Immigration, Kilo Change, Stinky Beach

Guest: John Carlos Frey, Investigative Journalist and Filmmaker, Author of “Sand and Blood: America’s Stealth War on the Mexico Border” Some –but not all -of the 350migrant children held for weeks in squalid conditions in a Border Patrol facility in Texas have reportedly been moved to a safer location. Customs and Border Patrol officials say they are not equipped to handle the deluge of migrants arriving at the southern border –more than half a million people since October. The Department of Health and Human Services says next week it will run out of money to care for unaccompanied migrant children and has requested nearly $3 billion in emergency funds from Congress. But some Democrats are reluctant to approve the funding because they oppose the Trump Administration’s underlying immigration policies.

Guest: Wolfgang Ketterle, Professor of Physics, MIT When you step on a scale or put some apples on the little one at the grocery store, how does the scale know exactly what a pound is? If you can believe, there’s actually a chunk of platinum in a vault in France that is the official kilo against which every scale in the world is calibrated. But this is 2019 and the world’s scientists have decided they can define the precise weight of a kilogram in a way that’s more high-tech (and hard for regular folks to understand).

Guest: Stephen Leatherman, Professor of Geomorphology, Florida International University Giant rafts of slimy brown seaweed are piling up on beaches from Cancun to Florida. Some popular tourist destinations in the Caribbean have declared a “state of emergency” over the issue. Even with tractors, they’re are having trouble keeping the beaches clear. And the seaweed takes on the stench of rotten eggs as it rots. It’s just a real mess and it’s been getting worse for the last five years or so.

Guest: Sabrina Strings, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Irvine, Author of “Fearing the Black Body” America is in the grips of an obesity epidemic, according to the CDC and the National Institutes of Health. Health is the reason for our concern. Excess weight leads to a whole host of problems, we’re told. But if you pull the threads of that concern back a few centuries, the reasons why we’re so convinced that fat is bad, have a lot more to do with race than with health.

Guest: Julie L. Heckman, Executive Director of the American Pyrotechnics Association (APA) It’s that time of year again when communities light the sky with patriotic displays and families try not to set their shrubs on fire with store bought displays. Did you know that virtually all the fireworks you buy at the grocery store or street stand are made in China and most of the big ones for professional displays, are too?

Guest: Rachel Wadham, Education and Juvenile Literature Librarian