Stories with The Apple Seed

Guest: Quinn Snell, PhD, Professor of Computer Science and Data Systems, Brigham Young University

Guest: Ione Fine, PhD, Professor of Psychology, University of Washington In the academic world, the way to get promoted is to publish your research in prestigious journals like Nature or The Lancet. But women don’t seem to get a fair shake in this system. University of Washington neuroscientist Ione Fine looked at the gender of the key researchers on thousands of articles published over the last decade in the top neuroscience journals.

Guest: Raphael Bousso, PhD, Professor of Physics, University of California Berkeley World-famous physicist Stephen Hawking died last week. As a bestselling author of “A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes,” he made cosmology more accessible to millions. His image in pop culture image helped with that accessibility too – Hawking had cameos on The Simpsons, Star Trek, the Big Bang Theory and, of course, his early years were the focus of the Oscar-winning film “The Theory of Everything.”  For a look now at Stephen Hawking’s legacy – scientifically and culturally – we’ve got one of his former students on the line.

Guest: Farhad Zadeh, PhD, Professor of Astronomy, Northwestern University, Faculty member, Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA), Weinberg College of Arts and Science We heard last hour how Stephen Hawking helped us better understand some of the mystery around black holes. In the center of our Milky Way galaxy, we’ve got a supermassive black hole, and lately astronomers have noticed unexpected things happening in the neighborhood right around it.

Guest: Nathan Connolly, PhD, Associate Professor of History, Johns Hopkins University, Author, “A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida,” Co-host, BackStory podcast

Guest: Mohammad Shahrad, PhD candidate, Princeton’s Department of Electrical Engineering The smartphone in your pocket holds more processing power than all the computers NASA had at its disposal when it sent the first astronauts to the moon. Yet, when the screen on a smartphone breaks or it no longer supports the latest apps, we toss them. Now researchers at Princeton are working to harness all that wasted processing power by bundling old phones into servers.