This episode is presented by eBay.

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Then when you're buying, you can discover loads of hidden gems. There's so many items where you think I would have never found that anywhere else. Then when you're selling, it's so simple and most

importantly, free. It's free, Rob. When it's this easy to sell for free and there's great deals

on things you love. You can't help but say when it's eBay. It excludes vehicles and business

sellers.

Welcome to Science Talk, the weekly podcast of Scientific American, posted on September 14th, 2010.

I'm Steve Merski. This week on the podcast, we'll talk with editor-in-chief Maria di Cristina and issue Michael Moyer about our annual single topic issue of the magazine.

Plus, we'll test your knowledge of some recent science in the news.

Every September, we publish a single topic issue.

Last year's choice helped dictate this year's.

Mariette, Michael, and I will explain further.

We chatted in the recording studio at the magazine's offices.

So we have this issue that might scare some people because it might look like it's our last issue because we have this big red cover and in large white letters it says, the end.

Right. And after we just finished celebrating our 165th anniversary last month, maybe people were wondering about that. But really what it is is the beginning, the beginning of scientific

Americans' latest single topic issue. Which is all about endings. Which is all about endings

and sort of deals with our eternal fascination with the topic of endings. You know, we, it's one of those, Steve, you can't look, you can't look away feelings.

And it seemed to us a really interesting bookend to do after last year when we had done a single

topic issue on origins.

And in fact, this issue had been sort of suggested many times over the last 10 years, originally as the death

issue, which people naturally sort of shied away from.

But by expanding it to just endings, it became somewhat more palatable.

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