North Korea, Museum of Failure, Body Sensors Predict Illness

Guest: Joseph Cirincione, President of Ploughshares Fund South Korea has a newly-elected leader with a starkly different take on North Korea than his predecessor. President Moon Jae-in is a human rights lawyer who favors dialogue and economic cooperation with North Korea. He even said during a speech while taking the oath of office Wednesday that he'd be open to visiting Pyongyang to talk about North Korea's nuclear program. Incidentally, President Trump said something similar this week: he'd be "honored" to meet with Kim Jong-Un under the right circumstances.

Guest: Samuel West, PhD, Curator at the Museum of Failure We all know Thomas Edison invented the light-bulb. But do you know he got it wrong over and over and over before it finally worked? In the face of so much failure, Edison famously said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” When it comes to innovation, failure comes with the territory.  Hence the new “Museum of Failure” in Sweden and a traveling display touring the globe. Coca-Cola Blak and a Bic Pen for women are part of the collection. Samuel West created the museum and joins us now from Sweden to talk about why we should celebrate flops, not bury them.

(originally aired Jan 31, 2017) Guest: Michael Snyder, PhD, Professor of Genetics, Stanford Your Fitbit can tell you how many steps you took in a day, but what if it could pick up subtle cues that you might be sick, even before you realize you’re not feeling well? The technology to do that is pretty much already here. What we need is computer programs that can collect that steady stream of data about our body temperature, heart rate, and oxygen levels and make sense of it.  Earlier this year, researchers at Stanford University published some preliminary work in the journal PLOS One that showed it’s possible.

(Originally aired Mar 14, 2017) Guest: Felice Jacka, PhD, Professor of Nutritional and Epidemiological Psychiatry, Deakin University When we’re feeling anxious or sad, we feel it in our gut – we say, “I have butterflies in my stomach” or “I’m feeling sick to my stomach.” But the relationship between your brain and your belly goes both ways. A growing body of research suggests the health of your gut – especially the bacteria in your gut – affects your mental health.  One recent study published in the journal BMC Medicine, found that eating a healthy diet for 12 weeks led to reduced symptoms of depression.

(Originally aired Sep 14, 2016) Guest: Prerna Gupta, Founder and CEO of Hooked "Dracula," "The Screwtape Letters," "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" – all are examples of fiction that plays out through the exchange of letters and documents. In the digital era, authors have taken to telling stories through chains of emails between characters. No surprise that text messages are the next frontier. That’s what a startup called Hooked has tapped into. They call themselves “fiction for the Snapchat generation.” You download the app, pick a story to read and up comes the first few lines – written as a text, of course. Click “next” and another text pops up to advance the plot. It’s working so well, the founders of Hooked think they could use the data from their app to find the next “Harry Potter.”