Thawing Permafrost, Healthy Anger, Understanding Trauma
Top of Mind with Julie Rose - Season 1, Episode 1213
- Nov 29, 2019 7:00 am
- 1:40:25 mins
Permafrost Releasing Greenhouse Gases as it Thaws (0:41) Guest: Jordan Wilkerson, PhD Student in Atmospheric Chemistry, Harvard We’ve got a feedback loop going on in the Arctic where, as the atmosphere warms, the permanently frozen ground there is thawing. As it thaws, carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide (AKA laughing gas) escape into the atmosphere, where they cause further warming, which thaws more permafrost, which releases more greenhouse gas and round and round. Only now are researchers getting a grasp on how fast that cycle is going. An atmospheric chemistry lab at Harvard just published some data showing there’s a lot more nitrous oxide escaping the permafrost than previously thought. Anger Can Actually Be a Good Thing (14:19) Guest: Ryan Martin, Professor of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay We often think of anger as a bad thing – it can make us mean and reckless and lead us to believe that the idiot cutting us off in traffic is a monster. And it’s even worse on the internet. But anger expert Ryan Martin says we’re overlooking the emotion's power for good. Sudden Infant Death Claims the Lives of 3,500 Babies Each Year, But New Research May Be the Answer to Ending It (31:39) Guest: John Kahan, President of the Aaron Matthews SIDS Research Guild at Seattle Children’s Hospital, Chief Data Analytics Officer at Microsoft Thousands of infants in the US every year die suddenly, for no apparent medical reason. There’s no warning. No way to know if an infant is at risk. The rate of these Sudden Unexpected Infant Deaths has remained steady since the mid-1990s. Efforts to prevent SIDS by putting babies to sleep on their backs and eliminating smoking in the household have reduced, but not eliminated these deaths. Why, with our advanced medical technology and economic wealth, haven’t we solved SIDS yet? Breathing and Shaking Toward Recovery from Trauma (50:51) Guest: James S. Gordon, MD, professor of psychiatry and family medicine, Georgetown Medical School, author of “The Transformation: