Melania as First Lady, Single-Gender Schools, Natural Disasters

Melania Trump as First Lady Guest: Kate Andersen Brower, Author of “First Women: The Grace and Power of America’s Modern First Ladies”  Melania Trump received a private tour of the White House residence last week from Michelle Obama. That’s a tradition dating back decades. As tradition goes, Melania Trump is unusual – she speaks with a Slovenian accent and is only the second American First Lady to have been born outside the United States.  She’s a former super model who once posed nude – that’s a first for First Ladies. And another first is her status as third wife of the president. But when she gets to the White House, author Kate Andersen Brower expects Melania Trump to be ultra-traditional in the role in comparison to her modern predecessors.  Single-Gender Schools Guest: Bette Heins, PhD, Professor of Education, Stetson University All-boys or all-girls schools carry either an antiquated Catholic school connotation or the posh-Ivy-league prep aura in US education today. Segregating students by gender is very, very rare in public schools – even on the classroom level. But The Atlantic magazine recently profiled a couple of all-girls public charter schools in California and Colorado that got us thinking about the concept again. These schools happen to be focused on preparing girls for STEM fields – the science, technology, engineering and math careers that tend to be male-dominated.  Metabolism Tips for the Holidays Guest: Taylor Newhouse, Registered Dietitian with the Texas A&M School of Public Health Oh, the holidays are coming, with all their emotional highs and lows and the simmering annoyance with that person in your life who can say yes to all the holiday delicacies without any worries because they have such a fast metabolism. The rest of us will put on a few pounds in the coming weeks, if the research is correct. Short of just saying “no” to everything tasty, is there anything you can do to give your metabolism a head start on the holiday eating season?   Why People Don’t Flee Natural Disasters Guest: Jennifer Horney, PhD, Associate Professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Texas A&M University Once a hurricane hits and floodwaters start to rise, helicopter camera crews inevitably capture heartbreaking scenes of people clinging to their rooftops in hopes of a rescue—as we recently saw after Hurricane Matthew in the southeast. At those moments, those of us sitting comfortably at home are tempted to wonder, “Why didn’t those people leave when evacuation was ordered?”  Arrival and Almost Christmas Guest: Rod Gustafson, parentpreview.com A rare piece of entertainment from outer-space arrived over the weekend – rare because currently the film Arrival is getting overwhelmingly positive reviews from both critics and audiences. Just check out its score on Rotten Tomatoes. And, it’s rare because it’s an alien movie that’s not about all-out-war to protect the human species from invaders. They do not blow up the White House or the Empire State Building in this film. Yes, the aliens have arrived on Earth. But the star of Arrival is a language expert played by Amy Adams. Artificial Blood Vessels that Grow with the Body Guest: Robert Tranquillo, PhD, Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Minnesota Tens of thousands of babies in America are born each year with a congenital heart defect. Many will need surgery to survive. And then, as they grow, they’ll need multiple open-heart surgeries to replace the original graft materials doctors used to fix the defects. At the moment, there aren’t any tissue or blood vessel graft materials that will grow along with the child.  But biomedical engineers at the University of Minnesota are making progress on that. Their latest work appears in the journal Natural Communications.