Christopher Intagliata was Science Friday’s senior producer, which means he was chief cheerleader for all the radio and podcast projects. He helped to select and shape stories, or put them to a gentle death if necessary. He was also the coordinating producer for Science Friday’s live stage events around the nation, and has skated Olympic ice and served as a prop in an optical illusion for SciFri.
Christopher started at Science Friday as an intern in summer 2008, until the day Ira Flatow called him at home, triggering enormous anxiety about the latest script he’d written, to ask if he wanted to be a producer. His favorite stories usually involve microbes or food or both, but anything can pique his interest—other than ocean chemistry. Sorry.
He also reports regularly for Scientific American‘s “60-Second Science” podcast, and was a 2015 Woods Hole Ocean Science Journalism fellow. Prior to becoming a science journalist, he taught English to soldiers and bankers in Verona, Italy, and traversed the Sierra Nevada mountains as a field biologist, on the lookout for mountain yellow-legged frogs. He speaks fluent Italian, awkward Japanese, and passable Ira Flatowese.
He is now an editor for All Things Considered.
24:57
Seeking a Grain of Truth in ‘Whole Grain’ Labels
Whole wheat, stone-ground, multi-grain. Have food labels got you confused?
21:26
Robert Langer, Father of Invention
The biotech pioneer has started two dozen companies, and has over 800 patents to his name.
23:32
Ask A Dentist: Facts To Sink Your Teeth Into
An apple a day keeps the doctor away. And, it turns out, the dentist. Did you know that the fibery skin is good for your teeth?
41:43
Tracking a Space Rock’s Streak Past Earth
Asteroid 2012 DA14 spans half a football field, and will whiz by the Earth a mere 17,000 miles above us–closer than many satellites.
47:18
Are We Losing the Race Against Climate Change?
China burns as much coal as the rest of the world combined. But it also leads in clean tech, and has a national climate change policy in place. A look at how the world is tackling climate change–with or without us.
22:42
Shoring Up the Nation’s Crumbling Coastlines
Can beaches be rebuilt to face fiercer storms and rising seas? Is there even enough sand to do it?
9:57
Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Encoded in DNA
If all the world’s information were encoded as DNA, it would fit in the back of a station wagon.
17:01
Colossal Quasar Clump Too Huge to Exist, in Theory
Astronomers have discovered a clump of 73 quasars spanning four billion light years at its widest point — that’s like 40,000 Milky Way galaxies lined end-to-end.
17:35
How Do You Fend Off the Flu?
Aside from getting the flu shot, how do you outsmart the wily flu virus? Hoard hand sanitizer? Dodge door knobs? Or quietly slink away from a coughing commuter?
29:43
The Fallacies of Fat
In “Fat Chance,” obesity doc Robert Lustig deconstructs the mythology on fat and exercise.