Saudi Succession, City Growth, Fish Mutations, Big Data

Guest: Fred Axelgard, a senior fellow in international relations, at the Wheatley institution at BYU and a former state department official who served in US embassy in Saudi Arabia Saudi Arabia is Top of Mind. The kingdom has been one of America’s most important Arab allies, is a top exporter and is deeply embroiled in the war in neighboring Yemen. And in the last two weeks, Saudi King Salman made surprising, and unprecedented, changes in the kingdom’s leadership, calling into question much of the conventional wisdom about the Saudi Arabia.

Guest: Michael Smith, a Mesoamerican archaeologist and a professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University It’s difficult to imagine that large urban centers in 2015, with their trains and taxis and traffic and tall buildings, could bear any resemblance at all to ancient settlements like the Aztecs of Mesoamerica. But archaeologists increasingly believe that urban centers follow predictable growth pattern that are the same no matter the era.

Guest: Michael Kent, a professor in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife at Oregon State University. His study on the effects of toxicants on mile-deep ocean fish was published in the journal the Marine Environmental Research Even if they don’t live close to the shore, fish can’t escape the consequences of human pollution. Scientists have recently discovered that deep-sea fish in the Bay of Biscay, west of France, have developed odd mutations from the poisons and metals that accumulate there. The findings are troubling both for the fish and the humans who could be harmed by eating them.

Guest: Sudha Ram, lead researcher on the study that used Twitter, Google Searches and environmental monitoring data to predict emergency room visits for asthma attacks with remarkable accuracy. Ram is also a professor of management information systems and computer science at the University of Arizona Researchers at the University of Arizona figured out how to harvest information from Twitter, Google and even the EPA’s air monitoring stations to predict with 75-percent accuracy when local hospitals would see a spike in asthma patients coming in for treatment.

Guest: Jack Zipes, author of Grimm Legacies: The Magic Power of the Grimms’ Folk and Fairy Tales, Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota and a fairy tale expert The classic fairy tales of American childhood are familiar from start to finish: Cinderella, Snow White, Rapunzel. “And they all lived happily ever after,” right? Well, it wasn’t always so. When the Brothers Grimm first published their now-famous tales, there was nothing “happily ever after about them.” They weren’t even fairy tales, according to Jack Zipes, author of Grimm Legacies: The Magic Power of the Grimm’s’ Folk and Fairy Tales.