Religious Freedom, Millennium Photograph, Civil War

Religious Freedom Acts (1:11) Guest: Elizabeth Clark, associate director of the International Center for Law and Religion Studies at BYU Lawmakers in Indiana and Arkansas have come under scrutiny and political pressure in the last few weeks for passing a law commonly referred to as a "RFRA," which stands for Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Critics say the laws empower businesses to discriminate against gays and lesbians in the name of religion. Late last week, Indiana's governor signed an amended version of the state's law clarifying that it cannot be used as a defense for discrimination. Arkansas' governor only signed his state's version after a similar provision was added. But Indiana and Arkansas are hardly the first to enact "Religious Freedom Restoration Acts." Nearly half of states have them and the federal government passed one in 1993 - and in the past, these laws had bi-partisan support and were largely noncontroversial. What's changed? Millennium-Long Photograph (25:33) Guest: Jonathan Keats, distinguished experimental philosopher, artist, writer, and a renowned contributor of Forbes magazine You have seen time lapse photos, right? Where a camera captures a single image over a period of minutes or hours to show how the environment changes over time? Well, suppose you could set a camera to capture the passage of years - even centuries? Civil War Photographs (38:09) Guest: Bob Zeller, president of the Center for Civil War Photography We recently learned about a trove of remarkable photos documenting life before and during the Civil War that has arrived at the Library of Congress and is being digitized for people to view online. The pictures themselves are remarkable, but so, too, is the story of how they came to be in a single collection. The photos offer a glimpse at daily life of southern slaves before the war and extend all the way to a shot of Abraham Lincoln's Illinois home draped in a black-and-white mourning cloth after his assassination. The Library of Congress announced last week it had acquired more than 500 of these images from the collection of an 87-year-old Texas grandmother. After-Hour Correspondence (51:26) Guest: Marcus Butts, lead researcher of study and associate professor of Management at the University of Texas at Arlington  Smartphones and remote access to the company network have changed the way we work. We are always connected - and many employees, it turns out, actually get angry when they get a work email at home after hours. A new study of more than 300 working adults published in the Academy of Management Journal explains the perils of the increasingly common corporate policy that employees are essentially always on call and expected to check email. There are obvious downsides, but some surprising upsides, too. Parent Previews: Furious 7 and Woman in Gold (1:07:17) Guest: Kerry Bennett and Rod Gustafson, parentpreviews.com The seventh installment in the Fast and Furious movie franchise beat analyst expectations and set box office records opening over the weekend. One big reason is that it is the last movie filmed by actor Paul Walker before he died in a car crash last year. Another, is the movie is racially diverse cast which helps attract lots of minority audiences. And then there are the cars jumping cliffs and skydiving from planes. Tech Transfer (1:19:30) Guests: Benjamin Bikman, professor of physiology and developmental biology in the College of Life Sciences at BYU Mike Alder, director of BYU's Technology Transfer segment Many health experts will tell you that losing weight is fundamentally just a matter of "calories in vs. calories out." Consume more calories than your body needs and it will store the excess as fat and you will gain weight. But it is not that simple, says BYU physiology professor Benjamin Bikman. He is researching the way certain tissues in our body accumulate a certain type of fat that can increase the likelihood of insulin resistance and obesity. Suppose we could prevent those tissues from accumulating that type of fat?