Are we witnessing the birth of a new "dark green religion"?More
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Science and Technology
Lauret Savoy believes too many nature writers focus on pristine wilderness and neglect the gritty reality of the places where people actually live - in cities, for instance, maybe even near toxic waste sites. And writing about these places means grappling with difficult questions about race and poverty. More
Deborah Blum talks about the serious scientific effort undertaken by an elite group of scientists and scholars a hundred years ago to investigate the supernatural.More
Deborah Blum tells the remarkable story of the scientists who invented forensic medicine and figured out how to catch murderers using poison.More
Aidan Campbell was 15 when she butchered a caribou at -35 degrees. Now she's 17 and she's already made three trips deep into the Alaskan wilderness with her dad, James. They describe some of their hair-raising adventures into places that few people go. More
Ann Gibbons is an award-winning science writer and author of “The First Human: The Race to Discover Our Earliest Ancestors.”More
Why is filmmaker Errol Morris is still outraged by the famous philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn?More
Famous for his stories of people with brain disorders, Oliver Sacks wrote a lot about neurological mysteries, like the way a song can activate parts of the brain that language can’t even touch.More
TTBOOK technical director Caryl Owen explains why she’s always been fascinated by rocks and the language of geology.More
Larry Brilliant is best known as part of the United Nations team of doctors responsible for curing smallpox. But back in the 1960s, he was a hippie whose guru told him his destiny was to help cure smallpox.More
Missy Makinia donated her kidney to whoever might need it. Her transplant surgeon — Josh Mezrich — invited Shannon into his operating room to see firsthand what it takes to remove and transport a human kidney.More
Devastated at the unexpected death of her morther, Cheryl Strayed embarked on a three-month solo trip along the rugged Pacific Crest...More
One way to survive on not quite enough sleep? Writer Daniel Pink swears by what he calls a "nappuccino," a short nap with a cup of coffee. You might want to take notes on this one.More
The world is getting noisier and it's hurting us. When George Mickelson Foy got worried about all of the toxic noise in his life, he set on a quest for absolute silence.More
One of the quietest places in the U.S. is a spot inside the Hoh Rain Forest in the Olympic National Park in Washington. It's called "One Square Inch of Silence." And it was created by the acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton.More
In 1993, Norwegian explorer Erling Kagge became the first person to cross Antarctica alone. It took him 50 days. The thing that had the biggest impact on him was the silence.More
Roland Griffiths is a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins. He's just turned his attention to psilocybin, a classic hallucinogen commonly known as magic mushrooms. He tells Steve Paulson about his findings.More
Sometimes you stumble upon a book that sets you on a whole new path. For Israeli historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari — author of "Sapiens," "Homo Deus," and "21 Lessons for the 21st Century" — it wasn’t a novel, a memoir, or even a history book that changed his world. It was a book about chimpanzees.More