Topic: Science and Technology (general)

Moira talks to author David Helvarg about his book, Rescue Warriors: The U.S. Coast Guard, America's Forgotten Heroes. He tells the story of the Coast Guard and how their missions range from saving fishermen in the icy waters off Alaska to rescuing thousands in the wake of Katrina.

Moira speaks with Rory Cooper and Oz Osborn about quality of life technology. The Quality of Life Technology (QoLT) Center is a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center (ERC) who's mission is to transform lives in a large and growing segment of the population, people with reduced functional capabilities due to aging or disability.

To reduce or even stop the threat of global warming, it stands to reason that the first line of defense is to avoid using fossil fuels in the first place. In this overview followed by questions from the audience, John Podesta suggests that this can be done by focusing on greater energy efficiency--both at small and large levels--from everyday items to international policy.

Christine Peterson is a founder and Vice-President of Foresight Institute, and focuses effort on educating the public on nanotechnology issues. In this emotionally-charged presentation at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, Peterson lays out the potential privacy concerns of using nanotechnology and closed-source software to monitor for a future terrorist attack.

In this humorous talk from the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, Damian Conway combines quantum mechanics and general relativity with Perl to write code that executes in constant time, zero time, and finally backwards in time.

Moira speaks with a panel of nationally-recognized engineering deans and professors, eliciting big ideas to meet the National Academy of Engineering's grand challenges.

Moira speaks with Dr. Alan Boss about his book The Crowded Universe and how NASA's Kepler Mission expects to discover possible life-supporting planets.

Today's human-computer interaction paradigms are not enough; they are clunky and not very efficient. We should instead follow Mother Nature and approach it in a more 'neural-like' way to make the human-computer interaction experience as smooth and natural as possible. Robert Nevin believes he has the right tool for the job at hand and introduces his take on this exciting field.

Dr. Moira Gunn interviews Alva Noe, author of the book Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness, in which he challenges the assumptions underlying neuroscientific studies of consciousness.

Moira speaks with Astrophysicist Mario Livio, who asks and answers the question: "Is God a Mathematician?"