Apple Seed

Guest: Philip Cook, Ph.D., Professor at Duke University.  James Holmes will spend the rest of his life in prison for killing 12 moviegoers and wounding 70 others in a mass shooting at a theater in Aurora, Colorado three years ago. His trial – which just ended – lasted three months, during which time, at least three mass shootings took place in the US: in a Charleston, South Carolina; outside a military recruiting office in Chattanooga, Tennessee; and in a movie theater in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Guest: Carrie L. Byington, M.D., Professor at the University of Utah.  Here’s some news that will definitely not surprise parents with multiple kids at home: the more kids you’ve got, the more likely everyone in the house is to be sick. Researchers at the University of Utah tracked several dozen households for an entire year – some with no kids, some with six or more kids – and compared the results.

Guest: Kevin Desouza, Ph.D., Associate Dean for Research at Arizona State University.  Imagine for a moment that you’re the mayor of a city. Could be any city, really. And you’re thinking about the not-too-distant future, when driverless cars will be commonplace on your city streets. What we know about these cars so far suggests we’ll see fewer accidents due to things like drunkenness or distraction. Roads will be less congested because cars will drive more efficiently than we humans. Even street lights could be programmed to work optimally with the automated vehicles. Sounds great, yeah?  But if you’re a mayor, this change probably ought to bring with it a sense of foreboding. All the revenues you’ve been collecting for your city budget from parking and speeding tickets? Wave goodbye to them.

Guest: David Latham, Ph.D., Senior Astronomer at the Harvard Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge.  The rocky, blue planet we call home has the perfect conditions for human life—lots of water, an atmosphere and an array of habitable temperatures.  So as astronomers search for life beyond Earth, they’re looking for planets with similar conditions.  Last month, NASA’S Kepler Mission seeking for planets beyond our solar system added 500 new candidates to the list. And of those, one in particular moved us a step closer to finding what one NASA administrator calls “Earth 2.0.” It’s called Kepler-452b.

Guest: Daniel Beard, Ph.D., Former Commissioner of the US Bureau of Reclamation.  As drought continues its grip on much of the Western United States, communities are being forced to rethink their ideas about water. Daniel Beard says we’ve too long taken for granted the availability of cheap, abundant water. And he says our national policies of damming and diverting rivers are partly to blame for that mindset.  During a recent visit to BYU, he spoke with Marcus Smith, host of Thinking Aloud on BYU Radio.