Karen A. Frenkel

Blogs for the Science Friday Initiative: ScienceFriday.com and TalkingScience.org

Cooper critiques our healthcare system via medical mannequins who "reside" in a fictitious clinic on a website. They blog and croon music videos about medical ethics and dilemmas patients and caregivers face. Pharmaceutical "sponsors" help get the message across.

The neuroscientist and Nobel laureate continues to explore the themes ellucidated in his 2007 book of the same name. Petra Seeger's film also depicts Kandel and his family's visit to Vienna, where he lived until age nine before World War II.

Ken Burns discusses the thrill of learning about science from a park ranger, science education, and what he hopes viewers, especially children, will take away from the series.

Charles Petit of MIT's Knight Science Journalism Tracker reviews my blog.

Magnetic Movie won the Imagine Science Film Festival's Nature Scientific Merit Award. But is the film a documentary about science or artistic expression? Here's what the filmmakers had to say.

The View, reimagined if it covered science. Hypothetical hosts discuss this October's women Nobel Laureates.

The acclaimed filmmaker discusses scientists as activists who cherished America's pristine landscape and fought to preserve it. The first of a two-part interview.

Between the Folds is a new documentary about origami, the Japanese art of paper folding––a gorgeous cinematic experience.

A review of a one-woman show by actress Emily Levine about her recovery from a serious illness––acromegaly.

A discussion of the portrayal of the female scientist in Ron Howard and Tom Hanks' new film, which is based on Dan Brown's novel about anti-matter.

Boys and girls attend Super Science Saturday and Science Cabaret at their New York CIty Upper West Side public school. In their cafeteria they handle organs of a human cadaver, name an Egyptian pigeon, hoola hoop against gravity, and more.

A new documentary invites you into a molecular biology lab and illuminates the risks and triumphs of three grad students and their principal investigator.

Let's Get Bookish About e-Readers and Study Them

Coverage of Alan Kay's speech (12/​9/​08) honoring Doug Engelbart upon the 40th Anniversary of the demo of the computer mouse, hypertext, and other features we take for granted today. Kay also analyzes what might have been, had Engelbart's full vision for computing been realized.

The concluding act of the opera about J. Robert Oppenheimer.

During which Mezzo Soprano Susan Graham Interviews Composer John Adams.

A review of Act One of John Adams' opera about the days just before scientists tested the atomic bomb in the desert in July 1945.

Imagine Science Film Festival
People's Choice Winner Dara Bratt Details In Vivid Detail

An interview with the award-winning Director of The Wormhole, which earned the Imagine Science Film Festival's Nature Science Merit Award.

The holograms of correspondent Jessica Yellin and rapper Will.I.Am were fascinating and spooky. But should the technology be used to glam up reporters?

An account of Awards Night at the Imagine Science Film Festival. I discuss the criteria with Juan Carlos Lopez, Editor-in-Chief of Nature Medicine and a festival sponsor, and Darcy Kelley, Columbia University Professor of Neuroscience and a festival judge and advisor.

My first blog is a review of BLAST!, a documentary by Mark Devlin, in which astrophysicists struggle to launch their telescope from Antarctica.

Selected Works

Articles - Online
SciAm.com The Wisdom of the Hive
Is the Web a Threat to Creativity and Cultural values? One Cyber Pioneer Thinks So.
SciAm.com Therapists Use Virtual Worlds to Address Real Problems
Troubled teens benefit from role-play in virtual worlds with their therapists.
SciAm.com Flying on a Wing and an Isotope
Resuscitating the Atomic Airplane
The Village Voice Unwelcome Science
New York's Newest Science Magnet School and its Pioneering Principal, Jose Maldonado-Rivera
The Village Voice Your Brain on 9/11
Three neurological studies reveal that traumatic memories of those near the site and bereaved children affect functioning of parts of their brains.
Womens eNews Mentor Programs Help Girls Engineer Their Futures
Women continue to lag behind men in engineering, but mentorship programs help attract girls.
CyberTimes Toy Story: Origin of a Species
The making of the first fully computer-generated cartoon feature film.
Articles - Blogs
Articles - Print Magazines
Scientific American MIND How Do Neurons Communicate?
The answer is surprisingly elusive and the subject of intense debate.
Scientific American Silicon Smackdown
A New Algorithim Could Soon Vanquish Go Pros
Scientific American MIND News: Tinkering With Our Clock
A gene that controls human sleep habits can transform the rodents into "early birds"
Scientific American MIND News: Your Brain on Toxins
A review of the literature shows that developing brains are vulnerable to a host of poisons.
Medical Spare Parts
NYSE Magazine
Catching the Customer
How online merchants gain buyers' trust
Battling CyberFraud
Jewerly Etailers and Customer Trust
Computers in Court
Technology Review
Women and Computing
Communications of the ACM
Oral History
Oral history Interviews with Geneva Overholser
Three two audio sessions and one videotaped session with the former editor of the DeMoines Register.
Pew Biomedical Scholars Interviews
Oral History
Summary and indeces
Book Reviews
Book Review/Essay Scientific American Why Aren't More Women Physicists?
Two books look for answers in the lives of a few who succeeded.
Book Review Scientific American MIND Play = Learning
Cognitive scientists describe decades of research on play by which children learn. The authors claim that No Child Left Behind over-emphasizes test scores, and ignores data on how kids learn best.
Books - Children's
Looking at Light
Fourth graders explore what makes rainbows, why there are colors, why lights add up to white and paints add up to black.
Listening to Sound
Fourth graders learn about sound waves, echoes, and music.
Light and Sound Technology
How we capture light and sound so that we can see and hear them any time we want.
Book
Public Television Documentaries
net.LEARNING
The Pros and Cons of Learning Online
Minerva's Machine: Women and Computing
How women overcome barriers in school and the industry