Downton Abbey, Pressure to Publish, Poisoned Water Solution

Guest: Jamie Horrocks, PhD, Assistant Professor of English at BYU As Downton Abbey begins its sixth and final season on Masterpiece in the United States, it remains the highest-rated PBS drama in history. Nearly 10 million people tune in Sunday evenings for the glamorous gowns, class tensions and salacious storylines of the Crawley family and their many servants. Downton Abbey features a mainly British cast and it’s pretty popular in the U.K., but, Americans are bonkers for this show.

Guest: Jacob Foster, PhD, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles Big discoveries – the kind that win Nobel Prizes and end up in textbooks – come from asking big questions, often in a realm others have yet to explore. Flip open a scientific journal, though, and most of what you’ll see is far more mundane: researchers building on each other’s work, incrementally expanding our understanding of established science. Why do relatively few scientists set their sights on the big questions?

Guest: Judit Smits, PhD, Professor of Public Health at the University of Calgary Lentils are cheap and good for you, but not exactly a favorite choice for a lot of us. They’re just so bland and squishy. It might be surprising, then, to learn that they may also have the power to save lives. University of Calgary public health professor Judit Smits is in the midst of a project to see if lentils could address what the World Health Organization calls the “worst case of mass poisoning in history.” Might lentils help people in Bangladesh deal with the arsenic in their water?

Guest: Ravi Mehta, PhD, Assistant Professor of Business Administration at the University of Illinois What leads people to be more creative in the way they use stuff? When you have a household problem to solve – say you’ve spilled something on the carpet or your shoes are starting to stink – what’s your inclination? Do you run off to the store and buy stain remover and odor eaters? Or do you follow the MacGyver method and dig around in your cabinets to see if you’ve got something that might do the job?

Guest: Rod Gustafson, Film Reviewer at ParentPreviews.com We’ll look at the winners of last night’s Golden Globes.

Guests: Larry Howell, PhD, Mechanical Engineering Professor at BYU; Mike Alder, Director of BYU’s Technology Transfer Office The art of origami is inspiring engineering innovation here at BYU. Scientists on campus have collaborated with NASA to design a solar panel that would expand to ten times its size after it’s launched into space. Now, mechanical engineering professor Larry Howell is turning to the potential of very tiny origami for use in surgery.