Author: Shelley Schlender

Holiday Sci & Tech Gifts // Eating Your Heart Out?

 

We take a look at favorite holiday sci-tech gifts, including the SparkFun Inventor’s Kit, Logicomix, Manga Guide to Electricity, Lego Mindstorms,  a fun new novelty for anyone on your list – giant microbes.  After the show, we also voted to add yet one more item to your last-minute gifts – a mesh bag of any size, for . . . what else?  Catching neutrinos.

Also on the show this week,  How on Earth’s Roger Wendell describes a new way to clean irrigation ditches, called, a “Self Cleaning Trash Screen for Irrigation Water (Watch on You Tube).”

Dick Williams (left) and Chip Grandits at KGNU

Local author and scientist Dick Williams talks with How on Earth’s Chip Grandits about Dick’s new book:  Eating Your Heart Out?  Williams, with coauthors Binx Selby and Linda Fong.  In his book, Dick writes, “For over a half-century, careful scientific researchers have known what a good balanced diet really means, yet most of us have largely ignored this important information. We have preferred to continue in our culturally determined ruts, eating ourselves to death. Major research projects have noted how some peoples in the world have lived healthy lives past the 100-year mark in communities, such as the Inuit living above the Arctic circle, and the traditional villages of the island, Crete, in the Mediterranean, where cardiac events are completely unknown. ”

Producer: Shelley Schlender
Co-Hosts: Tom McKinnon & Beth Bartel, with special reports from Roger Wendell and Chip Grandits.
Engineer: Shelley Schlender
Executive Producer: Tom McKinnon

Listen to the show:

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 23:41 — 32.5MB)

Subscribe: RSS

We Breathe Microbes with Noah Fierer

Noah Fierer

We explore the world microbes, and how they’re everywhere, and how the University of Colorado at Boulder has scientists such as Noah Fierer who are trying to track all those microbes down and figure out which ones help us and which ones don’t, and how they interact.  These scientists have studied the microbes on a human hand, the microbes in the air from dog feces, and they’re lastest project is known as Miasma.  That stands for Mapping and Integrated Analysis of Microbes in the Atmosphere.

Hosts: Ted Burnham and Breanna Draxler

Producer: Shelley Schlender
Engineer: Shelley Schlender
Headlines: Tom Yulsman
Executive Producer: Susan Moran

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 24:20 — 22.3MB)

Subscribe: RSS

GMOs & Health: The Loss of Small Farms and the Rise of Immune Disorders

We look at the strange rise in autoimmune diseases, allergies and asthma, with experts from the University of Chicago Celiac Disease Center and with National Jewish Health Immunlogist Andy Liu  in Denver.  And, we explore whether genetically modified crops might be increasing our chance of getting ill, with Agricultural Scientist, Charles Benbrook of The Organic Center.

In this report, Shelley Schlender takes a look at genetically modified crops and other modern farming techniques, and how they might, or might not be, connected to the dramatic rise in immune disorders.  As part of this report, she’ll look into the strange case of a bacteria in GM corn that was NOT supposed to get into human bloodstream.  Recent research indicates that it does.  And she’ll discuss the hygiene hypothesis with  health experts who suggest that our society has become so “clean” that, in some ways, it makes us sick.

Go here for extended interviews with Charles Benbrook, Andy Liu, Carol Shilson, Stefano Guandalini.

Co-hosts: Susan Moran and Joel Parker
Engineer: Tom McKinnon
Executive Producer: Susan Moran
Show Producer: Shelley Schlender

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 25:07 — 23.0MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Lean Deli Meat vs A Big Fat Steak . . . and Water in Outer Space

We talk with one of the nation’s leading nutrition scientists  . . . whose opinions about food and health might not be popular with the American Salt Institute . . . OR with the USDA.  Dariush Mozaffarian is with the Harvard School of Public Health, in the department of epidemiology.  Current projects include leadership of the Nutrition in Chronic Diseases Expert Group of the Gates Foundation.   He’ll explain data that indicates processed lean turkey meat and processed lean ham are a greater risk factor for diabetes and heart disease than eating an equal size serving of fresh, fat, juicy steak.  Mozaffarian talks with Shelley Schlender.  (and for an extended version of the interview, click here)

And we talk with CU astronomer Jason Glenn.   He’s one of the principal investigators on the Z-Spec telescope, operated out of Hawaii.  Recently, Glenn’s team has discovered an enormous cloud of water hanging in space—12 billion light-years away.  Astronomers have never before found water from that far back into the early universe. Glenn talks about the finding with Ted Burnham.

Also in this week’s show, we talk with Janos Perczel about a new design for an invisibility cloak. (and for an extended version of the interview, click here)

Co-hosts:  Joel Parker and Ted Burnham
Engineer: Shelley Schlender
Executive Producer: Susan Moran
Producer: Shelley Schlender

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 24:57 — 34.3MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Janos Perczel – Invisibility Cloak (Extended Version)

This podcast provides extended version of our interview with Janos Perczel about his new Invisibility Cloak.

Background:

An undergraduate  at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland has overcome a major hurdle in the development of invisibility cloaks by envisioning an optical device that would allow the cloak to hide things against CHANGING backgrounds.  The Institute of Physics and German Physical Society’s New Journal of Physics, published the study today, and the lead author, Janos Perczel, spoke with us about it from Hungary, via Skype,.  But first — putting aside Harry Potter’s cloak of invisibility for a moment, in real life, scientists have cloaked some palm-sized objects . . . but not especially well.  Here’s Janos Perczel.
Perczel
It depends on what you mean by an invisibility cloak.  The sort of stuff you see in Harry Potter films has never been made yet.  There have been experiments to test the theory but these experiments have always featured invisibility in some reduced form.
So far, cloaking only works when an object’s against one single field of steady background wavelength, like a “blue screen.”  And even that’s complicated. “Cloaking” conceals an object by bending light around it.  Perczel says it’s similar to putting a rock in a river, where the water bends around and covers the rock and makes it “disappear..  But just as water must speed up in order to hurry around the rock, bending light has required accelerating the light.   And super-speeded light flows too fast to allow a cloaking devices to adjust to changing backgrounds.  In the new report, Perczel and colleagues offer a solution.  They call it an invisibility sphere, and it buys enough time for the cloak to adjust to changing backgrounds by, well — what else?  Their device slows down the normal speed of light.

Janos Perczel

Perczel
So that all the light speeds that we use in our cloak will be less than the speed of light, in vacuum, so that the cloak we propose here would work for any frequency and would also work against an ever-changing background and a multiplicity of colors and, well anything.
It may be decades before this technology moves from theory to real world applications.  But Perczel predicts that there will be plenty.
Perczel
I’m not sure I would want to talk about the potential military applications, because that’s not something I’m terribly keen on. But, apart from those, this whole invisibility subject is based on transformation optics.  That’s the key word here, and it tells us how to control light and how to guide it pretty much any way we want to guide it around.  This might lead to the birth of incredible optical devices.  
Perczel envisions images that are sharper than the quality of the light the first hit the lens.  And who knows?  Maybe someday invisibilites cloaks will lead to anti-wrinkle creams and perhaps lower production costs of future Harry Potter movies.  Thanks to Shelley Schlender for doing this report.  You can hear an extended version of the interview, on our website, howonearthradio.org.

 

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 17:08 — 15.7MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Harvard Epidemiologist Dariush Mozaffarian on Salt (extended version)

Here’s an extended version of Shelley Schlender’s interview with Dariush Mozaffarian on Salt.  Note that in the interview, Shelley asks Dr. Mozaffarian to comment on some of the assertions made in the popular press, Scientific American story, It’s Time to End the War on Salt.”  The interview mentions a citation in the popular press article about the Cochrane Collaboration’s view on salt.  After the interview, Mozaffarian’s pointed out this more recent assessment from the Cochrane Collaboration:

The most recent on salt and blood pressure is below:
Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2004;(3):CD004937.
Effect of longer-term modest salt reduction on blood pressure.
He FJ, MacGregor GA.

Here are the verbatim conclusions from that report:
“CONCLUSIONS: Our meta-analysis demonstrates that a modest reduction in salt intake for a duration of 4 or more weeks has a significant and, from a population viewpoint, important effect on blood pressure in both individuals with normal and elevated blood pressure. These results support other evidence suggesting that a modest and long-term reduction in population salt intake could reduce strokes, heart attacks, and heart failure. Furthermore, our meta-analysis demonstrates a correlation between the magnitude of salt reduction and the magnitude of blood pressure reduction. Within the daily intake range of 3 to 12 g/day, the lower the salt intake achieved, the lower the blood pressure.”

Additionally, Mozaffarian suggests that people interested in this topic check out a meta-analysis by the British Journal of Medicine Titled, Salt intake, stroke, and cardiovascular disease: meta- analysis of prospective studies.

Last but not least, for a recent speech by Mozaffarian that provides even more detail on these topics, click here.

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 23:52 — 21.9MB)

Subscribe: RSS