The Weekly Weinersmith

In today's episode Kelly interviews Dr. Judy Illes to learn more about the latest work being done addressing the ethics of brain-computer interfaces. Dr. Illes is the Canada Research Chair in Neuroethics, and Director of Neuroethics Canada at the University of British Columbia.

In this week's show Kelly talks to Dr. Bryan Caplan about the impact of automation on jobs, and talks to Zach about his collaboration with Bryan called "Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration".  Also - if you visit WeeklyWeinersmith.com you can download a chapter on Advanced Nuclear Reactors! This chapter was cut from Soonish due to page limits, and is now available for download for free. 

Dr. Jordan Miller and his collaborators recently published a paper where they use a gel that hardens in response to light to create structures that are non-toxic, and so should be compatible with the human body. The paper made the front cover of Science! Check out this week's episode to learn more about the bioengineering work happening in the Physiologic Systems Engineering and Advanced Materials Laboratory at Rice University. 

In this week's episode, Kelly interviews Rosario Ballesteros-Casas, the Chief Executive Officer of VRAmericas. VRAmericas is working on AR and VR (virtual reality) applications to help train our workforce.

In today’s episode we’re going to chat about some of the cool projects happening at MIT’s Self-Assembly Lab, which is the lab for which our interviewee (Professor Skylar Tibbits) is the Founder and co-Director.

On today’s show Joy Dunn joins us to discuss Commonwealth Fusion Systems. Ms. Dunn spent about 10 years at SpaceX, where she worked on and led teams working on the Dragon spacecrafts, and became known as the “Mother of Dragons”. She is currently Head of Manufacturing at Commonwealth Fusion Systems.

Dr. Lindy Elkins-Tanton joins Kelly to talk about how we go about learning about asteroids, and about the Psyche mission in particular. We also spoke with Dr. Elkins-Tanton about the role of artists in communicating space research to the general public in ways that scientists can't.

Peter Beck, the founder and CEO of Rocket Lab, joins us today to talk about how Rocket Lab is democratizing space launch.

Dr. Elizabeth Frank joins us to talk about NewSpace.

Kelly and Zach discuss Zach's new book "Science - Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness"

Episode 54 Soonish - Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve And/Or Ruin Everything

Episode 53: Melanie Martin on breastfeeding

Episode 52: Deep sea ecology with Dr. Andrew David Thaler

Episode 51: Dr. Elizabeth Iorns on collaboration

Weekly Weinersmith on hiatus until January 2014