Trump Administration Revisiting National Monuments

Guest: Richard Coffin, Project Manager for USAFacts.org The spending bill Congress passed last week to keep the government funded through the end of September totals just over one-trillion dollars for six months of government business. If you want to know exactly how all that cash is spent, you’ll need a computer and a lot of patience. There are reams and reams of data available on government agency websites you can sort through. But now, thanks to USAFactsorg, you can just type in a key word like Medicare or military or education and get simple charts built from government data. USAFacts.org is a non-profit, non-partisan civic initiative that launched just a few weeks ago. It’s backed by retired Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer.

Guest: Daniel Kim-Shapiro, PhD, Professor and Associate Chair, Physics, Wake Forest University One thing most kids refuse to eat are beets—mainly because they were served either boiled or pickled. There were reports that former president Barack Obama hated beets so much that they weren’t even planted in the White House kitchen garden. But one thing most people wouldn’t consider is that beets can be delicious—when juiced.  “Unbeetable” is what Wake Forest University professor Daniel Kim-Shapiro calls the beet juice drink he’s developed. Some preliminary research shows it is not only tasty, but has particular health benefits for people over 55.

Guest: Joe Winer, University of California, Berkeley, Cognitive Neuroscience Can’t sleep? You’re far from alone. More than 8 million American adults rely on prescription sleep aids to catch their Z’s, and, alarmingly, that reliance only increases with age. Trouble sleeping is a common consequence of getting older, but is that because older people just need less sleep? Or does something go haywire in the body’s ability to sleep as we age – and then lack of sleep makes other aspects, such as memory loss, even worse?

Guest: Richard J. Evans, DPhil, Historian and President of Wolfson College at Cambridge If you wonder aloud, “What time is it?” all the people around you could pull out their smart phones and tell you the exact same time. Smart phones have been around long enough now that we take for granted that they’ll spring ahead for Daylight Saving Time, reset themselves when we cross a time zone, and that the time on your neighbor’s phone will be synchronized with the time on mine.  But, in historical terms, it really wasn’t that long ago that people didn’t feel the need to keep time at all. Many clocks, when they were used, only had an hour hand. So, what changed about us that prompted such a dramatic change in the way we track time?

Guest: Amie Houghton, Assistant Professor of Forensic Science, Utah Valley University Crime scene investigation has become a staple of TV drama. Viewers love those moments when the brilliant detective stoops under the yellow police tape, scans the scene crawling with technicians in lab coats cataloguing evidence and then picks up on a subtle clue that makes the whole mystery fall into place. But that’s TV.  Students at Utah Valley University are about to get some hands-on training in what CSI is really like. The university’s forensic science program there has acquired a home that can be made to resemble any crime scene Hollywood could conjure, so students can practice processing the evidence.

Guest: Sy Montgomery, Author, “The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness” Having an extra hand would certainly be convenient from time to time, but imagine if that extra appendage also had a mind of its own. What if it even had a bit of its own personality – like if it preferred to draw with pen, rather than pencil? That’s bizarre to consider, but for an octopus, it may be true, because the octopus has more than half of its neurons located on its eight arms instead of having them all concentrated in its brain like humans.