Great Pacific Garbage Patch Clean-Up, ACL Injuries, Cuban Constitution

Guest: Kate O’Neill, PhD, Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, UC Berkeley Over the weekend, an ambitious project to clean up what’s known as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” left from San Francisco. It’s headed toward an enormous swirling mass of mostly plastic trash out in the ocean between California and Hawaii. The cleanup project consists of a 2,000 foot-long floating tube with a skirt hanging down 10-feet underwater. A ship is pulling the tube out to the garbage patch, like a super long tail trailing behind it.

Guest: Michele Pistone, PhD, Professor of Law, Villanova University Six out of ten people who show up in immigration court in the US come without a lawyer. Not surprisingly, their chances of avoiding deportation are slim without someone who understands the system to advocate on their behalf. But it turns out you don’t have to be a lawyer to assist immigrants in court. Villanova University law professor Michele Pistone is building an online training course for non-lawyers who want to help refugees and asylum seekers navigate the immigration system.

Guest: Paul Sherbondy, M.D., Orthopedic Surgeon, Penn State Sports Medicine From basketball and volleyball courts to soccer and football fields, some 200,000 athletes injure their ACL every year in the US. About half of those are serious ruptures in the knee ligament. And even casual sports fans know that an ACL injury can derail the career of an athlete at any level. Why are these injuries so common and is there a way to prevent them?

Guest: Sam Payne, Host of the Apple Seed Sam Payne of The Apple Seed shares a story.

Guest: Robert Zemsky, PhD, Professor of Education, Founding Director, Institute for Research on Higher Education, University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education

Guest: Ted Henken, PhD, Associate Professor of Sociology, Baruch College Cuba is one of the last standard bearers of Communism globally – and now it appears to be backing away from that. Cuban politicians and voters are debating a new constitution that recognizes the “role of the market” and “private property.” Those ideas are central to Western Capitalism, which the Castros of Cuba have long railed against.