This week on Sound Effect, we tell stories of the lies we hear and the lies we tell. Old Time Con Woman One woman became one of the most infamous liars in the Northwest in the early 1900s. Maude Wagnon, who went under the alias Maude Johnson, swindled railroad companies out of an estimated thousands of dollars. Student Scam This past spring, hundreds of thousands of dollars, possibly over a million, were stolen from Chinese international students going to school at the University of Washington.

When I think back on it now, when I was growing up there’s two things that were really hard for me to tell my parents. The first was: ‘Hey Mum and Dad, so we’re getting sex education at school.’ And the second was, ‘I love you.’

All of our lives are ruled by time, but some of us are more aware of it than others. At the Northwest Kidney Centers in Seattle’s First Hill neighborhood, dialysis patients are very aware of the passing hours. They're hooked up to machines that display the elapsing time prominently on a screen. These machines filter and clean their blood, a job normally handled by healthy kidneys. Seattle native Vonita McGee is a patient at the center. She goes in for dialysis three days a week for four and a

In the spring of 2014, Marilyn Roberts' son, Kevin, was 27 years old and struggling with bipolar disorder. One day, he called his mom to tell her that he was taking a bus to go to downtown Olympia, Wash., not too far from where he lived. "He was to a point where wasn't cognizant of what was going on, on a day to day basis," Roberts remembers. Kevin smokes cigarettes. At a bus stop in Olympia, he lit up in a non-smoking area. Kevin exchanged a few words with transit workers who asked him to put

28-year old Yemeni-American Mokhtar Alkhanshali loves coffee. In fact, h e is the first Arab certified Q-grader, the coffee equivalent of a sommelier for wine. Mokhtar grew up between the United States and Yemen. In his grandparents’ garden in Yemen, Mokhtar picked red coffee berries off the trees and laid them out on drying beds. His grandmother taught him when to harvest the berries, and later, how to brew coffee with spices like cardamom and cinnamon. This early affinity with coffee stuck.

Retired University of Washington astrobiology professor Woody Sullivan is obsessed with the concept of time. It's apparent the instant you walk into what he call’s his “man lodge," the little study behind his North Seattle home. It’s full of shelves of books with titles like “Empires of Time,” and “Time, The Familiar Stranger.” Plus, there are shelves of small, ornate sundials, some that can fit into the palm of your hand. Finally, across his ceiling is Woody’s real masterpiece: a reflection

This week on Sound Effect , stories of time and how it rules our daily lives. Every Hour Injures, The Last One Kills For centuries, sundials have inspired artists and scientists alike as a way to display the passing of time. Retired UW astrobiology professor Woody Sullivan shares how his 25-year love affair with sundials began and how he invented the first working sundial tattoo. A Brewing War In 2015, 28-year-old Yemeni-American Mokhtar Alkhanshali wanted to bring the unique flavor and high

All around us, there are tiny creatures and simple organisms sharing planet Earth, including a type of worm that finds a home in rotting fruit. These microworms are about 1 millimeter long and transparent, barely visible to the human eye. Jihong Bai, a neurobiologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, uses these microworms in his lab to study how neurons in the brain talk to each other. However, a chance observation of the worms led him to a new discovery about animal behavior. It

Dancer Jody Kuehner didn't set out to become a female-bodied drag queen, sometimes called a "bio-queen." While collaborating with fellow dancer Ricki Mason in 2008, the two women created personas to push their work to new places and explore their own gender identities. In exploring her own femininity, Jody created her now beloved and award-winning drag persona, Cherdonna Shinatra. Cherdonna's over-the-top aesthetic conceals the woman underneath well enough that some audience members incorrectly

Hiding in plain sight can be a matter of course for people dealing with addictions; they tend to be really good at masking the need. That was the case for Michael Roberts. He had beer for the first time when he was 15, and worked for years to keep attention away from his alcoholism. He was eventually able to get sober. His last drink was eight years ago. And all those years Michael spent hiding made him an expert when it came to spotting his daughter Amber’s addiction. “She was one of those