The American Gut – What’s in YOUR Gut?

humanfoodproject.com/american-gut/
from humanfoodproject.com/american-gut/

We share three new findings that include contributions from Colorado scientists:  1.  Diane McKnight coauthors study about Bacteria that thrive in a frigid hell-hole – the pitch-dark, super-salty, poisonous Lake Vida in Antarctica, 2.  William Colgan offers new ways to calculate a glacier’s melting rates, 3.  Alicia Karspeck offers a new weather forecast – Cloudy with a Chance of Flu?

(6:00) Then we talk with Jeff Leach, founder of the Human Food Project, which has teamed up with CU researchers who include Rob Knight to create a crowd-sourced, crowd-funded way to learn more about the microbes that live in us and on us.  The new project is called The American Gut.  The deadline to sign up is January 7th.

Hosts: Jim Pullen and Tom McKinnon
Producer: Shelley Schlender
Engineer: Shelley Schlender
Executive Producer: Jim Pullen

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Bernie Krause

Today on How On Earth we speak with Dr. Bernie Krause about how soundscapes can help us understand the health of ecosystems. Dr. Krause has been recording the whole sounds of nature all over the world for 40 years. His new book is The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World’s Wild Places.

Hosts: Jim Pullen and Joel Parker
Producer: Jim Pullen
Engineer: Jim Pullen
Additional Contributions: Shelley Schlender and Rabah Kamal
Executive Producer: Jim Pullen

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Clean Tech Nation//Feedback in Climate Models

Clean Tech Nation (start time: 4:57): Over the last few years renewable electricity generation has doubled, thanks in part to President Obama’s 2009 stimulus package. In fact, many clean technologies and industries have taken off, including solar, biofuels, green building and electric vehicles. But the stimulus money is about to run out, as is the production tax credit for wind development. To make sense of the current status of and future prospects for clean tech, co-host Susan Moran interviews Clint Wilder, co-author (along with Ron Pernick,) Clean Tech Nation: How the U.S. Can Lead in the New Global Economy.

Wilder and Pernick run Clean Edge, a clean-tech research and advisory firm.

Dr. William Hay of the University of Colorado in Boulder.
Feedback in Climate Models (start time: 14:00): We are witnesses to unprecedented changes to the earth. Great storms and melting ice caps. Scientists say these events are related to the carbon we are dumping into the atmosphere. But even the scientists are stunned by the speed and scale of melting sea ice and ice caps and sea-level rise. Dr. Bill Hay, professor emeritus of geology at CU-Boulder, talks with us about why scientists haven’t been able to keep up with mother nature.

Hosts: Susan Moran and Jim Pullen
Producer: Jim Pullen
Engineer: Jim Pullen
Additional Contributions: Shelley Schlender
Executive Producer: Jim Pullen

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The Dust Bowl / Population Growth

Feature #1: The Dust Bowl (start time 6:53)

Dust Bowl, courtesy Creative Commons

As bad as the drought has been recently in Colorado and other states, it pales in comparison to the nearly 10-year-long drought of the 1930s. Its unrelenting and gargantuan dust storms inspired the name “The Dust Bowl.” In southeast Colorado and other Great Plains states, children died of dust pneumonia. Thousands of cattle died or were slaughtered. Hundreds of thousands of people were forced to flee their homes. It came to be called “the worst man-made ecological disaster in American history.” On November 18th and 19th PBS will air a four-hour documentary called “The Dust Bowl.” It was directed by Ken Burns and written and co-produced by author Dayton Duncan. How On Earth co-host Susan Moran talks with Duncan about the film and the lessons learned –or not learned — from The Dust Bowl.

Feature #2: Zero Population (start time 15:58)  John Seager, CEO of the nonprofit Population Connection, discusses with How On Earth co-host Ted Burnham about the organization’s efforts to help American citizens and politicians understand the environmental and other implications of the ever-expanding global human population. John will speak this Friday at the CU campus in Boulder. His presentation is titled, “Soaring Past 7 Billion: Population Challenges for a Crowded World.”

Hosts: Ted Burnham and Susan Moran
Producer: Susan Moran
Engineer: Maeve Conran
Executive Producer: Jim Pullen

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Stopping Cancer in its Tracks – Telomerase Receptor Inhibition

Last month, CU Nobel Prize Winner Tom Cech (Check) and colleagues announced a breakthrough in their quest to stop cancer.  It involves an enzyme known as telomerase (tell-AH-mer-aze), which helps cells divide almost endlessly – helpful when a child is growing.  In adults, most cells stop responding to telomerase.  Instead they save up a limited number of cell divisions timed to last through old age.  Cancer cells are different.  They are great gobblers of telomerase.  That’s where CU discovery comes in.  It’s a way to possibly prevent cancer cells from tanking up on telomerase.  Cech says that while human trials are years off, the discovery looks promising.  For more, here’s How on Earth’s Shelley Schlender, talking with CU Nobel Prize winner, Tom Cech, in an extended version of this interview on cancer:

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The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson

The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson (start time 6:20). The book Silent Spring, published in 1962, is widely credited for setting the stage for the modern environmental movement. Its author, Rachel Carson, an unassuming field biologist and writer, uncovered how in the process of killing crop pests, chemicals such as DDT were also killing birds, fish and other wildlife.  Fifty years after Silent Spring was published, several of the worst offending toxins are off the market – at least in the U.S. – but many more persist and new ones have emerged. And they’re wreaking havoc on human health, not just wildlife. How On Earth co-host Susan Moran talks with William Souder, author of the new book On a Farther Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson, which was just published last month to mark the 50th anniversary of the release of Silent Spring.

Hosts: Susan Moran, Joel Parker
Producer: Joel Parker
Engineer: Jim Pullen
Executive Producer: Jim Pullen

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CU Multidisciplinary Oil Production Study

Fracking well in Boulder County, Colorado. Photo courtesy of Jim Pullen.
How can we best live with natural gas development? A University of Colorado team has just been awarded an NSF grant to tackle the problem. Here to chat with us about the study is Dr. Joe Ryan, the lead-PI of the multidisciplinary team. And the lead of the study’s air quality task, Dr. Jana Milford, is also with us.
Hosts: Jim Pullen and Joel Parker
Producer: Jim Pullen
Engineer: Jim Pullen
Executive Producer: Jim Pullen

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Pledge Drive Show//Genetic-mutant Paganini

Paganini in 1831 (credit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niccol%C3%B2_Paganini)
This is our 2012 Fall Pledge Drive Show and our subject is Genes Gone Bad, or do you have to be a genetic-mutant superhuman to play Paganini? Helping us answer that question is Boulder’s own and world-renowned Dr. Gregory Walker. And in a very special treat, Gregory plays the magnificent Paganini Caprice No. 24, live in KGNU’s Kabaret studio. And we hear a bit of an interview with Sam Kean, author of the book, The Violinist’s Thumb, which inspired our show.
Hosts: Jim Pullen and Joel Parker
Producer: Jim Pullen
Engineers: Jim Pullen, George Figgs, and Dafe Hughes
Executive Producer: Jim Pullen

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Boulder Nobel Science Winner//Searching for Sister Earth

We talk with Travis Metcalfe, of Boulder’s Space Science Institute, where he is searching for Sister Earth and also part of the Blue Dot Project.  As for why, the past two decades have witnessed accelerating progress on one of the most fundamental questions in astronomy: Are we alone in the Universe? Astronomers have already discovered hundreds of planets around distant stars. Some of them are nearly as small as the Earth, and orbit in the “Goldilocks zone” of their parent star where liquid water can exist.

 

We congratulate Boulder’s David J. Wineland for winning the 2012 Nobel Prize in physics.     Wineland, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and CU-Boulder, shares the prize with and Serge Haroche of France.  They are credited with making breakthroughs in quantum physics by showing how to observe individual quantum particles without destroying them.  These, in turn, are the first steps toward building superfast computers based on quantum physics.

Hosts: Joel Parker, Beth Bartel
Producer: Shelley Schlender
Engineer: Jim Pullen
Executive Producer: Jim Pullen

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Neanderthals//Antarctica


Feature #1: Neanderthals (start time: 6:01)
Our Neanderthal ancestors have long been maligned as rather dim-witted cave-dwellers. But they may have been brighter — and more colorful — more like us, shall we say.  We turn to the BBC’s Science in Action for a look at new research into who these ancestors really were. Here’s BBC’s Jon Stewart.

Feature #2: Antarctica (start time: 11:03)
It may be hard for people living in Colorado and other land-locked states to grasp that our daily lifestyles – burning fossil fuels every time we turn on the lights or drive our car, for instance – affects the delicate marine ecosystems of the Southern Ocean, from the ice algae to the penguins and whales. And in turn, the health of the plants and animals, and indeed the ice they depend on, in Antarctica, affects our own health.  Cohost Susan Moran interviews Dr. James McClintock, a marine biologist at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, about his new book, “Lost Antarctica: Adventures in a Disappearing Land.” He shares his adventures waaayy down under, and his concerns about the future of the fragile and stunning continent. 

Hosts: Ted Burnham, Susan Moran
Producer: Susan Moran
Engineer: Joel Edelstein
Executive Producer: Jim Pullen

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