Jessica Benko

Jessica Benko appears in the following:

A 4-Track Mind

Friday, December 08, 2023

A neurologist issues a dare to a ragtime piano player and a famous conductor, then the impossible happens.
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Imaginary Friends Forever

Thursday, October 13, 2016

Children with imaginary friends can be more empathetic and social, but does that mean they’re more creative than other kids?

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Does Your Zombie Have Rabies?

Thursday, September 08, 2016

Some of our culture’s most enduring monsters transmit their contagion through biting — werewolves, zombies, and vampires. Could these myths actually be about rabies?

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Reconstructing Viruses

Thursday, September 08, 2016

Why do scientists want to recreate viral monsters like the 1918 Spanish flu? And if they do, should they be allowed to publish the instructions?

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Robopainter

Thursday, November 12, 2015

A painter with no training as a programmer designed the world’s first art-making computer. Forty years later, he’s still tweaking it — and it’s making the best art of its career.

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Reconstructing Viruses

Friday, September 12, 2014

Why do scientists want to recreate viral monsters like the 1918 Spanish flu? And if they do, should they be allowed to publish the instructions?

Comments [1]

Does Your Zombie Have Rabies?

Friday, September 12, 2014

Some of our culture’s most enduring monsters transmit their contagion through biting — werewolves, zombies, and vampires. Are these myths really about rabies?

Comment

Inner Voices

Thursday, June 27, 2013

How the voices in our heads shape us—for better and for worse.

Comments [29]

Does Your Zombie Have Rabies?

Friday, March 08, 2013

Long before science explained rabies, the virus showed up in folklore and literature. "The vampire myth, the werewolf myth, and the zombie myth," Bill Wasik tells Kurt Andersen, "are ...

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Reconstructing Viruses

Friday, March 08, 2013

Vincent Racaniello of Columbia University did groundbreaking research on reconstructing the DNA of viruses (sort of like microbial Jurassic Park). The method was used to re-create the...

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Imaginary Friends Forever

Friday, November 23, 2012

Lots of kids have imaginary friends. Marjorie Taylor, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon, has been looking at imaginary friends and the children who have them. “Th...

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Robopainter

Friday, July 06, 2012

AARON is the world’s first cybernetic artist: an artificially intelligent system that composes its own paintings. Incredibly, the system is the work of one man, Harold Cohen, who ...

Comments [11]

Storytelling and Science Collide

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

PRI
WNYC
Humans love a well-told story and scientists are beginning to understand why. According to a 2010 study by three Princeton researchers, the act of listening to, and comprehending, a n...
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Photographing the Microscopic World

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

PRI
WNYC
Bernardo Cesare's photographs investigate the history of the earth and expose the mysteries of its formation...
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Robopainter

Friday, December 16, 2011

AARON is the world’s first cybernetic artist: an artificially intelligent system that composes its own paintings. Incredibly, the system is the work of one man, Harold Cohen, who ha...

Comments [42]

Imagine Science Film Festival

Friday, October 07, 2011

PRI
WNYC
The fourth Imagine Science Film Festival (ISFF) will be held in New York City October 14-21. Venues in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens will host 80 films from 15 countries. They are ...
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2011 Nobel Laureate in Physics Teaches About Music

Wednesday, October 05, 2011

PRI
WNYC
Saul Perlmutter, 2011 Nobel Laureate in Physics, teaches "Physics and Music" at UC Berkeley. From his course description: "The mysteries of music have long inspired scientists to inve...
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Seeing Stats: The Art of Data Visualization

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

PRI
WNYC
Many scientists have no trouble conjuring rich images in their heads just from scanning columns of data. For the rest of us, it's essential to turn that data into something we can r...
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Poetry and Taxonomy

Thursday, September 01, 2011

PRI
WNYC
When Studio 360 contributor and science reporter Ari Daniel Shapiro visited at the Japanese Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology last winter, he met Dhugal Lindsay.  The Au...
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DJ Spooky Remixes Antarctica

Monday, August 22, 2011

PRI
WNYC
DJ Spooky (Paul D. Miller) has just released The Book of Ice, a new interactive graphic design project that weaves together the history and future of the human relationship to the wi...
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