Talks at Google

Writer, broadcaster, and researcher Dr. Aarathi Prasad visits Google to discuss her book “Silk: A World History.” In a tale that spans continents and millennia, Aarathi weaves together the complex story of the queen of fabrics. Through the scientists who have studied silk, and the biology of the animals from which it has been drawn, she explores the global, natural, and cultural history of a unique material that has fascinated the world for thousands of years.

Some four thousand years ago, humans began cultivating silkworms. With it came a growing obsession with unlocking silk’s secrets to understand how the strongest biological material ever known could be harnessed.

Explorers and scientists, including groundbreaking women who pushed the boundaries of societal expectations, dedicated their lives to investigate the anatomy of silk-producing animals. They endured unbelievable hardships to discover and collect new specimens, leading them to the moths of China, Indonesia, and India; the spiders of Argentina, Paraguay, and Madagascar; and the mollusks of the Mediterranean.

Rich with the complex connections between human and nonhuman worlds, the book not only peers into the past but also reveals the fiber’s impact today, inspiring new technologies across the fashion, military, and medical fields, and shows its untapped potential to pioneer a more sustainable future.

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Mary Roach visits Google to discuss her book "Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law."

What’s to be done about a jaywalking moose? A bear caught breaking and entering? A murderous tree? Three hundred years ago, animals that broke the law would be assigned legal representation and put on trial. These days, the answers are best found not in jurisprudence but in science: the curious science of human-wildlife conflict, a discipline at the crossroads of human behavior and wildlife biology.

Mary Roach is the author of six New York Times bestsellers, including "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers"; "Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal", and "Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void." Her books have been published in 21 languages, and her second book, "Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife", was a New York Times Notable Book. Mary has written for National Geographic, Wired, The New York Times Magazine, and the Journal of Clinical Anatomy, among others.

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Stephen Pearcy, lead singer and frontman of the rock band RATT, visits Google to discuss his book "Sex, Drugs, RATT and Roll: My Life in Rock."

Women. Spandex. Drugs. Hair spray.

Welcome to heavy metal rock ’n’ roll, circa 1980, when all you needed was the right look, burning ambition, and a chance. Cranking out metal just as metal got hot, RATT was the perfect band at the perfect time, and their hit single “Round and Round” became a top-selling anthem. The bigger RATT got, the more excessive lead singer Stephen Pearcy and his bandmates became. There was nothing these guys wouldn’t snort, drink, bed, or break. But as RATT scrambled up a wall of fame and wealth, they then experienced a gut-wrenching free fall. Pearcy’s stunningly honest rock ’n’ roll confessional, by turns incredible, hilarious, and lyrical, is more than a story of survival—it’s a search for the things that matter most.

Originally published in July of 2013.

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Global development leader, professor and author Edward ‘Ted’ Miguel visits Google to discuss how open science is transforming poverty reduction and global development.

What really works in the fight to empower the world's poorest people? What's the science behind traditional development programs, cash grants, and tech transfer efforts? Ted shares his learnings from his years leading UC Berkeley's Center for Effective Global Action, or CEGA.

Ted’s main research focus is African economic development, including work on the economic causes and consequences of violence; the impact of ethnic divisions on local collective action; interactions between health, education, environment, and productivity for the poor; and methods for transparency in social science research. He has conducted field work in Kenya, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, and India.

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World-renowned physicist Claudia de Rham visits Google to discuss her book “The Beauty of Falling: A Life in Pursuit of Gravity.”

Claudia de Rham has been playing with gravity her entire life. As a diver, she experimented with her body’s buoyancy in the Indian Ocean. As a pilot, she soared over Canadian waterfalls before beginning her daily scientific research. As an astronaut candidate, she dreamt of the experience of flying free from the Earth’s pull. And as a physicist, she discovered new sides to gravity’s irresistible personality by exploring the limits of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. In The Beauty of Falling, she shares captivating stories about her quest to gain intimacy with gravity, to understand both its feeling and fundamental nature. Her life’s pursuit led her away from her dream of becoming an astronaut to an exhilarating breakthrough at the very frontiers of gravitational physics.

While many of us presume to know gravity quite well, the brightest scientists in history have yet to fully answer the simple question: what exactly is gravity? De Rham reveals how great minds—from Newton and Einstein to Stephen Hawking - led her to the edge of knowledge about this fundamental force. She found hints of a hidden side to gravity at the particle level where Einstein’s theory breaks down, leading her to develop a new theory of “massive gravity.” De Rham shares how her life’s path turned from a precipitous fall to an exquisite flight toward the discovery of something entirely new about our surprising, gravity-driven universe.

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