From the Internet’s Beginnings to Our Understanding of Consciousness, This Editor Has Seen It All

Science Quickly

Scientific American

Science

4.2 • 639 Ratings

🗓️ 18 April 2025

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Senior mind and brain editor Gary Stix has covered the breadth of science and technology over the past 35 years at Scientific American. He joins host Rachel Feltman to take us through the rise of the Internet and the acceleration of advancement in neuroscience that he’s covered throughout his time here. Stix retired earlier this month, and we’d like to thank him for his intellect, inquisitiveness and inspiring run at Scientific American! Read some of Gary Stix’s recent coverage of neuroscience and psychology: Even Four-Year-Olds Instinctively Fact-Check for Misinformation https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/even-four-year-olds-instinctively-fact-check-for-misinformation/ You Don’t Need Words to Think https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/you-dont-need-words-to-think/ Wikipedia Searches Reveal Differing Styles of Curiosity https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/wikipedia-searches-reveal-differing-styles-of-curiosity/ E-mail us at [email protected] if you have any questions, comments or ideas for stories we should cover! Discover something new every day: subscribe to Scientific American and sign up for Today in Science, our daily newsletter. Science Quickly is produced by Rachel Feltman, Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Naeem Amarsy and Jeff DelViscio. This episode was hosted by Rachel Feltman with guest (and now retired senior editor!) Gary Stix. Our show is edited by Alex Sugiura with fact-checking by Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck. The theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Understanding the human body is a team effort. That's where the Yachtel group comes in.
0:05.8	Researchers at Yachtolt have been delving into the secrets of probiotics for 90 years.
0:11.0	Yachtold also partners with nature portfolio to advance gut microbiome science through the global grants for gut health, an investigator-led research program.
0:20.1	To learn more about Yachtolt, visit yawcult.co.
0:22.7	.jp. That's Y-A-K-U-L-T.C-O.JP. When it comes to a guide for your gut, count on Yacolt. For Scientific American Science quickly, I'm Rachel Feltman.
0:53.3	It goes without saying that a lot has changed at Scientific Americans since our first issue came out in 1845.
1:00.9	But the magazine and the world of science journalism in general also looks radically different today than it did in, say, 1990.
1:09.1	That's when today's guest first started working at Siam. Until his retirement
1:12.9	earlier this month, Gary Sticks served as Scientific American Senior Editor of Mind and Brain
1:17.7	Topics. Given that Gary worked at Siam longer than I've been alive, we thought it would be
1:22.8	cool to pick his brain about how his coverage areas of technology and neuroscience have evolved over the last
1:28.2	35 years. Gary, thanks so much for coming on to talk to us today.
1:31.9	Well, thank you for having me.
1:34.3	So when did you actually start at Scientific American?
1:37.3	I started in June of 1990. I was here largely before the internet, as we know it now. We take the floppy
1:47.8	disc, we create a printout, and that was used by the copy desk to actually edit the
1:54.2	articles we were doing. And there always are corrections to a manuscript. One copy editor would have to read to the other the changes.
2:05.9	So it was a very different world than the one we have now. To put that in context, there was an
2:13.3	internet. It was used by the government and certain academic facilities, but the time of
2:21.6	waking up in the morning and looking at your device was far, far away.
2:27.5	Right. Yeah. And you started out covering technologies. Is that correct? Yes. Scientific American was in its absolute pinnacle of its
2:37.6	heyday was the whole period after the launch of Sputnik and the recognition that the U.S.
	...

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