Science & Technology

Linguist Geoff Nunberg considers the use of the first person pronouns to personalize everything from computers to contracts.

Film critic John Powers reviews "You've Got Mail," which is a modern spin on the 1940 Christmas tale.

Journalist Mark Hertsgaard. He traveled around the world examining environmentally-damaged places. His new book about it is, "Earth Odyssey: Around the world in Search of Our Environmental Future" (Broadway Books). Hertsgaard also writes for the New York times, The New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, and the Nation.

Neil Gershenfeld is author of "When Things Start to Think." (Henry Holt) He talks about his research into the future technology. This includes shoes with computers in them, Refrigerators that tell you when the milk is expired, and coffee cups that know how you like your coffee. He co-directs the Things That Think research consortium at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Ma.

Barbara Bogaev interviews astronomer and writer Donald Goldsmith about the future of space travel. He was the consultant to the PBS documentary film "Voyage to the Milky Way" (TV/Books) and is the author of the companion book.

Science writer James Gleick ("GLICK"). His new book "Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything" (Pantheon) is about the accelerating pace of modern life. He writes about how technology has created the feeling that life moves too fast, but that we have become "addicted" to the pace and might as well learn to enjoy it.

Linguist Geoff Nunberg on the dot com craze started by the Internet.

Inventor and ex-magician David Levy. His inventions include a tiny keypad - the size of a credit card, a tattoo whose design can be changed at will, and a devise that seals severed arteries in one minute. In 1996, at MIT, he won the Lemelson-MIT Student Prize, which acknowledged him as one of the nation's premier young inventors.

Linguist Geoff Nunberg on the word "virtual" as In virtual reality.

Linguist Geoffrey Nunberg discusses the word hacker.

Doctor Mel Greaves, author of Cancer: The Evolutionary Legacy (Oxford University Press. Greaves is professor of cell biology and director of the Leukemia Research Fund Centre for Cell and Molecular Biology at the Institute of Cancer Research in London. Greaves places cancer in its evolutionary context, using examples from the 15th century to the most contemporary research. Greaves talks about the importance of looking at cancer through a Darwinian lens. He says there may be implications for research, prevention, and treatment.

Kraft was NASAs first flight director, from the first forays into space in the 1960s to after Neil Armstrong landed on the moon in 1969. Kraft also created Mission Control. He has written a new book, –Flight: My Life In Mission Control.

Film director Rob Sitch. He and his creative team at Working Dog, got their start in morning radio, then switched to TV. They made their first feature film The Castle in 1997. Their newest film The Dish is based on the true story of how three Australian scientists made possible the worldwide broadcast of Neil Armstrongs first steps on the moon. The film stars Sam Neill and Patrick Warburton ("Puddy" on Seinfeld).

Film critic Henry Sheeham reviews the new Stephen Spielberg film A.I.

Linguist Geoff Nunberg considers the efforts to make talking robots.

Rodney Brooks, the director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). His new book is called Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us. Brooks offers a vision of the future of humans and robots. He is also Fujitsu Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at MIT. Brooks is the chairman and chief technological officer of iRobot Corporation. He was one of the subjects of Errol Morris' 1997 documentary, Fast, Cheap and Out of Control.

An expert in climate change research, Paul Mayewski led the National Science Foundation's Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2. The project extracted ice cores chronicling 100,000 years of climate history. Mayewski, with co-author Frank White, writes about their expeditions in the new book, The Ice Chronicles: The Quest to Understand Global Climate Change (University Press of New England). Mayewski is also co-director of the Institute of Quaternary and Climate Studies at the University of Maine.

Linguist Geoff Nunberg reflects on the evolution of World Wide Web naming conventions, such as attaching "e" or "cyber" in front of everything Internet.

We remember paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould. He died Monday at the age of 60. Gould was a professor of geology at Harvard and curator of the university's Museum of Comparative Zoology. He wrote columns for Natural History Magazine and Discover Magazine, and had written several books, including the award-winning The Mismeasure of Man. Gould used his writing and teaching to demystify the scientific method and to provide a historical perspective on science for the layman.

Brazilian physicist Marcelo Gleiser is the author of the new book, The Prophet and the Astronomer: A Scientific Journey to the End of Time (WW Norton). In it he explores our relationship to the sky and how it has influenced religion and then in turn - science. He writes, 'one of my goals. . is to humanize science, to argue that our scientific ideas are very much a product of the cultural and emotional environment where they originate'. Gleiser is Professor of Natural Philosophy and professor of physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College.