Episode #5: What Are We Going to Tell the Kids?

What's is it worth to share your biology with another person on this earth? This month features a quartet of stories about uncommon families. We'll look at the difference between choosing our families and fertilizing them, between investing for the future and coming to terms with the past. Sara M. tells us what it's like for your own child to be first person you've ever met who's related to you. Jessica Hindman never thought that the simple act of going to college would leave a genetic trail of up to thirty children in her wake. Faced with a dud ovary, Abby Rabinowitz has to find some sperm, any sperm, in the greater New York area. And finally, mother and daughter Lacey and Anne Clarke reveal the forty year old secret that changed the shape of their small family forever.

Arts and Answers: Sun in a Bottle

As the testing of the atomic bomb began at Los Alamos, there was another superweapon in development—one that relied not on fission, like the A-bomb, but on fusion. The resulting H-bomb was one thousand times more powerful than its atomic counterpart, and the harnessing of fusion power soon began a quixotic pursuit to create the world's first fusion reactor: one that that held the promise of endless renewable energy. An interview with science journalist Charles Seife about his new book Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking.