Featured image is that of an interactive map of vaccine-preventable disease outbreaks across the globe, created by the Council on Foreign Relations. You can find it, and explore it yourself, at this link.

In this installment of These Vibes Are Too Cosmic, we spoke with Dr. Alexander Ploss,

professor in molecular biology here at Princeton. His research focuses on immune responses to human pathogens – specifically those infecting the liver, including hepatitis B and C viruses, yellow fever and dengue viruses and parasites causing malaria in humans. His group combines methods in tissue engineering, molecular virology and pathogenesis, and animal construction, to create and apply technologies to study human liver diseases caused by infectious diseases and if possible intervene in them. Specifically, he works to create “humanized mice” so we can study in lab mice diseases that typically only infect humans (and other very related species like great apes). In this interview, he discusses how his lab does this and the importance of this research.

I asked Professor Ploss to come speak with us because this topic of infectious diseases is incredibly important. Almost a quarter of the all human deaths worldwide occur due to infectious diseases. And, according to the WHO, in high-income countries like the United States, 7 in every 10 deaths are among people aged 70 years and older, and we perish primarily due to non-communicable diseases like cardiovascular diseases and cancer.
In contrast, in low-income countries nearly 4 in every 10 deaths are among children under 15 years, with only 2 in every 10 deaths are among people aged 70 years and older. In low income countries people predominantly die of infectious diseases like the ones studied by Professor Ploss.

Take a listen.

(Featured image above is from exeterstreethall.org.)

Today we discussed political psychology with Kabir Khanna, doctoral researcher in politics here at Princeton University. Kabir’s specialty is political psychology and public opinion.

We discuss both the polarized partisanship of elected officials, and how that compares to the electorate.  More specifically, Kabir explained that though it is clear that politicians have become more extreme on the liberal/conservative spectrum, we don’t quite know if the electorate as a whole has done the same – this is much harder to divine. Kabir discussed some methods of surveying the population to get a better handle on the truth of the situation. In fact, “the truth” and how to get there was much of our musings on today’s show.

This of course led us to discuss surveys, polls, and statistics. In particular, we discuss the details of some of Kabir’s work – which was featured in The New York Times’, The Upshot earlier this year. The work focused on how our opinion of the current state of the economy is affected by our politics, and how that affects our statement of factual pieces of information.

In this study, conducted with Kabir’s adviser Markus Prior and collaborator Gaurav Sood, they gave the participants a knowledge quiz and split them up in to three groups:

1. group 1 was just given the quiz,
2. group 2 was given the same quiz and told they’d get a dollar for every question they answered accurately, and
3. group 3 again received the same quiz, but instead of getting a dollar for correct answers they were directly encouraged to be as accurate as possible.

The study found that “…[w]hen survey respondents were offered a small cash reward — a dollar or two — for producing a correct answer about the unemployment rate and other economic conditions, they were more likely to be accurate and less likely to produce an answer that fit their partisan biases.” (From the Upshot article, a very nice summary of this study and a complementary one by a group at Yale University.)

Towards the end of the show we play music by Kabir Khanna’s band, Gulps – a local New Brunswick punk band that Kabir drums for – and discuss their music a bit. (Check out their Facebook page for upcoming shows and news!)

We also mentioned a past show with chemist-and-crystal-maker, Quinn Gibson.

Featured image is of gravitational lensing in Hubble Deep Field images. See how there’s copies of galaxies and smudging. These distortions in the image are due to large massive astronomical masses between Earth and the galaxies being imaged. Photo credit: NASA

**Apologies to Professor Spergel and listeners for the poor sound quality in part 1 of the interview. We were having trouble with mics, but it was fixed for the remainder of the interview.**

In this installment of These Vibes Are Too Cosmic we interviewed Professor David Spergel, chair of the Astrophysical Sciences Department here at Princeton University, on his research. Professor Spergel has been awarded many accolades for his research including a MacArthur Fellowship (“Genius Grant”) in 2001, Nature’s Ten People Who Mattered in 2014, and the Heineman Prize in 2015. He is part of several scientific collaborations including the historic Wilkinson Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite to map the cosmic microwave background, and currently the Atacama Cosmology Telescope and the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST).

Professor Spergel is known for having incredible depth and breadth of knowledge in astrophysics. In part 1, he takes us through his research spanning astronomical scales from planets to our entire universe. In part 2, we delve in to dark matter and energy, the strangeness of our universe, and the WFIRST satellite (Spergel is co-chair of the NASA science team). In the last part we answer a few listener questions which brings us to the risks involved in astronomy, the formation of our solar system (the planet Venus is weird, but it’s not a spaceship), and archeoastronomy.

Other mentions:

• The High-Definition Space Telescope and our prior interview with Professor Julianne Dalcanton
• BICEP2, our dusty galaxy, and past interview with Colin Hill
• Exoplanets and orphan planets
• If you’re interested in my research, as I mentioned it in part 3, it was discussed in a prior show.

Playlist:

Introduction @ 12:24
Part 1 @ 20:37
Part 2 @44:56
Part 3 @ 1:20:39

Credits for the featured image, above: NASA, ESA, J. Dalcanton, B.F. Williams, and L.C. Johnson (University of Washington), the PHAT team, and R. Gendler

In this installment of These Vibes, Astrophysics Professor Julianne Dalcanton (U. of Washington) joined us in the studio to talk about space telescopes – specifically two she’s

most psyched for: the just-proposed High-Definition Space Telescope, which would be “like the Hubble Space Telescope on steroids” (expected launch in ~2030) and the gorgeous feat of engineering that is the James Webb Space Telescope, to be launched in just a few years. We also got in to other exciting things like galaxies and exoplanets a bit.

Additionally, we talked about PHAT (actual acronym – I didn’t make this up), the Panachromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury. For a period of time, Professor Dalcanton and some colleagues dominate the Hubble Space Telescope taking image after detailed image of our nearest galaxy, Andromeda. What came together was the most detailed images ever taken (for example, the featured image above), and they’re stunning:

Here’s another cool video for you. We discussed how the James Webb Space Telescope is going to essentially unfold after it’s launched, since it’s so large no existing shuttle can carry it to space. Here’s a really neat animation of how it’s supposed to go down.

And the aforementioned James Webb Space Telescope “selphie”:

Towards the end, we discussed life on other planets and how hard it is to look at the endless stars in the Andromeda Galaxy – only one of the countless galaxies in our universe – and not believe there’s more life-forms out there.

Later in the show (about an hour and 20 minutes in), Latin America correspondent for Science Magazine, Lizzie Wade, called in to the studio from Mexico City. We discussed her

recent piece in Wired on how “Being Bilingual Changes the Architecture of Your Brain.” Lizzie discussed her own experiences becoming proficient in Spanish, as well as current science on the topic. She even touched a little bit on the ongoing debate on this topic (is bilingualism good for you? or neutral (neither good nor bad)?) as well as a bit of the shoddy history.

Last for the show, Wade told us a bit about two of her recent pieces on upheavals in the field of geology and some new findings on ancient stone tools in the Americas.

MUCH MOAR to see here:

• I would be extremely remiss if I didn’t mention that Julianne Dalcanton is also a major contributor to the excellent Discover Magazine blog Cosmic Variance. I had a whole slew of questions about her posts on CV that we sadly didn’t have time for. *Sigh.*
• Julianne Dalcanton was a WPRB DJ when she was at Princeton in the 90s, and some of the archives of her co-hosted show, The Three Bad Sisters (though there was two of them… this fact I love), are still online.
  • Like their 1991 Mudhoney interview.
  • And then there’s this written up piece on an old WPRB show called Spotlight that was run by Corey, Julianne’s co-host. Julianne is wonderfully mentioned in this piece as “another female DJ (whose name I forget).”
• AND definitely check out Lizzie Wade’s two very recent pieces on
  • Upheavals in geology: “Geology Is Breaking Apart Over When the Americas Came Together” in Wired, and
  • “Ancient stone tools are ‘best’ evidence yet for early peopling of the Americas” in Science.

Featured Image: Valdis Celms. View of Positron, 1977. Ink and collaged photograph mounted on fiberboard. Zimmerli Art Museum, Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union. © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / AKKA-LAA, Latvia. Photo Peter Jacobs

Last Tuesday was a wonderful, packed show. First we spoke to Ksenia Nouril, doctoral candidate in art history at Rutgers, New Brunswick, C-MAP Fellow at the Museum Of Modern Art in New York City, and Dodge Fellow at the Zimmerli Art Museum, also at Rutgers University.

Furthermore, Ksenia is the curator of an excellent exhibit at the Zimmerli Art Museum that explores this topic, entitled Dreamworlds and Catastrophes, that will be up until July 31st, 2016 (free entry, information for visitors).

Throughout the first hour of the show Ksenia spoke to us on the intersections of art and science in Cold War Era Soviet Russia.

We discussed specific pieces like the Positron (featured image), and The Cosmonaut’s Dream.

Further, Ksenia played and translated “I believe, friends!” by Vladimir Troshin (1962). In the video below he’s marching around Moscow, rousing listeners to exalt in the glory of the space race. Check it out:

Towards the end of the show Stevie spoke with the editors of the blog Highwire Earth, Julio Herrera Estrada (Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief, doctoral candidate in the Environmental Engineering and Water Resources Program) and Matt Grobis (Co-Founder and Managing Editor, doctoral candidate in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology)**, which posts articles from Princeton researchers who’s work focuses on balancing human development and sustainability. From prison reform to sustainable land use, there’s a lot of interesting stuff already up on the site. We hope this will be only the beginning of an ongoing partnership between These Vibes and Highwire Earth.

**Two other founders and editorial staff members, Arvind Ravikumar (Co-Founder and Associate Editor) and Greta Shum (Co-Founder and Communications Director), were not in the studio due to space and availability.