Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Keith Devlin, author of "The Unfinished Game," who talks about the letters exchanged between two mathematicians -- Pascal and Fermat -- changed our lives.

Jeff Waugh reaches back to the Middle Ages to bring the lessons that three giants of distant history can teach the free software community. A passionate advocate for software freedom and open source, he speaks about the historical influences on Ubuntu. Waugh also describes how the modern giants Python, Debian, and GNOME have each lent something to the values and culture of Ubuntu.

Defense journalists Nathan Hodge and Sharon Weinberger have traveled globally to visit sites where the infrastructure of the nuclear arms race still remains. On this edition of IEEE Spectrum Radio, Hodge and Weinberger, who are husband and wife, talk about nuclear tourism and their motivations for writing the book A Nuclear Family Vacation which chronicles an array of discoveries from a one-eyed baby in Kazakhstan to radioactive deer hunting in Tennessee.

How has the "fundamental right" to vote evolved since the colonial period? In this excerpt from the historical public radio show, BackStory, the hosts review how elections were handled as the country was formed and how voting fraud has always been a major problem. They interview Mark Summers, Professor of History at the University of Kentucky about how things have changed in the last two hundred years.

A naturalized citizen talks about the importance of a president showing strength and power and a producer reviews the differences between the current election and the 1968 campaign. Nick van der Kolk reviews what people are discussing when it comes to a president being strong, and Barbara Bernstein talks about how people alienated by the Nixon/McGovern campaign feel about the Obama/McCain campaign.

Brian Greene is well known for writing about our universe. Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Greene about his latest book "Icarus at the Edge of Time," and asks him why it is an entirely different book than we are used to.

Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Michael Meyer, author of "The Last Days of Old Beijing," about the transformation of a city.

Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with author Carl Zimmer about Ecoli: the good, the bad, and the under appreciated.

From the Tech Nation archives: the 1993 interview with Sir Edmund Hillary, who together with Tenzing Norgay in 1953 was first to reach the summit of Mount Everest.

Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with Neil Shubin, provost of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. He describes our 'inner fish,' a journey into the 3.5 billion year history of the human body.