Apple Music, Fireflies, Lasers, Twins

Guest: Eric Harvey, Assistant Professor in the School of Communications at Grand Valley State University.  The way that we access and listen to music has dramatically changed in the last decade. From cds to mp3s, and now on to streaming services. Apple has recently joined the streaming game, already being played by Spotify, Pandora, Tidal, and others. The participation of Apple, one of the industry giants, indicates that streaming is here to stay. But how is Apple Music holding up when compared to its competition?

Guest: Seth Bybee, assistant professor of Biology at Brigham Young University  Fireflies have long been among the most magical things about summer nights in the East and South. Remarkably, fireflies have started to pop up around Utah. BYU Entomologists are collecting public sightings online to track and study the insect population.  Add your sighting here

Guest: John Rogers, Urbana-Champaign engineering professor at the University of Illinois  Crafters will immediately get this conundrum: you’re working with something tiny – a piece of glitter or confetti – and you want to get it in just the right spot on your masterpiece, but you can’t seem to shake it off your finger. That’s because the speck of glitter has more surface area than it has weight, so gravity isn’t much help in breaking up the surface adhesion between your finger and the glitter.  Imagine you’re an engineer trying to build a circuit for a sensor that will fit on a piece of confetti. It’s a real challenge to get the stuff that makes up the circuit to stick to the tiny circuit board.  Researchers supported by the National Science Foundation have found a possible solution-- Lasers.

Guest: Nancy Segal, Ph.D., Director of the Twin Studies Center at California State University. 

Guest: Rod Gustafson, ParentPreviews.com  The little yellow tic-tac-shaped characters from the Despicable Me animated films showed everyone up over the weekend with the second-biggest animated film opening of all time. And they did it without speaking a word of English. But their goofy antics apparently make up for their gibberish. The movie is prequel to the Despicable Me story line and has them on the hunt for a suitable villain to serve.  Another film out over the weekend was Self/Less starring Ryan Reynolds and Ben Kingsley. Billionaire industrialist Damian Hale is master of his universe, until he encounters a foe that he can't defeat: cancer. His only hope is a radical medical procedure called "shedding," in which his consciousness is transferred to a healthy body.

Guests: Brian Iverson and Kevin Marr, BYU Mechanical Engineering, Mike Alder, Technology Transfer  Drones are all the talk right now. Unmanned aerial vehicles, as devotees prefer to call them, can be used by the military and in scientific exploration or taking cool photos, or spying on your neighbors. But 71 percent of the Earth is covered in water, so unmanned underwater vehicles are of equal interest in most of those same applications. At any rate, there’s a hunt on to find a better way to maneuver robotic vehicles underwater – even give them enough thrust to turn them into underwater rockets.