Election Interference, Planet Pluto, Disgusting Food Museum

Guest: Ryan Vogel, Director of the Center for National Security Studies, Utah Valley University US national security officials and the justice department have confirmed in quite a bit of detail that Russia has a sophisticated effort still underway to sow dissent around the mid-term elections just two weeks away. The Trump Administration also claims China is trying to influence the mid-terms.

Guest: Randy Jirtle, Professor of Biology, North Carolina State University Did you know that life experiences of your parents and grandparents may be embedded in your genes? For example, a recent study of Civil War and US Census data found that the sons of soldiers held in particularly harsh prison camps during the war had shorter lives. We’re talking about the sons of the soldiers – sons who weren’t even alive during the war. How can that be that a father might pass his own emotional or physical trauma down to a child through his genes?

Guest: Philip Metzger, Associate in Planetary Science Research, Florida Space Institute “Plutoed” is a real word, at least according to the American Dialect Society. It means “to be devalued” and it showed up after Pluto was demoted from planet status back in 2006. Technically Pluto is now considered a “dwarf planet” – not one of the major planets in our solar system. But planetary physicist Philip Metzger has long argued that the reasons used to kick Pluto out of the planet club were misguided. His recently salvo is an historical look at all the many ways the definition of planet and it’s use by astronomers has shifted over the centuries

Guest: Sam Payne Sam Payne shares a story

Guest: Chad Emmett, Associate Professor of Geography, Brigham Young University The death toll from the devastating earthquake and tsunami that hit Indonesia last month now stands at well over 2,000.  You may remember the earthquake and tsunami in 2004 that claimed over 230,000 lives in fourteen countries, including Indonesia. This particular part of the world is prone to such disasters and the people too-often ill-prepared to survive them. For the past few years, Chad Emmett, a BYU professor of Geography, has been working in Indonesia to build pathways for escape and to help educate people living at sea level about proper tsunami evacuation techniques after an earthquake.

Guest: Samuel West, psychologist, curator of the Disgusting Food Museum. There’s a Latin phrase my father often quoted: “De gustibus non est disputandum.” It means, roughly, “matters of taste cannot be disputed.” Food is the ultimate “matter of taste.” It’s both incredibly individual and culturally specific. The Disgusting Food Museum in Sweden introduces visitors to foods that may appall them, but also gets them to think about how we decide what is yummy and what is gross.