Science

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.

He invented the Segway Human Transporter, a high-tech scooter. The scooter relies on sensors, sold-state gyroscopes and software to produce a balanced ride even over rough terrain. Kamen's other inventions include a portable drug-infusion pump, a compact dialysis machine and a wheelchair that can climb stairs. Kamen heads DEKA Research and Development Corporation in New Hampshire.

Retired U.S. Navy flight surgeon and NASA astronaut Captain Jerry Linenger talks about the awe and peril of space travel. He spent five months on the Russian Space station Mir and wrote about the account in his book, Off the Planet: Surviving Five Perilous Months Aboard the Space Station Mir." He described the Mir as "six school buses all hooked together." During his time there, he says, he and fellow crew members had numerous brushes with death, lacked adequate supplies and battled constant system failures.

Scientist and conservationist Dr. Alan Rabinowitz. He’s been called the “Indiana Jones” of wildlife science. He is Director of the Science and Exploration Program at the Wildlife Conservation Society, based at the Bronx Zoo in New York. In 1985 his research in Belize resulted in the world’s first jaguar sanctuary. Since then he has spearheaded the preservation of vast tracts of wilderness land around the globe. The survival of the Jaguar is now in jeopardy.

In her new guide to the evolutionary biology of sex, Judson explores the sex lives of animals and insects. Posing as Dr. Tatiana, sex-advice columnist, she answers "letters" posted by such creatures as the fairy wren, the stalk-eyed fly and the African elephant. Her new book is Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation. Judson has also written for The Economist, Nature and Science. This interview first aired Aug. 13, 2002.

She's put together a book of photographs of and from the museum's collection of human oddities and outdated medical models. The Mutter Museum is in Philadelphia, Pa., and is one of the last medical museums from the 19th century. It originated with the collection of Dr. Thomas Dent Mutter, who gathered unique specimens for teaching purposes. The museum displays many strange human artifacts, such as a slice of a face, amputated limbs and a plaster cast of the conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker.

Phil Patton, author of Bug: The Strange Mutations of the World's Most Famous Automobile. It's a cultural history of the Volkswagen Beetle, the most produced and best-known car of all time. Patton writes for The New York Times, Esquire, Wired and ID. He also wrote Dreamland: Travels inside the Secret World of Roswell and Area 51.