Living Together Before Marriage Should Make for Better Marriages. So Why Doesn't It?

Guest: Justin Jones Spider silk is stronger than steel, super lightweight and surprisingly elastic. If we could make it in bulk, it it’d be great for everything from parachutes and sports gear to replacement tendons and ligaments. Which is why the US Navy has been investing for years in a lab at Utah State University that’s figured out how to coax the building blocks of spider silk out of goats and alfalfa and even E. coli bacteria.

Guest: Peter Leimgruber, Center Head and Conservation Biologist at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute Ivory poachers have long been a serious threat to African elephants, because both male and female African elephants can grow large tusks. Asian Elephants have escaped some of that poaching pressure, because only their males have tusks and they’re often smaller. But a new type of poaching has emerged in the last several years that has conservationists very worried about Asian elephant populations. Males, females and even juveniles are being killed for their skin.

(Originally aired October 24, 2018) Guest: Samuel West, psychologist, Curator of the Disgusting Food Museum There’s a Latin phrase my father often quoted: “De gustibus non est disputandum.” It means, roughly, “matters of taste cannot be disputed.” Dad, for example, liked to eat his spaghetti noodles and sauce in separate bowls. The idea of making a sweet pie out of a squash –pumpkin in this case –caused my French friends to shudder in disgust when I lived there years ago. Food is the ultimate “matter of taste.” It’s both incredibly individual and culturally specific.

(Originally aired October 10, 2018) Guest: Dan Choi, Founder and Owner of Remy New York Human hair is a billion-dollar industry globally–and we’re not talking about styling or coloring it. We’re just talking about the buying and selling of hair itself. When a Hollywood star suddenly grows luxurious long locks overnight, it’s thanks to extensions made of real human hair cut off someone else’s head. The trouble is that even the fanciest salons don’t really know where the extensions and wigs they’re using have come from. Common unethical sourcing practices include collecting hair from barbershop floors and exploiting desperately poor women in Asia and India. Entrepreneur Dan Choi’s aims to set a “fair trade standard” for hair. His company is called Remy New York and he commonly pays women five or ten times what a typical hair trader would for their ponytail

(Originally aired October 16, 2018) Guest: Keith Campbell, PhD, Professor of Psychology, University of Georgia There is no such thing as a selfie-free zone. Everywhere you turn, someone is hoisting a phone camera and posting it to Instagram or Facebook. Selfie-taking occasionally even turns tragic when someone loses their footing trying to capture the perfect shot on a hiking trail, for example. Are selfies turning us all into narcissists? Or maybe it’s just that social media is tapping into a narcissistic streak society already had in spades?