Death impacts everyone and we often shy from from discussing it. We talk to a variety of people to puzzle out questions that come along with death.

Voices:

Saul Arber -  Brookdale University Hospital and Medical Center. He is a Radiology Oncologist and Director of Radiology Oncology Dept. at Brookdale.

Daniel Braunfeld - The Facing History High School. He is a high school history teacher and lives in Manhattan.

Phil Harris - Harris Funeral Homes. He has been a licensed director since 1977 and along with his wife Cathy has lived in West Bend since 1987. They are the parents of Allison and Ashley Harris.

Steven Luper - Trinity University Philosophy Dept. He specializes in epistemology and ethics. Epistemology: In “The Epistemic Predicament” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 62 (1984) 26-50, on p. 38, I defended the condition that has come to be called the safety condition for knowledge. Ethics: Much of my work on ethics concerns the philosophy of death. In "Annihilation" The Philosophical Quarterly 37 (1985) 233-252, I argue that Epicurus's position that death is not bad for us makes sense only if life is not good for us. In The Philosophy of Death (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) I argue that death is sometimes bad for its victims both in a timeless sense and also retroactively.

Robert A. Neimeyer - University of Memphis Psychology Dept. He is a professor in the Psychotherapy Research Area of the Department of Psychology, University of Memphis, where he also maintains an active clinical practice. Since completing his doctoral training at the University of Nebraska in 1982, he has conducted extensive research on the topics of death, grief, loss, and suicide intervention. Neimeyer has published 25 books, including Grief and bereavement in contemporary society: Bridging research and practice, Constructivist Psychotherapy, and The Art of Longing, a book of contemporary poetry. The author of nearly 400 articles and book chapters, he is currently working to advance a more adequate theory of grieving as a meaning-making process, both in his published work and through his frequent professional workshops for national and international audiences.

Helen Spiegel - Animal Kind Clinic in Brooklyn. She has been a veterinarian at Animal Kind since the fall of 1996. When she is not working she can be found at the park holding onto two misbehaved rat terriers, "Molly" and "Milo". Dr Spiegel enjoys working and living in Park Slope.

Michelle Valladares - The City College of New York. She is a Creative Writing and Poetry professor as well as an active poet.

Tyler Volk - New York University Biology Dept. He is biology professor and Environmental Studies Director and has been active in what might be called biosphere theory, or Gaia theory (with "biosphere" or "Gaia" defined as the system of atmosphere, ocean, soil, and life). Are there unifying scientific principles that govern diverse phenomena within the biosphere? Past work in Gaia theory has primarily focused on the state of the global environment that surrounds living things, for example, on the chemistry or temperature of atmosphere or ocean. He has been suggesting another approach. This involves close attention to how organisms fit into and in fact make the chemical cycles, the so-called biogeochemical cycles. A potential universal metric for these cycles is the "cycling ratio." This is the ratio of an element's flux into the photosynthesizers within a system (either the biosphere system or subsystems within) relative to the flux of that same element across the system's boundary into the system. Volk explores how this metric could be useful for biosphere theory, as a way of comparing systems with life across different scales of space, essential nutrients, and evolutionary time.

Simkah Weintraub - The Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services in New York City. He serves as Rabbinic Director of the Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services (JBFCS), one of the nation's premier voluntary mental health and social service agencies, serving more than 60,000 New Yorkers of all religious, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds through a diverse network of 172 community-based programs, residential facilities and day-treatment centers. He maintains a private practice in Couples and Family Therapy in New York, working with couples and families confronting a wide range of issues, including chronic illness, infertility, and bereavement.

Voices:

John Barry - Historian, author, advisor. He is a prize-winning and New York Times best-selling author whose books have won more than twenty awards. In 2005 the National Academy of Sciences named The Great Influenza: The story of the deadliest pandemic in history, a study of the 1918 pandemic, the year’s outstanding book on science or medicine. In 2006 the National Academy also invited him to give its annual Abel Wolman Distinguished Lecture; he is the only non-scientist ever to give that lecture. In 1998 Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, won the Francis Parkman Prize of the Society of American Historians for the year’s best book of American history. Before becoming a writer, Barry coached football at the high school, small college, and major college levels. Currently Distinguished Scholar at the Center for Bioenvironmental Research of Tulane and Xavier Universities, he lives in New Orleans.

Helen Beebee -  University of Birmingham. Her research encompasses a range of related topics in metaphysics, epistemology and the history of philosophy, and mostly engages with issues relating to ‘Humeanism’. She’s worked recently on freedom of the will (defending compatibilism), causation and laws of nature, natural kinds, the problem of induction (in connection with a Humean account of laws), and Hume himself (in particular, developing a ‘projectivist’ interpretation of his work on causation).

Prof. Beebee is currently Director of Research for the School of Philosophy, Theology & Religion. Additionally she is Director of the British Philosophical Association, a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council Advisory Board, and an honorary professor at the Centre for Time, University of Sydney.

Luke Constas - Biology Instructor. New York City.

Michael Esfeld - Univeristy of Lausanne. He researches the structures and causation in the philosophy of physics and the philosophy of mind. His physics interests are summarized here:

Structural realism is a form of holism in the philosophy of physics, claiming that in the domain of fundamental physics, there are in the first place certain structures in the sense of networks of concrete physical relations instead of objects whose identity is constituted by intrinsic properties. We develop a conception of moderate ontological structural realism that recognizes objects as that what stands in the relations, but those objects are characterized mainly by the relations in which they stand. We apply this conception to quantum physics and to space-time as treated in general relativity theory. We currently investigate whether and in what sense these structures can be considered to be causal, their being causal distinguishing physical from mathematical structures and grounding the direction of time.

Ned Hall - Harvard University. He works mainly on metaphysics and philosophy of science, with a special emphasis on philosophical problems associated with the foundations of quantum physics. In the philosophy of physics, his current research focuses on disentangling the various problems associated with the quantum mechanical treatment of measurement, and on elucidating the implications of and conceptual basis for the usual quantum mechanical description of systems containing identical particles. His current interests in the philosophy of science center on the analysis of natural laws and their role within scientific theories. His other work has included investigations into the connections between probability theory and the logic of conditionals, the epistemology and metaphysics of objective probability, and the analysis of causation. He recently edited (with John Collins and L. A. Paul), Causation and Counterfactuals.

Alfredo Morabia, MD - Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. He was board certified in Internal Medicine at the University Hospital of Geneva, where he specialized in Occupational Medicine. He practiced both in Switzerland and Italy, before receiving a PhD in Epidemiology and an MHS in Biostatistics from the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health. Dr. Morabiz returned to Switzerland and served as professor and head of the division of Clinical Epidemiology at the University Hospitals of Geneva from 1990 to January 2006. He is currently professor of Epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health and at Queens College, City University of New York.

George Newman - Yale University. He is interested in the application of basic cognitive processes, such as categorization and causal reasoning, to consumer behavior.

Currently, his research examines the psychological processes underlying our concepts of authenticity and authentic “originals” in the domains of art, celebrity possessions, and consumer products. He is also interested in pro-social behaviors such as charitable giving and purchasing environmentally-friendly products, and how consumers may balance their desires to “do good” with desires to maximize the efficiency of their donations or purchases. Newman has published work on essentialism, perceptions of animacy, children’s conceptual development, causal reasoning, and identity continuity.

Jonathan Schaffer- Australian National University. He received his PhD from Rutgers University in 1999. He joined the ANU in 2007, from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Jonathan’s main interests are in metaphysics and epistemology. His current research centers on metaphysical monism, coupled with contrastive theories of causation and knowledge.

Daniel Schneider – University of Wisconsin. He is interested in Early Modern Philosophy, Ancient Philosophy and Philosophy of Science. He is particularly interested in the works of Spinoza and the development of a viable rationalist epistemology. He is currently working on a dissertation that examines the foundations of Spinoza’s metaphysics and reexamines the traditional Rationalist/Empiricist dispute.

This is the second episode in a longer series focused on issues surrounding the origin of life, where you’ll get the world experts giving you insights into the current state of the research.

Voices:
Dimitar Sasselov - Harvard University Astronomer
Susan Perkins - American Museum of Natural History Parisitologist 

In the last installment of our Origins of Life series, we join people for their first look at Saturn alongside astrophysicists who gaze up at the universe for a living. Learn the new techniques scientists use to FIND planets in other solar systems (exoplanets) and hear their thoughts about life in the deep void of space.

Voices:
Joe Delfausse - (retired) NY Amateur Astronomer's Association
Caleb Scharf - Columbia University 
Bob Hazen - Carnegie Institution and George Mason University
Dimitar Sasselov - Harvard University
Stephen Mojzsis - Colorado University and Universite Claude Bernard Lyon
Ben Oppenheimer - American Natural History Museum 

Bernie Krause is a musician who has drastically shifted his career to study natural soundscapes. He's discovered information hidden in these natural sounds that are telling for animals and us.

Voices:
Bernie Krause - soundscape researcher, musician, author
Jack McElaney - teacher and dean at Dwight School in NYC 

PRX homepage image from Shutterstock. 

Avery Wang helped found the app, Shazam. This app is now part of our cultural consciousness as a flagship app for all smartphones because it is so simple – hold up your phone to a song you hear and identify it. The app is almost magical. This is the story of how Shazam began (with the many hurdles Wang overcame) and how the algorithm actually works.