Robert Krulwich

Robert Louis Krulwich is an American radio and television journalist who currently serves as a science correspondent for NPR and is a co-host of the program Radiolab. He has worked as a full-time employee of ABC, CBS, National Public Radio, and Pacifica. He has done assignment pieces for ABC's Nightline and World News Tonight, as well as PBS's Frontline, NOVA, and NOW with Bill Moyers. TV Guide called him "the most inventive network reporter in television", and New York Magazine wrote that he's "the man who simplifies without being simple".

Background

Krulwich received his bachelor's degree in U.S. history from Oberlin College in 1969 and his Juris Doctor degree from Columbia Law School in 1974. Just two months later, he abandoned his pursuit of a law career to cover the Watergate hearings for Pacifica Radio. In 1976, he became Washington bureau chief for Rolling Stone.

From 1978 to 1985, he was the business and economics correspondent for NPR. Among other creative efforts, he recorded an opera called "Rato Interesso" to explain interest rates. He went on to host the PBS arts series Edge.

Richard Dawkins

Clinton Richard Dawkins FRS FRSL (born 26 March 1941) is an Englishethologist, evolutionary biologist, and writer. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was the University of Oxford's Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008.

Dawkins first came to prominence with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which popularised the gene-centred view of evolution and introduced the term meme. In 1982, he introduced into evolutionary biology the influential concept that the phenotypic effects of a gene are not necessarily limited to an organism's body, but can stretch far into the environment. This concept is presented in his book The Extended Phenotype. In 2006, he founded the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science.

Dawkins is a noted atheist, and is well known for his criticism of creationism and intelligent design. In his 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker, he argues against the watchmaker analogy, an argument for the existence of a supernatural creator based upon the complexity of living organisms. Instead, he describes evolutionary processes as analogous to a blind watchmaker. In his most popular book, his 2006 book The God Delusion, Dawkins contends that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and that religious faith is a delusion. He is an opponent of creationism being taught in schools. He makes regular television and radio appearances, predominantly discussing his books, his atheism and his ideas and opinions as a public intellectual.

Word

In linguistics, a word is the smallest element that may be uttered in isolation with semantic or pragmatic content (with literal or practical meaning). This contrasts deeply with a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning but will not necessarily stand on its own. A word may consist of a single morpheme (for example: oh!, rock, red, quick, run, expect), or several (rocks, redness, quickly, running, unexpected), whereas a morpheme may not be able to stand on its own as a word (in the words just mentioned, these are -s, -ness, -ly, -ing, un-, -ed). A complex word will typically include a root and one or more affixes (rock-s, red-ness, quick-ly, run-ning, un-expect-ed), or more than one root in a compound (black-board, rat-race). Words can be put together to build larger elements of language, such as phrases (a red rock), clauses (I threw a rock), and sentences (He threw a rock too, but he missed).

The term word may refer to a spoken word or to a written word, or sometimes to the abstract concept behind either. Spoken words are made up of units of sound called phonemes, and written words of symbols called graphemes, such as the letters of the English alphabet.

Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Timothy Gladwell, CM (born September 3, 1963) is a Canadian journalist, bestselling author, and speaker. He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996. He has written five books, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (2000), Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005), Outliers: The Story of Success (2008), What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures (2009), a collection of his journalism, and David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants (2013). All five books were on The New York Times Best Seller list.

Gladwell's books and articles often deal with the unexpected implications of research in the social sciences and make frequent and extended use of academic work, particularly in the areas of sociology, psychology, and social psychology. Gladwell was appointed to the Order of Canada on June 30, 2011.

Early life

Gladwell was born in Fareham, Hampshire, England. His mother is Joyce (née Nation) Gladwell, a Jamaican-born psychotherapist. His father, Graham Gladwell, is a mathematics professor from Kent, England.

Michio Kaku

Michio Kaku (/ˈmiːtʃioʊ ˈkɑːkuː/; born January 24, 1947) is a Japanese-American futurist, theoretical physicist and popularizer of science. Kaku is a Professor of Theoretical Physics at the City College of New York. He has written several books about physics and related topics, has made frequent appearances on radio, television, and film, and writes online blogs and articles. He has written three New York Times Best Sellers: Physics of the Impossible (2008), Physics of the Future (2011), and The Future of the Mind (2014). Kaku has hosted several TV specials for the BBC, the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, and the Science Channel.

Early life and education

Kaku was born in San Jose, California, to Japanese American parents. His father, born in California and educated in both Japan and the United States, was fluent in Japanese and English. Both his parents were interned in the Tule Lake War Relocation Center during World War II, where they met and where his older brother was born.