Quagga Invasion

Guest: Grant Madsen, PhD, Professor of History, BYU President Trump says his first 100 days in office were “just about the most successful in our country’s history.” So we’ve asked a US historian to fact check that claim. How do historians judge the early success of a president? And when did the “100 days” measurement become a thing anybody cared about?

Guest: Mark Looney, MD, Pulmonologist, Professor of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco The heart pumps blood, the stomach digests food and the lungs bring oxygen into the body. These basic organ functions we learned in grade school turn out to be much too simplified. The body is a complex and finely-tuned collection of processes. But researchers have recently discovered something that surprised even them – the lungs are also a major blood-making factory in the body, churning out at least half of the platelet cells that are critical for blood clotting. This discovery was made in mice, but it could provide important clues about human lungs, too.

Guest: Christine Hyung-Oak Lee, author of “Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember: The Stroke that Changed My Life” Nearly 800,000 people have a stroke every year, but young people don’t usually think it will happen to them. That was certainly the case with Christine Hyung-Oak Lee, who had a stroke at the age of 33. Her recovery was robust and impressive, although, as she explains in her memoir, “Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember: The Stroke that Changed My Life,” she is not the person she used to be, and, in some ways, that’s a good thing.

Guest: Gunjan Sharma, MEd, Education Researcher, Ambedkar University, Delhi; Fulbright-Nehru Visiting Scholar, BYU

Guest: Julianne H. Grose, PhD, Associate Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Biology, BYU Apple and pear orchard growers suffer hundreds of millions of dollars in losses every year because of a disease called fire blight. First, oozing cankers develop on the tree branches and leave streaks that darken to look like the branch has been licked by fire. Infected leaves and blossoms blacken and shrivel, too, like they’ve been burned. The name “fire blight” is apt, though it’s not caused by extreme heat. It’s actually caused by bacteria. BYU microbiologist Julianne Grose has developed a new way of treating it using viruses that eat bacteria.