The Apple Seed

Guest: David Blackmon, Independent Energy Analyst, Frequent Contributor to Forbes.com Every year at this time, gas prices seem to go up. Or maybe it’s just that we notice it a bit more, because we’re making vacation plans? You’re not imagining things: the price for regular unleaded gas is at its highest level in three years. Americans are paying an average of $2.74 per gallon of regular unleaded right now, which is 30-cents higher than it was at the start of the year.

Guest: Muhammad Zaman, PhD, Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Boston University, author of "Bitter Pills: The Global War on Counterfeit Drugs" If you’re buying cheap Lipitor or Viagra on eBay or a Chinese website, there’s a chance you’re getting a counterfeit. That seems pretty obvious. But the much larger problem for global drug supplies comes down to sloppiness and poor quality. Not that someone is making fake Viagra pills out of chalk, but that lifesaving malaria drugs and antibiotics are tainted with a deadly chemical or don’t have the full amount of active ingredient to make them effective. This problem is terrifyingly common around the world – and even occasionally in the US – according to Boston University biomedical engineering professor Muhammad Zaman's new book, "Bitter Pills."

Guest: Mary Himmelstein, PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity, University of Connecticut Eavesdrop on any school playground in America and you’re sure to hear someone being teased for being fat. Shaming and bullying about body shape is pervasive and harmful – for girls and boys. The University of Connecticut’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity recently conducted the first study about weight stigma that focused exclusively on men. The results suggest men and boys face stigma at rates similar to women and girls, but for slightly different reasons.

Guest: Joseph Dituri, Crew Commander of Crew 192 at the Mars Desert Research Station, Consultant for the International Board of Undersea Medicine NASA hopes to be sending people to Mars by the 2030s. But if you want to know what it might be like to live on the Red Planet today, just take a four-hour drive from Salt Lake City to a spot in the Utah desert near the town of Hanksville. For more than a decade, researchers have been marooning themselves in a tiny habitat in the desert “playing Mars” for weeks at a time. The Mars Desert Research Station is a privately-run facility funded by donors including Elon Musk of SpaceX.

Guest: Barbara Lipska, PhD, Director of the Human Brain Collection Core, National Institute of Mental Health and Author of "The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind"   Neuroscientist Barbara Lipska spent her career studying mental illness, and then she lived it. Tumors in her brain brought on all the confusion, irrationality and anger common in people with schizophrenia, which is the exact disease Lipska specializes in studying. Luckily, cutting-edge treatment saved Lipska’s life and restored her mind. She now considers her brain cancer a “priceless gift,” because suffering through mental illness taught her more about how the brain works than dissecting one in a lab ever could.