Category: Episodes

Fragrance Free – Roger the Barber // Shelly Miller

Roger the Fragrance Free Barber (photo c Shelley Schlender)
Roger the Barber (c Shelley Schlender)

Roger the Fragrance Free Barber (Starts 3:25)   Artificial fragrances in shampoos, colognes, lotions. deodorant, laundry detergent and more nearly led Roger the Barber, to give up his profession, due to his chemical sensitivities.  Then he opened his own, fragrance free, shop.  He caters to clients who prefer a fragrance free environment . . . and educates people about what fragrance free means.

 

CU Professor Shelly Miller (cc Shelley Schlender)
CU Professor Shelly Miller (c Shelley Schlender)

Shelly Miller – Clean Indoor Air – (Starts 10:35)  CU Boulder Professor Shelly Miller warns that ingredients in common consumer products sometimes add hazardous chemicals to indoor air.  Miller discusses CU Boulder’s Fragrant Free Initiative and the six classes of chemicals that can be hazardous, whether they’re fragrant or odorless, including fire retardants in clothes and furniture.

Host/Producer: Shelley Schlender
Engineer:Maeve Conran
Additional Contributions: Beth Bennett
Executive Producer: Susan Moran

Listen to the show:

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 26:40 — 24.4MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Miracle Brew – The Amazing Science (and Art) of Brewing Beer

Pete Brown, author
Pete Brown, author

This week on How on Earth, Beth interviews Pete Brown, author of Miracle Brew, the story of how beer is made of 4 seemingly simple components, but really from an amazing complexity of science and art. The New York Times recently reviewed Miracle Brew. Here’s what they said: A magisterial tour of fearsome science and vast brewery history leavened with cheery anecdotes, humor, vivid you-are-there prose and a clever eye for personality . . . His rhapsodies about the meaning of life and the meaning of beer are stirring. . . .His expertise and insight will leave you with a glimmer of infinity every time you hold a bottle of it in your hand.

Hosts: Beth Bennett, Susan Moran
Producer: Beth Bennett
Engineer: Maeve Conran
Additional Contributions: Susan Moran
Executive Producer: Susan Moran

Listen to the show:

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 27:52 — 25.5MB)

Subscribe: RSS

2017 Look Back – 2018 Look Forward

2017For this end-of-the-year/start-of-the-year  How on Earth show, we look back to 2017 with clips from some of our features from the past year: selections about tracking methane leaks, ketogenic diets, using MDMA to treat PTSD, gravitational waves, the solar eclipse, space missions, and the politicization of science.  Those are just a few of the topics we covered in 2017, which also included: the continuation of the Our Microbes, Ourselves series, global warming and climate change, research about aging, mutant proteins, how humans have altered nature, future technologies, nuclear tests and the Van Allen belts, biofuels, extinctions following an asteroid impact, monorails, life expectancy in America,  observing stellar occultations by objects in the distant solar system, space shields for satellites, virtual colonoscopies, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), chronic fatigue syndrome, protecting pollinators, testing our drinking water, cancer, the Long Now foundation, citizen science, fracking, and more!

Hosts: Joel Parker, Susan Moran
Producer, Engineer: Joel Parker
Additional Contributions: Beth Bennett, Shelley Schlender
Executive Producer: Susan Moran

Listen to the show:

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 25:19 — 34.8MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Keto for Cancer, part 2

KetoForCancerThis week on How on Earth, Beth finishes the interview with Miriam Kalamian, author of Keto for Cancer. This encyclopedic volume lays out the groundwork for using a ketogenic diet to treat cancer. But, as the author points out, the diet, which starves cancer cells, should be used in conjunction with other therapies. To see the book, go to https://www.chelseagreen.com/keto-for-cancer; to see Miriam’s website go to https://www.dietarytherapies.com/

Hosts: Beth Bennett & Chip Grandits
Producer: Beth Bennett
Engineer: Chip Grandits
Additional contributions: Joel Parker
Executive Producer: Beth Bennett

Listen to the show:

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:30 — 27.9MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Healthy . . . But Missing Gut Microbes

Toby Hammer says initially, he, too, was surprised about the missing microbes.
Toby Hammer says initially, he was surprised about the missing microbes.

Healthy . . . But Missing Gut Microbes (Starts 3:25) Practically everyone on the planet now knows that animals have microbes in their guts. This is a new field of exploration, and top researchers emphasize that we need to learn much more before making any blanket statements about the total effect of the gut microbiome.  Nevertheless, it’s become politically correct to advocate specific diets to eat, for the sake of healthy gut microbes, and to assume that all animals “need” gut microbes. That’s one reason the research from CU-Boulder evolutionary biologist Toby Hammer is so fascinating.  Hammer has discovered a number of animals that probably don’t need microbes in their guts – ranging from some insects to some animals as large as, well, a panda bear.  It all began with Hammer’s research into caterpillars . . . 

Host: Chip Grandits
Producer: Shelley Schlender
Engineer: Chip Grandits
Executive Producer: Beth Bennett

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 26:06 — 23.9MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Ketogenic Diet for Treatment of Cancer//BBC Science in Action

KetoForCancerThis week on How on Earth, we started speaking with Miriam Kalamian, author of the newly released Keto for Cancer. The interview starts at 11′ 30″, but unfortunately we lost the connection after only 5 minutes. You can link to her book at http://www.chelseagreen.com/keto-for-cancer and we will have her back to hear the full story! For the remainder of the show we linked to the BBC Science in Action segment on building proteins from novel DNA sequences.

Hosts: Beth Bennett and Chip Grandis
Producer: Beth Bennett
Engineer: Maeve Conran
Executive Producer: Beth Bennett

Listen to the show:

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 25:43 — 23.5MB)

Subscribe: RSS

The Unnatural World

the-unnatural-world-9781476743905_lgThe Unnatural World (start time: 6:58): It’s an audacious topic for a book: the planet, and audacious individuals who are working to save — actually, to remake — human civilization and our home on Earth. David Biello is the science curator at TED and a contributing editor at Scientific American. His debut book, The Unnatural World: The Race to Remake Civilization in Earth’s Newest Age (Scribner), will be out in paperback next month. It explores how we have altered “nature” in so many ways, from burning fossil fuels and warming the oceans and atmosphere, to tearing down tropical rain forests, to killing off so many species. In this newest epoch, dubbed by many the Anthropocene, humans are not just messing things up; they are also inventing solutions, as Biello notes. Daring optimists in his book include Elon Musk and his Tesla electric cars and trucks.

Hosts: Chip Grantis, Susan Moran
Producer: Susan Moran
Engineer: Chip Grantis
Executive Producer: Beth Bennett
Additional Contributions: Joel Parker

Listen here to the show:

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 26:42 — 24.4MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Lancet Countdown on Climate Change

Lancet Countdown LogoLancet Countdown on Climate Change (starts 3:45) Respectable science journals no longer debate whether human activity causes climate change, or even if it can be reversed to prevent human suffering.  They now scramble to figure out what will be the cost and who will pay.  The bill will be payable in lost lives and livelihoods.  The British Medical Journal, The Lancet has assembled an interdisciplinary team of scientists to help tally this enormous global bill.  On October 30th they released their 2017 Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change.  The report concludes that the delayed response to climate change over the past 25 years has already jeopardized human lives and livelihoods, and the impacts must be assessed in terms of global public health.  One of the contributors to that report is local climate scientist, Max Boykoff, a fellow at CIRES in Boulder, where he directs the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research.  

Hosts: Shelley Schlender and Chip Grandits
Producer: Shelley Schlender and Chip Grandits
Engineer: Shelley Schlender
Additional Contributions: Beth Bennett
Executive Producer:Beth Bennett

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 27:14 — 31.2MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Tamed and Untamed: Essays on the Animal Kingdom

Tamed and Untamed
Tamed and Untamed

This week on How on Earth, Beth interviews Sy Montgomery and Liz Thomas, co-authors of Tamed and Untamed: Close Encounters of the Animal Kind: Some amazing stories of their experiences with animals throughout the animal kingdom, ranging from domestic animals (chickens are smarter than we thought!) to wild animals to invertebrates. the 2-3 page format of their book makes for easy reading! See their book at http://www.chelseagreen.com/tamed-and-untamed

Host: Beth Bennett
Producer: Beth Bennett
Engineer: Maeve Conran
Additional Contributions: Joel Parker
Executive Producer:Beth Bennett

Listen to the show:

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 26:41 — 24.4MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Mutant Proteins // Future Technologies

Proteins foldedMutant Proteins and Protein Evolution (starts 4:42) CU School of Medicine professor David Pollock explains why he has devised a new way to identify and predict both the evolution of proteins and disease causing protein mutations.    Pollock’s highly technical model uses an analogy about a physical model called the Stokes Shift to help explain the biochemical properties of how proteins change, for better or worse.  Pollock’s study has just been published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.  Its title is “Sequence entropy of folding and the absolute rate of amino acid substitutions.”  Additionally, he has written a “behind the paper” explanation for a more general audience to explain the concepts being explored in his ground-breaking research.

Soonish GraphicSoonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That’ll Improve and/or Ruin Everything (starts 15:00) Dr. Kelly Weinersmith is an adjunct assistant professor in the BioSciences Department at Rice University. She specializes in the study of parasites.  But her curiosity has taken her well beyond parasites to ask all-encompassing questions, such as, what will the future will look like – the future of space research, medicine, robots, and, well, humans.  These topics are all part of Weinersmith’s new funny-serious book.  It’s called Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That’ll Improve and/or Ruin Everything. Weinersmith co-authored the book with her husband, Zach.  They’ll be at book signings this week Denver and Boulder.

Hosts: Shelley Schlender, Susan Moran
Producer, Engineer: Shelley
Additional Contributions: Beth Bennett
Executive Producer: Beth Bennett

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 26:09 — 24.0MB)

Subscribe: RSS