FDA and Sunscreen

Guest: Kerry Hanson, Research Chemist, University of California, Riverside

Memorial Day weekend is when outdoor pools open in places around the country where pools close during the winter. That makes it the official start of summer for a lot of us. This year it also coincides with the end of a public comment period on new sunscreen regulations being considered by the US Food and Drug Administration. The proposal says that only two of the active ingredients often used in over-the-counter sunscreen are “generally recognized as safe and effective.” Only two. So, what to do about sunscreen this summer?

 

The Book-to-Movie Hollywood Pipeline

Guest: Matthew Janzen, Senior VP of Production and Development at Lionsgate

The Hunger Games lit a fire in Hollywood’s heart. Suddenly theaters were flooded with movies based on young adult novels about dark futures where teenagers band together to fight the forces of evil (usually adults). There were the four Hunger Games films (based on only three books). And The Divergent series. And The Maze Runner series. And Hollywood even dredged up Orson Scott Card’s old bestseller Ender’s Game for a theatrical run.

 

Where You Live Affects your Health

Guest: Richard G. “Bugs” Stevens, Professor of Community Medicine and Healthcare, University of Connecticut

Time zones drawn on a map of the US look like four vertical stripes running from North to South. The stripes are pretty wide, though: Amarillo, Texas and Nashville, Tennessee are both in the Central time zone, but they’re nearly 1000 miles apart. That means on many days, people in Amarillo are waking up while it’s still dark outside, but further east over in Nashville, the sun’s already up when the alarm goes off. Now that might just seem like a quirk of the time zone system. But more and more studies are finding that situations like that can have serious health consequences.

 

The Shadow of Chernobyl

Guest: Kate Brown, Professor of Science, Technology, and Society, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Author of “Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future”

The explosion and subsequent meltdown at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986 is often called the single worst technological disaster in human history. The world actually didn’t learn of the explosion until a few days after it happened, when scientists in Scandinavia detected unusual levels of radiation in the atmosphere. That initial coverup, followed by months –years, even –of bungled response to the disaster, has been the focus of Kate Brown’s research for a decade. 

 

Worlds Awaiting: Predicting in Reading

Guest: Rachel Wadham, Host, Worlds Awaiting on BYUradio, Education and Juvenile Collections Librarian, BYU