Science

Physicist David Albright is president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington, D.C. He's the co-author of a new report on A.Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program, that was published in the Spring 2005 edition of The Washington Quarterly. Khan sold nuclear technology and information to Iran, Libya and North Korea. He was reportedly able to do this for the last 20 years, while eluding authorities and intelligence agencies. Albright says Khan's actions have had an impact on nuclear proliferation.

Gareth Cook covers science for The Boston Globe. Last week, he won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism for his yearlong series of stories on stem-cell research. The judges praised Cook's work for explaining "the complex scientific and ethical dimensions of stem cell research."

Donald Kroodsma is a renowned specialist in the interpretation of bird songs. His new book, The Singing Life of Birds, describes how birds communicate and why. But Kroodsma is also the subject of another book — about those who listen to birds.

Dr. Mark Hochberg is the CEO of the College of Physicians in Philadelphia, a private medical society that was founded in 1787 that includes the fourth largest medical historical library in the country, and the Mutter Museum. He'll talk about his colleague Gretchen Worden.

The son of the late President Ronald Reagan has been invited to speak at the Democratic convention next week. He and his mother have become outspoken proponents of stem cell research. Reagan has edited the book, If You Had Five Minutes with the President.

He's the principal scientific investigator for the twin rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, on Mars. The two landed on the surface of Mars in January, and are helping astronomers to determine whether or not there was life on the planet. Squyres will talk about the many gadgets they created to work on Mars, and what it's like working on "Mars time." Squyres is also a professor of astronomy at Cornell University.

With his book, The Elegant Universe, physicist Brian Greene developed a reputation for explaining complex scientific theories with insight and clarity. The book was the basis for a PBS series. His new book is The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality. Greene is a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University. He received his undergraduate degree from Harvard and his doctorate from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes scholar.

Artist and photographer Joseph Scheer is a professor of print media and co-director of the Institute of Electronic Art at Alfred University in New York. Over the last few years he's collected more than 20,000 specimen of moths. He then photographed them up close, capturing the varied colors and patterns not visible to the naked eye. He's collected them in the new over-sized book, Night Visions: The Secret Designs of Moths. It includes an introduction by Marc Epstein, a Lepidopterist (moth expert) at the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institute.

His new book is Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind. He’s also the author of The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions, which received the John Burroughs Medal for natural history writing. Quamman is the author of five nonfiction books, and four books of fiction. He’s been honored with the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has written for National Geographic, Outside and Harper’s.

He was the co-leader of the team that discovered three very important skulls in Ethiopia. The human remains are about 160,000 years old and offer evidence of the earliest ancestors of modern humans. They bolster the theory that modern humans emerged in Africa and are not related to Neanderthals, who lived in Europe. White is a professor of anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley.