It’s been 60 years, to the day, since Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was the first human to travel to space in a tiny capsule attached to an R-7 ballistic missile, a powerful rocket originally designed to carry a 3-5 megaton nuclear warhead. In this new episode marking the 60th anniversary of this historic space flight—the first of its kind—Scientific American talks to Stephen Walker, award-winning filmmaker, director and book author, about the daring launch that changed the course of human history, and charted a map to the skies and beyond. Walker discusses his new book, Beyond: The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey into Space , out today, and how Gagarin’s journey—an enormous mission fraught by danger and planned in complete secrecy by the Soviet Union—happened on the heels of a Cold War between the US and the USSR, and sparked a relentless space race between a rising superpower and an ailing one, respectively. Walker, whose films won Emmys and BAFTAs, revisits the complex politics and pioneering science of this era, from a fresh perspective. He talks about his hunt for eye witnesses, decades after the event, how he uncovered never-before-seen footage of the space mission, and most importantly, how he still managed to put the human story at the heart of a tale at the intersection of political rivalry, cutting-edge technology, and humankind’s ambition to conquer space, and explore new frontiers.

Science Talk

First in Space: New Yuri Gagarin Biography Shares Hidden Side of Cosmonaut

Here is our next installment of a new pop-up podcast miniseries that takes your ears into the deep sound of nature. Host Jacob Job , an ecologist and audiophile, brings you inches away from a multitude of creatures, great and small, amid the sonic grandeur of nature. You may not be easily able to access these places amid the pandemic, but after you take this acoustic journey, you will be longing to get back outside. Strap on some headphones, find a quiet place and prepare to experience a riot of bird song inside the Tensas River National Wildlife Refuge  that will stay with you long after the episode ends.

National Park Nature Walks, Episode 4: Beautiful Swamp

Here is our next installment of a new pop-up podcast miniseries that takes your ears into the deep sound of nature. Host Jacob Job , an ecologist and audiophile, brings you inches away from a multitude of creatures, great and small, amid the sonic grandeur of nature. You may not be easily able to access these places amid the pandemic, but after you take this acoustic journey, you will be longing to get back outside. Strap on some headphones, find a quiet place and prepare to experience the transcendence that explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark must have felt at the end of their journey—inside a park that bears their names .

National Park Nature Walks, Episode 3: Where Lewis and Clark Trod

Here is our next installment of a new pop-up podcast miniseries that takes your ears into the deep sound of nature. Host Jacob Job , an ecologist and audiophile, brings you inches away from a multitude of creatures, great and small, amid the sonic grandeur of nature. You may not be easily able to access these places amid the pandemic, but after you take this acoustic journey, you will be longing to get back outside. Strap on some headphones, find a quiet place and prepare to experience the what it feels like to listen to the forest from 150 feet off the ground in Sequoia National Park .

National Park Nature Walks, Episode 2: Sequoia Heights

Today we launch a new pop-up podcast miniseries that takes your ears into the deep sound of nature. Host Jacob Job , an ecologist and audiophile, brings you inches away from a multitude of creatures, great and small, amid the sonic grandeur of nature. You may not be easily able to access these places amid the pandemic, but after you take this acoustic journey, you will be longing to get back outside. Strap on some headphones, find a quiet place and prepare to experience the west side of Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado.

National Park Nature Walks, Episode 1: Rocky Mountains

Today on the Science Talk podcast, Noam Slonim  of IBM Research speaks to Scientific American about an impressive feat of computer engineering: an AI-powered autonomous system that can engage in complex debate with humans over issues ranging from subsidizing preschool and the merit of space exploration to the pros and cons of genetic engineering.  In a new Nature paper , Slonim and his colleagues show that across 80 debate topics, Project Debater’s computational argument technology has performed very decently—with a human audience being the judge of that. “However, it is still somewhat inferior on average to the results obtained by expert human debaters,” Slonim says.  In a 2019 San Francisco showcase, the system went head-to-head with expert debater Harish Natarajan.  Beyond gaming, it’s rare to see humans and machines go against each other, let alone in an oratory competition. Not unlike its human counterpart, the AI was given only 15 minutes to research the topic and prepare for the debate—rifling through thousands of gigabytes of information at record speed to form an opening statement and layer counterarguments that were later delivered through a robotic female voice, in fragments and with near perfect diction.  It couldn’t best Natarajan in San Francisco, but in a different debate, the system—co-led by Slonim and fellow IBM researcher Ranit Aharonov —has managed to change the stance of nine people in a debate on the use of telemedicine, essentially swaying the debate to its side and rebutting the argument of its opponent. In other words, in this realm, humans still prevail. But how do you build the architecture for a complex system like this? Is the AI capable of recognizing meaning or larger contexts in a debate? Can a system descended from Project Debater one day intervene in real-life social media arguments to quell misinformation or stir a debate in one direction or another, for better or worse? We answer these questions and more in the podcast.

AI Can Now Debate with Humans and Sometimes Convince Them, Too

It is the wood that the rock greats have sworn by—swamp ash, in the form of their Fender Telecaster and Stratocaster guitars—for more than 70 years. If you have ever listened to rock, you have probably heard a solid-body swamp ash guitar. But now  climate change is threatening the wood that helped build rock and roll. In today’s podcast, veteran guitarist Jim Campilongo takes us through the finer points of swamp ash and what it would mean to lose it.  Bonus material: Here’s Campilongo showing the difference between the sound of a solid-body swamp ash guitar and a hollow-body one.  And here’s a little information about Campilongo’s latest project: He teams up with his longtime collaborator Luca Benedetti on the album  Two Guitars . Check it out. Editor’s Not (2/16/21): This podcast incorrectly stated that the article  on climate change and swamp ash in the February 2021 edition of Scientific American  was authored by Priyanka Runwal and Andrea Thompson. The author was Runwal alone.

Climate Change Could Shred Guitars Known for Shredding

Today on the Science Talk podcast, Alexis Gambis , a New York University biologist and independent filmmaker, speaks about making Son of Monarchs , which won the 2021 Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. The film is about a Mexican scientist who studies the evolution of monarch butterfly wings. It is a cultural piece about the politics of immigration, spirituality and shifting identities. Gambis talks about science beyond the lab bench, bringing CRISPR technology to the big screen and how he is usually given to bold, innovative features that focus on science or technology and that depict a scientist as a central character.  In one scene in Son of Monarchs,  the main character stands in a rowdy bar and raises his glass to “CRISPR and the genetic revolution.” There are several allusions throughout the film to how gene editing fascinates and terrifies us. Evolutionary science is the thread that ties the human story together.  From script to screen, the scientist-director meditates on the long journey to the finish line, securing funding and how science’s big stories can be weaved into art.  Gambis has been running a science film festival for 13 years and making science films for longer. His next project, El Beso , is a plunge into the life and science-fiction writings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal, an early 20th-century Spanish neuroscientist who won the 1906 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. 

On Finding Yourself in a Butterfly's Wings

Environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb talks about his book Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter .

A Breakdown of Beavers

Kidney disease affects millions of Americans, but corporate capture of dialysis, along with disparities in treatment and transplant access, mean that not everyone's journey is the same. On this Science Talk podcast, we speak with Carrie Arnold, lead reporter in an ambitious, year-long reporting project into the current state of chronic kidney disease treatment in the U.S., from diagnosis to dialysis, and from maintenance treatment to transplant (for those who are lucky). You can read the first part in the series here . It's a story of technological and procedural advance, but also one that has seen just two large, for-profit enterprises come to dominate the market for dialysis delivery. It's a story of expanding access, but also one still marked by racial and ethnic disparities. And it's a tale of medical innovation and adaptation, but also one beset by conflicts of interest and an inability to adapt to holistic modes of care that other disease specialities, from cardiology to oncology, have long ago embraced.  For the 37 million Americans navigating the corridors of kidney disease, these are likely familiar issues. But for the third of Americans at risk for renal disease — and for anyone who cares about how the nation's health care dollars are spent — this five-part collaboration between Undark Magazine and Scientific American pulls back the curtain and provides an unflinching look at what's working, and what's not. 

America on Dialysis

About a year ago, SARS-CoV-2 (which wasn’t called that yet) was just beginning to emerge in a cluster of cases inside China . We know what has happened since then, but it bears repeating: there have been  69 million cases and more than 1.5 million deaths  globally as of December 10, 2020, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. And as the virus raced around the world, science has also raced to understand how it actually works, biologically. Today on the Science Talk podcast, a virologist who has been part of that massive effort joins us. Britt Glaunsinger  is a professor in the department of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She has been studying viruses for 25 years, with a particular focus, before December 2019, on the herpesvirus. Over the past 12 months, her lab has been focusing on strategies the virus uses to suppress the body's innate immune system.

What Science Has Learned about the Coronavirus One Year On

Scientific American  and the World Economic Forum sifted through more than 75 nominations for the most innovative and potentially game-changing technologies in 2020. The final top 10 span the fields of medicine, engineering, environmental sciences and chemistry. And to win the nod, the technologies must have the potential to spur progress in societies and economies by outperforming established ways of doing things. They also need to be novel (that is, not currently in wide use) yet likely to have a major impact within the next three to five years. Here’s your guide for the (hopefully) near future.  Read the full report here .

2020's Top 10 Tech Innovations

Materials scientist and science writer Ainissa Ramirez talks about her latest book The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another .

Inventing Us: How Inventions Shaped Humanity

Science Talk is a weekly science audio show covering the latest in the world of science and technology. Join Steve Mirsky each week as he explores cutting-edge breakthroughs and controversial issues with leading scientists and journalists. He is also an articles editor and columnist at Scientific American magazine. His column, "Antigravity," is one of science writing's great humor venues. Also check our daily podcast from Scientific American : "60-Second Science." To view all of our archived podcasts please go to www.scientificamerican.com/podcast