Perpetual Notion Machine

The ancient game of chess is experiencing a new renaissance. Bruce Pandolfini has seen it all, and joins host Patrick Sajbel as he shares his perspective as a chess coach, author, and consultant.

His career took off while reporting for PBS on the 1972 Fischer-Spassky world championship match in Reykjavik, Iceland. As teacher and coach, he was portrayed by Ben Kingsley in the 1993 movie ‘Searching for Bobby Fischer’. Pandolfini was recently chief consultant for the wildly popular Queen’s Gambit Netflix series, where he not only trained all the actors, but also worked on the original novel with writer Walter Tevis in 1982.

He is an author of numerous chess instruction books and joins us from his home in New York.

Photo courtesy of Freepik.com

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Tonight, the Perpetual Notion Machine discusses a very somber subject, suicide. Deciding to end one’s own life has been with us, probably, forever. But, we want to know some of the complexity and psychology behind why this occurs, especially now, with the mental strain of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Our guest Chuck Raison, a psychiatrist in human ecology at UW-Madison, talks with PNM’er Dennis Shaffer. The overall rate of suicide has been steadily increasing for the last couple of decades, hitting 14.2 suicides per 100,000 people in 2018. The steady increase ended in 2019 when the number dropped a little below 14.2. But surprisingly, in a report that came out last November, the number of suicides dropped again in 2020, the first year of the pandemic.

According to Chuck, the pandemic has clearly caused a high rise in mental strain from depression, anxiety, and loneliness, which often lead to signs of suicide like helplessness and hopelessness. But in the past, most successful suicides are committed by older white males, who appear to suffer from a more severe type of depression that makes them more determined to be successful. Many more younger people ATTEMPT suicide but are not successful. COVID-19 may have changed the scenario. For young people depression generally comes and goes, but during this pandemic, depression tends to hit harder and more swiftly, and committing suicide becomes an impulsive, and now more successful, decision. Chuck says that this needs to be studied intensely if this becomes the norm in suicides in the future. Impulsive suicides provide no signs or signals for the victim to receive the help he/she needs.

For more information, here are several websites: National Institute of Mental Health, the CDC, American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, and National Alliance on Mental Illness.

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The food plants we eat every day haven’t always looked the way they do now. Through the process of domestication, humans have selected plant populations for traits that we find desirable, leading to crop plants that may be drastically different from their wild ancestors. On today’s episode of Perpetual Notion Machine, ethnobotanists Eve Emshwiller and Alex McAlvay join host Serena Zhao for an exploration of different forms of domestication from plants to ecosystems, and the importance of genetic diversity in crop species.

Our guests have a recent paper “Brassica rapa Domestication: Untangling Wild and Feral Forms and Convergence of Crop Morphotypes” that examines the wild ancestors of turnips and relatives. Dr. Emshwiller is an Associate Professor of Botany at UW-Madison, and Dr. McAlvay is an Assistant Curator in the Institute of Economic Botany at the New York Botanical Garden.

Tune in to find out what dogs have in common with broccoli, and more!

 

Images courtesy of: Clark, Jim (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) on Wikimedia Commons/USDA  Lance Cheung, via CC 2.0

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Tonight, the Perpetual Notion Machine provides an eclectic mix presented by longtime PNM’er Dennis Shaffer. He discloses some of the top science news stories of 2021, at least those considered important by the editors of the Smithsonian Magazine. Of those in the top ten, perhaps the most obvious is the rollout of the vaccines to guard against COVID-19, even though the rollout was pretty shaky, and the launch, finally, of the James Webb Space Telescope. Also, we have two short clips of past PNM shows. Since PNM celebrated 25 years on the air in October, we talk with two original PNM’ers, Kris Wedding Crowell and Kelly Loyet, that aired on a 10th anniversary show back on 2006. And we have a short clip from a show last October when PNM’er Anita Nsubuga talked with Lucas Richert about psychedelics. And there’s some Christmas music, and a couple of science-themed songs, one by The Dandy Warhols.

If you want to read more the top science stories of 2021, click on this link to the Smithsonian Magazine.

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Tonight, the Perpetual Notion Machine welcomes back Ajay Sethi to talk about the new omicron variant of COVID-19. Ajay is an epidemiologist and Associate Professor of population health sciences at UW-Madison. With omicron only discovered about a month ago, Ajay distinguishes what we know from what we don’t know yet. One thing we do know is how contagious this variant is compared to the previous ones, even infecting those with vaccinations. In just one week the number of cases involving omicron went from just 4% to 75%. But for now, omicron doesn’t seem to be more severe than even the delta variant. So far, even vaccinated people appear to have mild symptoms. And thus for added protection, Ajay highly recommends getting a booster shot. As contagious as omicron, the most vulnerable continue to be the unvaccinated. And with so many still unvaccinated and the omicron variant having 50 mutations, the next variant could be even more deadly.

For more information, here’s a link to the CDC webpage on omicron.

And here’s the main webpage on COVID-19 from Public Health Madison and Dane County.

Image courtesy: Gerd Altmann via Pixabay

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Tonight, the Perpetual Notion Machine explores the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The launch date is scheduled for December 22. This will be the most advanced technologically engineered telescope ever designed, at least 10 times more powerful than the Hubble Space Telescope. Joining us is Michael Maseda, an Assistant Professor in astronomy at UW-Madison.

Of course, the most pronounced piece of equipment is the telescope, which is composed of a mirror assembly. The JWST has the biggest one yet, 21 feet across, which makes it easier to see faint light from further away. But that is pretty big to be confined inside a capsule on a journey to its final destination. So this mirror will be folded into 18 hexagons, and then unfold during deployment. Also, the JWST will capture light mostly from the infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum. Michael says this will give us a chance to see things on a different scale than Hubble. And one of the instruments on the JWST that Michael was involved with could capture images that falls right into his area of study, the formation and evolution of galaxies.

For more information, check out the JWST website, this NASA website, and this website from the Space Telescope Science Institute. Here is a nice website that compares Webb vs. Hubble.

Image Courtesy: NASA GSFC/CIL/Adriana Manrique Gutierrez via Flickr (artist conception)

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Host Patrick Sajbel welcomes a force in science education for more than a half century, Professor Bassam Shakhashiri.

Shakhashiri reflects on the need for science literacy in the general public and the importance of the conversation to achieve this. He has been recognized with the first award of the William T. Evjue Distinguished Chair for the Wisconsin Idea (a position held for 20 years), and assistant director at the National Science Foundation (NSF), with the National Science Board’s Public Service Award.

In addition to a 51-year professional career in the University of Wisconsin Department of Chemistry, he also served as the President of the American Chemical Society, one of the world’s largest scientific organizations with over 150,000 members in 150 countries.

Over the course of 50+ years, he has prepared a library of tools and presentations that can be used by educators, citizens and anybody with science curiosity.

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Every school term, UW-Madison’s School of Journalism and Mass Communications and University Communications invites a science writer to campus as the Science Journalist in Residence. This provides that person a chance to interact with students and to share their journalism experience and expertise. Tonight, the Perpetual Notion Machine has the privilege of also tapping into that experience with the current Science Journalist in Residence Caroline Chen. Caroline works for ProPublica as their investigative health reporter, currently focusing on the COVID-19 pandemic.

PNM’s newest volunteer Serena Zhao talks with Caroline on what it’s like reporting on COVID-19, and also the challenges of doing her job under COVID-19 conditions. And she discusses how she manages the uncertainty inherent in science, especially pronounced with COVID-19.

Image Courtesy: Bill Graf for UW-Madison

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Alzheimer’s Disease is the 6th leading cause of death in Wisconsin. One in six people over the age of 65 are affected with the disease. The good news is the monumental ongoing effort to identify, track, treat and prevent the disease.

Perpetual Notion Machine host Patrick Sajbel welcomes back Dr. Nathaniel Chin, assistant professor in the division of geriatrics and gerontology with patients in the UW Health Memory Clinic, medical director of the WI Alzheimer’s Disease Research Study and the Wisconsin Registry for Alzheimer’s Prevention Study.

Dr. Chin focuses on Alzheimer’s as the most common form of dementia, noting UW research and resources, including clinics, and the extensive data collection to track and understand the disease. He has created over 100 podcasts on Alzheimer’s research to help in the advancing field of care and prevention.

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On this episode of Perpetual Notion Machine, Emily Morris talks to popular science author Mary Roach. Her new book is Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law. We talk about how to be a good animal neighbor, counting animals with their poop, the agencies responsible for wildlife management, and why it wouldn’t be so bad to be your own scarecrow.

Mary will be discussing her book with Josh Foer online at the Wisconsin Book Festival Sunday, October 24, 2021 at 11am CT.

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