Shows
SoonishThe Otherworldly Power of a Total EclipseThe most important piece of advice David Baron ever got: “Before you die, you owe it to yourself to see a total solar eclipse.”The recommendation came from the Williams College astronomer Jay Pasachoff, a beloved teacher and textbook author, after Baron interviewed him for a 1994 radio story. Baron listened—and it changed his life. He saw his first eclipse in Aruba in 1998, and has since become a true umbraphile. The upcoming eclipse of April 8, 2024, will be the ninth one he’s witnessed.A veteran science journalist and former NPR science correspondent, Baron joined Soonish from his...
2024-03-181h 08
The SoCon Report Podcast365 Days of LIFE #AfterRoe: How Life Has Changed One Year After the Overturn of Roe v. Wade | SoConReport Ep.281 year ago today, life won. Roe v. Wade was overturned. On June 24, 2022, The Supreme Court came to the conclusion that Roe v. Wade was “egregiously wrong” and incorrectly decided. After years of limiting the extent to which states and Congress could protect unborn children, the Court finally returned the issue back to the
One year after the overturn of Roe v. Wade, there is still much work to be done. While some states have taken bold steps to protect babies, many need far stronger protections and some are even radically pro-abortion. And the needs extend beyond policies: in al...
2023-06-2430 minThe SoCon Report Podcast365 Days of LIFE #AfterRoe: How Life Has Changed One Year After the Overturn of Roe v. Wade | SoConReport Ep.281 year ago today, life won. Roe v. Wade was overturned. On June 24, 2022, The Supreme Court came to the conclusion that Roe v. Wade was “egregiously wrong” and incorrectly decided. After years of limiting the extent to which states and Congress could protect unborn children, the Court finally returned the issue back to the
One year after the overturn of Roe v. Wade, there is still much work to be done. While some states have taken bold steps to protect babies, many need far stronger protections and some are even radically pro-abortion. And the needs extend beyond policies: in al...
2023-06-2430 min
New Books in Science, Technology, and SocietyExtraterrestrialsAn interview with Wade Roush, author of Extraterrestrials, from The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series. Are we alone in the universe? If not, where is everybody? And which might be more meaningful?Soundtrack produced by artist and author of High Static, Dead Lines (Strange Attractor Press, December 2018) Kristen Gallerneaux.Everything we know about how planets form and how life arises suggests that human civilization on Earth should not be unique. We ought to see abundant evidence of extraterrestrial activity--but we don't. Where is everybody? In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, science and...
2023-05-0216 min
New Books in Big IdeasExtraterrestrialsAn interview with Wade Roush, author of Extraterrestrials, from The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series. Are we alone in the universe? If not, where is everybody? And which might be more meaningful?Soundtrack produced by artist and author of High Static, Dead Lines (Strange Attractor Press, December 2018) Kristen Gallerneaux.Everything we know about how planets form and how life arises suggests that human civilization on Earth should not be unique. We ought to see abundant evidence of extraterrestrial activity--but we don't. Where is everybody? In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, science and...
2023-04-2716 min
The MIT Press PodcastExtraterrestrialsAn interview with Wade Roush, author of Extraterrestrials, from The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series. Are we alone in the universe? If not, where is everybody? And which might be more meaningful?Soundtrack produced by artist and author of High Static, Dead Lines (Strange Attractor Press, December 2018) Kristen Gallerneaux.Everything we know about how planets form and how life arises suggests that human civilization on Earth should not be unique. We ought to see abundant evidence of extraterrestrial activity--but we don't. Where is everybody? In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, science and...
2023-04-2716 min
"Join The Conversation" with George Christopher ThomasEpisode #10 -- Interview with Dr. Wade Roush (Ph.D. from MIT, Climate Change Activist, Science Journalist)Dr. Wade Roush Interview.
Keywords: Harvard, MIT, Technology, Drake Equation, Fermi Paradox, Brainwaves, Futurism, Sea Level Rise, Aliens, White House, Weather.
2022-04-1647 min
Innovation AnsweredWho are the Unsung Persistent Innovators?In our Persistent Innovators miniseries, InnoLead and Wade Roush explored the cultures of four large companies that have pushed the innovation envelope for decades: Disney, Apple, Lego, and Novartis. But who else deserves recognition? From making pizza ever more convenient at Domino's, to finding new markets at FujiFilm, we dissect the practices and strategies at six more persistently-innovative companies, with input from guests like Bill Taylor, Braden Kelley, and Rita McGrath. Special thanks to our friends at PatSnap and Innovation Academy for sponsoring this miniseries.
2022-03-2225 min
SoonishHow Novartis Built a Hit Factory for New DrugsWhen you hear people use the phrase "It's a hits-driven business," they're usually talking about venture capital, TV production, videogames, or pop music—all industries where you don't make much money unless you come up with at least one (and preferably a string of) massively popular products. But you know what's another hits-driven business? Drug development. This week, we present the fourth and final episode in the Persistent Innovators miniseries, originally produced for InnoLead's Innovation Answered podcast and republished here for Soonish listeners. It's all about the giant Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis, maker of more than a dozen blockbuster dru...
2022-03-121h 00
SoonishHow LEGO Learned to Click AgainLEGO is so omnipresent in today’s culture—through its stores, its theme parks, its movies, and of course its construction kits—that it’s hard to imagine a world not strewn with billions of colorful plastic LEGO bricks. Yet less than two decades ago, in 2003, the company came close to extinction, thanks to a frenetic bout of new-product introductions that left out LEGO’s core customers: the kids and adults who just love to build stuff with bricks. In today’s episode of Soonish, hear how the family-owned company behind the LEGO “system of play” recovered from this near-death exper...
2022-02-2655 min
Innovation AnsweredWhat Makes LEGO a Persistent Innovator?LEGO is one of the world’s most famous and admired brands. The company’s colorful plastic bricks are the literal building blocks of an empire that spans a $5 billion annual toy business, hundreds of retail stores, 10 theme parks, and a series of hit movies. But what LEGO actually sells isn’t just the bricks, it’s a whole system of play: an endlessly expandable way for children (and adults) to combine hand, eye, and imagination. It was when product developers drifted away from that system in the 1990s and early 2000s—introducing a blizzard of toy lines that...
2022-02-1452 min
SoonishArt and Technology at DisneyThis week, Soonish presents Part 2 of The Persistent Innovators, a miniseries I've been guest-producing and guest-hosting for Innovation Answered, InnoLead's podcast for people with creative roles inside big companies. You can think of Persistent Innovators as the corporate equivalent of human super-agers—meaning they don’t settle into a complacent old age, but manage to keep reinventing themselves and their products decade after decade. Two weeks ago I republished the miniseries' debut episode about Apple, and now I want to bring you the next episode, about The Walt Disney Company. As you'll hear, I focused on how the rise of n...
2022-02-1254 min
Innovation AnsweredWhat Makes Disney a Persistent Innovator?Disney isn’t the world’s largest media company—that title goes to Comcast. But it’s probably the one that has burrowed the deepest into our psyches. As it approaches its 100th birthday in 2023, The Walt Disney Co. not only dominates in its original field of feature animation, but also operates some of the world’s most famous film studios (Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, 20th Century, Searchlight), television and streaming networks (ABC, ESPN, National Geographic, Hulu, Disney+), and theme park resorts. And to generate the content and experiences that power all of those properties, it marries the latest media technologies with story...
2022-01-3151 min
SoonishThe Reinvention of AppleThis week, I've got something different for Soonish listeners. I'm sharing Part 1 of "The Persistent Innovators," a miniseries I'm currently guest-producing and guest-hosting for InnoLead's podcast Innovation Answered. The big question the series tackles is: "How do big companies become innovative—and stay innovative?" I'm looking at four long-lived global companies—Apple, Disney, LEGO, and Novartis—and asking how they've all stayed creative and curious long past the age when most companies stop innovating and decide to coast on profits from their existing businesses. For this initial episode, I traced Apple's evolution from a renegade upstart in the ear...
2022-01-2954 min
Innovation AnsweredWhat Makes Apple a Persistent Innovator?If you want to understand how some large organizations manage to keep innovating, decade after decade, you need to study the companies that actually do that. And Apple is at the top of the list. Thanks largely to sales of its world-conquering iPhone, it recently became the first company in the world to reach a $3 trillion market capitalization. But Apple’s journey toward “persistent innovator” status started long before the iPhone’s introduction in 2007. In this first episode of our Persistent Innovators miniseries, guest host and producer Wade Roush travels back to the 1980s and 1990s, to talk with people w...
2022-01-1850 minInnovation AnsweredSneak Preview: Our New Season on Persistently Innovative CompaniesThere’s a great quote in David Robertson and Bill Breen’s book Brick by Brick, a look inside The LEGO Group. They write, “The most difficult challenge in business is not to invent an innovative product; it’s to build an organization that can continually create innovative products.” How companies can become innovative and stay that way is the focus of a special series coming soon from Innovation Answered, the podcast for corporate innovators. We’ll be looking at big, established companies like LEGO, Apple, and Disney and asking what makes them so successful decade after decade and how they bou...
2021-12-2015 min
SoonishThis Is How You Win the Time WarClock time is a human invention. So it shouldn’t be a box that confines us; it should be a tool that helps us accomplish the things we care about.But consider the system of standard time, first imposed by the railroad companies in the 1880s. It constrains people who live 1,000 miles apart—on opposite edges of their time zones—to get up and go to work or go to school at the same time, even though their local sunrise and sunset times may vary by an hour or more.And it also consigns people like m...
2021-11-0451 min
SoonishGoodbye, GoogleWhat if a technology company becomes so rich, so powerful, so exploitative, and so oblivious that that the harm it's doing begins to outweigh the quality and utility of its products? What if that company happens to run the world's dominant search, advertising, email, web, and mobile platforms? This month's episode of Soonish argues that it's time to rein in Google—and that individual internet users can play a meaningful part by switching to other tools and providers. It's half stem-winder, half how-to, featuring special guest Mark Hurst of the WFMU radio show and podcast Techtonic.* * * B...
2021-06-2542 min
SoonishFusion! And Other Ways to Put the Adventure Back in Venture CapitalVenture capital is the fuel powering most technology startups. Behind every future Google or Uber or Snapchat is a syndicate of venture firms hoping for outsize financial returns. But the vast majority of venture money goes into Internet, mobile, and software companies where consumer demand and the path to market are plain. So what happens to entrepreneurs with risky, unproven, but potentially world-changing ideas in areas like zero-carbon energy or growing replacement human organs? If it weren't for an MIT-born venture firm called The Engine and a tiny handful of other venture firms tackling "Tough Tech," they'd probably never...
2021-05-1838 min
SoonishHope for Ultra-Rare DiseasesIn this episode of Soonish you'll meet Stanley Crooke, the former CEO of Ionis Pharmaceuticals and the head of a new nonprofit called N-Lorem, which is working to make mutation-correcting "antisense oligonucleotide" drugs available free for life to people with uncommon genetic diseases. These are conditions so rare they often don't have a name. But while the diseases themselves are unusual, the problem isn't: as many as 350 million people worldwide are thought to carry mutations that give rise to unique "N of 1" health problems.The debut of hyper-personalized antisense medicines is a topic I covered i...
2021-04-3045 min
Kentucky Sports Radio Podcast Network11 Personnel E90: Kiyaunta Goodwin and the Wade Twins are WildcatsAn historic recruiting weekend for the Kentucky football team calls for an emergency Saturday night podcast. Nick Roush and Adam Luckett break down what the high-profile additions of Kiyaunta Goodwin, Keaten and Destin Wade mean for the Wildcats' future. Highlights:
Goodwin's athleticism is unparalleled to humans his size.
How UK kept "chipping away" to win big.
The role the Big Blue Wall played to get Goodwin.
Stoops has successfully built a fence around the state.
Stealing players from the state of Tennessee from the Vols is glorious.
Keaten Wade is the perfect fit in UK's defense.
Destin Wade is mu...
2021-04-1839 min
11 PersonnelKiyaunta Goodwin and the Wade Twins are WildcatsAn historic recruiting weekend for the Kentucky football team calls for an emergency Saturday night podcast. Nick Roush and Adam Luckett break down what the high-profile additions of Kiyaunta Goodwin, Keaten and Destin Wade mean for the Wildcats' future. Highlights:
Goodwin's athleticism is unparalleled to humans his size.
How UK kept "chipping away" to win big.
The role the Big Blue Wall played to get Goodwin.
Stoops has successfully built a fence around the state.
Stealing players from the state of Tennessee from the Vols is glorious.
Keaten Wade is the perfect fit in UK's defense.
Destin Wade is mu...
2021-04-1839 min
SoonishTechnology and Education After the PandemicThe coronavirus pandemic has had a devastating impact on education on schools around the world, often rendering in-classroom instruction too dangerous for both students and teachers. But one reason the effects of the pandemic haven’t been even worse is that, in education as in many other fields, a few new technologies were ready for broader deployment.I’m not talking about Zoom and other forms of videoconferencing, which have by and large been a disaster for both K-12 and college students. Rather, I’m talking about massive open online courses, or MOOCs, as well as the huge b...
2021-02-0339 min
Soonish"We've Needed Something to Bring Us Together"In honor of the inauguration of Joseph R. Biden—a day of long-awaited endings and new beginnings—I'm republishing my Season 2 opener, "Shadows of August," which I first released a little more than three years ago, during the the fiery early months of the Trump presidency. On a road trip to southern Illinois to witness the total eclipse that sliced across the continent on August 21, 2017, I had a couple of other adventures: at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, I unintentionally got conscripted as a fake Confederate soldier in a bizarre reenactment of Pickett's Charge. I also met a few of the Black resi...
2021-01-2045 min
What The If?SOLSTICE Special: Paul McAULEY Shrinks The SUN!Happy Holidays from WTiF! In honor of the SOLSTICE this week, we present an encore of one of our most popular episodes. Enjoy!
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The incredible Science Fiction author PAUL McAULEY joins us to celebrate episode 100!
With a preview of the science behind his upcoming novel, WAR OF THE MAPS, Paul asks: What The IF we could save the Earth from the inevitable death of the Sun!
It's gonna be a lotta work! First we've gotta MOVE the Earth outward when the Sun expands into a RED GIANT, then we need to HUDDLE UP close (!) when the Sun shrinks into...
2020-12-2546 minWhat The If?SOLSTICE Special: Paul McAULEY Shrinks The SUN!Happy Holidays from WTiF! In honor of the SOLSTICE this week, we present an encore of one of our most popular episodes. Enjoy!
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The incredible Science Fiction author PAUL McAULEY joins us to celebrate episode 100!
With a preview of the science behind his upcoming novel, WAR OF THE MAPS, Paul asks: What The IF we could save the Earth from the inevitable death of the Sun!
It's gonna be a lotta work! First we've gotta MOVE the Earth outward when the Sun expands into a RED GIANT, then we need to HUDDLE UP close (!) when the Sun shrinks into...
2020-12-2546 min
SoonishThe Inventor of the Cell Phone Says the Future Is Still CallingIn 1973, there was only one man who believed everyone on Earth would want and need a cell phone. That man was a Motorola engineer named Martin Cooper.“I had a science fiction prediction,” Cooper recounts in his new memoir, Cutting the Cord: The Inventor of the Cell Phone Speaks Out. “I told anyone who would listen that, someday, every person would be issued a phone number at birth. If someone called and you didn’t answer, that would mean you had died.”Your email address or Facebook profile may have displaced your phone number as the marker...
2020-12-1841 min
SoonishThe End of the BeginningSoonish's six-month detour into electoral politics finishes where it started, with a conversation with our favorite futurist, Jamais Cascio. We talked late on November 6—when it was already clear that Joseph R. Biden would win the presidential race, but before the networks had officially called it—and we explored what Biden's unexpectedly narrow win will mean for progress against the pandemic; for the fortunes of the progressive left; and for the future of democracy in the United States.Turning Donald Trump out of office was an enormous and crucial accomplishment, and Biden voters should take a moment to c...
2020-11-1555 min
SoonishAmerican Reckoning, Part 2: A New Kind of NationWelcome to a special two-part series about the looming clash over the future of America. In Part 1, we looked at the tattered state of our democracy and searched for peaceful ways through an election season in which one candidate—Trump—has threatened violence and disruption if he doesn’t win. Here in Part 2, we look at the work waiting for us after the election: fixing the way we govern ourselves so that we’ll never have another president like Trump or another year like 2020.The real breakdowns in our system go much deeper than Trump—hence the cliché tha...
2020-10-1241 min
SoonishAmerican Reckoning, Part 1: Civil Wars and How to Stop ThemWelcome to a special two-part series about the looming clash over the future of America. In Part 1, we look at the tattered state of our democracy as the election approaches, and we assess nonviolent ways to respond to the twin threats of political polarization and President Trump's thuggish behavior. Part 2 is coming October 12.These are probably the last two pre-election episodes I’ll make, so I decided to try something a little ambitious and probably a little crazy: making sense of 2020 in all its perverse complexity. It’s a cliché at this point to say that Donald Trump...
2020-10-0953 min
SoonishAfter Trump, What Comes Next?Donald Trump will not be president forever. Whether he leaves office in 2021 or 2025; whether he steps down peacefully or not; whether he’s replaced by a Democratic president or a Republican one—he will leave. And then the country will face the immense task of restoring democratic norms and facing up to the failings that allowed a populist, white-nationalist demagogue like Trump to reach office in the first place.In this episode, with help from University of Chicago political scientist Will Howell, we look at the leading explanations for Trump’s rise and the competing ideas about ways t...
2020-09-1536 min
SoonishUnpeaceful Transition of PowerVoters, hold on to your hats. The U.S. election system could face an unprecedented array of challenges in November, from the coronavirus pandemic to the prospect of cyberattacks to the depradations of President Trump himself. And that means there’s a non-zero chance that the election will misfire, leaving us with the wrong president—or no president at all—come noon on January 20, 2021.At least, that’s the argument legal scholar Lawrence Douglas lays out in Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Election Meltdown in 2020, a new book that goes into extreme and eye-opening detail about th...
2020-06-2448 min
Faith Driven InvestorEpisode 25 - Planning for the Exit with Wade MyersWelcome back to the Faith Driven Investor podcast. Today’s guest is the survivor of a parachute failure. Seriously. And while that was shocking to us, during our conversation with Wade Myers, we found that that is only one of the many many interesting things about him. He joined us today to talk about small business exit strategies, how investors and entrepreneurs alike can plan for them, and what it looks like to finish well.As always, thanks for listening.Useful Links:Every Entrepreneur Needs to Think About Exit StrategyW...
2020-06-0844 min
SoonishBrittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, Incomprehensible: How One Futurist Frames the PandemicFuturists—who sometimes prefer to be called scenario planners or foresight thinkers—specialize in helping the rest of us understand the big trends and forces that will shape the world of tomorrow. So here’s what I really wanted to ask one: Is a cataclysm like the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 the kind of event we should be able to see coming? If so, then why didn’t we do more to get ready? Why has the federal government’s response to the spread of covid-19 been so inept? And above all, what should we be doing now to get our politi...
2020-05-1236 min
Plastisphere: A podcast on plastic pollution in the environmentPlastics and the CoronavirusFor this episode, Anja tried something new: She asked listeners, researchers and podcasters to send her audio comments on what is happening now during the coronavirus pandemic. In this episode, you’ll hear some of the messages that arrived in her inbox the past weeks. With input from Justine Ammendolia, Wade Roush, Brooke Bauman, Sedat Gündoğdu, Jacqui Kidman, Susanne Brander, Rebecca Altman, Sydney Harris, Tridibesh Dey and Merijn Tinga. Audio from Hong Kong by Gary Stokes.
The Plastisphere is a research and interview podcast by German freelance journalist Anja Krieger.
Subscribe: www.plastisphere.earth
Transcript with links and (comi...
2020-04-2837 min
IT VisionariesWhat Does Sustainability Mean Today?Throughout the years, the idea of sustainability has changed and the metrics by which we measure how sustainable we are have shifted. So where are we on the sustainability timeline? And what should we be focusing on to become more sustainable in business and in life? To answer those questions is Science journalist Wade Roush, and Patrick Flynn, the Vice President of Sustainability at Salesforce. On this episode of IT Visionaries, they discuss the current state of the sustainability efforts, as well as the lessons they’ve learned from the past and how to prepare for and evolve in th...
2020-04-2848 min
New Books in TechnologyWade Roush, "Extraterrestrials" (MIT Press, 2020)Everything we know about how planets form and how life arises suggests that human civilization on Earth should not be unique. We ought to see abundant evidence of extraterrestrial activity―but we don't. Where is everybody? In Extraterrestrials (MIT Press, 2020), science and technology writer Wade Roush examines one of the great unsolved problems in science: is there life, intelligent or otherwise, on other planets?This paradox (they're bound to be out there; but where are they?), first formulated by the famed physicist Enrico Fermi, has fueled decades of debate, speculation, and, lately, some actual science. Roush lays ou...
2020-04-2754 min
New Books in ScienceWade Roush, "Extraterrestrials" (MIT Press, 2020)Everything we know about how planets form and how life arises suggests that human civilization on Earth should not be unique. We ought to see abundant evidence of extraterrestrial activity―but we don't. Where is everybody? In Extraterrestrials (MIT Press, 2020), science and technology writer Wade Roush examines one of the great unsolved problems in science: is there life, intelligent or otherwise, on other planets?This paradox (they're bound to be out there; but where are they?), first formulated by the famed physicist Enrico Fermi, has fueled decades of debate, speculation, and, lately, some actual science. Roush lays ou...
2020-04-2754 min
New Books in Big IdeasWade Roush, "Extraterrestrials" (MIT Press, 2020)Everything we know about how planets form and how life arises suggests that human civilization on Earth should not be unique. We ought to see abundant evidence of extraterrestrial activity―but we don't. Where is everybody? In Extraterrestrials (MIT Press, 2020), science and technology writer Wade Roush examines one of the great unsolved problems in science: is there life, intelligent or otherwise, on other planets?This paradox (they're bound to be out there; but where are they?), first formulated by the famed physicist Enrico Fermi, has fueled decades of debate, speculation, and, lately, some actual science. Roush lays ou...
2020-04-2754 min
The MIT Press PodcastWade Roush, "Extraterrestrials" (MIT Press, 2020)Everything we know about how planets form and how life arises suggests that human civilization on Earth should not be unique. We ought to see abundant evidence of extraterrestrial activity―but we don't. Where is everybody? In Extraterrestrials (MIT Press, 2020), science and technology writer Wade Roush examines one of the great unsolved problems in science: is there life, intelligent or otherwise, on other planets?This paradox (they're bound to be out there; but where are they?), first formulated by the famed physicist Enrico Fermi, has fueled decades of debate, speculation, and, lately, some actual science. Roush lays ou...
2020-04-2754 min
New Books in Biology and EvolutionWade Roush, "Extraterrestrials" (MIT Press, 2020)Everything we know about how planets form and how life arises suggests that human civilization on Earth should not be unique. We ought to see abundant evidence of extraterrestrial activity―but we don't. Where is everybody? In Extraterrestrials (MIT Press, 2020), science and technology writer Wade Roush examines one of the great unsolved problems in science: is there life, intelligent or otherwise, on other planets?This paradox (they're bound to be out there; but where are they?), first formulated by the famed physicist Enrico Fermi, has fueled decades of debate, speculation, and, lately, some actual science. Roush lays ou...
2020-04-2754 min
Begin The Breakthrough Full Audiobook Now, Thriller Fans!Extraterrestrials by Wade RoushPlease visithttps://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/406382to listen full audiobooks.
Title: Extraterrestrials
Author: Wade Roush
Narrator: Rick Adamson
Format: Unabridged Audiobook
Length: 4 hours 47 minutes
Release date: April 7, 2020
Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1
Genres: Medicine & Naturopathy
Publisher's Summary:
Everything we know about how planets form and how life arises suggests that human civilization on Earth should not be unique. We ought to see abundant evidence of extraterrestrial activity—but we don't. Where is everybody? In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, science and technology writer Wade Roush examines one of the great unsolved problems in science: is th...
2020-04-074h 47
Absorb The Sensational Full Audiobook Now, Thriller Fans!Extraterrestrials by Wade RoushPlease visithttps://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/2/audible/235397to listen full audiobooks.
Title: Extraterrestrials
Author: Wade Roush
Narrator: Rick Adamson
Format: mp3
Length: 4 hrs and 46 mins
Release date: 04-07-20
Ratings: 4.5 out of 5 stars, 9 ratings
Genres: Astronomy
Publisher's Summary:
2020-04-074h 46
The Wow! Signal PodcastExtraterrestrialsReleased: 6 April 2020 Duration: 53 minutes, 55 seconds Author and podcaster Wade Roush talks about his forthcoming book from MIT Press, Extraterrestrials. The book covers astrobiology, SETI, the Fermi paradox and more for a literate but non-specialist audience. WADE ROUSH, a Boston-based science and technology journalist, is a columnist at Scientific American and the producer and host of Soonish, an independent podcast about the future. He has served as Boston bureau reporter for Science, senior editor and San Francisco bureau chief at MIT Technology Review, chief correspondent and San Francisco editor for Xconomy, and a...
2020-04-0653 min
The Constant: A History of Getting Things WrongThe Foolkiller Pt 5: The White WhaleHere we are. We've examined arctic explorers, secret armies, zany daredevils, Wisconsin whiz kids and so many more only to come up empty. This is the end of the rope. Can we solve the mystery of The Foolkiller, the submarine discovered in the Chicago River in 1915, or is this one just meant to be a mystery forever. Stick around and find out. Get a free trial of The Great Courses Plus and three months of unlimited access for just $30 dollars by going to https://www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/theconstant (https://www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/theconstant)Get 10% off your first month of...
2020-03-101h 51
IconographyA Tale of Two Bridges (3rd Birthday Special w/ Wade Roush of Soonish)Iconography started three years ago with an episode about two neighboring bridges in the heart of London. Now, for our third birthday, Wade Roush of fellow Hub & Spoke show Sooinsh brings us the story of two Boston bridges that share a similar story, though that story has a very different ending. Stick around after Wade's story to hear him and me chat about what makes bridges so iconic and what Spider-Man, Magneto, and Godzilla have to do with it.
2019-12-151h 08
SoonishMaking MoonriseFifty years after Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins went to the moon, it’s hard to shake off the afterimage of the Saturn V rocket rising into the sky on a column of flame, and remember that the astronauts' bold adventure was also the product of decades of work by engineers, politicians, propagandists, and even science fiction writers. That’s the gap Lillian Cunningham of the Washington Post set out to fix in her podcast, Moonrise. And she’s here with us today to talk about how the show got made, what she thinks the Apollo story can te...
2019-11-1443 min
Stride & SaunterEpisode 242: A Pale Blue Launch IIWhat would you send into outer space to commemorate Earth and humanity, to a potential audience of alien life? This week, we continue an interview series to tackle that question. In each entry, we’ll interview someone about the five objects - with a stipulation - they would place in a space capsule to launch into the starry beyond. For our second episode, we spoke with Wade Roush about the five objects that he would launch - all of which had to contain wood.
2019-11-0633 min
SoonishElection Dreams and NightmaresThe moment in the voting booth when you put your pen to your ballot (or put your finger to the electronic touchscreen, as the case may be) is democracy distilled. It’s the act that makes America a republic. But while the casting your vote is critical, it’s everything that happens before, during, and after that moment that makes up the larger election system. And these days there are whole armies of people working to influence and disrupt that system—and opposing armies working to protect it and make it safer and more accessible.In this specia...
2019-10-3135 min
SoonishThe Great Blue Hill HeistIn this short bonus episode, hear the bizarre story of a college student who scaled a New England weather tower on a dare, stole a curious scientific instrument as a trophy, and inadvertently disrupted a series of climate observations going back more than 130 years.
I made this four-minute, non-narrated piece in 2018 as part of the 24-Hour Radio Race from KCRW’s Independent Producer Project.
To view the show notes, a photo gallery, and a full transcript visit soonishpodcast.org/307-the-great-blue-hill-heist
The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay.
Additional music is...
2019-08-1906 min
SoonishI Have Seen the Future of DisplaysApple used the opening keynote presentation at its annual World Wide Developers Conference in San Jose in June to roll out the usual array of software updates and new computer hardware. But tucked into middle of the keynote was one the event's most consequential and underappreciated pieces of news: For the first time in more than three years, Apple will offer its own LCD computer monitor, the Pro Display XDR.
It's a serious piece of gear, with 20 million pixels and new techniques for handling light and heat that deliver extremes of brightness, contrast, and color. And it...
2019-08-0728 min
SoonishHow to Fix Social MediaEarlier this year Soonish took on social media in an episode called A Future Without Facebook. In that show I explained my own decision to quit the troubled platform and talked with friends and colleagues about their own reasons for staying or going.
But the story of how these platforms are confounding earlier hopes for social media—and are instead blowing up our democracies—was never just about Facebook. In today’s special follow-up episode, I speak with national security expert Juliette Kayyem and former Twitter engineer Raffi Krikorian about the challenges spanning all of our social media...
2019-07-2434 min
Boston Speaks Up017: Tech-Science Journalist Wade RoushGuest Wade Roush has been covering technology and science for almost 25 years. BostInno readers may recognize Roush from his time serving as staff editor at Xconomy (2007-2014). He’s also written a lot for print magazines, notably Scientific American, MIT Technology Review, and Science. In 2014-15, Roush was acting director of MIT's Knight Science Journalism fellowship program and the producer of the ScienceWriters2015 conference. He recently edited Twelve Tomorrows, a science fiction anthology published by the MIT Press, and recently finished another book for MIT Press, due out spring 2020. Roush’s latest career move piqued our interest as he’s plunge...
2019-07-081h 31
What The If?100 - Paul McAULEY Shrinks The SUN!The incredible Science Fiction author PAUL McAULEY joins us to celebrate episode 100!
With a preview of the science behind his upcoming novel, WAR OF THE MAPS, Paul asks: What The IF we could save the Earth from the inevitable death of the Sun?
It's gonna be a lotta work! First we've gotta MOVE the Earth outward when the Sun expands into a RED GIANT, then we need to HUDDLE UP close when the Sun shrinks into a WHITE DWARF.
Yep, Paul treats us to some EPIC ENGINEERING and ultra vivid SOLAR SCIENCE.
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PAUL McAULEY'S first novel won the Philip...
2019-07-0246 min
What The If?100 - Paul McAULEY Shrinks The SUN!The incredible Science Fiction author PAUL McAULEY joins us to celebrate episode 100!
With a preview of the science behind his upcoming novel, WAR OF THE MAPS, Paul asks: What The IF we could save the Earth from the inevitable death of the Sun?
It's gonna be a lotta work! First we've gotta MOVE the Earth outward when the Sun expands into a RED GIANT, then we need to HUDDLE UP close when the Sun shrinks into a WHITE DWARF.
Yep, Paul treats us to some EPIC ENGINEERING and ultra vivid SOLAR SCIENCE.
---
PAUL McAULEY'S first novel won the Philip...
2019-07-0246 minWhat The If?100 - Paul McAULEY Shrinks The SUN!The incredible Science Fiction author PAUL McAULEY joins us to celebrate episode 100!
With a preview of the science behind his upcoming novel, WAR OF THE MAPS, Paul asks: What The IF we could save the Earth from the inevitable death of the Sun?
It's gonna be a lotta work! First we've gotta MOVE the Earth outward when the Sun expands into a RED GIANT, then we need to HUDDLE UP close when the Sun shrinks into a WHITE DWARF.
Yep, Paul treats us to some EPIC ENGINEERING and ultra vivid SOLAR SCIENCE.
---
PAUL McAULEY'S first novel won the Philip...
2019-07-0246 min
SoonishThe Art that Launched a Thousand RocketsThe adjective “visionary” gets thrown around a lot, but it’s literally true of Chesley Bonestell and Arthur Radebaugh, the two illustrators featured in this week’s episode. Both men used their fertile visual imaginations and their artistic skills to create engaging, influential depictions of human space exploration and our high-tech future. Their work was seen by millions of magazine and newspaper readers throughout the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s—boosting public support for space exploration and industrial R&D at a critical time for the U.S. economy. Now, both men are the subjects of documentary films.
Chesley Bonest...
2019-05-1434 min
Business Lab10 Breakthrough Technologies with Bill Gates[Sponsored] In this episode: Microsoft co-founder and former CEO Bill Gates talks with Gideon Lichfield, MIT Technology Review’s Editor-in-Chief, about the magazine’s new list of 10 Breakthrough Technologies, which Gates curated.The magazine has been publishing its list of 10 Breakthrough Technologies (formerly 10 Emerging Technologies) annually since 2001 as a way to highlight the recent advances that could have the biggest impact in the near future. Usually the magazine’s expert editors and reporters put together the list, but this year we invited a special guest curator, Bill Gates, to share his own perspective on which emerging technologies could m...
2019-03-2819 min
SoonishA Future Without FacebookEvery technology has its growing pains, but Facebook, at age 15, has matured into a never-ending disaster. Here at Soonish, I'm fed up, and I'm closing my accounts. In this episode, you’ll hear how I reached this point, and how other Facebook users are coming to grips with the chronic problems at the social network. You might just come away with some ideas about what to do to limit Facebook’s power over your own life!
The first signs that something was seriously wrong at Facebook surfaced in—well, when?
Was it 2014, when the company acknowledged it had...
2019-03-2244 min
Business LabWhen Our Devices Can Read Our Emotions: Affectiva’s Gabi Zijderveld[Sponsored] In this episode: Emotion-tracking AI is starting to help machines recognize our moods. Are we ready?Personal assistants like Siri, Alexa, Cortana, or Google Home can parse our spoken words and (sometimes) respond appropriately, but they can’t gauge how we’re feeling—in part because they can’t see our faces. But in the emerging field of “emotion-tracking AI,” companies are studying the facial expressions captured by our devices’ cameras to allow software of all kinds become more responsive to our moods and cognitive states.At Affectiva, a Boston startup founded by MIT Media Lab resea...
2019-02-2832 min
Business LabAI Is Real Now: IBM’s Sophie Vandebroek[Sponsored] In this episode: Why there will never be another “AI winter,” and what IBM and MIT are doing together to ensure that. More times than almost any other field of innovation, artificial intelligence has weathered recurring cycles of overinflated hope, followed by disappointment, pessimism, and funding cutbacks. But Sophie Vandebroek, IBM’s vice president of emerging technology partnerships, thinks the AI winters are truly a thing of the past, thanks to the huge amounts of computing power and data now available to train neural networks.In this episode Vandebroek shares examples of real-world applications enabled...
2019-02-2832 min
How Do We Fix It?Getting off Facebook: Wade RoushLife as a teenager is proving traumatic for Facebook. The social media juggernaut turned 15 this month. The company has gone from being universally celebrated for changing the way we communicate, to a troubled adolescent with serious questions about its entire business model. Critics say Facebook ignored hate speech on its site and played down destructive actions by internet trolls and other bad actors. More than two-thirds of American adults are Facebook users, but surveys show that many more of us are increasingly uncomfortable that Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp-- all owned by the same parent company-- know so mu...
2019-02-0824 min
Business LabDeep Learning Hope and Hype: Technology Review’s Will Knight[Sponsored] In this episode: Why researchers at the year’s biggest AI conference focused on how to keep human bias out of computer algorithms.Both the progress and the hype around cutting-edge machine learning techniques were on vivid display at the December 2018 NeurIPS Conference in Montreal, Quebec, says Will Knight, MIT Technology Review’s senior editor for artificial intelligence. One big question hanging over the meeting, Will says, was how to detect and reverse the sexism, racism, and other forms of bias that seep into machine-learning algorithms that train themselves using real-world data. Participants also previewed the comin...
2019-01-3129 min
Business LabHow AI Is Changing Knowledge Work: MIT’s Thomas Malone[Sponsored] In this episode: How the right AI algorithms can help organizations evolve into “superminds” that are smarter than their individual members.Thomas Malone is a professor of management at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, founder and director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, and author of the 2018 book Superminds: The Surprising Power of People and Computers Thinking Together. The book explores the different ways groups of people make decisions, and how new forms of artificial intelligence, especially machine learning, can help. Malone predicts that AI, robotics, and automation will destroy many jobs—including those of high-s...
2019-01-2431 min
Business LabTechnology for Workplaces That Work: Humanyze’s Ben Waber[Sponsored] In this episode: What new kinds of sensor data can tell us about the merits of open offices and remote work.Do open offices foster more collaboration, or just more frustration? Should managers encourage employees to telecommute, or is a scattered workforce less cohesive? The conventional wisdom on these issues swings like a pendulum, and for managers the only constant seems to be anxiety that they’re not getting it right. But new technology may offer some real answers. Ben Waber, a former MIT Media Lab doctoral student, is president and CEO of Humanyze, a Boston sta...
2019-01-2430 min
Business LabHelping Cloud Workers Cope: Google’s Eve Phillips[Sponsored] In this episode: How Google is working to make life in the cloud less confusing and more productive.Google’s Chrome browser and its related operating system, Chrome OS, are among the main on-ramps to “cloud work” for millions of office employees and students. Eve Phillips, Google’s group product manager for Chrome Enterprise and Education, helps to make sure people who use Chrome always have access to the apps and the data they need to get their tasks done. She also thinks a lot about how to make web-based software more user-friendly, and how to minimize...
2019-01-1729 min
The Story ColliderMoments of Truth: Stories about pivotal momentsThis week, we’re presenting two stories about pivotal moments in science when everything suddenly becomes clear.Part 1: When puppeteer Raymond Carr gets the opportunity of a lifetime, to work on a big-budget show about the evolution of dinosaurs, he worries about how his creationist parents will react.Part 2: A trip to the Kennedy Space Center reminds Wade Roush of what originally inspired him to pursue science journalism. Raymond Carr is a Jim Henson Company trained puppeteer who has been performing for more than 15 years. He has traveled to every major city in Nor...
2018-11-3023 min
SoonishThe Track Not TakenThe Meigs Elevated Railway—one of the world’s first monorail systems—looked like something out of a Jules Verne novel. But it was very real. In this week’s episode, hear how nineteenth-century Bostonians missed their chance to build a steam punk utopia.
The monorail system was the brainchild of Joe Meigs, a Civil War veteran and tinkerer who had political and financial backing from Massachusetts governor Benjamin Butler. Meigs envisioned a system that would soar above the streetcar traffic clogging Boston’s streets. Beginning in 1884, thousands of people boarded his distinctive cylindrical train cars for 20-mph rides...
2018-11-0925 min
New Books in Science FictionWade Roush, ed., “Twelve Tomorrows” (MIT Press, 2018)Science fiction is, at its core, about tomorrow—exploring through stories what the universe may look like one or 10 or a million years in the future.
Twelve Tomorrows (MIT Press, 2018) uses short stories to fit nearly a dozen possible “tomorrows” into a single book. Edited by journalist Wade Roush, the collection features stories by Elizabeth Bear, SL Huang, Clifford V. Johnson, J. M. Ledgard, Liu Cixin, Ken Liu, Paul McAuley, Nnedi Okorafor, Malka Older, Sarah Pinsker, and Alastair Reynolds.
The book is the latest in a series of identically titled books launched in 2011 by MIT Technol...
2018-10-1840 minNew Books in TechnologyWade Roush, ed., “Twelve Tomorrows” (MIT Press, 2018)Science fiction is, at its core, about tomorrow—exploring through stories what the universe may look like one or 10 or a million years in the future.
Twelve Tomorrows (MIT Press, 2018) uses short stories to fit nearly a dozen possible “tomorrows” into a single book. Edited by journalist Wade Roush, the collection features stories by Elizabeth Bear, SL Huang, Clifford V. Johnson, J. M. Ledgard, Liu Cixin, Ken Liu, Paul McAuley, Nnedi Okorafor, Malka Older, Sarah Pinsker, and Alastair Reynolds.
The book is the latest in a series of identically titled books launched in 2011 by MIT Technol...
2018-10-1840 minThe MIT Press PodcastWade Roush, ed., “Twelve Tomorrows” (MIT Press, 2018)Science fiction is, at its core, about tomorrow—exploring through stories what the universe may look like one or 10 or a million years in the future.Twelve Tomorrows (MIT Press, 2018) uses short stories to fit nearly a dozen possible “tomorrows” into a single book. Edited by journalist Wade Roush, the collection features stories by Elizabeth Bear, SL Huang, Clifford V. Johnson, J. M. Ledgard, Liu Cixin, Ken Liu, Paul McAuley, Nnedi Okorafor, Malka Older, Sarah Pinsker, and Alastair Reynolds.The book is the latest in a series of identically titled books launched in 2011 by MIT Technol...
2018-10-1839 min
SoonishWhen Minds and Machines ConvergeCan thought-power control the world outside our heads? Thanks to new brain-machine interface technology, the answer is yes. But the real question is whether it can it help us control the world inside our heads. In the Season 3 opener of Soonish we meet Ariel Garten, co-founder of Interaxon, a Canadian startup that’s one of the first to offer a consumer neurofeedback device. Interaxon’s Muse headband reads brainwaves to help people with the sometimes vexing task of meditation. It points toward an era when may be able to control our brain states and share our thoughts directly with our...
2018-10-0130 min
SoonishMaking Music with MachinesWe can’t predict what kind of music people will want to make or hear in the future. But based on the sounds coming out of today's studios and clubs, it's a good bet that the tunes of tomorrow will be heavily mediated by digital technology.
This week’s show asks how software has changed the way composers and performers make music, and how our tools for creating music will evolve in the near future. You’ll meet people using technology on different scales to create scores for film, television, and podcasts, classical canons, and electronic dance music...
2018-07-2740 min
SoonishTomorrow, Today with Ministry of IdeasThe way we picture the future is still based, in large measure, on the visions brought to life at the world’s fairs and international expositions that swept the globe between the 1850s and the 1960s—especially the New York World’s Fairs of 1939-40 and 1964-65, the Seattle World’s Fair of 1962, and Disney World’s EPCOT Center (which is, in essence, a permanent World’s Fair). But the fairs were about much more than technology: they were also about a specific vision of Western dominance, one that treated people from colonized or developing countries as little more than zoo spe...
2018-07-0239 min
SoonishSci-Fi That Takes Science SeriouslyThe golden era of “hard” science fiction that respects the rules of actual science lasted from the 1940s to the 1960s. In the 1970s, demand for hard sci-fi fell off a cliff, with a big push from the first Star Wars movie in 1977. But for the last year and a half, Soonish host Wade Roush has been part of a project to revive this underappreciated genre. This week’s episode is all about Twelve Tomorrows, the new short-story anthology Wade edited for MIT Technology Review and the MIT Press. The episode outlines the book’s mission and origin story. And four...
2018-06-1839 min
SoonishThe Future Is ClearEpisode 2.07: What's ubiquitous but invisible, versatile yet temperamental, goopy when it's hot yet brittle when it's cold, as old as civilization yet as new as the screen of your smartphone? The answer is glass. This week on Soonish, we ask what glass really is, where it comes from, who's using it in interesting ways today, and how it will fit into our world in the future. We visit the world capital of glass—Corning, New York, home to both Corning, Inc., and the remarkable Corning Museum of Glass—and we spend time with master glassblower Josh Simpson and the dire...
2018-02-1735 min
SoonishLooking Virtual Reality In The EyeEpisode 2.06: The immersive, 3D environments of virtual reality aren’t science fiction any more, and they aren’t just for video games. In this episode Wade visits “The Enemy,” a groundbreaking VR exhibit about the psychology of war. The creation of photojournalist Karim Ben Khelifa, it introduces visitors to hyper-realistic avatars based on six real fighters from Israel, El Salvador, and the Congo. It offers a vivid reminder that all conflict is grounded, to some extent, in stereotypes and misperceptions. It also demonstrates that VR has arrived as a powerful new storytelling medium. But could that power be misused for misc...
2018-01-0536 min
SoonishA Space Shuttle Isn't Cool. You Know What's Cool? A Space Elevator (Soonish on Soonish)Episode 2.05 of Soonish, the podcast, is all about Soonish, the book! Host Wade Roush interviews Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, the husband-and-wife team behind the new book Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That’ll Improve and/or Ruin Everything. Kelly Weinersmith is a parasitologist at Rice University and co-host of the podcast Science…Sort of, and Zach Weinersmith is the creator of the wildly popular Web comic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Their book is a funny, fast-paced, loving-but-skeptical look at coming engineering advances that could transform domains like space travel, robotics, and medicine. The episode also features a story about Space Shut...
2017-12-1555 min
SoonishBack To The Futurists With Tamar AvishaiEpisode 2.04 is a special crossover show featuring Tamar Avishai's The Lonely Palette, one of the founding shows in our new podcast collective, Hub & Spoke. In this episode Tamar focuses on Italian Futurism, a pre-World War I art movement fueled by a heady mix of diesel and testosterone. The Futurists consciously aimed to use painting, sculpture, and photography to celebrate speed, power, industry, and all of the exhilarating ways technology was changing the world. What they couldn't represent—because it hadn't happened yet—was the ruin and destruction technology would bring to Europe as soon as the war began. After the...
2017-11-0839 min
The Lonely PaletteBonus - Introducing Hub & Spoke (by way of Soonish)The Lonely Palette is thrilled to announce that we're a founding member of Hub & Spoke, a brand spanking new collective of Boston-centric, idea-driven podcasts. To kick things off, we're proud to present an episode of Soonish, the podcast about the future, hosted by veteran technology journalist Wade Roush. This episode, "Can Technology Save Museums?" not only asks some important questions about the future of art museums, but features me telling The Lonely Palette's origin story (spoiler: I say puke a lot). Learn more about Soonish and Hub & Spoke: http://www.thelonelypalette.com/episodes/2017/10/24/special-episode-10-introducing-hub-spoke-by-way-of-soonish Music used: The Blue...
2017-10-2537 min
The Lonely PaletteSpecialEp. 0.2 - Introducing Hub & Spoke (by way of Soonish)The Lonely Palette is thrilled to announce that we're a founding member of Hub & Spoke, a brand spanking new collective of Boston-centric, idea-driven podcasts. To kick things off, we're proud to present an episode of Soonish, the podcast about the future, hosted by veteran technology journalist Wade Roush. This episode, "Can Technology Save Museums?" not only asks some important questions about the future of art museums, but features me telling The Lonely Palette's origin story (spoiler: I say puke a lot).
Learn more about Soonish and Hub & Spoke:
http://www.thelonelypalette.com/episodes/2017/10/24/special-episode-10-introducing-hub-spoke-by-way-of-soonish
Music used:
The Blue Dot...
2017-10-2537 min
SoonishMapping the Future with Tim O'ReillyEpisode 2.03: For a sane, humane, and skeptical perspective on what’s happening to Silicon Valley and why our high-tech economy seems to be failing us, there’s no better source than Tim O’Reilly, master trend spotter and founder of computer book publisher O’Reilly Media. Soonish’s in-depth conversation with the admired entrepreneur, investor, and author focuses on his new book “WTF: What’s The Future and Why It’s Up to Us,” published October 10. In the interview—and in the book—O’Reilly shares the mental maps he uses to make sense of emerging technologies and their impact. And he argues th...
2017-10-2447 min
SoonishIntroducing Hub & SpokeEpisode 2.02: Big news! Soonish is a founding member of Hub & Spoke, a Boston-centric collective of smart, idea-driven podcasts. Together with the art history podcast The Lonely Palette and the new philosophy-and-culture show Ministry of Ideas, we’re celebrating independent audio storytelling and the power of art, science, arguments, and ideas to change the world. In this episode you’ll hear the Ministry of Ideas pilot, “The Shape of History,” hosted by Zachary Davis and produced by Nick Andersen, Pallavi Kottamasu, and Virginia Marshall. To subscribe to Ministry of Ideas, visit ministryofideas.org or search Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcatch...
2017-10-1318 min
Stride & SaunterEpisode 163: The Great American EclipseOn August 21st, 2017, millions of Americans flocked to see a total solar eclipse as it ventured across the continental U.S. Beyond the visual and scientific marvel, the event came at a time of great division in our country. The path forward is unclear, and rife with political disagreements, shame and fear for our future. But the eclipse obscured all of that for a while, creating unity and a sense of perspective and place in the universe. This week, we speak with technology journalist Wade Roush about his thoughts and experiences on the eclipse. How might it serve as a...
2017-09-2035 min
SoonishShadows Of August: The Eclipse Road Trip EditionEpisode 2.01: The conflict in Charlottesville in August of 2017 showed that Americans are having a hard time figuring out how to represent the country’s past, let alone how to fix the present or plan for the future. But sometimes a stunning natural event like a total solar eclipse can bring us back together—if only for a few minutes. For the Season Two premiere of Soonish, host Wade Roush went on a road trip across 10 states, visiting the place with more Confederate monuments than any other place in America (hint: it’s not in the South); a virtual ghost town w...
2017-09-1446 min
SoonishWashington, We Have A ProblemEpisode 1.10: Just in time for Independence Day 2017, it's a special politics edition of Soonish! With his attacks on judges and journalists, his attempts to quell inquiries into his campaign’s Russia ties, his early-morning tweetstorms, and so much more, Donald Trump has breached every norm of presidential conduct. And he’s testing the constitutional separation of powers in ways the nation’s founders could never have anticipated. In this episode, we try to understand Trump’s impact on government—and what his presidency might mean for America’s future—using a metaphor from the aerospace business: gimbal lock. It’s one of the per...
2017-07-0331 min
SoonishA Tale Of Two BridgesEpisode 1.09: When Boston’s elegant Longfellow Bridge opened in 1907, it was innovative example of classical European bridge architecture adapted for a busy American city. But over the next century, officials allowed the bridge to rust to the point of near-collapse. And recently, a futuristic new cable-stay bridge, the Zakim Bridge, was built across the Charles River just a mile downstream, displacing the Longfellow as an icon of the city and proving that Bostonians still have a taste for modernity. Now the Longfellow Bridge is being painstakingly restored and recreated, down to the last rivet. But for the price of fi...
2017-06-0836 min
SoonishHacking TimeEpisode 1.08: Why do "productivity" tools like email, to-do lists, and calendars make so many of us feel miserable and overburdened? Why hasn't anyone come up with a better way for us to manage our diverse commitments and our chronic information overload? This episode of Soonish looks at our personal futures and the tools we use to manage them. We talk with folks who are pursuing new technologies for keeping our lives organized. We look at the kludge-y but often brilliant productivity solutions people have hacked together for themselves. And we ask whether, in some way, we’re all missing th...
2017-05-1133 min
SoonishAstropreneursEpisode 1.07: More than 500 people have flown in space since Yuri Gagarin’s historic ride in 1961—and virtually every one of them has been a military officer or government employee. But now that’s changing. Jeff Bezos’s rocket company Blue Origin aims to begin commercial passenger flights to space in 2018, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX has announced plans to send two private citizens around the moon, also in 2018. Meanwhile, here on Earth, there’s a boom in space-related innovation and investment, not just at big aerospace companies but at dozens of smaller startups. This week on Soonish, we look at the new e...
2017-04-2032 min
Let's Chat! With Chris RevillWade Roush of SoonishWade Roush is a science and technology journalist, academic has worked with various startups and host of the podcast Soonish. Soonish is a podcast about the future: How we think and talk about it, what we can do to shape it, and why our best forecasts—and our worst fears—are usually wrong. On this episode we chat about podcast mirroring blogging cycle, the death of the newspaper industry, working at NASA's Ames Research Center, how we should not fear the robot uprising, storytelling and more.
2017-04-041h 04Podcasters of Podcasting with Nathan PeaveyWade Roush of SoonishWade Roush is a science and technology journalist, academic has worked with various startups and host of the podcast Soonish. Soonish is a podcast about the future: How we think and talk about it, what we can do to shape it, and why our best forecasts—and our worst fears—are usually wrong. On this episode we chat about podcast mirroring blogging cycle, the death of the newspaper industry, working at NASA's Ames Research Center, how we should not fear the robot uprising, storytelling and more.
2017-04-041h 04
SoonishOrigin StoryEpisode 1.06: After in-depth episodes about movies, monorails, museums, manufacturing, and meat, the show goes meta and I talk about Soonish itself. Hear how Carl Sagan and extraterrestrials helped to kickstart my science journalism career, how the Challenger disaster woke me up to technology’s double-edged nature, and how the New York World’s Fair of 1939 got me thinking about the world of the future. Also, I explain how you can now support Soonish directly through Patreon. The Soonish theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. Additional music in this episode by Podington Bear. For more details on this episode visit www...
2017-03-2919 min
SoonishMeat Without The MooEpisode 1.05: We meet people working to promote a range of alternatives to meat from livestock--including a cricket farmer, a researcher studying ways to grow meat from muscle cells in the laboratory, and a startup founder commercializing jackfruit, a huge fruit from India with a meat-like texture. The logic behind their work is simple. In the coming decades, as the human population expands toward 10 billion people by 2050, we'll probably have to figure out how to replace a lot of the meat we currently get from pigs, chickens, cattle, and fish with other forms of protein. That's partly because we’re al...
2017-03-0833 min
SoonishFuture Factories, With Workers Built InEpisode 1.04: Six million manufacturing jobs have disappeared in the U.S. since 2000, and you've probably heard economists and politicians say "those jobs aren't coming back." But that view isn't quite right. It doesn’t account for a cultural and technological revolution sweeping the United States—one that promises to redefine manufacturing, make it drastically more accessible, and create a ladder to new kinds of jobs for unskilled, semi-skilled, and skilled workers alike. In this episode of Soonish, we visit TechShop, a maker space where craftspeople are using high-tech tools to come up with new products. We talk with a busi...
2017-02-2233 min
SoonishCan Technology Save Museums?Episode 1.03: Museum attendance declined steeply in the first decade of this century, according to a survey by the National Endowment for the Arts. The NEA found that audiences were being siphoned away by the Internet, television, and other distractions. So, technology can be seen as a threat to museums—but maybe it's also a tool they can use to re-engage with the public. In this episode of Soonish, we visit museums in Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Boston to see how some curators and educators are leaning on software, mobile devices, and digital media to get visitors excited about art. Th...
2017-02-0832 min
SoonishMonorails: Trains Of Tomorrow?Episode 1.02: Monorails first captured the public imagination as the "trains of the future" here in the U.S., thanks to projects like the Disneyland monorail (1959) and the Seattle World's Fair monorail (1962). But today, it seems that new monorail systems are being built everywhere except America. Monorails have key advantages over competing forms of mass transit, such as buses, subways, and light rail—so what happened to the prospects for the technology in the U.S.? For the answer, Soonish went straight to the president of the Monorail Society, a 7,000-strong group with members around the world. And we traveled to...
2017-01-2529 min
SoonishHow "2001" Got The Future So WrongEpisode 1.01: This inaugural episode of Soonish is about the boldest vision of the future ever put down on film: Stanley Kubrick’s "2001: A Space Odyssey." The movie came out in 1968, and it offered a detailed and inspiring forecast for life the early 21st century, including giant space stations, moon bases, thinking computers, and humans traveling to Jupiter. By putting the year in the title, Kubrick tied these forecasts to a very specific date. But by the time the actual year 2001 rolled around, very few of the film’s predictions had come true, and its optimism seemed almost naïve. In to...
2017-01-1133 min
SoonishComing SoonEpisode 1.00: A preview of coming attractions from Soonish, a new podcast about the future hosted by technology journalist Wade Roush, PhD. Each episode tells a story about the technological choices we’re making today and how those choices could end up helping us, or hurting us, tomorrow. The first episode premiers Friday, January 13th. Find more info at soonishpodcast.org. Music by Kai Engel.
2016-12-1002 min
Inquiring Minds95 Wade Roush - How Disasters Affect ScienceOn the show this week we talk to journalist and educator Wade Roush about how disasters can affect our appreciation of the science behind them—and what we can do to be sure the right story gets out.Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/inquiringminds
2015-07-241h 00
Life TipsSafari and the World Wide WadeXconomy is dedicated to providing business and technology leaders with timely, insightful, close-to-the-scene information about the local personalities, companies, and technological trends that best exemplify today’s high-tech economy.Their goal is to become the authoritative voice on the exponential economy, the realm of business and innovation characterized by exponential technological growth and increasing share of productivity and overall economic growth.Wade Roush is Chief Correspondent for Xconomy. He is a veteran science and technology writer whose recent work has focused on consumer Internet technology, including search, social computing, geocomputing, Web services, online virtual worlds, and th...
2009-12-0354 min