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 tiny South Asian kingdom of Bhutan has taken a different approach—for forty years, it has been measuring Gross National Happiness instead of “Gross Domestic Product.” The results of that focus have been mixed, but a global discussion about the value of measuring “well-being” is underway. The UK is collecting national “life satisfaction” statistics for possible use in developing policies. Japan and Chile are considering the same thing. Even here in the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention take periodic stock of people’s satisfaction with life in some health surveys.  The overarching question though, is whether or not happiness is something that can be measured reliably.  “Happiness is a bit of a tricky word so we labeled it subjective wellbeing. What we mean by it,” explains Diener “and what we measure are people’s feelings and appraisals, their judgment of how life’s going. How satisfied are you are as a whole? If you could live your life over, how much would you change? How close is your life to your ideal?”  “First of all, it reflects the overall quality of life in society. It gives a broad picture that goes beyond money,” says Diener on why happiness measurements matter.  “It’s not just telling you how society’s doing, but how it’s going to do better.”  Mind Games and Manipulation  Guest: Diane Benscoter, author of “Shoes of a Servant: My Unconditional Devotion to a Lie” and founder of Own Your Own Brain  Young radicals from Western nations including America are swelling the ranks of the Islamic State. They are recruited through slick marketing and compelling messages that convey the opportunity to be part of something bigger that ones’ self—to belong, to have meaning.  We discuss the impacts of manipulation on Top of Mind.  “I see it in a variety of places. We see it in gangs, we see it in terrorist organizations like ISIS, we see it in relationships sometimes. There’s the type that goes on in businesses that takes advantage of people of scams. It can appear in a variety of situations in society,” says Benscoter.  Ownyourbrain.org, empowering individuals to resist manipulation  “It’s like a fire, if it doesn’t have oxygen, it can’t burn,” says Benscoter on resisting manipulation.  Oscar Recap  Guests: Rod Gustafson and Kerry Bennett, Parentpreviews.com Social media is a-flutter today with Oscar gossip. The Twitter consensus is that John Travolta was creepy, John Legend and Common made everyone weep with their Best Song winner “Glory” from the movie Selma and Best Supporting Actress winner Patricia Arquette’s call for women to be paid equally has generated heated debate.  “I wasn’t really surprised, but I was disappointed,” reflects Gustafson and Bennett about last night’s Oscars.   “These are industry professionals and Birdman just plays right into them. It’s about a washed up actor who’s trying to reignite his career. They \[The Academy] are biased. They really love movies about movies, about people who are in the industry,” says Gustafson.  Tech Transfer – Brad Bundy Enzymes Guests: Brad Bundy, Biotech  Mike Alder, head of the BYU Technology Transfer Office  The complexity of human life boils down to just 20 building blocks called amino acids. In a laboratory here at Brigham Young University under the director of Brad Bundy, researchers are trying to expand that vocabulary of building blocks. If they succeed, we could have better ways to treat cancer, better vaccines, and better way to sense the presence of hazardous chemicals in our environment.  “Proteins are the catalysts of life. They’re the things that make all the chemical reactions in our bodies. They are the reason that everything occurs,” says Bundy.  “Over half of the top grossing drugs are proteins,” says Bundy. “They are very exciting in their application.”  “Inside cells, if you want to try to recode, to try to put a lot of these manmade proteins into amino acids, it’s really hard to do inside a living cell.”