Why Pluto Matters, According to the Scientist Who Got Us Closest to the Dwarf Planet (0:30)

Guest: Alan Stern, Principal Investigator, New Horizons Mission, NASA

The solar system you learned in grade school got a major shakeup in the late 1990s. Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are all still there. But Pluto was always the odd planet out. So distant and small and not like the little rocky planets near the sun or gas giants, either. But then, high-powered telescopes revealed in the 1990s that tiny Pluto was just one of a whole class of dwarf planets way out there that far outnumber the planets we all memorized in school. So NASA said, “We gotta go explore that place.” And planetary scientist Alan Stern said, “I’m your man.”

 

737 Max Crisis Fuels Major Losses for Boeing in 2019 (21:18)

Guest: Scott Hamilton, Managing Director of the Leeham Company

Boeing said today it lost half a billion dollars in 2019 –that’s the first annual loss for the company in more than two decades and there’s one reason for it: the 737 Max.

 

Should We Be Scared of Facial Recognition Technology? (35:39)

Guest: Eric Goldman, Law Professor, Santa Clara University

A privacy advocacy group and 40 other organizations wrote a letter to the government this week, calling for a ban on facial recognition technology. The letter was prompted by a recent New York Times expose on a company called Clearview AI. It’s all really speculative right now, but the article claims that Clearview is pulling images from social media sites to create a facial recognition program and that more than 600 law enforcement agencies have used it to solve crimes.

 

The Apple Seed (50:39)

Guest: Sam Payne, Host, The Apple Seed, BYUradio

Sam tells the story of how the Grammys came to be and some of the surprise winners of those first awards.

 

Jane Austen’s Unfinished Novel Hits The Small Screen (58:44)

Guest: Jane Hinckley, Professor of Comparative Arts & Letters, Brigham Young University

When Jane Austen died of illness at the age of 41, she was working on another novel, but she only finished 11 chapters. It’s got an unusual setting for an Austen story and it features her only black character. What did she have in mind for this novel? A writer known for adapting Jane Austen for film and television has taken a stab at finishing it for a series airing now on PBS Masterpiece. It’s called Sanditon.

 

Lost and Found: Young Fathers in a New Age (1:20:31)

Guest: Paul Florsheim, PhD, Coauthor of Lost and Found: Young Fathers In the Age of Unwed Parenthood, Professor of Community and Behavioral Health Promotion, University of Wisconsin

The rate of teenage pregnancy in America has declined drastically over the last 20 years –which is good news. But over that same period, we’ve seen a steady rise in unwed parenthood –especially among young parents under the age of 25, and the kids end up being raised by a very young –often very poor-single mother. What about the young fathers? What could help them be more involved in the lives of their children?