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sellers.

Welcome to Science Talk, the weekly podcast of Scientific American posted on June 2nd, 2010.

I'm Steve Murski. The June issue of Scientific American magazine is out.

It features a special section called 12 events that will change everything. Editor-in-chief Mariette de Christina, section

editor Philip Yam and I talked about the 12 events as well as other items in the June issue.

Mariette, this is a bit of a departure from our usual format. Where did this article come from?

Actually, it came from a conversation that Phil Yam, the senior news editor and I had,

once upon a time. Every so often, we stop what we're doing day to day and we take a look

ahead and we try to see what are the things that are coming up that we ought to keep an eye on.

And one day, Phil came up to me and said, hey, Mariette, in the course of thinking

about things that we're doing, I keep track as the news editor of all kinds of things that, if

they happened, would make enormous changes in people's lives. Do you think the other

editors might be interested in such a thing? And I said, not only would the other editors

be interested in it, and I thought readers would really be interested in it. And this is the beginning. And that actually, not only would the other editors be interested in, I thought readers would

really be interested in it. And this is the beginning. And that actually really surprised me, because I looked at it purely as a functional practical part of my job. I mean, I thought about some of these events if they happened very quickly and suddenly, how do we mobilize our staff, how would we cover it, who would do what? So I really started out totally practical, on a practical sent, and Ms. Mary, I decided, you know, a lot of our readers have probably enjoyed reading

about these. Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things we don't realize working on the insides

of Scientific American all the time, is that the editors, not just in working with the scientists,

...