Worlds Awaiting: ALA Book Award Predictions

Guest: Hans Kundnani, Senior Research Fellow, Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House Since the election of President Trump, and with the impending exit of Britain from the EU, there’s been debate about who should replace the US and the UK as the leader of Europe – and beyond. German Prime Minister Angela Merkel has positioned herself as that leader, but she faces significant challenges to her political power. Skeptics say she’s overestimating Germany’s ability to fill America’s shoes.

Guest: Rainer Hebert, PhD, Associate Professor, Materials Science and Engineering, University of Connecticut The US Navy’s aircraft carriers are enormous – 1,000 feet long, capable of carrying airplanes (obviously) and a crew of 6,000 people. They’re basically self-contained cities at sea that will stay out for months at a time. But routinely, the Navy has to take these enormous ships offline to inspect and make repairs, because if something breaks while they’re at sea, it’s really expensive and time-consuming to come all the way back to shore for a fix. The Navy would like to extend the amount of time ships can stay out to sea between maintenance visits, but they need a better way to monitor critical equipment on the ship in real-time. And it would be even better if they could somehow manufacture the repair parts right on the ship.

Guest: Sarah Milton, PhD, Associate Professor of Biological Sciences, Florida Atlantic University Sea turtles undertake a hazardous journey as soon as they hatch on the beach where their mother laid them. Usually under the cover of night, they emerge from the nest and head toward the surf where they’ll swim out to sea. That is, unless there are a lot of lights or obstacles in their path. If they become disoriented, then a trip that should take a few minutes might turn into hours of wandering before they finally make it to the water’s edge. Scientists at Florida Atlantic University wanted to know if all that extra energy would hurt a hatchlings’ ability to swim once they made it. So they made turtle treadmills to find out.

Guest: Erin Fehr, Archivist, Sequoyah National Research Center at the University of Arkansas-Little Rock A hundred years ago, the United States was entrenched in European battlefields, desperately looking for a way to win the first World War. One problem they had: Germany had hacked the US military codes. But two soldiers from the Choctaw tribe were stationed in France, and they turned out to be a secret weapon. They became the first American Indian code talkers, a generation before the famous Navajo code talkers.

Guest: Kendall Hulet, CEO, Cake Technologies Browsing the web on your tiny phone screen can be frustrating—you click on a link, wait for it to load, back up to the results page, click on another link. What if your search called up a stack of results and you could swipe through them like Tinder dates until you found the perfect match? That’s the way the mobile web browser “Cake” works.