Water Matters, Quest for Quiet, Exercise Slows Down Parkinson's

Guest: Radhika Fox, Executive Director, Value of Water Campaign, and CEO, US Water Alliance There’s a one-in-ten chance your house has a leaky toilet, shower or faucet that’s wasting 90 gallons or more per day, according to the EPA. That obviously adds up on your monthly water bill. But it’s also part of an enormous nationwide problem – trillions of gallons of water lost every year through leaky drinking water, stormwater and sewer pipes.  What will it take to tackle America’s water waste problem?

Guest: Matthew Jordan, PhD, Associate Professor of Media Studies, Pennsylvania State University In the hit suspense film “A Quiet Place” we watch a family struggling to live their lives in complete silence so as not to attract vicious aliens with super-sensitive hearing. Silence is safety. Sudden noise brings sure death. Penn State University media studies professor Matthew Jordan wonders if the movie is doing so well with audiences because of our own complicated relationship to noise.

Guest: Brayden King, PhD, Professor of Management and Organization, Max McGraw Chair of Management and the Environment, Northwestern University Google is facing several lawsuits over gender discrimination and sexual harassment in the workplace. Remember how Google’s motto was “Don’t be evil”? Now it’s “Do the right thing.” So what happens when a successful, well-respected company that holds itself up as a pillar of the community, goes before a jury on allegations that it did not do the right thing? Does prestige buy a company some benefit of the doubt? Or does a prestigious company get judged more harshly because we expect more of them?

Guest: Robert Hampson, PhD, Professor of Physiology/Pharmacology and Neurology, Wake Forest University School of Medicine When you hit middle age, you start to fear those “senior moments” when you forget things more frequently. People turn to memory-boosting pills like gingko or fish oil. But the future of memory enhancement could be more high-tech, if the results of a small study out of Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center are any indication. Scientists there have been able to boost memory with brain implants.

Guest: Ann Edwards Cannon, Author, and Staff, The King’s English Bookshop, Salt Lake City, UT The fate of the Russian Grand Duchess Anastasia Romanov was one of the most fascinating mysteries of the 20th century: was she executed in a basement cellar with the rest of the royal family, or did she miraculously survive and resurface two years later in Berlin? The woman who showed up in Berlin, whom her detractors called Anna Anderson, spent 50 years trying to prove that she really was Anastasia and held claim to the Romanov fortune. DNA testing in the last couple decades has settled the matter, but still, author Ariel Lawhon has turned the story into the historical thriller “I Was Anastasia.”

Guest: Daniel Corcos, PhD, Professor of Physical Therapy and Human Movement Sciences, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine There is no cure for Parkinson’s disease, but there are medications that can reduce the common symptoms, such as tremors, stiffness and slow movement. New research published in "JAMA Neurology" suggests that getting on a treadmill and working hard for 30 minutes also helps – and may even delay progression of the degenerative neurological disease. The findings are a bit counterintuitive, so we’ve got one of the lead researchers on with us.