Your Old Books: Should They Stay or Should They Go?

Guest: Matthew Slonaker, JD, Executive Director of the Utah Health Policy Project

Guest: Scott Anderson, Lead Author of “The Psychobiotic Revolution: Mood, Food, and the New Science of the Gut-Brain Connection” There’s a network of nerves around your gut so involved in your physical and emotional well-being, it’s often called your “second brain.” It takes its cues primarily from a huge community of microbes living in your gut. More and more evidence suggests that what you eat determines how happy those microbes are. And how happy those microbes are affects how happy you are. Literally. Bacteria in your gut affect your mental health.

Guest: Jeremy Straub, PhD, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, North Dakota State University In the last 18 months, terrorists pledging allegiance to ISIS have made trucks their preferred weapons. More than 100 people around the world have been killed in nearly a dozen such attacks, including eight fatalities in New York last week. When someone uses a gun to kill lots of people, we immediately start debating gun control. Debating “vehicle control” after a terror attack seems preposterous, but what if the focus weren’t on controlling who can drive one? What if we focus on technology that would let the vehicle take control away from the driver who tries to steer the truck into a crowd of people?  The technology to do that already exists. The question is, do we really want our vehicles to be able to override us?

Guest: Valerie Hill-Jackson, PhD, Clinical Professor in the Department of Teaching, Learning, and Culture, Texas A&M University America’s public schools are becoming steadily more diverse: sometime in the next few years, white students nationwide will drop below 50 percent. But the mix of teachers standing in front of those classrooms is not getting more diverse. The overwhelming majority are white - more than 80 percent. Black teachers are in particularly short supply and becoming more so with each passing decade.  To understand why that is – and why you should care - we need a brief history lesson.

Guest: Brooks Keeshin, MD, Clinician Researcher in the Division of Child Protection and Family Health at the University of Utah, Child Psychiatrist at the Center for Safe and Health Families at Primary Children’s Hospital, Salt Lake City A gunman’s rampage in Sutherland Springs, Texas, over the weekend is the latest in a string of mass shootings in the US. As parents, how do we explain these acts of violence to our children when they are becoming more and more common? How young is too young for a conversation about an event as unpredictable and terrifying as a mass shooting?