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Guest:  Quinn Mecham, Ph.D., professor of Political Science at BYU. His research focuses on political mobilization in the Islamic world.  World news is top of mind today, as we welcome BYU political science professor Quinn Mecham back for his monthly analysis of three international events we should be paying attention to.  He discusses the recent Turkish parliamentary election, the Greek debt crisis, and the attempted arrest of Sudan’s President in South Africa.

Guest:  Kate De Medeiros, Ph.D., professor of Gerontology and Sociology at Miami University and author of “Narrative Gerontology in Research and Practice.”  Kate De Medeiros tells us there’s a power of cultural arts like writing and painting that help minimize the effects of age. As a writer the idea that the act of writing a poem could somehow minimize the difficulties of growing old intrigued me.

Guest: Peter Whybrow, M.D., is director of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA and the author of "The Well-Tuned Brain: Neuroscience and the Life Well Lived."  We’re a nation of spenders – by the end of 2014 American households owed nearly 12-trillion dollars in debt. That’s from data the Federal Reserve Bank of New York collects. Why is it seemingly so easy for us to spend money we don’t have? Neuroscientist Peter Whybrow says it’s because the human brain isn’t built to handle the temptation of easy credit.

Guest: Nancy Lee, M.D., is the Deputy Assistant Secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services and Director of the Office on Women’s Health.  I remember when I was in college, I could eat my fill at the cafeteria, skip exercising and no one could tell the difference. Now that I’m a BIT older than I was then, I have to watch what I eat and be diligent about regular exercise. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. This year, the Office of Women’s Health at the US Department of Health and Human Services has been celebrating women at every age and stage of life.

Guest: Colleen Fitzgerald, Ph.D., Professor of Linguistics at the University of Texas at Arlington and director of the Native American Languages Lab.  Of the hundreds of native languages once spoken in North America, 194 remain, and only 33 of those are spoken by both adults and children.  The rest are endangered as the older speakers of those languages pass away without teaching them to the young.