Living Lab Radio

By Jay L. Zagorsky , Boston University Gift giving is a big deal this time of year. To find the “perfect” gift , Americans will spend about 15 hours shopping. Women will do about twice as much as men. And they’ll shell out about US$1 trillion on gifts. While retailers relish the holiday shopping season as a time when consumers open their purses or wallets, for many consumers – especially those who do not like shopping – these days are filled with dread . They mark moments when shoppers clog

The Impossible Burger has put high tech meat alternatives on people’s plates and minds. But just how big could this emerging sector become? And how soon? A new analysis says it could make the cow all but obsolete in a matter of years.

This year’s United Nations conference on climate change is underway in Madrid, Spain, with about 25,000 people from 200 countries attending. The mood is one of urgency, according to participants.

“Essentially, the cost of producing protein is going to come down fast. So, it's five times cheaper by 2030 - and ten times by 2035 - than existing methods. And so, ultimately, this means 50 percent fewer cows by 2030. And it won't stop there.” – Catherine Tubb

In July of 2014, images of an enormous crater in the Siberian tundra captivated scientists and the public, alike. Others were soon found, and a cause proposed: climate change. Specifically, the finger was pointed at an underground build-up of methane released as permafrost thaws. But this was not a climate change impact that anyone had anticipated.

“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” – Max Planck The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Max Planck articulated what has come to be known as Planck’s Principle in his 1950 Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers . The idea was born out of his frustration that eminent colleagues, notably Albert Einstein, were resistant to the

A new meta-analysis of dozens of studies finds evidence that mind-body therapies, like meditation, can reduce not only pain, but also opioid use. “There have been other reviews of studies of mind body therapies for people experiencing various types of pain,” said Eric Garland, lead author of the study in the Journal of the American Medical Association and director of the Center on Mindfulness and Integrative Health Intervention Development at the University of Utah. “By and large, those reviews

Before heading home for turkey, the Supreme Court this week declined to hear a case pitting a prominent climate scientist against a conservative news outlet and a free-market think tank. To be clear, this is considered a win for the climate scientist as it allows his defamation case to go forward. Michael Mann is the scientist in question. He leads the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University and is best known as one of the originators of the now infamous hockey stick graph

"I didn't expect it then and I still don't expect it now. It's not something that any Arctic scientists talk about for this to happen on land - to have land explode because of a buildup of methane below the ground. It still surprises me now." - Sue Natali This week on Living Lab Radio: Jennifer Hijazi of E&E News reports on a defamation lawsuit that is mixing climate science and free speech issues in novel ways. The Supreme Court has said that scientist Michael Mann's case can move forward.

Stargazing and storytelling are universal, age-old past-times. For millenia, people have looked to the sky, seen shapes in the stars, and attached stories to them. Constellations and their movements have been used to navigate the seas, predict personalities and major events, and to teach moral lessons. “The sky was always there,” says Anthony Aveni, professor emeritus at Colgate University and author of Star Stories: Constellations and People . “The sky was the storyboard, filled with tales