Claude Levi-Strauss in 1989.

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At the imperial dawn of the 20th century, there was the “civilized” world and the “savage” or “primitive” world, and one felt free to judge the other.

By the century’s end, the whole idea of primitive man as separate from civilized man was pretty well gone. And with it, the “savage mind.”

Much of the banishing was the work of the towering anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. Levi-Strauss has died at 100 in his native France. We are all, he said, driven by deep myth and common structures of thinking — even to our own extinction.

This hour, On Point: The mind and work of Claude Levi-Strauss.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Nur Yalman, professor emeritus of social anthropology at Harvard University. He is also a professor of Middle Eastern Studies and has looked at issues of cultural diversity and international conflict. His 1967 book “Under the Bo Tree: Studies of Caste, Kinship, and Marriage in the Interior of Ceylon” was influenced by Levi-Strauss’s work. Most recently he’s co-author of “A Passage to Peace: Global Solutions from East and West.”

Rosemary Joyce, chair of the anthropology department at the University of California at Berkeley. She is also an archaeologist whose primary work is in Central and South America, with a focus on Honduras. Her books include “Ancient Bodies, Ancient Lives” and “Mesoamerican Archaeology: Theory and Practice.”

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With the whole world talking about climate change and global warming, arctic biologist Bill Streever is looking the other way. He’s thinking about the cold.

Cold ice caps, cold tundra, cold lips, cold lungs. He’s looking back at cold explorers, men who died of cold.

He’s looking around at animals that thrive and survive in the cold. Frogs that become frogsicles, and hop again in spring. All things cold.

A warming climate may make cold itself an endangered species.

This hour, On Point: Igloos, permafrost, absolute zero and one man’s relentless pursuit of the cold.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Bill Streever joins us from Anchorage, Alaska. A biologist, he chairs the North Slope Science Initiative’s Science Technical Advisory Panel. He started out as a commercial diver in harbors and oilfields in Maine, the Gulf of Mexico, and the South China Sea. His new book is “Cold: Adventures in the World’s Frozen Places.”

Browse and read excerpts from the book.

More:

You can’t build igloos with powdery snow.  But you can build a quinzhee.  Bill demonstrates how it’s done in this video on YouTube:

Songlist: Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow (Frank Zappa); Hey Ya (Outkast); Antarctica (The Weepies)

A shopper walks through downtown Seattle Wednesday, April 29, 2009. (AP)

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Forty-plus years ago, psychologists sat kids down in front of a tasty marshmallow to see who could wait the longest before grabbing and eating when the prize was double the treat.

Years later they looked back, and guess what? The kids who could wait were far more successful in many aspects of life.

Now that America is on a forced march from the “instant gratification society” to a world of delayed gratification, that science is turning heads again.

This Hour, On Point: we’ll look at willpower and winners in the new American economy.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Science writer Jonah Lehrer is a contributing editor at Wired, and author of “How We Decide” and “Proust Was a Neuroscientist.” His new piece, in this week’s New Yorker, is “Don’t! The secret of self-control.”

Psychologist Walter Mischel is a professor at Columbia University, and author of “Personality and Assessment.” He pioneered the “marshmallow experiments” in the 1960’s, which studied delayed gratification and self-control in children.

Economic historian Richard Sylla is a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, and author of “The American Capital Market: 1846-1914″ and “A History of Interest Rates.”

 

More links:

Listen to Radiolab’s take on “Mischel’s Marshmallows”

Here’s ABC’s version of the marshmallow experiment, with M&M’s and the Dilley Sextuplets:

Bruce M. Hood

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You may think you’re not superstitious. Think again. Would you want to wear Jeffrey Dahmer’s raincoat? Put on the sweater of a cannibal mass murderer? Why not?

Why do we knock on wood? Walk around black cats? Believe in premonitions? Believe that rituals at home plate may bring us a home run?

Cognitive psychologist and neuroscientist Bruce Hood says it’s baked in our human nature. A pull to the supernatural. That it’s not all we are, but it’s an important, powerful piece of who we are as humans. He calls it supersense.

This hour, On Point: Why we believe the unbelievable.

You can join the conversation. Are you beyond superstition? Are you sure? Do you embrace the supernatural? Why?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Joining us in our studio is Bruce Hood, chair of developmental psychology and director of the Cognitive Development Centre at the University of Bristol in southwest England. His new book, out this week, is “SuperSense: Why We Believe in the Unbelievable.”

Spectators watch as an undersea volcano erupts off the coast of Tonga, tossing clouds of smoke, steam and ash thousands of feet into the sky above the South Pacific ocean, on March 18, 2009. The eruption was at sea about 6 miles from the southwest coast off the main island of Tongatapu, an area where up to 36 undersea volcanoes are clustered. (AP)

It’s volcano time in Alaska. Mount Redoubt, 100 miles southwest of Anchorage, blowing miles high over the land of grizzly bear and glacier.

And in the South Pacific — off the coast of Tonga — an undersea volcano erupting up through the waves in a spectacular display.

We don’t get to talk with volcanologists often here. Today we will — about the eruptions this week, the deep-Earth plumbing that makes them blow, and the consequences on the ground, the sea, and in the air, of all that power.

This hour, On Point: It’s volcano time. We’ll bring in the volcanologists.

You can join the conversation. Have you been following the reports from Redoubt? From north and south and South Pacific? What’s your experience of volcanoes? Your question on volcanoes?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Peter Cervelli joins us from the operations room of the Alaska Volcano Observatory in Anchorage. He’s the volcanologist and geophysicist on the job there.

From Girdwood, Alaska, we’re joined by Cyrus Read. He’s an engineer and geophysicist with the Alaska Volcano Observatory and travelled to the Mt. Redoubt observation hut this week. See images of the current Redoubt activity.

With us from Washington, DC, is Marianne Guffanti, senior geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. She is the lead scientist for the USGS on the issue of volcanic hazards to aviation and serves as a technical advisor to the Federal Aviation Administration.

And from Pasadena, California, we’re joined by Mark Simons, professor of geophysics in the Seismological Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He studies volcanoes worldwide using satellite imagery to detect bulges in the Earth’s crust as volcanoes become active.

Here’s a shot from the Redoubt webcam on Monday, March 23:

Alaska Volcano Observatory / U.S. Geological Survey

And here’s an amazing YouTube video of the eruption off the coast of Tonga in the South Pacific last week (more from YouTube here):

And here’s a video from the Discovery Channel highlighting their five favorite volcano webcams around the world…

Jay O. Sanders, left, as Galileo and Edward Hermann as Pope Urban VIII in the Huntington Theater Company's production of Richard Goodwin's play "Two Men of Florence." (Courtesy Huntington Theater Company)

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Four hundred years ago this year, the great Italian physicist and astronomer Galileo Galilei first picked up the telescope. And, of course, turned it on the heavens.

What he saw there, and all around him, put him on a collision course with the Church. Before that epic clash of faith and science was over, Galileo had tangled with a pope — and lost.

Science marched on. So did the fight. It’s still in the headlines. And now, on stage, in a dramatic recreation of the clash by former JFK speechwriter Richard Goodwin.

This hour, On Point: Faith and science, Galileo and the pope, tangle again.

You can join the conversation. With stem cells, global warming, and all the rest, is the battle between faith and reason really over? Is it ever over? Can, should, one side win?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

With us in our studio today are:

Richard Goodwin, author, speechwriter and playwright. He was adviser and speechwriter to JFK, LBJ, and Robert Kennedy. His play, just opened in Boston’s Huntington theater, is “Two Men of Florence.”

Jay O. Sanders plays Galileo Galilei in the Huntington production of “Two Men of Florence.”  He has a long list of stage, film and TV credits to his name: “Revolutionary Road,” “Cadillac Records,” “Glory,” “Law & Order,” and much more.

Edward Hermann plays Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, who goes on, in the play, as in history, to become Pope Urban VIII, Galileo’s inquisitor. A Tony Award winner, in his long film and TV career he has starred in “Reds,” “Annie,” “The Purple Rose of Cairo,” “Law & Order,” and “M*A*S*H.”

Watch a trailer for “Two Men of Florence” and a mini-documentary about the Huntington Theater production:

Many people are confident that, sequestered deep within the cryptic machinery of the United States Department of Defense, are plans and personnel ready to deal with the aftermath of discovering extraterrestrials. It’s a pleasant assumption, and one that gains currency from the fact that, a half century ago, both the U.S. military and the Central Intelligence Agency got their collective knickers in a knot about UFOs. Both figured that there was at least a chance that some UFOs were uninvited visitors to our world. However, they worried more about uninvited Soviet aircraft or missiles. The government did, indeed, try to formulate plans.

So it’s true that the military has shown interest in extraterrestrials, in particular, those that might be violating our airspace. But detection of a signal from another planet, around another star, would be a totally different kettle of kippers. To begin with, SETI is a passive listening experiment. The aliens wouldn’t know that we’d picked up their broadcasts any more than the BBC knows that you’ve just tuned in one of their short-wave news reports. Doing so hardly ever provokes BBC announcers to leave their London studios, seek you out, and either destroy your neighborhood or abduct you for experiments that are too personal by half. So it’s hard to imagine that the military would see any security threat in a detection, a result that’s akin to finding a bottled message washed up on the beach.

There’s also the barrier of distance. While we don’t know how far the nearest aliens are, it seems unlikely on statistical grounds that they’d be any closer than a few hundred light-years. That’s an enormous distance, even for the most advanced rockets we can imagine. The aliens, whether we detect them or not, are remote, and we are buffered from their predations (if that’s what they have on their minds) in the same way that oceans buffered Native Americans from being bothered by the Roman Empire.

Of course, you could rightly argue that the first residents of the Americas eventually were bothered, once the Europeans developed ship technology that could cross those insulating seas. Maybe the aliens have the equivalent of warp drive, and can use exotic physics to bridge vast interstellar tracts. Maybe our early television and radar signals have given aggressive aliens a head start and they’re already on their way to trash our world or haul you out of your bedroom. In either case, shouldn’t the military be prepared for actual visitors?

That would be a waste of your taxes. It’s unclear whether humans will ever be able to send themselves to the stars—the technical barriers are formidable. But even optimists would concede that such abilities are at least a few hundred years in our future. Consequently, any extraterrestrials who come here can be safely reckoned to be centuries or more ahead of us, technologically speaking. Any earthly defense against such a society would be like the armies of the American Civil War making plans to battle the U.S. military of today.

Hollywood occasionally tries to circumvent this dead-obvious circumstance by invoking human bravery or cleverness for a Hail Mary defense against invaders from space. But bravery doesn’t help much if your weaponry is outclassed by a few orders of magnitude. And outwitting the extraterrestrials doesn’t make sense. In the popular 1996 film Independence Day, our species turns the tables on some nasty aliens by uploading a virus to their computers. This is absurd to the point of being quaint. Imagine a “computer” of a century or more ago, for example, Charles Babbage’s difference engine, being used to disable a modern laptop. The two machines are of completely incompatible construction. Indeed, about the only way such an early machine could cripple your laptop is if the former was dropped on the latter.

One can argue that the military has devised plenty of contingency plans of which we’re unaware, and a defense against aliens might be one of them. But assuming this to be true is merely paranoia fed by irrational argument.

Reprinted with permission of the National Geographic Society from the book Confessions of An Alien Hunter by Seth Shostak. Available where all books are sold.

Back to Kepler and the Search for Life

Image A for the afterlife, if we’ve got one at all, is pretty sketchy. Harps, clouds, angels, pearly gates. Fire and brimstone.

Maybe you picture something else. Strawberry fields. Bliss. Nothingness. Reincarnation.

Neuroscientist David Eagleman has a hobby of imagining afterlives. He’s pictured scores. Really thought them through. Now he’s put forty in a new book. Forty ways of thinking about the afterlife, if there is one.

God is he. God is she. God is they. God is gone. You’re young in heaven. You’re old. You’re a microbe.

This hour, On Point: Imagining the afterlife.

You can join the conversation. How do you picture it? Something? Nothing? Heavenly choirs?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

David Eagleman, neuroscientist at Houston’s Baylor College of Medicine and author of the new book “Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives.” 

You can read four stories from “Sum” on the book’s website. And here are short summaries of all 40 stories.

A forensic scientist trainee looks over bullet casings at a forensics lab in Richmond, Va., in July 2008. (AP)

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If your image of crime labs comes from shows like “CSI,” get ready for a shocker: a landmark report released yesterday by the National Academy of Sciences says we’ve got a problem when it comes to forensic science.

From fingerprints and ballistics to blood splatter and bite marks, America’s crime labs just aren’t cutting it. The report calls for a major overhaul — and calls into question decades of cases based on forensic evidence.

How we move forward will have a far-reaching impact on crime labs, courts — and American criminal justice.

This hour, On Point: Crime labs, and the future of forensics.

You can join the conversation. Have you ever wondered about the validity of forensic evidence? How it’s used in court? Do you have first-hand experience?

-Jane Clayson, guest host

Tom Ashbrook is on vacation this week.

Guests:

Harry Edwards, co-chair of the National Academy of Sciences panel that put out the new report, “Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States: A Path Forward.” He’s a senior Circuit Judge and Chief Judge Emeritus for the U.S. Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia Circuit.

James Doyle, director of the Center for Modern Forensic Practice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. A veteran litigator, he’s the author of “True Witness: Cops, Courts, Science, and the Battle against Misidentification.”

Barry Fisher, director of the Los Angeles County Crime Laboratory. In 1969 he joined the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department crime laboratory and has worked in most of the sections of the laboratory. He’s past president of the American Academy of Forensic Science and the American Academy of Crime Laboratory Directors.

Barry Scheck, co-founder and co-director of The Innocence Project, an organization dedicated to exonerating wrongfully convicted people. He served on O.J. Simpson’s defense team, winning an acquittal in 1995 at Simpson’s murder trial.

More links:

Today’s Los Angeles Times runs a big piece on the new NAS report, along with an opinion piece by UCLA Law School’s Jennifer L. Mnookin.

Sylvia Earle, at work. (Google Earth)

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Oceanographer and explorer Sylvia Earle went down to the sea when sea exploration was a man’s world — and she made it her own.

She walked the ocean floor untethered deeper than any human before or since. Lived and dived and explored beneath the sea all over the world. Helped change our understanding of the watery mass and life of the Earth — and is still doing that today.

At 73, she is the driving force behind the new Google Earth Oceans feature. And she’s still diving.

This hour, On Point: Explorer Sylvia Earle on a life in the sea.

You can join the conversation. Are you a diver? A deep sea diver? What do you see going on in our oceans? What’s your question for the woman who has lived there?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Sylvia Earle is Explorer-in-Residence at National Geographic and co-author of “Ocean: An Illustrated Atlas.”  She’s lead advisor on the new Google Earth Ocean layer, and a 2009 TED prize recipient.  A pioneering and record-setting deep diver, she has logged over 6,000 hours underwater and led more than 50 expeditions, including the first team of women aquanauts during the 1970 Tektite Project.

More links:

Download Google Earth 5.0, and take Sylvia’s Ocean Tour here.  You can also explore sea ice and pollution in near real-time with gadgets from the Google Earth Gallery.

Learn more about deepwater corals and Thunder Bay Sinkholes at NOAA Ocean Explorer.

In this photo made available by Advanced Cell Technology, a single cell is removed from a human embryo to be used in generating embryonic stem cells for scientific research. A Massachusetts biotechnology company has developed a new way of creating stem cells without destroying human embryos. (AP)

On August 9, 2001, President George W. Bush hit the brakes on embryonic stem cell research. Not a complete halt, but a big slowdown on research into the wonder cells that can turn into any other kind of cell in the human body.

Potential cures for cancer, diabetes, heart disease, MS, Parkinson’s, and more, all seemed further away. But the work didn’t stop. Scientists in other countries jumped in, in a big way. American researchers found new ways forward.

Now Bush is gone, Obama’s in, and hopes and expectations are rising again. Stem cell research has come in from the cold, once more promising medical miracles. Last month, the FDA approved the first trials of embryonic stem cell therapy for human patients — paralyzed patients with spinal cord injuries.

All this as new methods of creating new cells from adult tissue may bypass debates over human embryos entirely.

This hour, On Point: The leading edge of stem cell research — now.

You can join the conversation. Are you hoping that stem cell therapies may one day save you or someone in your family? Are you ready to let the research roll?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

David Scadden, professor of medicine at Harvard University, where he’s co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, and director of Massachusetts General Hospital’s Center for Regenerative Medicine.

John Gearhart, director of the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1998, he led one of two teams — along with James Thomson’s at the University of Wisconsin — that first isolated and identified human embryonic stem cells.

Adderall (Photo by hipsxxhearts, Flickr.com)

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Attention-deficit drugs like Adderall and Ritalin have helped millions of ADHD kids get along. For a new generation, they’ve also fed a black market in college dorms and high-pressure labs, where off-label use by the non-ADHD gets term papers written and lab reports done.

Now, pharmaceutical companies — and some scientists — are saying maybe we should consider “cognitive enhancers,” drugs like these, for the general population.

Some call it “cosmetic neurology,” and say it’s time. Others say it’s a bad, bad idea.

This hour, On Point: The debate over drugs for the mind.

You can join the conversation. Is it time to loosen up? To think of Adderall and Ritalin the way you might think of an hour of exercise? Or a cup of coffee? A fine way to sharpen up? Or is general use of pills for the mind a bad idea?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from New York is Ellen Gibson at BusinessWeek magazine. She recently wrote the article “Mental Pick Me Ups: The Coming Boom.”

From Philadelphia, we’re joined by Martha Farah, professor of psychology and director at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. She is co-author of a commentary in the December issue of the journal Nature, “Towards responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy.”

From Garrison, N.Y., is Thomas Murray, president of The Hastings Center, a bioethics think tank. He was formerly the director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics in the School of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University.

And from Washington, we’re joined by Nora Volkow, director of the National Insitute on Drug Abuse at the National Institutes of Health.

An image of President-elect Barack Obama made using nanotechnology, and imaged using a scanning electron microscope are shown in Ann Arbor, Mich., on Oct. 31, 2008. The face consists of millions of vertically-aligned carbon nanotubes, grown by a high temperature chemical reaction. (AP Photo/John Hart)

For scientists across America, Barack Obama’s inauguration was a breath of fresh air — a pledge to “restore science,” Obama said, “to it’s rightful place.”

In week one, the president set a new green agenda for emissions standards and fuel efficiency for cars. Al Gore is on Capitol Hill today, urging action on climate change. And there are billions for research grants in the proposed stimulus package.

But solar panels and green cars are the easy part. There are still big, controversial decisions ahead on stem cell research, the Internet, space, and more.

This hour, On Point: Obama and American science.

You can join the conversation. Does science need to be “restored” to its “rightful place” in policy making? Is the President right to put the environment front and center?

-Jane Clayson, guest host

Guests:

Joining us from New York is John Rennie, editor-in-chief of the Scientific American.

With us from Washington, DC is Francesca Grifo, senior scientist and director of the Scientific Integrity Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

And from Worcester, Mass., is Robert Lanza, chief scientific officer at Advanced Cell Technology, a biotech company that plans to ask the FDA to approve a study that uses embryonic stem cells to treat blindness.

Dr. Nathan Wolfe

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Some of the most punishing pandemic diseases to hit human health come from the wild. A local hunter deep in the rain forest brings down a beast, butchers it, its blood mingling with his own, and a virus is passed.

Enough mingling of the wrong virus over time, and a pandemic is born. Scientists think HIV and then AIDS leached into the human population this way decades ago.

Field biologist Nathan Wolfe is on the hunt for the next viral killers, to stop them before they decimate entire populations. He’s tracking them down in the rainforests of Cameroon, in Malaysia, in China and beyond, and to the blood of hunters who kill wild game.

This hour, On Point: Into Africa, and beyond, with the virus hunters.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Nathan Wolfe joins us from Stanford, California. He is director of the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative, a pandemic warning system which works with more than 100 scientists and staff around the world, including in Cameroon, China, and Malaysia. He is a field biologist and visiting professor of human biology at Stanford University. He has spent more than eight years in Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa tracking the movement of viruses.

Joining us from Yaounde, Cameroon, is Matthew LeBreton, ecology coordinator for the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative in Cameroon, where he has been since 2000. He has a staff of roughly 30 that works on multiple sites, collecting blood samples and offering education on how viruses, including HIV, spread.

More Links:

The Global Viral Forecasting Initiative site offers in-depth descriptions of its work in Cameroon, China, Malaysia, Congo, Madagascar, and Laos, including images from the field. At the bottom of this page is a graphic photo of a blood-soaked hunter and his kill.

“Deep in the Rain Forest, Stalking the Next Pandemic” — a recent profile of Nathan Wolfe in The New York Times.

“The Plague Fighters: Stopping the Next Pandemic Before It Begins” — Wired magazine featured this article on Nathan Wolfe’s work, including photos and video.

“I think, therefore I am,” said the great mathematician and philosopher Rene Descartes. And the world has never been the same.

Putting thought at the center of existence meant no more automatic acceptance of the word of kings or the divine. It meant scientific method, secular culture, modern life. And centuries of struggle between the champions of faith and reason. A struggle that is hot again today.

A new intellectual detective story tracks not just the ideas of Descartes but his actual bones through the philosophical battlefield and today’s headlines.

This hour, On Point: Faith, reason and Descartes’ bones.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guest:

Joining us from Atlanta is Russell Shorto. He’s a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and bestselling author the 2004 book “The Island at the Center of the World,” about Dutch Manhattan. His new book is, “Descartes’ Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason.”

You can read an excerpt from the book.

Computer screens in the Atlas control room capture the movements of the first beams circulating the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland on September 10, 2008.

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They flipped the switch, the proton’s flew, and the world hasn’t blown up, yet.

Three hundred feet underground on the French-Swiss border, the biggest physics experiment in history launched yesterday. The Large Hadron Collider.

The biggest atom smasher ever built: a seventeen-mile collision track, and sky-high hopes for cosmic breakthroughs in our understanding of the universe — of muons and gluons and quarks, of dark matter and black holes and — maybe — whole new space-time dimensions.

This hour, On Point: Particle physics, a giant new tool, the shape of the universe, and you.

You can join the conversation. What are your hopes and fears for the earth’s largest atom smasher? What’s the cosmic question you want answered when it makes its own big bang?

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from Paris is Adrian Cho, staff writer for Science magazine. He was at the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Switzerland yesterday when they fired up the Large Hadron Collider for its first big test.

Joining us from Driggs, Idaho, is Leon Lederman. He’s an experimental physicist, and director emeritus of the Fermilab atom smasher, outside Chicago. He won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1988 for his work on neutrinos, and he coined the term “God particle” for the Higgs boson with his 1992 book “The God Particle: If the Universe is the Answer, What is the Question?”

Joining us from New York is Lisa Randall. She’s a professor of theoretical physics at Harvard University, renowned for her work on string theory and author of “Warped Passages: Unraveling The Mysteries Of The Universe’s Hidden Dimensions.”

Also from New York, we’re joined by Janna Levin. She’s a professor of physics and astronomy at Columbia University, and author of the novel “A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines.”

More links:

The official site of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN explains the science behind all the excitement.

Nature magazine’s website offers an excellent interactive diagram of the LHC, part of its special section on the collider. Also worth a visit is the BBC’s guide to the LHC.

And just for laughs, here’s a (sort of) rap video about the LHC…

Front cover detail of "Physics for Future Presidents" by Richard A. Muller

In January next year, a new American president will step into the Oval Office and into a mess of challenges from energy crisis and terrorism to global climate change.

Berkeley physics professor Richard Muller has a few things he’d like that president to know about the science around those challenges.

From solar power to dirty bombs, he reminds us, the world is real. You can’t just wave a wand. His celebrated course “Physics for Future Presidents” is one of Berkeley’s most popular.

This hour, On Point: We get the briefing, the short course. Physics for Future Presidents.

-Tom Ashbrook

* * *

Guest:

Richard A. Muller, professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley and a MacArthur Fellowship winner, he is the author of “Physics for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines.”

* * *

Links:

Excerpts from “Physics for Future Presidents” on the book’s official website.

See the website for Muller’s popular Berkeley course.

Robotic Mars exploration has been no picnic. Half of all Mars missions have ended in failure. But right now, the Mars Phoenix Lander is up there, well-landed, sending back astonishing images, and — it appears — shaking off its problems extending the eight-foot arm that will dig for ice.

The Phoenix is looking for conditions that would support life on Mars. But the bigger search for life “out there” goes way beyond the Martian north pole, to “weird life” and “exoplanets.”

This hour, On Point: The Phoenix has landed: the new mission to Mars, and the search for life beyond Earth.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Peter Smith, principal investigator and project leader of the Phoenix Mars Mission and a scientist at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory.

Sara Seager, professor of planetary science and associate professor of physics at MIT.

Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA’s Mars Exploration Program.

Jill Price has a memory like few others in the world. She’s 42 years old, and she remembers everything.

Every instant of her life, and the life around her, since she was fourteen. Down to the smallest detail. Like a movie that never stops running. Whether she likes it or not. And not just what happened, but the date and time and place.

Jill Price’s memory is so unusual that scientists couldn’t believe it. They had to make up a name for it.

Now she’s talking, in the hope that her powers may help explain your memory.

This hour, On Point: Jill Price — the woman who can’t forget.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Jill Price, co-author with Bart Davis of the memoir “The Woman Who Can’t Forget: The Extraordinary Story of Living with the Most Remarkable Memory Known to Science.”

Larry Cahill, associate professor of neurology and behavior at UC Irvine and co-author of the 2006 paper that defined Jill’s condition.

John Gabrieli, professor of cognitive neuroscience at MIT.

Perfumes are more than a scent. They are a state of mind — at least that what all the ads tell us.

A little dab here and you’re picnicking in fields of wild flowers, or experiencing the blush of first love. A spritz there and you’re rolling in satin sheets, and feeling oh so Hollywood. Dab your wrist, and you’re on a tropical paradise, without leaving the office.

But how do you really know how all these perfumes really smell on you?

The authors of a new book on perfumes with whom we speak today have traveled the world and sniffed the world’s best and worst.

This hour, On Point: A perfume primer guaranteed to stir your soul and senses.

-Jane Clayson

Guests:

Luca Turin, a biophysicist and perfume critic, is co-author of the new book, “Perfumes: The Guide.”

Tania Sanchez, a writer and perfume critic, is co-author of “Perfumes: The Guide.”