As his title indicates, Harvard astronomy department chairman Avi Loeb is an extremely credentialed astronomer. So when he asserted that an object currently passing through our solar system might just… Read the rest of the article: Interview with the astronomer who speculated that Oumuamua might be a sign of extraterrestrial life

My guest in this edition of the After On podcast is British Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees. And just to state the obvious? Astronomer Royal is such a cool title. And… Read the rest of the article: Will the human race survive the twenty-first Century?

For billions of years, all life on Earth – in all of its mad diversity – has been encoded in the four-letter alphabet of DNA. A,T,G, and C – that's… Read the rest of the article: Synthetic biologist Floyd Romesberg is developing a third, artificial base pair for DNA

Many people have equated Stewart Brand to the mythical "World's Most Interesting Man," who was featured for years in those Dos Equis commercials. Enough people that the comparison's a bit… Read the rest of the article: Interview with Stewart Brand on the 50th anniversary of the Whole Earth Catalog

I don't know anyone with a broader purview on the crazy range of medical developments that are vying to extend or radically improve our lives than Daniel Kraft. Daniel is… Read the rest of the article: The crazy range of medical developments vying to extend or radically improve our lives

George Goldsmith and Katya Malievskaia are a married couple whose startup – Compass Pathways – will soon launch the largest triple-blind clinical trial ever of a psychedelic drug. The drug… Read the rest of the article: Depression: the psychedelic cure

George Church's Harvard lab is one of the most celebrated fonts of innovation in the world of life sciences. George's earliest work on the Human Genome Project arguably pre-dated the… Read the rest of the article: The astounding present and dizzying future of synthetic biology

Rodney Brooks is the father of the Roomba, the founder of iRobot, and the creator of both the Baxter and Sawyer product lines from Rethink Robotics. He's arguably the world's… Read the rest of the article: Rodney Brooks on the present and future of robotics & AI

When David Eagleman was a kid, he and his friends infiltrated a nearby construction site. Soon enough, he was tumbling three stories to the ground. The fall seemed to take… Read the rest of the article: Why neuroscientist David Eagleman thinks we live in the past

Mary Lou Jepsen was finishing her PhD work in holography at Brown University when she started getting sick. Really sick. After a year of steady decline, she was living in… Read the rest of the article: On tumors, MRIs and telepathy: Mary Lou Jepsen on the future of devices that could read images from our brains

I first met Aubrey de Grey over ten years ago, when he presented at a conference I attended. And his core message blew my mind. It was — and remains… Read the rest of the article: If Aubrey de Grey is right, you could live forever

Over the past couple of weeks, I ran two unusual episodes of the After On Podcast, both of them connected to … After On! The novel, that is. The podcast… Read the rest of the article: John Hodgman and others read the After On audiobook

You'd have to be living in some kind of a news blackout not to have heard chatter about cryptocurrencies recently. The granddaddy of 'em all – BitCoin – has appreciated… Read the rest of the article: Cryptocurrency: From Basic Definitions to Expert Issues in One Interview

Imagine that a folded note before you reveals — definitively — whether an excruciating, protracted neurological death lies a decade into your future. Should you look? Do so, and you… Read the rest of the article: The promise and peril of reading your genome in 2017 (or for that matter, 2018)

I'm taking a week off from producing a full podcast, and am instead presenting what I hope will be a fun Thanksgiving road-trip accompaniment. It's an audibobook excerpt. But since… Read the rest of the article: Music Piracy: The Extraterrestrial Threat

As I say at the start of our interview, Ev has founded an almost unreasonably long list of companies – and the three listed above each had huge impacts on… Read the rest of the article: An hour with Ev Williams: founder of Medium, Twitter, and Blogger

Before Chris Anderson bought it in 2001, the TED conference was like a hip indie band only the in-crowd knew about. It was cool, small, had incredible buzz, and always… Read the rest of the article: TED Chief Chris Anderson on the neuroscience of memes and the future of TED

The After On podcast a series of unhurried conversations with thinkers, founders, and scientists. It began as a complement to the novel After On, in that its first eight episodes explore science,… Read the rest of the article: Space archaeology: A conversation with TED Prize winner Sarah Parcak

In this week's episode of the After On podcast, I interview Tim O'Reilly – one of the most original and influential thinkers in tech. His new book, WTF, debuts today.… Read the rest of the article: After On Podcast: The Tim O'Reilly Interview

(Photo: Joi Ito, CC-BY) He's not the only major figure in the world of tech and ideas who goes by Chris Anderson. His namesake runs the TED conference – whereas… Read the rest of the article: Chris Anderson: Drone mogul and former bass player for REM (no, not *that* REM).