Partisanship Stalls Pandemic Relief (0:32)

Guest: Mitt Romney, Republican US Senator from Utah

Attempts to negotiate another pandemic relief package have fallen apart in Washington and states are struggling to figure out how to implement the orders President Trump issued extending unemployment insurance.

Catching Wildfires Cold in Their Tracks (12:49)

Guest: Chaz Nelson, Smart City Engineer, Utopia Fiber

For much of the Western United States, it’s wildfire season. As wildfires get bigger and hotter, they’re harder to fight. Catching them early is key. A team of engineers at Brigham Young University has developed an early warning system to spot fire before anyone even notices the smoke.

Mapping Out The Universe (20:33)

Guest: Kyle Dawson, Professor of Physics and Astronomy, University of Utah

A map of the universe. Captain Kirk and his Starship Enterprise surely had one. But in real-life, the map’s been a long-time coming. Scientists have just released the most complete one yet–it’s 3-D, which is cool. But let’s be clear, it’s just a tiny, tiny sliver of all the space out there. Still, this new map is an important milestone for cosmologists trying to understand the origins of the universe.

CIA Turns to TV to Find New Recruits (36:09)

Guest: Nicholas Dujmovic, Professor of Politics, The Catholic University of America, Former Intelligence Officer at the CIA

The last thing you’d expect from a secret spy agency is an ad splashed across streaming TV sites. The CIA aired its first-ever advertisement made for television. It’s got dramatic music and cryptic comments and even a covert handoff between spies in the field. Why is the CIA recruiting on TV?

What the Lumpkin Sisters Can Teach Us About America (52:54)

Guest: Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Emerita Professor of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Author of “Sisters and Rebels: A Struggle for the Soul of America”

The current debate in America over whether it’s appropriate to fly the Confederate flag or keep a monument to Confederate soldiers on public property has prompted many of us to learn, for the first time, the history of those symbols and how they came to be so prominent in Southern culture. This hour we’re going to explore that history through the story of three sisters born to a former slave-holding family in the South, who came of age in the early 1900s, just as nostalgia for the pre-Civil War days reached a high point. These three sisters took radically different paths. One remained devoted her entire life to white supremacy. One wrote an autobiography of the racism embedded in her family story that shocked the community. Another became a leading author of radical, left-wing novels about race and women’s rights. And all of this happened against the backdrop of two World Wars, the Great Depression, the Red Scare and the Civil Rights movement.

Intuitive Prosthetics Controlled by the Brain (1:28:30)

Guest: Cindy Chestek, Professor of Biomedical Engineering, University of Michigan

Prosthetic hands for people who’ve had an arm amputation have gotten pretty sophisticated. They can do all kinds of grasping and lifting moves, but typically it takes a lot of work for a person wearing the prosthetic to figure out how to make it move on command. There's a new kind of prosthetic that allows a person with an amputation to move a prosthetic hand, just by thinking about it.