COVID-19 Misinformation, Female Race Team, Ocean Acidification

When It Comes to Coronavirus Info, Who Can You Trust? (0:31) Guest: Scott C. Ratzan MD, MPA, Distinguished Lecturer, Graduate School of Public Health, City University of New York Should you cancel your travel plans because of coronavirus? Keep your kids home from school? Stop going to church and other gatherings? It’s really hard to know with the steady drumbeat of new COVID-19 cases and deaths around the country. A group of leading public health experts have published an “urgent call” for a coordinated effort to tell Americans what they need to know about coronavirus. Why Hundreds of Scientific Studies Get Retracted Every Year (20:16) Guest: Ivan Oransky, Co-Founder of RetractionWatch.com, Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University’s Carter Journalism Institute Since the start of this year, more than 200 studies published in scientific journals have been retracted because of mistakes – or in some cases, outright fraud by the scientists who did them. A lot of these studies got tons of hoopla when they were first published, including breathless headlines in the press. And then, a year later, five years later – in a few cases more than a decade later – the journal that published the study says, “Oops! We shouldn’t have published that.” But at that point, isn’t the damage already done? A retraction rarely gets the same publicity that the original study had. Treating Gun Violence Like a Public Health Epidemic (37:14) Guest: Megan Ranney, MD, Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine at Brown University, Chief Research Officer for the American Foundation for Firearm Injury Reduction For the first time in 20 years, the US government is offering grants to researchers looking into gun violence. Since 1996, there’s been a moratorium on any federal funding for firearm safety research for fear results of that research might be used to restrict gun access in the US. So what’s changed? Emergency room physician Megan Ranney has been researching firearm injuries for years, despite the federal moratorium. New Treatment for Child Anxiety (50:50) Guest: Wendy Silverman, Alfred A. Messer Professor of Child Psychiatry and Psychology, Director of the Yale Child Study Center Program for Anxiety Disorders, Yale University Anxiety disorders in children are common, but also really hard to treat. Only half of kids with anxiety respond to standard therapy treatment and medication. So researchers at Yale University have just come up with a novel approach that’s working – show anxious youth happy faces and sad faces over and over again. What Will It Take for Women to Be Taken Seriously in Autoracing? (1:07:37) Guest: Jackie Heinricher, Principal owner of Heinricher racing, Race Car Driver and Leader of the First Full-Season All-Female Team of Drivers to the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship. You know those long-distance relays where a team takes turns running stretches of the race over a 24-hour period? There’s an endurance event like that in auto racing – maybe you saw it featured in the new film “Ford vs. Ferrari”? 24 Hours of Le Mans is the premier event in endurance car racing. In North America, there’s a series of similar races and last year, for the first time in history, an all-female team of drivers competed in the full season. They even placed in the top 10. But now that team is disbanded and founder Jackie Heinricher is trying to figure out just what it will take for women to be taken seriously her sport. Is the Ocean Turning Into Vinaigrette? Ocean Acidification, Explained. (1:27:43) Guest: Scott Doney, PhD, Oceanographer and Environmental Scientist, University of Virginia Twenty years from now, scientists say virtually all of the planet’s coral reefs will be gone, because ocean water will be too warm and too acidic for coral.