Bears Ears, Fighting Back in School Shootings, Leap Second

Bears Ears and Native American Approaches to the Environment Guest: Chip Colwell, PhD, Senior Curator of Anthropology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science  In the final weeks of his Presidency, Barack Obama has used his power under the Antiquities Act to create new national monuments in Utah and Nevada that place more than a million acres of land off-limits to development. Republican lawmakers and state and local officials hope the new President or Congress can undo the designations. The Utah land known as “Bears Ears” will be the first national monument to be co-managed by Native American tribes that lobbied for its creation. Anthropologist Chip Colwell has studied the way indigenous communities see natural places as living beings and how embracing that view might lead to changes in our laws.  Training Kids to Fight Back in a School Shooting Guest: Greg Crane, former police officer, Founder and CEO of ALICE Columbine, Virginia Tech and Newtown are tragic and well-known school shootings. But a tally of news and police reports by the advocacy group Every Town for Gun Safety shows that since 2013, there’s been an average of nearly one instance a week of a gun fired on school property somewhere in America.  Thankfully, most of those instances have not ended in mass casualties. Still, responding to an active shooter is now on the list of things school officials and students are expected to prepare for – along with earthquakes and fire. Many are turning to a training called “ALICE,” that is somewhat controversial because it teaches students and teachers to fight back, rather than just hunker down and hope to survive.  What Medieval Monks Can Teach Us about Treating Mental Health Guest: Carol Neel, PhD, Professor of European Middle Ages, Colorado College While not always effective, the medications and psychotherapy we use to today to treat mental illness are certainly more enlightened than the asylums, lobotomies and exorcisms that used to be standard treatment.  But historical handling of mental illness isn’t all rubbish, according to medieval history professor Carol Neel of Colorado College. Her research suggests that monks during the Dark Ages had a pretty enlightened view of depression and psychoses that we could stand to learn from.  Did you miss New Year's Eve Leap Second? Guest: Patrick Wiggins, NASA Solar System Ambassador to Utah While you were watching for the clock to strike midnight on New Year’s Eve, you probably missed the strange thing that happened at 7 p.m. Eastern.  Just as the time rolled over from 6:59:59 to 7 p.m., there was a slight hesitation as an extra second was added to the world’s clocks. It’s called a “leap second.” Why do we need them? "Popular Science" Magazine Gets a Makeover Guest: Joe Brown, Editor-in-Chief, "Popular Science" For a period in the 1800s, science was really taking off as a field and the public was endlessly fascinated by new discoveries about how weather worked and how the body worked and how amazing the natural world was. And it was during this period that a new publication arrived on newsstands with a goal of sharing scientific knowledge with the public. Writing by Charles Darwin, Louis Pasteur and Thomas Edison all appeared on the pages of The Popular Science Monthly. In the nearly 150 years since its first issue, the magazine has undergone lots of ownership and design changes, but it’s always been focused on making science interesting and accessible to “the rest of us” who get quickly lost attempting to read a scientific journal article. What the newest makeover means for readers. Please Don't Power Pose Guest: Kristopher Smith, doctoral student in Psychology, University of Pennsylvania I bet you’ve heard that posing like Wonder Woman with feet apart and hands on hips for two minutes before an important task will boost your confidence. Harvard researcher Amy Cuddy’s Ted Talk about “power posing” has been viewed 38 million times. But several months ago, Cuddy’s collaborator – Berkeley professor Dana Carney - publicly denounced their earlier research that found holding a power pose for just a few minutes, could lower stress hormones and boost testosterone. Carney wrote in October: “I do not believe that ‘power pose’ effects are real.” She said her conclusions come partly because since they first published their work in 2010, other social scientists have had a limited success replicating the findings.  Psychologists at the University of Pennsylvania just published a study in which power posing didn’t seem to be related to winning behavior in competitive situations and may actually backfire in some cases. Doctoral student Kristopher Smith is the lead author on the research.