Featured image: The warps in spacetime caused by gravity even affect light, so that heavy objects create distorted views of galaxies behind them. (Courtesy NASA)

Our guest this week is the luminous Prof. Jo Dunkley of Princeton’s Departments of Physics and Astrophysical Sciences, who just published her first book, Our Universe: An Astronomer’s Guide. Jo boils down our universe’s 13 billion year history into a digestible story, traveling from planets to stars to clumps of dark matter on the way. She reminds us of the painstaking research that enables our modern understanding: for example, female “computers” like Henrietta Swan Leavitt in the early 20th century made crucial discoveries about stars and distance even as male scientists monopolized the telescopes. Finally, Jo explains the radical idea of measuring gravity by looking at distortions in the cosmic microwave background, a primary thrust of her current research.

In other news:

• Three exoplanets around one star: the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite just discovered a trio of planets larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune, filling a gap we don’t have in our own solar system.
• Human brains may be capable of halfway sleeping, according to new models of cross-brain communication that show unihemispheric sleep–just like dolphins and birds.

The playlist can be found at WPRB.com or below.

This is a three hour episode. The first hour is music only. One hour in, TVR2C regular programming begins and the interview with Mr. Kshirsagar begins at about 1 hour and 30 minutes in.

In this show Stevie speaks with technology policy expert Mihir Kshirsagar. Mihir is the technology policy lead at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy and formerly was Assistant Attorney General of New York and was in the AG’s Bureau of Internet & Technology as the lead trial counsel.

Mihir and Stevie speak about the biggest issues in technology policy including big data and data security, as well as some of its history, and the role that both governments and tech companies have to play. Here’s some of the topics:

• Antitrust in tech — what is “antitrust” and why is it an issue in tech right now
• Mihir explains his biggest concerns in technology policy today as:
  • Generally, the rise of big data. There’s always been data, but the ability to parse massive amounts of data and make meaningful decisions off of it is unprecedented.
  • Data security and privacy
  • Platforms/intermediaries (middlemen) in tech, specifically the requirement to communicate or access the internet through an intermediary such as Facebook or Google, vs direct connection
• In the final part of the interview, Mihir discusses his recommendations for the typical consumer of news about tech companies and emerging technology. Essentially, don’t let it scare you! And don’t let anyone convince you that it doesn’t concern you. It does! These companies and tech are ubiquitous, and changing the landscape of communication and access to information and services, to name just a few.

Science news:

• Mannequins to make drivers slow down in Central New Jersey
• Bioprinting complex, highly viable living tissue in just a few seconds
• Experimental US Air Force space plane breaks previous record for orbital spaceflight

Featured image: Stents are marvels of modern medicine that prop open coronary arteries and resume blood flow, ending the blockage that leads to heart attacks. (Courtesy Getty Images)

Today we speak with Dr. Haider Warraich, cardiologist starting at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, on his new book, State of the Heart. As a medical professional and writer, Haider knows firsthand the power of stories to stick in human memory; but he also knows how little the average person understands their hardest-working organ. His book brings the heart, its ailments, and its medical history to life. Though it continually pumps blood through your body, it took humans millennia to understand how the heart works, and medical mysteries still abound. Hear about blood pressure, heart attacks, stress and anxiety, and the future of cardiovascular technology.

Plus, a great intro on the 50th anniversary of the moon landing with Dr. Ingrid Ockert of the Science History Institute, including a massive rocket display on the Washington Monument and a review of the glorious archival film, Apollo 11.

The playlist can be found on WPRB.com or below.

Featured image: A sunset over Lake Michigan on July 5th, 2008. When photographed by Dr. Vanderbei, he didn’t realize the curved Earth would change the mirrored solar radius. (Courtesy Optics & Photonics)

This week, we host Prof. Robert Vanderbei of Princeton’s Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering (also this summer’s Scientist in Residence at the Princeton Public Library!), expert on telescope design and hobbyist in (among many things) astrophotography. Robert has a passion for digging into the unusual, finding ways to prove to himself how the world works. With astrophotography, he uses telescopes and high-quality cameras to measure distances in space and sometimes discover surprises like variable stars—but he is careful to mention that you can measure an amazing amount even with the right sunset photo. Even down here on Earth, Robert explains how he verified that “local warming” is occurring right alongside global climate change, as demonstrated via years of weather station data you can download yourself.

In other news:

• Given the archaeology of greasy urns found near Stonehenge, it could be that the monument builders used pig fat to help transport stones from quarries to the famous site.
• After over sixty years since a plethora of atomic bomb tests overhead, some of the Marshall Islands are still uninhabitably radioactive.

The playlist can be found on WPRB.com or below.

Featured image: Subtle suggestions, like pictures in the bottom of cafeteria food trays, can influence people to make different choices for their lunch. (Courtesy MPR News)

Today, Kelsey Ockert from the Princeton Public Library brings us Secrets from the Eating Lab by Traci Mann, PhD. It’s a book full of science about nutrition, hunger, and dieting that often flies in the face of “conventional wisdom” (on a topic where opinions abound!). Traci advocates for an easing up on the stress around dieting: it doesn’t usually work for humans to clamp down into strict routines, since our willpower is limited. Listen for a message of body-positivity, appetite and social pressures as backed up by laboratory data!

In other news:

• Scientists are laying the groundwork for measuring certain hard-to-find exoplanets with gravitational waves, at least once the satellite-based detectors are deployed!
• Children’s ears may not be fit to be around bathroom hand dryers, as published by an affected young scientist.
• A new gamma ray detector in Tibet has measured the highest energy light ever, giving us new info on stellar explosions in space.
• Crop failures are devastating to regions, but get much worse when food can’t be imported either. What happens in a future when many crop failures are synchronous?

The playlist can be found online at WPRB.com or below.

Featured image: Scott Andrews and his first creation the SC1, custom-built for measuring visible light signals at extreme speeds. (Courtesy Titan Labs)

This week, Scott Andrews of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Titan Labs joins us to share his work on developing superfast cameras for scientific measurements. If your camera is too slow, the event you’re trying to see is too blurry to understand—and tracking the motions of atoms occurring in quadrillionths of a second is hard with any present-day technology. Scott is developing improvements to streak cameras, which convert light into electrons in order to measure events on the picosecond or femtosecond time scale. Hear how he does it, plus the benefits of thinking through design from different perspectives.

In other news, tree lobsters are on the up-and-up in the insect world, and their aggressively long tails seem to be for pinning down down rivals, not mates.

The playlist can be found at WPRB.com or below.

Featured image: The open-ended Reddit, the one-time “front page of the internet,” attracts a wealth of content. But its huge community often brings it in contact with the web’s dark side. (Courtesy Veronica Belmont)

Joining us this time is Dr. J. Nathan Matias, Assistant Professor at Cornell University and former Associate Research Scholar at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy. Nathan focuses on the intersection of sociology, psychology and the internet, examining issues like online behavior, harassment, and the shaping of modern discourse by websites and their design choices. We talk through his research on Reddit’s /r/science subreddit, where Nathan and the site moderators encouraged welcoming behavior by including a small rule reminder for commenters. Plus: under the obligation to experiment, websites that manage what we see online ought to do tests to see how their choices affect our experience, and make their results public — taking the tools they use to make effective advertising and deploying them in our interest!

In other news: the hunt for ancient creatures in Burmese amber is enriching our understanding of ancient life, but it also funds unsafe, exploitative mining and the civil war in the area.

The playlist can be found at WPRB.com or below.

Featured image: How people view climate change depends intimately on its portrayal in the media. How can it be covered well? (Courtesy Reuters and Oxford)

This week we host Margaret Koval, former broadcast news producer and current Princeton Communications Director of Special Projects. Initially a staffer on Capitol Hill with an academic interest in Soviet affairs, Margaret transitioned to broadcast news, cutting tape herself and traveling widely. Eventually she sought longer-form stories, producing documentary films on the World Wars, ancient Rome and more. Here at Princeton, she leads the She Roars podcast, interviewing women alumni from Nobel laureates to community activists, and is planning to start a solution-oriented podcast on climate change.

Before the interview, listen for a Wayfinding book giveaway: Thanks to those that called in and offered their methods of navigation! We heard about getting around with landmarks, compasses, white canes, light pollution, and by memory association.

In other news:

• Sea sponges might be a convenient natural collector of environmental DNA, which helps scientists assess which species exist in a given ocean environment.
• State parks are a hugely appreciated tourist resource, but they may be strapped for resources as climate change increases the length of summertime and local governments let their budgets stagnate.

The playlist can be found at WPRB.com or below.

Featured image: Songline dot art of Aboriginal Australians, which acts as a cultural narrative tool and a map through Australian grasslands and deserts all at once. (courtesy National Geographic)

This week, author Maura O’Connor guides us through her new book Wayfinding: The Science and Mystery of How Humans Navigate the World. Our modern selves may rely on GPS to get from A to B, but our brains are capable of extreme navigational feats: Inuits in snow, Aboriginal Australians in the bush, and seafarers in Oceania all travel far without the concept of “being lost.” Maura shares how these travelers use natural clues and cultural context to find their way, and how neuroscience shows that wayfinding, memory and storytelling are all intertwined.

In other news:

• Another new book, Supernavigators, details the wondrous worlds of animal navigation.
• Cities are large enough reservoirs of concrete and heat that they create their own clouds, as scientists showed in new satellite and ground-based observations.
• A new database of solar panels in Australia helps engineers pick panel sites, with data on cloud coverage, voltage returns and local grid efficiency.

The playlist can be found below or on WPRB.com.