Seafood, Unopened Scrolls, Manipulation, Oscars, Proteins

Guest: Gavin Gibbons, Vice President of Communications for the nonprofit organization National Fisheries Institute  The Christian season of Lent is underway, during which many Catholics abstain from red meat on Fridays and eat fish instead. That has us thinking about the state of the seafood industry. Pollution, warming temperatures and radiation  “The future of seafood and expanded consumption of seafood is going to come from fish farms. It’s not only safe, it’s a smart choice,” says Gibbons.  “People are not being mercury poisoned. That’s sort of an old way of thinking,” says Gibbons. “The benefits outweigh the risks in terms of mercury and in terms of ingesting it.”  “There is no concern in terms of radiation and commercial seafood,” reassures Gibbons, “coming off the coasts of Japan.”

Guests: Roger Macfarlane, Classics Professor at BYU  Brent Seales, Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Kentucky  The eruption of Mount Vesuvias in 79 AD buried entire cities in volcanic ash. The Roman town of Herculaneum was destroyed, including a tremendous trove of scrolls. The contents of this ancient library are virtually unknown.  “Many of the scrolls were in fact open physically and you can see the writing doing that. The problem is that they are so fragile,” says Seale.  “The images that come from the scanner,” explains Seale, “look more like slicing something on a deli slicer. They don’t give you the flattened surface and that’s where we need to computer science to create that.”  “We’ve been able over the centuries,” says MacFarlane, “to be able to edit complete texts of the Herculaneum papyri.”

Guest: Dr. Ed Diener, Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia and University of Utah 

Guest: Diane Benscoter, author of “Shoes of a Servant: My Unconditional Devotion to a Lie” and founder of Own Your Own Brain 

Guests: Rod Gustafson and Kerry Bennett, Parentpreviews.com Social media is a-flutter today with Oscar gossip. The Twitter consensus is that John Travolta was creepy, John Legend and Common made everyone weep with their Best Song winner “Glory” from the movie Selma and Best Supporting Actress winner Patricia Arquette’s call for women to be paid equally has generated heated debate.  “I wasn’t really surprised, but I was disappointed,” reflects Gustafson and Bennett about last night’s Oscars.   “These are industry professionals and Birdman just plays right into them. It’s about a washed up actor who’s trying to reignite his career. They \[The Academy] are biased. They really love movies about movies, about people who are in the industry,” says Gustafson.

Guests: Brad Bundy, Biotech  Mike Alder, head of the BYU Technology Transfer Office  The complexity of human life boils down to just 20 building blocks called amino acids. In a laboratory here at Brigham Young University under the director of Brad Bundy, researchers are trying to expand that vocabulary of building blocks. If they succeed, we could have better ways to treat cancer, better vaccines, and better way to sense the presence of hazardous chemicals in our environment.  “Proteins are the catalysts of life. They’re the things that make all the chemical reactions in our bodies. They are the reason that everything occurs,” says Bundy.  “Over half of the top grossing drugs are proteins,” says Bundy. “They are very exciting in their application