Popular science is an interpretation of science intended for a general audience. While science journalism focuses on recent scientific developments, popular science is more broad-ranging. It may be written by professional science journalists or by scientists themselves. It is presented in many forms, including books, film and television documentaries, magazine articles, and web pages.
This American Life (TAL) is an American weekly hour-long radio program produced in collaboration with Chicago Public Media and hosted by Ira Glass. It is broadcast on numerous public radio stations in the United States and internationally, and is also available as a free weekly podcast. Primarily a journalistic non-fiction program, it has also featured essays, memoirs, field recordings, short fiction, and found footage. The first episode aired on November 17, 1995, under the show's original title, Your Radio Playhouse. The series was distributed by Public Radio International until June 2014, when the program became self-distributed with Public Radio Exchange delivering new episodes to public radio stations.
Michio Kaku is an American theoretical physicist, futurist, and popularizer of science. He is a professor of theoretical physics in the City College of New York and CUNY Graduate Center. Kaku is the author of several books about physics and related topics and has made frequent appearances on radio, television, and film. He writes online blogs and articles.
A podcast is an episodic series of spoken word digital audio files that a user can download to a personal device for easy listening. Streaming applications and podcasting services provide a convenient and integrated way to manage a personal consumption queue across many podcast sources and playback devices.
WESU is a college/community non-commercial FM radio station owned by Wesleyan University and licensed to Middletown, Connecticut. It was founded in 1939 as an unofficial AM carrier current campus radio station in the basement of Clark Hall. Upon gaining recognition, the station operated under the unofficial call sign WES. In the 1950s, the call sign became WESU. Then on February 25, 1961, it began operating an FM station at 88.1 MHz, eventually abandoning the AM station. Between 1967 and 1990, WESU was owned and operated by an independent student group, the now-defunct Wesleyan Broadcast Association, Inc. Today, it is owned by the Trustees of Wesleyan University, and operated by students and community volunteers. In 1999, the station moved offices and studios from the basement of Clark Hall to its current location next the Wesleyan Argus on 45 Broad Street.
The Ricky Gervais Show is a comedy radio show in the UK starring Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant, and Karl Pilkington, later adapted into a podcast and a television series. Despite being named after the more famous Gervais, it mostly revolves around the life and ideas of Karl Pilkington. The show started in August 2001 on Xfm, and aired in weekly periods for months at a time throughout 2002, 2003, 2004, and mid-2005. In November 2005, Guardian Unlimited offered the show as a podcast series of 12 shows. Throughout January and February 2006, the podcast was consistently ranked the number one podcast in the world; it appeared in the 2007 Guinness World Record for the world's most downloaded podcast, having gained an average of 261,670 downloads per episode during its first month. According to the BBC, by September 2006, the podcasts of the series had been downloaded nearly 18 million times. As of March 2011, the podcast has been downloaded over 300 million times. An animated series based on the podcast and adapted for television debuted for HBO in the U.S. and Channel 4 in the U.K. in 2010.
Podcasting, previously known as "audioblogging", has its roots dating back to the 1980s. With the advent of broadband Internet access and portable digital audio playback devices such as the iPod, podcasting began to catch hold in late 2004. Today there are more than 115,000 English-language podcasts available on the Internet, and dozens of websites available for distribution at little or no cost to the producer or listener.
Live Audio Wrestling was a Canadian sports radio talk show hosted by "The Mouth" Dan Lovranski and Jason Agnew. The program primarily covered news and events surrounding professional wrestling and mixed martial arts. First premiering in May 1997 as an internet radio show, The LAW later shifted to conventional radio on several stations in the Toronto area, and moved to CHUM in 2011, where it remained until its cancellation on October 30, 2017.
Radiolab is a radio program produced by WNYC, a public radio station in New York City, and broadcast on public radio stations in the United States. The show is nationally syndicated and is available as a podcast. Live shows were first offered in 2008.
WVNT, The Valleys News Talk Leader, is a radio station broadcasting a News Talk Information format. Licensed to Parkersburg, West Virginia, United States, it serves the Parkersburg-Marietta area. The station is currently owned by Burbach Of WV, Llc.
Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration Into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel is a book by theoretical physicist Michio Kaku. Kaku uses discussion of speculative technologies to introduce topics of fundamental physics to the reader. The topic of invisibility becomes a discussion on why the speed of light is slower in water than in vacuum, that electromagnetism is similar to ripples in a pond, and Kaku discusses newly developed composite materials. The topic of Star Trek "phasers" becomes a lesson on how lasers work and how laser-based research is conducted. The cover of his book depicts a TARDIS, a device used in the British science fiction television show Doctor Who to travel in space and time, in its disguise as a police box, continuously passing through a time loop. With each discussion of science fiction technology topics he also "explains the hurdles to realizing these science fiction concepts as reality".
Point of Inquiry is the radio show and flagship podcast of the Center for Inquiry (CFI), "a think tank promoting science, reason, and secular values in public policy and at the grass roots". Started in 2005, Point of Inquiry has consistently been ranked among the best science podcasts available in iTunes. It has been celebrated for its guests and for the quality of its interviews. Former guests include leading scientists, writers and public intellectuals such as Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Paul Krugman, Lisa Randall, Brian Greene, Oliver Sacks, Susan Jacoby, David Brin and Temple Grandin.
Stuff You Should Know, often abbreviated as SYSK, is a podcast and video series published by Stuff Media and hosted by Josh Clark and Charles W. "Chuck" Bryant, both writers at HowStuffWorks. Since debuting in 2008, the podcast is consistently ranked in the Top 10 on iTunes and is one of the most popular podcasts in the world, being downloaded millions of times each month.
The Symphony of Science is a music project created by Washington-based electronic musician John D. Boswell. The project seeks to "spread scientific knowledge and philosophy through musical remixes." Boswell uses pitch-corrected audio and video samples from television programs featuring popular educators and scientists. The audio and video clips are mixed into digital mashups and scored with Boswell's original compositions. Two of Boswell's music videos, "A Glorious Dawn" and "We are All Connected", feature appearances from Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, and Stephen Hawking. The audio and video is sampled from popular science television shows including Cosmos, The Universe, The Eyes of Nye, The Elegant Universe, and Stephen Hawking's Universe.
Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 is a 2011 book by theoretical physicist Michio Kaku, author of Hyperspace and Physics of the Impossible. In it Kaku speculates about possible future technological development over the next 100 years. He interviews notable scientists about their fields of research and lays out his vision of coming developments in medicine, computing, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and energy production. The book was on the New York Times Bestseller List for five weeks.
Madhulika (Lika) Guhathakurta is an American Astrophysicist and scientist with NASA's Heliophysics Science Division. She was the lead program scientist for NASA's Living With a Star initiative and serves as program scientist on the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), Van Allen Probes, and Solar TErrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) missions. Lika was previously the program scientist on SPARTAN-201, a free-flying science instrument platform designed to study velocity and acceleration of the solar wind and observe the sun's corona. These missions were conducted as part of the larger STS-56, STS-69, STS-77, STS-87, and STS-95 mission objectives. She has worked as an educator, scientist, mission designer, directed and managed science programs, and has built instruments for spacecraft. Dr. Guhathakurta is known for her work in heliophysics where she has authored over 70 publications on the subject. She served as the NASA Lead Scientist for the North American Solar eclipse of August 21, 2017.
Brady John Haran is an Australian-British independent filmmaker and video journalist who produces educational videos and documentary films for his YouTube channels, the most notable being Periodic Videos and Numberphile. Haran is also the co-host of the Hello Internet podcast along with fellow educational YouTuber CGP Grey. On 22 August 2017, Haran launched his second podcast, called The Unmade Podcast, and on 11 November 2018, he launched his third podcast, The Numberphile Podcast, based on his mathematics-centered channel of the same name.
The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind is a popular science book by the futurist and physicist Michio Kaku. The book was initially published on February 25, 2014 by Doubleday.
James Edward Baggott is a British science writer living in Reading, Berkshire, England who writes about science, philosophy and science history. Baggott is the author of nine books, including Farewell to Reality: How Modern Physics Has Betrayed the Search for Scientific Truth, Origins: The Scientific Story of Creation, Higgs: The Invention and Discovery of the God Particle and The Quantum Story: A History in 40 moments.
Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century is a popular science book by Michio Kaku first published in 1997. In Visions, Kaku examines the great scientific revolutions that have dramatically reshaped the twentieth century, namely quantum mechanics, biotechnology, and artificial intelligence and shows how they will change and alter science and the way we live.
