Astronaut Cady Coleman and scientist/author Andrew Maynard return for another season of the groundbreaking podcast at they tackle everything from disability in space to extraterrestrial intelligence! — I can’t believe that it’s been a year since we launched season one of the Mission: Interplanetary podcast. That first season was groundbreaking in who we spoke with, and what we talked about. And now we’re back for even more!

Opening comments to the ANSI Nanotechnology Standards Panel Advanced Materials workshop, August 20, 2020. I want to start with an anecdote. Back in the 1980’s when I was in high school in the UK, a select number of students each year sat for the entrance exams for Oxford and Cambridge…

How are a 20th century meteorologist, a 1993 Stephen Spielberg movie, and the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics connected? — In 2018 I wrote about chaotic and complex systems in my book Films from the Future: The Technology and Morality of Sci-Fi Movies. The book uses science fiction movies to explore the growing challenges around socially responsible and ethical innovation — and it starts withe the 1993 classic Jurassic Park.

The newly-announced Tesla robot looks like something out of a dystopian sci-fi movie. But that’s the least of our problems. — It was, perhaps, inevitable: Elon Musk announces a humanoid robot designed to help with those repetitive, boring tasks we all hate doing, and all we can think about is a string of dystopian robot sci-fi movies where everything goes horribly wrong. Yet troubling as the robot futures in movies like…

The physical basis for human-driven climate change is compelling. But to survive it, we need to get much better at understanding people. — On Monday, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published the first part of its Sixth Assessment Report (due in its entirety in 2022), and its strongest warnings to date about the dire challenges of global warming. …