Preparing for and Forecasting the Next Big Earthquake

Guest: Michael Bitzer, Professor of Political Science, Catawba College The winner of North Carolina’s 9th Congressional seat is still undecided because the state’s board of elections has refused to certify the result. As of now, Republican Mark Harris leads Democrat Dan McCready by 905 votes. But the state board is investigating allegations that the Harris campaign may have benefited from mail-in ballots that were collected fraudulently.

Guest: Henry T. Greely Professor of Law, Director of the Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford University. A Chinese scientist announced last month that the first gene-edited babies have been born in China after editing the DNA of the twin girls’ embryos to help make them resistant to HIV infection. Dr. He Jainkui said he implanted the embryos in their mother, and the babies were born and are alive and healthy. But the scientific community is in an uproar over the announcement.

Guest: Laura J. Kray, Professor at the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley Imagine you are selling your car and you know it’s got an oil leak. Do you tell the buyer during the negotiation or not? What if the car belongs to a friend who asked you to sell it for her - would you tell the buyer about the oil leak in that case? According to one recent study, your answer in both cases may depend on your gender.

Guest: Carl Saab, Professor of Neurosurgery, Brown University, Director of the Pain & Neural Circuits Center research lab, Rhode Island Hospital. Chronic pain is among the thorniest problems in medicine. It affects 1 in 6 American adults and we simply don’t have very effective treatment for it. That’s one reason overuse of opioids has become such an epidemic problem. We also don’t have very good ways of diagnosing pain other than the “rate your pain on a scale of 1-10” method, which scientists agree is not very scientific.

Guest: Norman C. Ellstrand, Distinguished Professor of Genetics, Department of Botany and Plant Sciences, University of California, Riverside Quick quiz – how many varieties of apple can you name? Gala, Fuji, Granny Smith, Red Delicious, Pink Lady are available at the local grocer. But if you had to name a few types of banana. . . . uh, what? Here in the US, there’s only one kind of banana in the supermarket – sweet, yellow, no seeds, about as long as your hand. It’s a variety called Cavendish and it dominates the international banana market. Which turns out to be a big problem.