soonish

Iconography started three years ago with an episode about two neighboring bridges in the heart of London. Now, for our third birthday, Wade Roush of fellow Hub & Spoke show Sooinsh brings us the story of two Boston bridges that share a similar story, though that story has a very different ending. Stick around after Wade's story to hear him and me chat about what makes bridges so iconic and what Spider-Man, Magneto, and Godzilla have to do with it.

In today's episode Kelly interviews Dr. Judy Illes to learn more about the latest work being done addressing the ethics of brain-computer interfaces. Dr. Illes is the Canada Research Chair in Neuroethics, and Director of Neuroethics Canada at the University of British Columbia.

In this week's show Kelly talks to Dr. Bryan Caplan about the impact of automation on jobs, and talks to Zach about his collaboration with Bryan on a graphic novel called "Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration". 

Also - if you visit WeeklyWeinersmith.com you can download a chapter on Advanced Nuclear Reactors! This chapter was cut from Soonish due to page limits, and is now available for download for free. 

Dr. Jordan Miller and his collaborators recently published a paper where they use a gel that hardens in response to light to create structures that are non-toxic, and so should be compatible with the human body. The paper made the front cover of Science! Check out this week's episode to learn more about the bioengineering work happening in the Physiologic Systems Engineering and Advanced Materials Laboratory at Rice University. 

In this week's episode, Kelly interviews Rosario Ballesteros-Casas, the Chief Executive Officer of VRAmericas. VRAmericas is working on AR and VR (virtual reality) applications to help train our workforce.

In today’s episode we’re going to chat about some of the cool projects happening at MIT’s Self-Assembly Lab, which is the lab for which our interviewee (Professor Skylar Tibbits) is the Founder and co-Director.

On today’s show Joy Dunn joins us to discuss Commonwealth Fusion Systems. Ms. Dunn spent about 10 years at SpaceX, where she worked on and led teams working on the Dragon spacecrafts, and became known as the “Mother of Dragons”. She is currently Head of Manufacturing at Commonwealth Fusion Systems.

Dr. Lindy Elkins-Tanton joins Kelly to talk about how we go about learning about asteroids, and about the Psyche mission in particular. We also spoke with Dr. Elkins-Tanton about the role of artists in communicating space research to the general public in ways that scientists can't.

Welcome to the reboot of The Weekly Weinersmith, celebrating the paperback release of our book Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That’ll Improve and/or Ruin Everything.

In this podcast series, we’re going to revisit each of the 10 technologies discussed in Soonish, expanding on topics touched on in the book, exploring related matters, and checking out new advances since the book came out.

That is - the stuff in the podcast will be different from the book, so go buy it.

The first chapter in Soonish is on Cheap Access to Space, and it was one of the hardest ones to write, because private launch companies were making advances so quickly it was hard to keep up.

But at some point, we had to put our pencils down, and we submitted the book to our editor in 2016.

A few months before our book came out in hardback in 2017 a company called Rocket Lab completed a test flight of its Electron rocket.

They’ve now entered high frequency launch operations, and as of May 5, 2019, they’ve launched 28 satellites into space.

Amazingly, Peter Beck, the founder and CEO of Rocket Lab (!), took the time to talk to me about how his company is democratizing space launch.

Welcome to the reboot of The Weekly Weinersmith, celebrating the paperback release of our book Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That’ll Improve and/or Ruin Everything.

In this podcast series, we’re going to revisit each of the 10 technologies discussed in Soonish, expanding on topics touched on in the book, exploring related matters, and checking out new advances since the book came out.

The first chapter in Soonish is on Cheap Access to Space. We mostly talk about ways to reduce the price of launching things into space, but reducing launch costs is only one part of a current movement called "NewSpace".

In this first podcast episode, we interview Dr. Elizabeth Frank about NewSpace. Dr. Frank earned her PhD at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and did her postdoc at the Carnegie Institution for Science (working on NASA's Messenger, which orbited Mercury). She then spent 2 years working at Planetary Resources, Inc., and is now an Applied Planetary Scientist at First Mode.

Zach and Kelly are BACK! Well, for now. Turns out we haven't just been sitting by the beach instead of recording podcasts - we've been writing a book! That book is called Soonish - Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve And/Or Ruin Everything, and it's coming out through Penguin Press in the US and Particular Books in the UK on October 17th. This episode gives you a flavor of what the book is about, and some insights into the harrowing tale of what we went through to write this book while working our "normal" jobs and raising 2 kids. You can preorder the book here. 

Wade Roush is a science and technology journalist, academic has worked with various startups and host of the podcast Soonish. Soonish is a podcast about the future: How we think and talk about it, what we can do to shape it, and why our best forecasts—and our worst fears—are usually wrong. On this episode we chat about podcast mirroring blogging cycle, the death of the newspaper industry, working at NASA's Ames Research Center, how we should not fear the robot uprising, storytelling and more.