TV Star Interviews

Today, I conducted a brief interview with Steve Arnold, star of the Science Channel television show "Meteorite Me." The season premier of the third season of the show is tonight (November 28) at 10:00 p.m. and both Steve and his cohost Geoff are looking to remind old fans and alert potential new fans of that fact.

I had spoken with Steve last year, as well, and published several fairly popular articles about the show. Today's interview ended up being published on three Yahoo! web properties: Associated Content, Yahoo! News, and Yahoo! TV. It'll be interesting to compare the popularity of the three separate web locations of the same article.

Celebrity interviews are examples of going straight to the source for information. From a journalism perspective it's the same as interviewing the victim of a crime or other person with first-hand knowledge of an event or topic. Celebrities with something to promote may be easier to get as interview subjects because they also benefit by granting the interview as long as they get their plug into the interview. When the topic of the interview and the event being plugged coincide, such as an article about the season premier of a television show, everybody wins.

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Meanwhile, as per my last post, I'm still working on discussing the situation on the streets in Egypt with people who live there. I was surprised, although I shouldn't have been, that the first two people I contacted essentially refused to speak about it, saying they didn't know anything about it. I suspect that they simply didn't feel safe discussing their feelings about the current political situaion in Egypt.

2001 Anthrax Attacks Remembered

This weekend marks the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. It was just a week after that that letters containing deadly highly purified anthrax spores were sent out to several media outlets in New York City. Those letters were followed up with similar letters to Senators Leahy and Daschle in Washington, DC.

The anthrax spores were so easily spread that postal workers employed in the post offices which handles the letters began contracting anthrax. One woman in Connecticut died after a letter she received from an unrelated source simply came into contact with one of the anthrax letters. In all 5 died, more than 30 were infected, and thousands were medicated as a precaution.

I recently spoke to one of the people responsible for sequencing the genome of the anthrax spores used in the attack to determine its origin for the FBI. I asked her to talk about the investigation and whether we are safer today because of new precautions put in place after those anthrax attacks in 2001. Read the interviews at the following links:

• Are We Safer frm Bioterror attacks after the 2001 Anthrax Letter Attack?
• Investigator Discusses 2001 Anthrax Attacks

View from the top

The subject of my latest series of interviews have climbed to the summit of Mount Everest,but that isn't his primary claim to fame. Scott Parazynski is best known as a veteran NASA astronaut who has travelled 23 million miles aboard five space shuttle missions. He has been on numerous spacewalks totalling 47 hours outside the spacecraft. He was also instrumental in the development of a heat tile repair system to prevent future accidents like the one that claimed Columbia and it's crew.

It was a fun interview, and I was able to cover a lot of groun: from Mount Everest to Mars, so to speak. The first one covers what it's liek to look down from the top of Everest and to look down on the Earth from space. It really changes one's global perspective, Parazynski says. Read more about his feelings about the fragility of Earth at this link.

The second part of the interview dealt with the end of the Space Shuttle program. Parazynski disagrees with the decision to retire the space shuttles before a new crew launch vehicle is available. Read more about this and why he resolved to fly one more time to honor the crew lost in the Columbia accident here.

The third part of the interview is more or less a catch all for everything else that we discussed. What's next for the future of NASA? How does the human body change in the absence of gravity? What are the medical risks of space travel? What do Space Station resident do when a potentially harmful burst of solar flare radiation is heading their way? How does Russian Cosmonaut training differ from NASA astronaut training? If these questions intrigue you, or you're curious about what else I asked, read the third part of  my interview with astronaut Scott Parazynski here.