America Needs More Immigration, Children of Divorce, Mars

Guest: Lant Pritchett, PhD, Professor of Practice of International Development, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard President Trump is unapologetic about his approach to immigration. He wants people to "Buy American and Hire American." Immigrants, Trump says, threaten our jobs and our safety. He's particularly critical of low-skilled immigrants from poor countries coming to the US to take advantage of higher paying jobs and better quality of life.  However, Pritchett says those are precisely the immigrants America needs more of. He says their contributions are good for our economy and much better for their home countries than the billions of dollars the US spends every year trying to improve the economy, education and health of people in developing nations.

Guest: Michael Murphy, Psychology Postdoctoral Research Associate, Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Carnegie Mellon University Parents who are divorcing often worry about the emotional fallout their separation will have on their children. Research results now suggest a rancorous divorce can also have a lasting physical effect on the health of children. To the point that, even as adults, children of divorce may be more susceptible to illnesses like the common cold.

Guest: Santani Teng, PhD, Postdoctoral Researcher at Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute Watching a person with visual impairments navigate the world with the use of a long white cane is truly awe-inspiring. The cane is a really low-tech solution, but in experienced hands it's very effective. Not perfect though: it can tell someone if there's an obstacle ahead, but not precisely what that obstacle is. A team at MIT has developed a solution that could help.

(Originally aired Mar. 13, 2017) Guest: Janina Chilton, Historian for the Utah State Hospital There’s a cemetery just down the road from our studio here in Provo, Utah where 474 unmarked graves contain the remains of patients who died while housed at the Utah Territorial Insane Asylum. They died paupers, and when no families came to claim the bodies, they were buried in graves that have been long since forgotten.  This scenario played out in cemeteries near mental hospitals across the country during the 1800s and early 1900s. Today communities from Minnesota to Mississippi to right here in Provo, Utah, are working to restore some dignity to these forgotten graves. For more information on the Forgotten Patient's Cemetery Project click here.

(Originally aired Feb. 27, 2017) Guest: Vinay Prasad, MD, Professor of Medicine, Oregon Health and Science University Does your doctor Tweet? That’s maybe a strange question, but more and more doctors are using social media, including our next guest Vinay Prasad, who is a cancer doctor. A few years ago, he began to notice other cancer doctors tweeting about various drugs and clinical trials, and he started to wonder if they were being paid by drug companies to post that information. We’ve all seen celebrities, pro-athletes and popular bloggers promoting products from sponsors on their social media accounts. Has that kind of advertising taken root in medicine, now, too?

(Originally aired Oct. 3, 2016) Guest: Christiane Heinicke, PhD, Physicist who Completed a Year-Long Simulation in a Mars Habitat Fifteen years from now, NASA hopes to send the first astronauts to Mars, but there’s a lot to figure out in the meantime. Anyone who goes to Mars will need to spend a lot of time in a shelter of some sort and wear a spacesuit when outside – because of intense radiation from the sun. And it’ll be a long mission – the flight to Mars takes six months and they’ll have to spend a few years there before returning to Earth. So NASA needs to know how humans will hold up under the stressful of such isolation and being in tight quarters with the same few people for so long. So that’s how six volunteers ended up in a simulated Mars habitat funded by NASA on the rocky surface of the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii