Rebuilding After Disasters, Poison Frogs, Bitcoin

Guest: Mark Abkowitz, PhD, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Engineering Management, Director, Vanderbilt Center for Environmental Management Studies, Vanderbilt University America has been pummeled: Hurricane Harvey in Texas, Hurricanes Irma and Maria in Florida and Puerto Rico, and the horrific fires in Napa Valley, California. But as people return to what’s left of their homes and consider the prospect of rebuilding, now is the perfect time to ask whether we should rebuild in areas prone to natural disaster.

Guest: Becca Tarvin, PhD, Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Integrative Biology, University of Texas at Austin Ecuador’s phantasmal poison frog has a neon yellow tiger stripe down its back. It’s a warning. Predators beware, this little frog produces a deadly neurotoxin. But here’s a puzzle: why don’t the frogs poison themselves?

Guest: Gisella Caccone, PhD, Senior Research Scientist, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Director of DNA Analysis Facility, Director of YIBS MSCG Laboratory, Yale University When Charles Darwin visited the Galapagos Islands, the unique species he found there inspired his theory of evolution. Now, researchers are using the principles of evolution to bring back Galapagos tortoises that humans drove to extinction.

Guest: Phil Larson, Assistant Dean for Communications, Strategy, and Planning, University of Colorado Boulder Last week, a satellite launched into space aboard a special rocket built by SpaceX.  What's special about the rocket is that it's reusable. About 7 minutes after it roared away from the launch pad at Cape Canaveral and released the satellite into orbit, the rocket came on home, touching down gently on a landing pad just off the coast. It's the twelfth time SpaceX has pulled off the feat of launching and landing a rocket. Up until just a few years ago, the rockets were for one-time use only. Which is a little like taking your car on a road trip and then sending it to the junkyard.

Guest: Anne Bissonnette, PhD, Associate Professor of Material Culture and Curatorship, Curator of Clothing and Textiles Collection, University of Alberta It’s just a fact of life that our bodies change in shape and size as we age. Sudden, or even subtle, shifts in weight can require a whole new wardrobe. Why are clothes in the Western world designed so that even a slight gain in the hips or belly requires a new pant size? On the other hand, the one-size-fits-all sari from India is proof that clothing can both fit and flex with the normal shifts in a body.

Guest: Paul Vigna, Journalist, The Wall Street Journal, Author, "The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and the Blockchain Are Challenging the Global Economic Order" The next time you swipe your card at your local 7-Eleven, think about this: Before the money can leave your bank account and end up in 7-Eleven’s, there are at least five different organizations that will handle your credit card information. It’s an invisible bureaucracy of banks and finance companies and government agencies that set interest rates, charge fees, and control nearly everything about the way we use money.  The electronic currency called bitcoin sidesteps all of that in a way that could save a lot of money. But bitcoin also has features that make it really attractive to drug dealers and hackers. So is bitcoin something to fear or embrace?