Hospitals Struggling, Saving Iñapari, Murder Hornets

Why the COVID-19 Pandemic Is Not Good Business for Hospitals (0:31) Guest: Vivian Ho, PhD, Professor of Economics at Rice University, Professor of Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine If there’s such a thing as a boom time for hospitals and doctors, you’d think a global health crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic would be it. And yet, the American Hospital Association says hospitals are losing an estimated $50 billion a month right now. More than 100,000 hospital employees lost their jobs last month in the US. Preserving the Iñapari Language (18:07) Guest: Chris Rogers, Assistant Professor of Linguistics, Brigham Young University The most spoken language in the world is English. Next comes Mandarin Chinese. Then Hindi. One of the least-spoken languages in the world? Iñapari. It’s from Peru. One of literally thousands of languages on the verge of disappearing. Chris Rogers captured that audio. He’s a professor of linguistics at BYU who went to Peru to document and preserve the Iñapari language. The Sony PlayStation 3: The World’s Cheapest Supercomputer (31:48) Guest: Gaurav Khanna, Professor of Physics, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth With one Playstation, you can play some video games. But with hundreds of Playstations, you can look inside a blackhole. That’s what Gaurav Khanna did. He’s a professor of Physics at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. Back in the early 2000s, Professor Khanna didn’t have the funding for blackhole research, so he turned to a cheaper option: connecting Playstation 3's to create his own supercomputer. And it’s still being used today. Why Men Are Starting to Knit (50:38) Guest: Louis Boria, Knitwear Designer, Brooklyn Boy Knits My grandma was a great knitter and tried to teach me, but I didn’t have the patience for it. I always figured I’d take up a hobby like that when I’m old. That’s the stereotype, of course. Louis Boria has upended that with his Brooklyn-based knitting business and advocacy efforts, which include men’s knitting circles. Bees Practice Social