Jessica Benko
radio, writing, and producing projects
RECENT WORK:
STUDIO 360 | 11/23/12
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. “They tend to be more social, less shy, and do better on tasks which require you to take the perspective of another person in real life. We have found that they are more creative on some kinds of tasks. Other people have found that their narratives are richer.”
ThIS AMERICAN LIFE | 10/05/12
The story of a woman who was almost killed several times...by a thought she just couldn’t get rid of. Act III of TAL episode 476: What Doesn’t Kill You
The Atavist | 05/16/12
One woman’s battle against paralysis at the frontiers of science
Review here
Paralyzed and unable to speak after a stroke, Cathy Hutchinson was trapped inside her mind, only communicating with the outside world through her eyes. Then she heard about an experiment called BrainGate at Brown University that hope to allow immobilized patients to control robotic limbs with their thoughts. But can what sounds like science fiction eventually transform the lives of quadriplegics? And could it help Cathy take control of her life? The Electric Mind is a story of a radical new technology, a pioneering group of researchers, and one woman’s effort to transcend her condition and the body itself.
STUDIO 360 | 12/16/11
AARON is the world’s first cybernetic artist: an artificially intelligent system that composes its own paintings. Edward Feigenbaum, one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence, considers AARON a remarkable example of AI displaying genuine creativity. “What you call a creative act, it’s actually a behavior that you observe,” he says, “It elicits a kind of emotion of, “How did he or she or it think of that?”
STUDIO 360 | 11/04/11
What traits could we engineer to “improve” people? Kurt Andersen talks with Greg Stock, a leading proponent of genetic engineering. We’ll hear from a double amputee and MIT scientist who walks using bionic legs of his own creation; and from a doctor and an artist exploring mankind’s ability to defy the limits of nature with the help of a bit of bio-enhancement.
The People Who Walk WIth Reindeer: Sami
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE | 11/01/11
photographs by Erika Larsen Text | Photos | Video
Two hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle, near the jagged tips of Norway’s crown, the sun does not set for weeks on end during the summer months, and the midnight sun bounces off fields of midsummer snow. The solstice comes and goes but the Sami reindeer herders are too busy to pay much attention. “We’re always in the middle of calf marking at this time,” Ingrid Gaup says, referring to the yearly ritual in which the herding families carve their ancient marks into the ears of the new calves. In the Sami’s homeland, spread across northern Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia, the notion of time is untethered from the cycles of the sun and is yoked instead to something far more important: the movement of the reindeer ....
RADIOLAB | 7/26/11
Bob Milne, ragtime pianist extraordinaire, has a rare ability that has brain researchers scratching their heads and hoping to discover how his mind works.
Virginia Quarterly Review | 9/4/10
Gold, mercury, poverty and profit in the Amazonian region of Madre de Dios, Peru | photographs by Bear Guerra
*finalist for the Livingston Award for International Reporting
*included in Notable Essays in Best American Essays 2010
*included in Notable Writing in Best American Science and Nature Writing 2010
HIDDEN DIMENSIONS: EXPLORING HYPERSPACE
WORLD SCIENCE FESTIVAL | 6/5/10
(video of full program) Extra dimensions of space–the idea that we are immersed in hyperspace -- may be key to explaining the fundamental nature of the universe. Relativity introduced time as the fourth dimension, and Einstein’s subsequent work envisioned more dimensions still--but ultimately hit a dead end. Modern research has advanced the subject in ways he couldn’t have imagined. John Hockenberry joins Brian Greene, Lawrence Krauss and other leading thinkers on a visual tour through wondrous spatial realms that may lie beyond the ones we experience.
BACK TO THE BIG BANG: INSIDE THE LARGE HADRON COLLIDER
WORLD SCIENCE FESTIVAL | 6/5/10
(video of full program) Venture deep inside the world’s biggest physics machine, the Large Hadron Collider. This extraordinary feat of human engineering took 16 years and $10 billion to build, and and has begun colliding particles at energies unseen since a fraction of a second after the big bang. We'll explore this amazing apparatus that could soon reveal clues about nature’s fundamental laws and even the origin of the universe itself. John Hockenberry moderates a discussion among physicists including Marcela Carena, Monica Dunford, Jennifer Klay and Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek.
WORLD SCIENCE FESTIVAL | 6/4/10
(video of full program) This statement is false. Think about it, and it makes your head hurt. If it’s true, it’s false. If it’s false, it’s true. In 1931, Austrian logician Kurt Gödel shocked the worlds of mathematics and philosophy by establishing that such statements are far more than a quirky turn of language: he showed that there are mathematical truths which simply can't be proven. In the decades since, thinkers have taken the brilliant Gödel's result in a variety of directions--linking it to limits of human comprehension and the quest to recreate human thinking on a computer. This program explores Gödel's discovery and examines the wider implications of his revolutionary finding. Participants include mathematician Gregory Chaitin, author Rebecca Goldstein, astrophysicist Mario Livio and artificial intelligence expert Marvin Minsky.
MIND AND MACHINE: THE FUTURE OF THINKING
WORLD SCIENCE FESTIVAL | 6/4/10
(video of full program) Creative thought is surely among our most precious and mysterious capabilities. But can powerful computers rival the human brain? As thinking, remembering and innovating become increasingly interwoven with technological advances, what are we capable of? What do we lose? Join Luciano Floridi, John Donoghue, Gary Small and Rosalind Picard for a thought-provoking program about thinking.
BLACK HOLES AND HOLOGRAPHIC WORLDS
WORLD SCIENCE FESTIVAL | 6/3/10
(video of whole program) Black holes are gravitational behemoths that dramatically twist space and time. Recently, they’ve also pointed researchers to a remarkable proposal—that everything we see may be akin to a hologram. Alan Alda joins Kip Thorne, Robbert Dijkgraaf and other renowned researchers on an odyssey through one of nature’s most spectacular creations, and learn how they are leading scientists to rewrite the rules of reality.
RADIOLAB | 9/25/09
What's gotten into you? In this hour we explore nature's moochers - the good, the bad, and the hideous. We have stories of lethargic farmers, zombie cockroaches, and even mind-controlled humans (kinda, maybe). Could parasites be the shadowy hands that pull the strings of life?
RADIOLAB | 9/18/09
What happens at the moment when we slip from life...to the other side? Is it a moment? If it is, when exactly does it happen? And what happens afterward? It’s a show of questions that don’t have easy answers. So, in a slight departure from our regular format, we bring you eleven meditations on how, when, and even if we die.
WORLD SCIENCE FESTIVAL | 6/13/09
Alan Alda explored the nature of creative breakthroughs with innovators Dean Kamen, holder of more than 440 U.S. patents, and Hugh Herr, Director of the MIT Biomechatronics lab. The instant of inspiration can be as unpredictable as lightening, but true innovators create optimum conditions for transformative insights. What does it take to throw out conventional approaches to a problem and come up with something entirely new? A sold-out audience joined us for a discussion about curiosity, passion, perseverance, collaboration and discovery.
WORLD SCIENCE FESTIVAL | 6/11/09
Created especially for the World Science Festival, this presentation filled the seats of the Hayden Planetarium for an immersive, three-dimensional tour of the cosmos through the AMNH’s Digital Universe. Theoretical physicists Jim Gates, Lawrence Krauss, and Evalyn Gates, and astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, Frederick P. Rose Director, Hayden Planetarium, led a cosmic journey to explore the surprising factors that are firing a revolution in modern cosmology.
RADIOLAB | 12/12/08
One of the great and noble pursuits of humankind, the quest for scientific knowledge is also one of the most dangerous, frustrating, ego-driven, transcendent, sublime, dirty, long, demoralizing, inspiring...you get the idea. Why are inquiry and discovery so seductive? We take a grand tour of characters and their stories of love and loss in the name of science.
RADIOLAB | 12/05/08
Humans love to solve problems. In this hour of Radiolab, diagnosis: our attempt to find out what’s wrong and give it a label. In this day and age, we have astonishing technology--chemicals and computers and machines that can pinpoint things imperceptible to our senses. But humans aren’t obsolete. Intuition and creativity still lead the way both in discovering the nature of the problem, and in dealing with that knowledge.
RADIOLAB | 11/28/08
This hour of Radiolab: a look at race. When the human genome was first fully mapped in 2000, Bill Clinton, Craig Venter, and Francis Collins took the stage and pronounced that “The concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis.” Great words spoken with great intentions. But what do they really mean, and where do they leave us? Our genes are nearly all the same, but that hasn’t made race meaningless, or wiped out our evolving conversation about it.
RADIOLAB | 11/21/08
Sperm carry half the genes needed for human life. In this hour of Radiolab, some basic questions and profound thoughts about reproduction. To begin: why so many sperm? We turn to the animal kingdom for answers, which lands us on a tour of sperm battles in ducks, flying pig sperm, and promiscuous whippoorwills. Next, we ponder fatherhood and wonder...in a world where sperm can be frozen and kept for all eternity...what the future holds for men. We end quietly, in a stark sonic space with a widow struggling to keep some essence of her husband alive.
RADIOLAB | 11/14/08
We turn up the volume on the voices in our heads and try to make sense of the babble. On a journey around the country to understand how emotion and logic interact to guide us through our options, we ponder how we get through the million choices and decisions we make every day. Forget free will, some important decisions could come down to a steaming cup of coffee.
RADIOLAB | 3/21/08
Why do some songs mercilessly stick in our heads and repeat themselves over and over? What makes these hooks so hooky? And how does a songwriter will a song forth from the ether? Nightmarish stories of musical hallucinations, songs that transcend language, and the triumphant return of the Elvis of Afghanistan.
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