Fusion Power & Evolution

On this week’s installment of Exploration, Michio Kaku chats with NYU Professor Charles Seife about the future of fusion power.
Later in the hour, Dr. Neil Shubin is in to discuss the evolution of humans from the fish.

About the guests:

Before joining the Department of Journalism, Charles Seife was writer for Science magazine -specializing in physics and mathematics- and had been a U.S. correspondent for New Scientist. He holds an A.B. in mathematics from Princeton University, an M.S. in mathematics from Yale University, and an M.S. in journalism from Columbia University. His research interests include science and mathematics journalism.

Seife’s freelance work has appeared in The Economist, Scientific American, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Washington Post, The New York Times and other publications. He is also the author of Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea (2000), which won the 2000 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, as well as Alpha & Omega: The Search for the Beginning and End of the Universe (2003), Decoding the Universe: How the New Science of Information is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos, From Our Brains to Black Holes (2005), Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking (2008), and the forthcoming Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception (2010).

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Neil Shubin (born December 22, 1960) is an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist and popular science writer. He is the Robert R. Bensley Professor of Organismal Biology and Anatomy, Associate Dean of Organismal Biology and Anatomy and Professor on the Committee of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Chicago along with being the Provost of the Field Museum of Natural History. He is well known for his discovery of Tiktaalik roseae.

Shubin earned a Ph.D. in organismic and evolutionary biology from Harvard University in 1987. He also studied at Columbia University and the University of California, Berkeley.

Shubin was ABC News‘s “Person of the Week” in April 2006 when Tiktaalik was unveiled, and appeared on The Colbert Report on January 14, 2008, and again on January 9, 2013. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2011.

 


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