Benghazi, Zebra Stripes, Breast Cancer Risk, Eye-Tracking

Guest: Glenn Thrush, Chief Political Correspondent for Politico  Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spent a day last week being grilled by members of the House Select Committee on Benghazi. Her performance dominated headlines and news talk shows right through the weekend. All of this tracing back to the night of September 11, 2012 when terrorists overran a US diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. Four Americans died: Ambassador Christopher Stevens, state department official Sean Smith and CIA contractors Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty. An extremist militia leader from Libya has been charged with murder in the attack and is awaiting trial in the US.

Guest: Theodore Stankowich, PhD, Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences at California State University, Long Beach  How did the zebra get its stripes is one of those age-old questions like “what came first, the chicken or the egg?” Scientists have developed lots of theories about why zebras evolved stripes and other horse-like creatures didn’t.

Guest: Charlotte Gard, PhD, Assistant Professor of Applied Statistics at New Mexico State University; Jeffrey Tice, MD, Associate Professor at the UC San Francisco School of Medicine  One in eight U.S. women will be diagnosed with invasive breast cancer in her lifetime.  The challenge in predicting who will be at risk and who won’t, is that family history isn’t all that helpful: About 85% of breast cancer occurs in women with no family history of it. So, the real goal would be to develop a way of calculating a woman’s risk that her breast tissue cells will mutate, regardless of her family history.  Online Risk Calculator  To download an app of the model for iOS

Guest: Kevin John, PhD, Professor of Communications at BYU  Have you noticed that you don’t see as many ads along the borders of your Facebook feed lately? Maybe you haven’t because, it turns out, people really weren’t paying much attention to those ads in the first place. Which is why Facebook is shifting ads to appear in the stream of news you’re your friends. Those “sponsored” messages that look like a standard post, but are really a paid ad. And for that, you can thank eye-tracking research. Rather than survey people about what they noticed in an ad, media researchers can now just put people in front of a webpage and use infrared cameras to see where their eyes linger, and then adjust accordingly.

Guest: Rod Gustafson, Film Reviewer at ParentPreviews.com  The 80s cartoon girl group “Jem and the Holograms” has been reimagined for the big screen and updated for the era of Taylor Swift and Hannah Montana-turned-Miley Cyrus. Rod also discusses the new Vin Diesel flick, “The Last Witch Hunter,” and an old favorite: “My Fair Lady.”

Guests: Spencer Guthrie, PhD, Professor of Civil Engineering at BYU; Brian Mazzeo, PhD, Electrical Engineering Professor at BYU; Spencer Rogers of BYU’s Technology Transfer Office  Do you cross a bridge on your daily commute? The Federal Highway Administration this year said some 61,000 bridges across the country structurally deficient and needing repair. You might be in one of the 215 million vehicles crossing that cross over those bridges every day. There is a national program to address those deficiencies, but one of the challenges in knowing whether a bridge needs repair is knowing what’s going on beneath the surface: Down inside the concrete, where deterioration might be underway long before it’s visible on top.