Worlds Awaiting: Reading-Without-Walls Challenge

Guest: Michael Kugelman, Deputy Director and Senior Associate for South Asia, Asia Program, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. President Donald Trump met Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi face-to-face for the first time Monday. It was a working meeting, rather than an official state visit. So let’s consider what world’s largest democracies have to work on.

Guest: Jean Potvin, PhD, Professor of Physics, St. Louis University The largest creature on the planet survives by feeding on some of the smallest life forms. It’s the blue whale, and every day it consumes up to 4 tons of shrimplike animals called krill, which are only a couple of inches long. The secret to getting enough of its teeny-tiny food to maintain its huge body lies in the blue whale’s comb-like rows of teeth, called baleen. Jean Potvin at St. Louis University has been using the laws of physics to unlock the feeding secrets of baleen whales.

Guest: William C. Weld, PhD, Clinical Assistant Professor of Finance, University of North Carolina In the last month, Amazon’s stock price has come tantalizingly close to $1000 per share, which means that anybody wanting to buy into Amazon should be ready to cough up some serious dough. But twenty or thirty years ago, this never would have happened. Any company whose stock had grown to a value this big would have performed a “stock-split,” which is like trading one $500 share for two shares worth $250 each. These days stock splitting is very rare.

Guest: Sheldon Jacobson, PhD, Professor of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Airplane security seems to be a moving target: when officials got wind that terrorists were cooking up explosives made of liquids and gels, along came the 3 oz carry-on limit. Then came the attempted underwear and shoe bombers, so now we have to take off our shoes and get a full-body scan to check our underwear before boarding a flight. Laptops already have to come out and be turned on for scanning. Recently, the US banned laptops in the cabin of flights coming from 10 airports in the Middle East. That prohibition may soon extend to all international flights in and out of the US. Do these widening bans on carry-on items make us that much safer? Where does it end?

Guest: Reed Wolfley, News Media student, BYU, Student Producer for Top of Mind Last fall, we had a conversation on Top of Mind with the donor organization, Be the Match about bone marrow transplants, which can save the lives of people suffering from certain types of leukemia, lymphoma, or blood disease. Our student engineer Reed Wolfley was working in the studio that day, running the sound controls. Something clicked for him and he decided to join the donor registry. To his surprise, Reed was quickly matched with a needy recipient and a little over a week ago, he flew across the country to donate bone marrow. So we’ve asked him in to talk about the process.