The Story Collider

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 megaphone.fm/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 megaphone.fm/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

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 megaphone.fm/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 s

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 megaphone.fm/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 megaphone.fm/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 megaphone.fm/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 megaphone.fm/adchoices

Darcy Burke's mother gave her a book on mountain lions, and it had the effect that every science writer wishes their book will have. Kind of. 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 megaphone.fm/adchoices

As a new, super competitive, graduate student Aditi thinks she has the perfect way to impress her advisor and labmates ... until one night it spirals a tiny bit out of control. Aditi is a New York-based cancer researcher and a freelance science and creative writer; her occupations are a miscellany of creative pursuits. Every week the Story Collider brings you a true, personal story about science. Find more here: http://storycollider.org/. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kimberly Rae Miller's family had a secret: her dad was a hoarder. But when she begins digging into the research on hoarding, she finds it's not nearly as simple to fix as she'd hoped. Kimberly Rae Miller is a writer living in New York City. She haswritten for Yahoo!'s Shine, Figure magazine, and contributed to CBS Radio/CBS New York. In 2010, Kim was featured in Katharine Sise's career guide Creative Girl. She blogs at TheKimChallenge.com. Her memoir, Coming Clean, will be published by Amazon Publishing July 23rd. Every week the Story Collider brings you a true, personal story about science. Find more here: http://storycollider.org/. If you enjoy these stories, please consider donating, http://storycollider.org/donate Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sara Peters has epilepsy, but no drugs seem to help. So she agrees to be hooked up to a machine at the hospital for days, in hopes of inducing the one thing she and her husband, Peter Aguero, dread the most: a seizure. Recorded at TEDMED 2013. Video: http://tedmed.com/talks/show?id=189377 Originally from New Jersey, Sara Peters now lives in Sunnyside, Queens with her charming, maddening husband. A tech writer whose work focuses on IT security, she is currently editor-in-chief of a Web publication for IT professionals. Sara is also a storyteller and actor. Onstage she's played a Texan housewife, an Oklahoman spinster, an Irish housekeeper, and an English android. She's been a rower, a ballerina, a track runner, a Hula Hoop instructor, and is an occasional and very poor surfer. Her favorite television show is Naruto, which is a Japanese cartoon about a teenage ninja. Peter Aguero was born and raised in the wilds of South Jersey. He is a Moth Grandslam Champion, host of Moth Storylams and an instructor for the M

When Ben Moskowitz gets to take special classes in elementary school, he's excited at first, but then he starts to realize there might be something different about him. Ben Moskowitz is from Glen St. Mary, Florida. He works as an audiovisual preservationist at New York University. He is a Moth GrandSlam Champion and a pretty nice guy. He currently lives in Brooklyn with his two cats, Scotty and Viva. Every week the Story Collider brings you a true, personal story about science. Find more here: http://storycollider.org/. If you enjoy these stories, please consider donating, http://storycollider.org/donate Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Science writer Alex Brown's philosophical education becomes very practical when he is diagnosed with meningitis. Every week the Story Collider brings you a true, personal story about science. Find more here: http://storycollider.org/ Alex Brown has a BSc Natural Sciences from the University of Bath and will soon graduate with an MSc Science Communication from the University of the West of England. He currently works in administration in a lab in Geneva, Switzerland. He is also fascinated by the interaction between languages and science, which he blogs about on "Do You Speak Science?" hosted by SciLogs.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Three years after a mysterious illness nearly drove her insane and took her life, Susannah Cahalan visits a patient with the same rare, dangerous condition. Every week the Story Collider brings you a true, personal story about science. Find more here: http://storycollider.org/ Susannah Cahalan is the New York Times bestselling author of "Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness." She began her investigative reporting career at The New York Post when she took an internship her senior year of high school. She has now been at The Post for ten years, three of which she worked full-time after graduating from Washington University in St. Louis. Her work has also been featured in The New York Times, Scientific American, and Glamour UK. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Elna Baker's grade school reputation faces it's greatest threat: her engineer father's enthusiasm for homework. Every week the Story Collider brings you a true, personal story about science. Find more here: http://storycollider.org/ Elna Baker is a writer and comedic storyteller. She's appeared on The Moth Radio Hour, This American Life, BBC Radio 4, All Things Considered, WTF with Marc Maron, Studio 360, The Sound of Young America, The Joy Behar Show and at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater. She's written for ELLE, Glamour, Men's Journal, O Magazine, More Magazine, Five Dials Literary Journal and xoJane.com. Her memoir The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance was published by Penguin, earning four stars in People Magazine and the 2010 AML award for best humor writing. She's also the co-host and co-creator of The Talent Show, recently named best variety show by New York Magazine. Her upcoming novel You Are My Revenge, co-written with Kevin Townley, will be published by Scholastic in 2014. Learn

A physicist decides that the best way to make progress on his robotics project is to go to Namibia to study termites. Every week the Story Collider brings you a true, personal story about science. Find more here: http://storycollider.org/ Justin Werfel is a research scientist at Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. He received his PhD at MIT and did postdoctoral work at Harvard and the New England Complex Systems Institute. He works on topics including swarm robotics, evolutionary theory, DNA self-assembly, and cancer modeling, and recently published an invited book chapter about the ecology of Fraggle Rock. He's a two-time MassMouth Big Mouth Off finalist and Audience Choice winner. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Science writer Seth Mnookin set out to write a book on whether vaccines were dangerous, but discovered the issue was more complex than he'd thought. Every week the Story Collider brings you a true, personal story about science. Find more here: http://storycollider.org/ Seth Mnookin teaches in MIT's Graduate Program in Science Writing. His most recent book, The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy, was one of The Wall Street Journal's Top Five Health and Medicine books for 2011 and is a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He is also the author of the 2006 New York Times-bestseller Feeding the Monster and 2004's Hard News, which was a Washington Post Best Book of the Year. He's a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and blogs at the Public Library of Science. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As grad school for neuroscience wears on, Michael Nitabach feels the pull of law school, and goes. But he had another surprise coming. Every week the Story Collider brings you a true, personal story about science. Find more here: storycollider.org/ Mike Nitabach is Associate Professor of Cellular & Molecular Physiology and of Genetics at Yale School of Medicine, where he directs a research program aimed at understanding how neural circuits process information and control behavior. He received his PhD at Columbia University and post-doctoral training at NYU. He also made a detour between graduate school and post-doctoral training to law school at NYU, and practiced law for five years at Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy LLP, where he focused on biotech and pharmaceutical patent prosecution and litigation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices