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Guest: Bella Dinh-Zarr, Board Member, National Transportation Safety Board Utah has just become the first state to lower its blood alcohol level for drunk driving from .08 to .05. That’s the lowest in the nation and critics say it will result in lots of people getting arrested after having just a drink or two with dinner, and do nothing to address the most dangerous drunk drivers who ignore blood alcohol limits anyway.

(Originally aired 07/16/2018) Guest: Angie Holan, Editor, PolitiFact Fact checking has become so popular that major news outlets do it on Presidential speeches in real-time. Political campaigns fact-check their opponents’ claims. But how sure can we be that the people doing the fact checking are not biased? That they’re not looking more critically on one party than another?

(Orginially aired 07/30/18) Guest: Norah Dunbar, Professor of Communication, UC Santa Barbara (07/30/2018) Sometimes politicians misstate facts. Sometimes they twist the facts on purpose. Sometimes they just flat lie. So let’s talk about that. We like to think we can tell when someone is lying –they act shifty; they’re not making eye contact. But it turns out humans are terrible at spotting a liar. We can be trained, though. And University of California-Santa Barbara communication professor Norah Dunbar has developed a video simulation to speed up the process of training someone to detect a lie.

(Originally aired 8/22/18) Guest: Michelle Duster, Author, Speaker, Lecturer of Business Writing, Columbia College Chicago And now, to a conversation about the contributions of Ida B. Wells, an African American journalist who was born enslaved near the end of the Civil War, sued a railroad for discrimination, and risked her life to expose the violence of lynching in the Jim Crow South. Last summer, we spoke with Michelle Duster, a great granddaughter of Wells, and a driving force behind efforts to honor her legacy. Fundraising for the first phase of a memorial to Ida B. Wells has since reached its $300,000 goal. Duster is a lecturer at Columbia College Chicago and member of the Ida B. Wells Memorial Foundation.

(Originally aired 08/02/18) Guest: Phil Bresnahan, Senior Development Engineer, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego, Lead Engineer of the Smartfin Project. The ocean is a vital part of the health of our planet: holding oxygen and regulating temperature are just two of its many jobs. But its vital signs can be really hard to measure. That’s why oceanographers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC-San Diego have enlisted surfers to take the pulse of the ocean, with a special surfboard fin embedded with sensors.