This year marks four centuries since the Mayflower’s historic voyage from Plymouth, England to Plymouth Rock. To commemorate the journey, amid proposals to build a replica, a different sort of idea rose to the surface: sailing an unmanned ship along the same route that the Mayflower took. Brett Phaneuf, director of the Mayflower Autonomous Ship Project, discusses how the project took off, and what it could mean for the future of the shipping industry and our understanding of the oceans.
Apr 10, 2020•12 min
Breaking persistent cycles of poverty may seem an impossible task, but the findings of a landmark government social experiment tell a different story. Back in the mid-1990s, a program called “Moving to Opportunity” gave some families, living in troubled public housing projects in five large cities, vouchers and additional assistance to move away to low-poverty neighborhoods. Lawrence Katz, a professor of economics at Harvard University and the principal investigator of the long-term evaluation o...
Apr 03, 2020•28 min
It often feels like trash is piling up all around us, and that our consumption habits have put us on the road to environmental disaster. Just take a look at recycling bins stacked high with Amazon boxes and takeout containers. But research shows that we’re actually using fewer resources than we were 25 years ago, a process called “dematerialization.” That’s according to Andrew McAfee, the Co-Director of the Initiative on the Digital Economy at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the author of...
Apr 03, 2020•21 min
After the devastating Ebola virus outbreak beginning in 2014, several public health experts predicted that a pandemic of some kind lay ahead – it was not a case of if, but when. Dr. Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute and professor of Global Health at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, was one of those people. He even taught a course about what it would take to prevent the next major infectious disease outbreak. Jha says we have the tools at our disposal to confro...
Mar 27, 2020•28 min
City life has, mostly, slowed to a standstill. Madison Square Garden isn’t hosting basketball games. You can’t grab a drink at the bar around the corner. Great public spaces - the Spanish Steps, Times Square, Las Ramblas - are empty. This situation won’t go on forever, of course. But the coronavirus pandemic will leave a permanent mark on our cities. That’s according to Richard Florida, a professor at the University of Toronto’s School of Cities and co-founder of the website CityLab. He explains...
Mar 27, 2020•21 min
Should you be the best at one skill, or be pretty good at a bunch of different ones? David Epstein, the author of Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, says that practicing one skill for 10,000 hours (as some have suggested) might not necessarily set you up to be the next Tiger Woods or the next chess grandmaster. But in a world where we’re constantly encountering new experiences, Epstein believes that the ability to take knowledge from one situation and apply it to another, to ...
Mar 20, 2020•37 min
By 2050, almost 10 billion people are expected to be living on planet Earth, and most of them will reside in urban areas. Some experts say we will need to take advantage of everything in our agricultural arsenal to feed all those mouths. Could a technology-based method of growing veggies and herbs inside the home be part of the solution? Innovation Hub’s senior producer, Elizabeth Ross, reports on a relatively new approach to growing food which has its roots in outer space.
Mar 20, 2020•11 min
You might not think that a simulation meant for kids could change how something plays out in real life, but in the 1990s, the arcade game NBA Jam did exactly that. One feature of the game allowed players to be “on fire.” The more a player scored, the higher chance he or she had of scoring again. Fast forward to today and you can’t escape the concept of a hot streak, or a “hot hand”' as it’s called in basketball. Athletes swear by it, even refusing to touch another player’s “hot” hand. But is a h...
Mar 13, 2020•34 min
Picking up and moving to new opportunities has always been a part of the American dream. But, says Tamim Bayoumi, a deputy director at the International Monetary Fund and a co-author of the paper “Stranded! How Rising Inequality Suppressed US Migration and Hurt Those Left Behind,” that narrative has shifted in modern America. As well-paying jobs are increasingly concentrated in cities with high living costs, some Americans find themselves unable to pursue the careers that could most help them an...
Mar 13, 2020•15 min
More than thirty million people have used at-home DNA testing kits, sold by companies such as 23andMe, Ancestry and others, to flesh out their family tree or to help them discover long-lost relatives. However, mail-in genetic tests can sometimes bring unexpected and unsettling results that challenge long-held assumptions about who we think we are. In her book, “The Lost Family,” journalist Libby Copeland investigates the consequences of the commercialization of our genes and considers the implic...
Mar 06, 2020•27 min
Are you looking at this article while you’re supposed to be doing something else? Chris Bailey, author of, “Hyperfocus: How to Manage Your Attention in a World of Distraction,” says you’re not alone. From the hits of dopamine we get when we check social media, to the trick our minds play on us when we’re multitasking that makes us think we’re being more productive than we really are, our world is a really distracting place. It is possible to undo the effects of all that stimulation and reset our...
Mar 06, 2020•22 min
On this week’s show, we explore efforts to remake public education in North Dakota and beyond with Governor Burgum, Cory Steiner, the superintendent of Northern Cass School District where By next school year, grade levels are expected to be a thing of the past and students will chart their own course to high school graduation, at their own pace, and Ted Dintersmith, a venture capitalist and the author of, “What School Could Be: Insights and Inspiration from Teachers Across America.” Two parents ...
Feb 28, 2020•36 min
Access to the internet is prized across the world. Payal Arora, author of The Next Billion Users: Digital Life Beyond The West, says that young people, in non-Western countries, will make up the bulk of the next billion online users. Western aid groups often make assumptions about what these new users want from technology, but they are frequently mistaken. How exactly are young people in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and South America using technology? One example: in countries where dating is ...
Feb 28, 2020•12 min
In the midst of the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt campaigned on a platform that would bring radical change to America: a package of policies he called the New Deal. The New Deal completely reinvented our infrastructure and central government, according to Eric Rauchway, a professor of history at the University of California, Davis, and author of the book Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash Over the New Deal. He says that the effects of FDR’s revolutionary plan remain...
Feb 21, 2020•32 min
When Carter Bryant invented Bratz dolls, Mattel (the makers of Barbie) took its former employee to court, claiming he had come up with his ideas on the company’s time. Bratz were the first dolls to successfully compete and - in some places - outsell Barbie. Orly Lobel, a law professor at the University of San Diego, has written about the lengthy and costly legal fight Mattel and Bryant engaged in over Bratz in her book: You Don’t Own Me: The Court Battles That Exposed Barbie’s Dark Side. That fi...
Feb 21, 2020•18 min
Politics in the United States has long been dominated by two main groups – the Republicans and the Democrats – but, in recent decades, we’ve seen increasing divisiveness and conflict. Voters have become less concerned with what government does, and more interested in politicians they believe represent who they are. Lilliana Mason, assistant professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, and Marc Hetherington, professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina...
Feb 14, 2020•49 min
Have you ever wanted to be rich? Really rich? Gregory Zuckerman, a special writer at The Wall Street Journal and author of “The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution,” shares the story of the mathematicians who cracked Wall Street’s code. Starting from humble beginnings in a strip mall on Long Island, NY, the hedge fund company that Simons started (where about 300 people work today) now pulls in more money in a year than companies like Hasbro and Hyatt Hotels, w...
Feb 07, 2020•28 min
At this very moment, you’re probably being inundated with noise. Whether the sound is something you chose, like music or our podcast, or something outside of your control, like traffic outside or planes overhead, you are essentially never enjoying true silence. According to David Owen, a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of “Volume Control: Hearing in a Deafening World,” all that noise is doing something to our brains; and it’s not very good news.
Feb 07, 2020•21 min
In 1983, Congress passed the Orphan Drug Act which incentivized the development of treatments for rare diseases. Since passing, the legislation has helped to create hundreds of new treatments for rare diseases... but it may have also had some side effects. According to Dr. Peter Bach, a pulmonologist and intensive care physician at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, the push towards finding cures for rare diseases has been so strong that drug companies are paying little attention to more co...
Jan 31, 2020•26 min
It was once a virtue to have some excess weight, kids weren’t considered picky eaters, and the term “overweight” didn’t even exist. What changed? Helen Zoe Veit, an associate professor of history at Michigan State University, and author of “Modern Food, Moral Food: Self-Control, Science, and the Rise of Modern American Eating in the Early Twentieth Century,” joined us to talk about how America began to moralize the food that we eat — or don’t eat.
Jan 31, 2020•23 min
The heroism of D-Day is immortalized in history books, but far less attention is given to the individuals who worked undercover to prevent Germany from developing an atomic bomb during WWII. In his new book, The Bastard Brigade: The True Story of the Renegade Scientists and Spies Who Sabotaged the Nazi Atomic Bomb, science writer Sam Kean tells the stories of the men and women who made up the Alsos Mission, or the “Bastard Brigade.” They worked tirelessly to make sure Germany’s (impressive) scie...
Jan 24, 2020•28 min
After Russia sent a man into space, the United States didn’t want to be left behind. But getting a man on the moon wasn’t as easy as just saying we would. David Meerman Scott, a marketing strategist and co-author of the book Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program talks about just what it took — from PR strategies to partnering with Walt Disney — to get enough support for the mission. Without the marketing and media attention, Scott thinks, we couldn’t have landed on the moon...
Jan 24, 2020•21 min
It’s no secret that men and women are different — it’s the punchline of a hundred jokes. But does our sex really show in our brains, or is there something else at play? Gina Rippon, a neuroscientist at Aston University in the U.K. and author of “Gender and Our Brains,” argues that sex doesn’t play nearly as big a role in influencing our brains as we might think. Rather, she says, social cues likely start to influence children at very, very young ages - and it is those cues that account for many ...
Jan 17, 2020•22 min
When you hear the name “Stanford,” chances are a certain university in Palo Alto, CA will come to mind. But you may be less familiar with the story of Leland Stanford, the university’s founder. As a railway entrepreneur and key player in West Coast politics, Stanford lived a controversial life that changed the history of California, strengthened a divided nation, and planted the seeds for the rise of Silicon Valley.
Jan 17, 2020•27 min
In 1956, a book was published. It was called The Organization Man, and it was hugely influential. It described a world that was something like a “corporate welfare state.” A world in which, if you were able to land a job at a big industrial company like Ford or GE, you essentially had a stable job for life, with a decent salary, benefits, vacation days, and health care. If you’re under 40, this may seem like science-fiction, but it described the economy as the author saw it. So what drove the ch...
Jan 10, 2020•26 min
“Don’t believe everything you read on the internet.” The urgency behind this sentiment is stronger than ever at a time when misinformation is everywhere. So how has Wikipedia, famous for allowing anyone to edit, become a paragon for truth? Andrew Lih, author of “The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia” and the Wikimedia Strategist for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, breaks down where Wikipedia came from, how it works, and where it c...
Jan 10, 2020•23 min
You’ve probably experienced this: it’s high school, the night before an exam, and you’ve got a 500-page textbook in your left hand and highlighters in your right hand. You have highlighted all the important information in the book, and there isn’t a whole lot of white space left. Unfortunately, you’re not sure that you’ve absorbed any of the material in a meaningful way. Turns out, there is little evidence that highlighting and underlining material in books is a good strategy for successful lear...
Jan 03, 2020•17 min
Learning a second language is tough. You have to consider grammar, pronunciation, and, sometimes, words that don’t even exist in your native language. And the conventional wisdom had been: if you want a child to learn a second language, start them as young as possible. But a new study has found that there’s a little more leeway than we originally thought. We talk with Boston College assistant psychology professor Joshua Hartshorne about his and his colleagues’ research and what it means for aspi...
Jan 03, 2020•12 min
The U.S. does not fare well in math when compared with other industrialized nations, as demonstrated by international tests like the PISA. So, for parents who want to help their students get ahead in math and can afford it, after-school programs that focus deeply on the subject have become attractive. There are plenty of extracurricular math programs around, but one run by the Russian School of Mathematics (RSM) for students from kindergarten through 12th grade, is particularly popular, serving ...
Jan 03, 2020•20 min
From the moment that Judith Grisel started drinking alcohol at age 13, she was hooked. For the next ten years, Grisel suffered from addiction, as she used drugs from marijuana to opiates to psychedelics. As a recovering addict and neuroscientist, Grisel learned that she was especially vulnerable because she was genetically predisposed to addiction. (She is one of many who are susceptible to the disease.) Grisel, a professor of psychology at Bucknell University and the author of “Never Enough: Th...
Dec 27, 2019•27 min
