Student Success

Guest: Sallie Permar, MD, Pediatrician and Director of Neonatal Viral Pathogen Immunity at the Duke Human Vaccine Institute In a matter of just over a week, the Zika Virus has jumped to the front page of US newspapers and has been the subject of emergency meetings at the CDC and World Health Organization. Pregnant women are being advised not to travel to countries where Zika is spreading because of the virus’ possible link to birth defects. Zika is a mosquito-borne illness that has spread to at least 23 countries in the Caribbean and Central and South America. Officials in Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador and Jamaica, are urging women not to get pregnant at all until the threat has passed.

Guest: Nancy Scheper-Hughes, PhD, Professor of Medical Anthropology and Sociocultural Anthropology at UC Berkeley How desperate would you have to be to sell a kidney? Say you live in a third-world country, you’re mired in poverty and donating a kidney could fund an education for your child? Or, suppose you live in a war-torn country and a kidney could pay your passage to freedom?  These are extreme, but not necessarily uncommon, in the very active international market for buying and selling organs. But Medical Anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes says far too often the market is unkind to donors. She says having two kidneys doesn’t mean you’ve got a spare. Donors are often in poor health and worse-off financially after giving up a kidney.

Guest: Rob Gustafson, Film Reviewer at ParentPreviews.com We discuss film “The Finest Hours,” about a US Coast Guard rescue.

Guests: Barry Lunt, PhD, BYU Information Technology Professor; Mike Alder, Director of BYU’s Technology Transfer Office CDs, DVDs, flash drives…they’re unwieldy, but really, what better solution do we have for keeping stuff that’s important to us? Computers crash. The Cloud is so new, you have to wonder if storing stuff on Google or Apple’s servers is really a permanent solution. One day it could be gone in a puff. BYU information technology professor Barry Lunt has come up with a solution that is so durable he calls it “permanent storage.” It’ll survive a fire, a flood and even the passage of 1000 years.