Coding with DNA

Guest: Shima Baradaran Baughman, JD, Professor of Law at the University of Utah, Author of “The Bail Book: A Comprehensive Look at Bail in America’s Criminal Justice System” Nearly two-thirds of the people sitting in jail around the country right now have not been convicted of a crime. So why are they behind bars? Mostly because they either couldn’t come up with the money to make bail or a judge deemed them too risky to go free while they wait for trial. "And so what?" you may be thinking. These people obviously did something to get themselves arrested. But what about “innocent until proven guilty”? As legal scholar Shima Baradaran Baughman sees it, America’s bail system is racist, unfair to people who are poor, unnecessarily expensive to tax payers and maybe even unconstitutional.

Guest: Missael Garcia, PhD, Postdoctoral Researcher of Electrical Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign The mantis shrimp has the some of the most complex eyes in the animal kingdom, and if we could see like they do, scientists think we’d have better underwater navigation systems. Engineers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have made a camera to help our much-less capable human eyes see more like the mantis shrimp. It’s called the “mantis cam” and we recently learned about it through an article in “The Atlantic.”

(Originally aired: June 15, 2017) Guest: Anne Bissonnette, PhD, Associate Professor of Material Culture and Curatorship, Curator of the Clothing and Textiles Collection, University of Alberta It’s just a fact of life that our bodies change in shape and size as we age. Sudden – or even subtle – shifts in weight can require a whole new wardrobe. Why are clothes in the Western world designed so that even a slight gain in the hips or belly requires a new pant size? A exhibit called "Misfits" at the University of Alberta in Canada explored the lack of adaptability in Western clothing.

Guest: Ksenija Marinkovic, PhD, Associate Professor of Psychology, Adjunct Associate Professor of Radiology, and the Director of the Spatio-Temporal Brain Imaging Laboratory at San Diego State University Crashes caused by drunk driving kill more than 10,000 people a year in the United States. Why do so many people who’ve been drinking still get behind the wheel and think they’re fine to drive? Neuroscientists at San Diego State University may have found the answer.

Guest: Nicola Fox, PhD, Parker Solar Probe Project Scientist and Chief Scientist, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory If you’re making summer plans, you need to hurry to get a ticket to this summer’s hottest spot. NASA is launching the first-ever spacecraft to the sun and you can be part of the mission. Captain Kirk is doing it – aka William Shatner. Get your ticket to the sun here.