Venezuela, Mercies in Disguise, Football and Brain Disease

Guest: Laura Gamboa-Gutierrez, PhD, Professor of Political Science, Utah State University For more than three months now, there have been almost daily clashes in the streets between protesters and security forces in Venezuela. At least 85 people have died and more than a thousand injured as Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro tries to crack down on protests against him. Last week, an armed group of Maduro’s supporters stormed the National Assembly and beat up some of his fiercest critics. Once one of the wealthiest and most stable democracies in Latin America, Venezuela is now in economic shambles and sliding quickly toward dictatorship.

Guest: Mark Davies, PhD, Professor of Linguistics, BYU Ever had this problem? Try to type in “sorry I missed you” and your phone insists on autocorrecting it to “sorry I kissed you”? Why does autocorrect insist that “sorry I” should be followed by “kissed” instead of “missed” or any number of less embarrassing alternatives?  How do our phones and computers come up with words to suggest as we type? Through giant databases, or corpora of words, which catalogue how words most frequently appear in context. BYU linguistics professor Mark Davies has designed 21 such word databases, commonly used by tech companies, people learning English and even judges looking to see how past courts have interpreted certain phrases over time.

Guest:  Michael Alosco, PhD, Clinical Neuropsychology Fellow, Boston University Back-to-school also means back to the gridiron. Football players from high school to the pros are suiting up to make the hard tackles that thrill fans. But, mounting evidence points to a risk of long-term brain damage football athletes might be sustaining as they slam into each other. The NFL has agreed to a one billion dollar settlement for retired players diagnosed with brain injuries. At least 18,000 former players are part of that settlement.  In recent weeks, researchers at Boston University School of Medicine published the largest study, to-date, showing a degenerative brain disease called CTE in former football players of all levels.

(originally aired March 21, 2017) Guest: Gina Kolata, Author and Science Reporter, New York Times, Author of “Mercies in Disguise: A Story of Hope, A Family’s Genetic Destiny, and the Science that Rescued Them” If a blood test could tell you that you would probably die of an incurable disease, would you get the test? Amanda Baxley faced that dilemma after watching her father, uncle, and grandfather succumb to a rare and fatal condition known as Gerstmann-Sträussler-Scheinker (GSS), which has symptoms similar to Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases.  As Amanda pondered getting the blood test to see if she, too, had the gene for GSS, some in her family begged her not to. Just think of the Pandora’s box such knowledge could unlock for a family with deep religious beliefs. .

(originally aired May 1, 2017) Guest: Mark Looney, Pulmonologist, Professor of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco The heart pumps blood, the stomach digests food and the lungs bring oxygen into the body. Turns out these basic organ functions we learned in grade school are much too simplified. The body is a complex and finely tuned collection of processes. But researchers have recently discovered something that surprised even them – the lungs are also a major blood-making factory in the body, churning out at least half of the platelet cells that are critical for blood clotting. This discovery was made in mice, but it could provide important clues about human lungs, too.