Justice Scalia, Indian Spice, Antarctica, Burnt Out Physicians

Guest: John Fee, JD, Professor of Constitutional Law at BYU, Former Clerk for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia  The late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s sudden passing over the weekend at the age of 79 leaves a vacancy on the nation’s high court over which the President and Congress will spar for months to come. The vacancy is now a key topic in the presidential election underway.

Guest: Ruplal Choudhary, PhD, Food and Bioprocess Engineer, Associate Professor in the Department of Plant, Soil and Agricultural Systems at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale  If you cook Indian food, you probably have a jar of turmeric in your spice rack. It’s pungent, with just a hint of ginger, and also turns out to have medicinal properties so strong that one of its main compounds is being tested as an antibacterial agent. It can even kill that nasty food-borne bug E. coli.

Guest: Jay Zwally, PhD, Glaciologist with the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center  As global temperatures rise, ice caps shrink and seas rise. Right? Well, last year, scientists from NASA released a report said that the ice in the Antarctic is actually increasing, which contradicts several other reports in recent years that claim that the Antarctic has been losing ice. The findings are so controversial that even within NASA, scientists don’t agree about them. Eric Rignot, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has been quoted as saying that “\[t]here is no quality data to support the claims made by the authors of \[ice] growth in East Antarctica.” It’s complicated, measuring the ice on this frozen continent, but lead author Jay Zwally defends the science behind his findings.

Guest: Maureen Meyer, Film Teacher at the Walden School in Provo, Utah  You know about the Grammys last night for all the big music awards. But there is also a Technical Grammy Awards ceremony that will be taking place later this spring, and one of the posthumous recipients is a BYU alum named Harvey Fletcher. He died 35 years ago, but his innovations continue to influence just about everything about the way we enjoy music today. Fletcher has been called “The Father of Stereophonic Sound.” And if you wear a hearing aid, you can also thank Dr. Fletcher for his work in that field.

Guest: Colin West, PhD, MD, Director of the Mayo Clinic Department of Medicine Physician Well-Being Program  When you go to the doctor, it’s your health that’s on your mind. I’ll bet it doesn’t even cross your mind to wonder how your doctor is doing, health-wise. Maybe it should. Research out of the Mayo Clinic finds an epidemic of professional burnout is afoot among America’s doctors. More than half report signs of career burnout and there’s been a pretty significant jump in that figure over just three years.

Guest: Jeremy Majerovitz, Pre-doctoral Fellow at the Harvard Lab for Economic Applications and Policy  Living in America means being able to improve your status no matter where you start from. That promise has brought immigrants to this country for centuries. It’s woven into the personal stories politicians share on the campaign trail and the tales in best-selling books.  But for children across this country living with single mothers in poor, segregated neighborhoods the promise is largely out of reach.  New analysis of millions of tax records from the last two decades shows that for young boys, the outcome is particularly dire. Whereas, men are generally more likely to work than women, if you’re a poor boy in certain neighborhoods in America, the opposite is true. Those boys become unemployed men.