catastrophe, its human cost, and the future of energy. And this one time, in Seoul, she rode the world's fastest elevator. Every week the Story Collider brings you a true, personal story about science. Find more and subscribe to our podcast at our website: http://storycollider.org/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

How does a landscape artist become the host of a popular science show on YouTube? For Emily Graslie it started with pictures of a wolf head on Facebook. Emily Graslie graduated from The University of Montana with a BFA in painting in 2011. Her relationship with science began as an internship with The University of Montana Zoological Museum during her senior year. What started off as a means to practice scientific illustration gradually developed into a love of skeletal preparation and an interest in the inner workings of natural history museums. In January of 2013, with the help of YouTube educator Hank Green and producer Michael Aranda, Emily and co. launched a YouTube channel about science museums and research collections. 'The Brain Scoop' aims to share the wonderful inner and outer workings of natural history museums by discussing all aspects of science, biology, and the joys of discovery. Every week the Story Collider brings you a true, personal story about science. Find more and subscribe to our podcast at our website: http://storycollider.org/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From a (mostly) successful model rocket launch to a missed opportunity by Richard Feynman, Alan Lightman learns that the equations aren't the whole story. Alan Lightman is a physicist, novelist, and essayist. He has served on the faculties of Harvard and MIT and was the first person at MIT to receive dual appointments in science and in the humanities. His scientific work has been in the area of theoretical astrophysics. His literary work has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, Harper's, and other publications. Lightman's novel Einstein's Dreams was an international bestseller and his novel The Diagnosis was a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction. Lightman's latest novel is Mr g, a story of the creation as told by God. Every week the Story Collider brings you a true, personal story about science. Find more and subscribe to our podcast at our website: http://storycollider.org/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When two residents of her nursing home fell in love, sexual rights advocate Robin Dessel had to decide how the staff would handle their rendezvous. Robin has over 25 years of experience at the Hebrew Home at Riverdale, and oversees vision care, memory care and sexual rights and expression. Robin co-authored the nation's first sexual rights policy for residential health care, recognizing the sexual rights of all residents including those with dementia, entitled "Residents' Rights to Intimacy and Sexual Expression" (1995; updated 2013). Robin is a frequent guest educator and presenter at national and state conferences including: Leading Age; Leading Age New York; Leading Age Florida; American Society on Aging; National Aging and Law; NYC Elder Abuse; NYS Department of Health Surveillance Training Academy. She has been featured in such prestigious media outlets as Bloomberg News, BBC, ABCNews.com, Newsweek.com, WNBC, NPR and Chicago Tribune. Every week the Story Collider brings you a true, personal story about science. Find more and subscribe to our podcast at our website: http://storycollider.org/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Stephanie Nothelle loves volunteering at her local nursing home, but she doesn't know what to do when one of the residents says, "I die today" and asks for a last cup of coffee -- against doctor's orders. Stephanie Nothelle is an Internal Medicine resident at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center. She is an aspiring geriatrician and has spent many hours volunteering in nursing homes and previously worked at an Adult Day Care center before attending medical school. She currently does research on cardiovascular risk factors and development of dementia. She will completing her residency in June of 2014 and then will be chief resident at her residency program before starting her geriatrics fellowship. Every week the Story Collider brings you a true, personal story about science. Find more and subscribe to our podcast at our website: http://storycollider.org/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For her masters thesis in science writing, Aviva Hope Rutkin starts writing about sensory substitution -- a way of swapping in one sense for another. But her work leads to a mysterious Dr. Bach-y-Rita and a whole new way of knowing someone. Aviva Hope Rutkin writes about science and technology for the MIT Technology Review and The Raptor Lab. She has previously interned at Nature Publishing Group, Time, NASA, Brookhaven National Laboratory, and the Marine Biological Laboratory. She studied neuroscience and Chinese at Union College, where she wrote her first thesis on interactive fiction. In the fall, she will graduate with a Master's in Science Writing from MIT. Every week the Story Collider brings you a true, personal story about science. Find more and subscribe to our podcast at our website: http://storycollider.org/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Richard Pollack finds himself moderating an uneasy negotiation between Israelis and Jordanians, as part of an international effort to stem a scourge of houseflies. Richard Pollack is a public health entomologist serving academia (Harvard School of Public Health & Boston Univ) and government service, and operates the consulting venture, IdentifyUS. He has traveled the globe to study, teach about, and guide policy issues relevant to medically relevant pests, such as mosquitoes, lice, ticks, bed bugs, and the microbes they transmit. When not in the lab or field, he often is embroiled in efforts to base policy decisions on evidence rather than folklore and fear. Every week the Story Collider brings you a true, personal story about science. Find more and subscribe to our podcast here: http://storycollider.org/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

After he's named lab safety officer, John Rennie must recover a precious sample from the bottom of a vat of liquid nitrogen. So he reaches in. John Rennie is a science writer, editor, and lecturer based in New York. Viewers of The Weather Channel know him as the host of the original series Hacking The Planet and as one of the hosts of The Truth About… series of specials. He is also currently the editorial director of science for McGraw-Hill Professional, overseeing its highly respected AccessScience online reference and the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science & Technology. Every week the Story Collider brings you a true, personal story about science. Find more and subscribe to our podcast (and see our celebration of a million downloads!) here: http://storycollider.org/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices