Seafood, Unopened Scrolls, Manipulation, Oscars, Proteins

Global Seafood Market  Guest: Gavin Gibbons, Vice President of Communications for the nonprofit organization National Fisheries Institute  The Christian season of Lent is underway, during which many Catholics abstain from red meat on Fridays and eat fish instead. That has us thinking about the state of the seafood industry. Pollution, warming temperatures and radiation  “The future of seafood and expanded consumption of seafood is going to come from fish farms. It’s not only safe, it’s a smart choice,” says Gibbons.  “People are not being mercury poisoned. That’s sort of an old way of thinking,” says Gibbons. “The benefits outweigh the risks in terms of mercury and in terms of ingesting it.”  “There is no concern in terms of radiation and commercial seafood,” reassures Gibbons, “coming off the coasts of Japan.”  Reading Unopened Scrolls  Guests: Roger Macfarlane, Classics Professor at BYU  Brent Seales, Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Kentucky  The eruption of Mount Vesuvias in 79 AD buried entire cities in volcanic ash. The Roman town of Herculaneum was destroyed, including a tremendous trove of scrolls. The contents of this ancient library are virtually unknown.  “Many of the scrolls were in fact open physically and you can see the writing doing that. The problem is that they are so fragile,” says Seale.  “The images that come from the scanner,” explains Seale, “look more like slicing something on a deli slicer. They don’t give you the flattened surface and that’s where we need to computer science to create that.”  “We’ve been able over the centuries,” says MacFarlane, “to be able to edit complete texts of the Herculaneum papyri.”  Gross National Happiness  Guest: Dr. Ed Diener, Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia and University of Utah  The Pursuit of Happiness is enshrined in our Declaration of Independence, but as a nation, we’re far more concerned with measures such as interest rates, unemployment, and economic output.  The tin