Gulf Coast Life

What is lightning, and how is it formed? Is all lightning made from the same stuff? How dangerous is lightning? Get all your lightning questions answered in this episode.

If no action is taken to reduce emissions by the end of this century, intense heat will cost Florida’s economy roughly $8 billion in lost work every year. And tens of millions of outdoor workers in the U.S. risk losing a collective $55.4 billion dollars in earnings each year by midcentury.

Hospitals around Florida are seeing COVID-19 cases in record numbers, and more younger patients are being admitted to hospitals in recent weeks than since the pandemic began nearly a year and a half ago. We're getting an update from Lee Health officials.

The documentary film “Love Wins Over Hate” features a series of honest and thought-provoking interviews with former white supremacists, and others who held extreme views but have since renounced them. It attempts to get to the heart of why people hate, and sometimes take on extremist ideologies like white supremacy — and what it takes to escape that world, and in some cases go on to work to help others escape. We talk with its producer and director, Susan Polis Schutz.

The U.S. Census Bureau released its first data set from the 2020 census last week, with more detailed numbers expected at the end of September. This means states, including Florida, are beginning the process of drawing new congressional, and state legislative districts as required by the U.S. Constitution.Here in Florida it’s up to the state legislature to draw the new districts, and because of two 2010 amendments to the the state constitution passed by Florida voters — called the Fair Districts Amendments — new districts are supposed to establish "fairness," be "as equal in population as feasible" and use existing "city, county and geographical boundaries."We plan on following this process closely on this show, as the 2022 legislative session approaches. For starters we’re going to get a bit of a history lesson from the leader of the Fair Districts Coalition, which led the 2010 effort.

Did you know that scientists are working on ways to CO2 into solid rock in order to sequester it? Or that the same things that make water so critical to our world is also what makes it so potentially dangerous to us? Those are just two of the interesting concepts revealed in the new NOVA and PBS series Out of Our Elements that explores the magic of molecules and how much of the modern world is built on the interesting ways they interact. We’re joined by the two people who make it.

The public radio world and long-time NPR listeners are grieving the loss of a great journalist and host, Neal Conan, who died Tuesday of glioblastoma at the age of 71. In honor of his life, we’re listening back to our conversation with Neal Conan on this show back in 2009 when he came to Southwest Florida and spent some time with the WGCU-FM news team.

While scholars have mostly focused on law enforcement’s use of aggression and brutality as a means of maintaining African American subordination, Black citizens of that time have often come off as powerless in their encounters with law enforcement.The new book, “Race, Crime, and Policing in the Jim Crow South” explores the various ways African Americans responded to the expansion of police departments in the early 20th-century South, including thousands of examples of African Americans seemingly working with law enforcement in order to, in some sense, take advantage of the only government institution they had access to: the police department.

As students get ready to go back to school, the Delta variant of the Coronavirus has some parents nervous about sending their ineligible-for-vaccine kids into classrooms where Gov. Ron DeSantis had forbidden mask mandates.

Julie K. Brown's investigate reporting is responsible for reopening the sex-trafficking case against Jeffrey Epstein, causing Labor Secretary Alex Acosta to step down, and setting in motion millions of dollars of compensation for Epstein’s victims.