Mars Yacht Club

“Aspirin and Old Lace?” Okay, it would take a bottle full of pills in a glass of elderberry wine to really harm you, but aspirin can be deadly. So can too much of anything, including water. Dose is key in toxicology, after all, but there are some poisons that can do deadly work in tiny amounts.

Hear about the chemistry of poisons … why Botox may freeze your emotions as well as your face… which animal is most lethal to humans… and how 19th-century poisoners got away with murder – until the birth of forensic science.

• Deborah Blum – Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer, author of The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York
• Martyn Smith – Toxicologist, University of California, Berkeley
• Joshua Ian Davis – Psychologist, Barnard College, New York
• Jamie Seymour – Venom biologist, director of The Tropical Australian Stinger Research Unit, School of Marine Tropical Biology, James Cook University, Cairns, Australia

ENCORE We could choose not to pay income tax and suffer the consequences. But we can’t avoid death. The biological functions of all organisms eventually cease. But why should this be? Find out why animals die and meet one creature that is biologically immortal.

Plus, a trip to the Body Farm where decaying bodies help science…how we might cheat the Big Sleep with drugs… why Mexican cemeteries look like villages… and a doctor’s fight against one of the world’s deadliest diseases.

• Bill Bass – Forensic Anthropologist, founder of the University of Tennessee Forensic Research Facility. Author of Beyond the Body Farm: A Legendary Bone Detective Explores Murders, Mysteries, and the Revolution in Forensic Science and fiction, written under the pen name, Jefferson Bass. The latest: Bones of Betrayal: A Body Farm Novel.
• Stanley Brandes – Cultural Anthropologist, University of California, Berkeley, author of Skulls to the Living, Bread to the Dead: The Day of the Dead in Mexico and Beyond
• Matt Kaeberlein – Pathologist, University of Washington
• Ross Donaldson – Doctor and author of The Lassa Ward

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ENCORE A new herbal supplements is on the shelf, and it claims to improve memory. Should you take it? It’s not easy to sort through the firehose of health and nutrition advice that comes at us daily. Find out how to get healthy about health advice, plus hear the story of Bernarr Macfadden, the eccentric who kicked off America’s fitness craze; he believed that eating less was good for you, but he didn’t believe germ theory.

Plus, our Hollywood skeptic spills his guts and other entrails for a phony class for nurses and Phil Plait gives us the latest lapse in critically-thinking brains.

It’s Skeptic Check… but don’t take our word for it.

• Phil Plait – Author, badastronomy.com and Death from the Skies!: These Are the Ways the World Will End . . .
• Mark Adams – writer and editor, and author of Mr. America: How Muscular Millionaire Bernarr Macfadden Transformed the Nation Through Sex, Salad, and the Ultimate Starvation Diet
• Jim Underdown – Executive Director, Center for Inquiry, West – Los Angeles
• Steven Novella – Assistant professor of neurology at Yale School of Medicine

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Shh – can you keep it down? Nope. Not unless you want to do away with civilization. Our buzzing, humming, whirling, machine-driven world is a poster child for technological progress, right? As is hearing loss. It’s driven one man to search the world for silence. We’ll hear what he didn’t hear, and what Einstein predicted we should hear in deep space, where gravitational waves may reveal the hidden sounds of the universe, including the birth of black holes.

• George Foy – Author of Zero Decibels: The Quest for Absolute Silence
• Garret Keizer – Author of The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want: A Book About Noise
• Craig Hogan – Director for Particle Astrophysics at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory

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The recipe for being a scientist was easy in the old days… just be born into a rich family, have an interest in nature and plenty of time to indulge yourself. But are the days of gentlemen scientists over? Maybe not.

We go to the Maker Faire and check out how small-scale projects have big-scale ambitions.

Also, how everyday experience often tells us something profound about the universe.

• Spencer Weart – Former director of the Center for the History of Physics, at the American Institute of Physics
• Tim Russ – Actor, and the character Tuvok on Star Trek Voyager
• Marcus Chown – Science writer and author of The Matchbox That Ate a Forty-Ton Truck: What Everyday Things Tell Us About the Universe

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An ant … can’t … move a rubber tree plant… but the colony can. As a group, ants are an efficient, organized, can-do bunch. And a model for humans trying to manage complex systems.

Find out about the eerie collective intelligence of animals, and how an MIT researcher is hoping to put humans to work collaboratively to solve problems like climate change.

Also … hear how research into flocking behavior helps Hollywood film a herd of stampeding dinosaurs.

• Steve Strogatz – Applied mathematician at Cornell University and author of Sync: How Order Emerges From Chaos In the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life
• Craig Reynolds – Senior researcher for Sony Computer Entertainment
• Thomas Malone – Director of the Center for Collective Intelligence at MIT
• Iain Couzin – Biologist at Princeton University

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Genes – what are they good for? Absolutely… something. But not everything. Your “genius” genes need to be turned on – and your environment determines that. Find out how to unleash your inner-Einstein, and what scientists learned from studying the famous physicist’s brain.

Also, the bizarre notion that your children inherit not just your genes, but also the consequences of your habits – smoking, stress, diet, and other behaviors that turn the genes on.

Plus Francis Collins on affordable personal genomes, and a man who decoded his own DNA in under a week.

• Francis Collins – Geneticist, Director of the National Institutes of Health
• David Shenk – Journalist, and author of The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ Is Wrong
• Stephen Quake – Biophysicist, Stanford University
• Dean Falk – Anthropologist and Senior Scholar at the School For Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico

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ENCORE It’s always a surprise to go digging in Seth’s garage – who knows what we’ll find! In this impressive heap of paraphernalia, tucked between boxes of old radio tubes and hydraulic jacks, we stumble upon the secrets to our galaxy’s central black hole… witness the dance of the PhD theses… uncover the genome of milk (while moo-ving boxes) and … hey? Who’s that crunching numbers in the corner? It’s astrophysicist Mario Livio addressing the mathematical mysteries of universe.

• Andrea Ghez – Astronomer at University of California, Los Angeles
• Kathryn Denning – Professor of Anthropology at York University
• Mario Livio – Senior Astronomer at the Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute and author of Is God a Mathematician?
• John Bohannon – Gonzo Scientist and Contributing Correspondent for Science
• Katrien Kolenberg – Astrophysicist, University of Vienna
• Danielle Lemay – Nutrition Scientist at the University of California, Davis

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Live forever? Both cancer cells and stem cells can make a claim to immortality. Left unchecked, tumors will grow indefinitely. And stem cells offer the promise of non-stop rejuvenation.

We’ll find out whether the surprising discovery of stem cells in the brain really can keep our thinking organ young. And we’ll hear the remarkable story of Henrietta Lacks, the woman who unwittingly donated tissue to science in 1951, and whose cancer cells are still grown in laboratories around the world today.

• Rebecca Skloot – Journalist and author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
• Fred Gage – Neurobiologist at the Salk Institute
• Randy Schekman – Molecular and cell biologist at the University of California, Berkeley

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ENCORE We should award frequent travel miles to your brain. After all, it’s evolved a long way from the days of guiding brachiation from tree-to-tree to become the three pounds of web-surfing, Sudoku-playing powerhouse it is today. But a suite of technologies may expand human brains further still.

From smart pills to nano-wires: discover the potential – and peril – of neuro-engineering to repair and enhance our cognitive function.

Also, how our brains got so big in the first place: a defense of the modern diet.

• Bill Leonard – department chairman and professor of Anthropology at Northwestern University
• Michael Gazzaniga – neuroscientist and director of the University of California – Santa Barbara’s SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind. Author of
  Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique
• Ian Pearson – futurologist at Futurizon
• Steven Rose – biologist and director of the Brain and Behavior Research Group at the Open University in London. Author of The Future of the Brain: The Promise and Perils of Tomorrow’s Neuroscience
• Ed Boyden – neuroscientist at MIT’s Media Lab and Department of Biological Engineering

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