Hey, O, Maddie here. Today you'll hear a conversation with an author and a scientist who basically

changed the way I think about light. Well, artificial light. It's one of the most important

inventions you never think about. It's the last episode of this very special week where we've

been celebrating the work of black scientists. Who I will remind us all are woefully underrepresented

in their fields and in the media due to systemic exclusion and discrimination. As we close out

the week, we want to say thank you to all the scientists who have helped us share their work

with you. We appreciate you. Okay, here's the show. You're listening to shortwave

from NPR. Hey, everybody. Maddie, Sify here. Today we are chatting with Anisa Ramirez,

a materials scientist or as she describes it. I'm an Adam whisperer and that's what I do. I

learn how atoms interact and then I try and get them to do new things to say form steel, glass

or copper materials that we've used throughout history to create the inventions all around us.

But Anisa takes it a step further. She argues that those inventions have shaped us in return.

When we talk about invention, we usually say, I invent this and then we put a period at the end of

that sentence. And what I'm saying is replace that period with a comma and say, and this invention

changed me this way. She writes about this in her new book, The Alchemy of Us, how humans in matter

transformed one another. I'm trying to impress upon people that there's a dance. We create something,

but then it changes us somehow, sometimes in ways that we predict and sometimes in ways that we

don't predict. Today on the show, we focus on an invention that's transformed how we live, work

and even sleep. And while learning about the process of invention as well as the personalities

and the flaws of our favorite inventors is so important.

So we're talking with Anisa Ramirez, a material scientist about her new book on inventions,

the technologies that we've created that in turn have shaped us. One chapter that captures this

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