Carolina Panthers in Super Bowl, Airplane Germs, Brazil in Crisis

Guest: Erik Spanberg, Senior Staff Writer at the Charlotte Business Journal  Sunday’s matchup between the Denver Broncos and the Carolina Panthers features a few storylines that have captured fan attention. Carolina’s Cinderella status for one – and its high-energy young quarterback, known for his on-the-field enthusiasm and his off-the-field fashion.  Denver, of course, has storied quarterback Peyton Manning. He and the Broncos are veterans of this Super Bowl stuff. As a team, they’ve been seven times and won two. Manning has one Super Bowl ring from back when he was with the Indianapolis Colts. The Panthers, on the other hand, have only ever been once – more than a decade ago. And they didn’t win.

Guest: Raymond Wang, Seventeen-year-old Inventor and Winner of the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair  Seventeen-year-old Raymond Wang has come up with an ingeniously simply solution to bad smells and germs spreading on airplanes. Using a lot of 3-D computer modeling, he invented a fin-like attachment to the air vents in a plane so it flows down and out through filters along the side of the cabin. As it is, Wang’s computer models show the air in a plane circulates all over the place – along with any germs people have coughed up – before leaving through the filters.

Guest: Paulo Sotero, Director of the Brazil Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center  Brazil is at the epicenter of the Zika virus epidemic that is now a global health crisis. Last week, Brazil’s health minister was quoted as saying the country was “badly losing” the battle against Zika.  Paulo Sotero says it’s just the latest in a line of leadership failures the country is suffering. The once rising economic power rising star is facing its second consecutive year of deep recession and a major corruption scandal implicating many of Brazil’s top officials and political parties. Now there’s the Zika virus stretching resources and discouraging people from visiting the country. And let’s not forget later this year, Brazil will host the Summer Olympics.

Guests: Andrew Maxfield, Composer and Producer; Glen Nelson, Writer and Playwright of the musical “The Bridge” 

Guest: Gillen D’Arcy Wood, PhD, Author of “Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World”  These days, if a volcano erupts, the world knows about it instantly, thanks to Twitter and satellite communications. But before those things were around, a giant eruption could disrupt weather and climate patterns for years without people really understanding why.  That’s the story of Tambora, which erupted in 1815. Its eruption was 100 times the size of the eruption at Mt. St. Helens back in 1980.