Please Explain (The Leonard Lopate Show)

This week’s Please Explain looks at the outbreak of fungal meningitis from contaminated steroid shots. We’ll find out how epidemiologists trace outbreaks like this to their origins and what compounding pharmacies are and how they work. Dr. Emil Hiesiger, clinical associate professor of neurology, NYU  School of Medicine, and Dr. William Schaffner, Professor of Preventive Medicine and Chair of the Department of Preventive Medicine at Vanderbilt University and president of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, explain.

Jumping off buildings, running from a car engulfed in flames, getting into a brawl with a villain all some of the feats we see frequently in movies—and they’re performed by stuntmen (and women). Two experts join us to explain how stunts are performed in movies and on television: Hal Needham worked as a stuntman on more than 300 feature films and he was a pioneer in improving stunt technology and safety. He also directed the films Smokey and the Bandit, Cannonball Run, and Hooper, among others. He’s written about his career in Stuntman! My Car-Crashing, Plane-Jumping, Bone-Breaking, Death-Defying Hollywood Life. And Blaise Corrigan, a stuntman who has worked in New York for more than 20 years in such films as The Avengers, The Departed, The Bourne Legacy, and the television shows Boardwalk Empire, 30 Rock, and Law and Order.

From Apple's iCloud to Dropbox, cloud computing is becoming an increasingly important and useful part of digital life. This week's Please Explain is about the physical structures that make cloud computing possible, and their hidden impact on the environment. We're joined by James Glanz from The New York Times, who spent a year investigating the physical structures that make up and support cloud computing, and Dennis Symanski, Senior Project Manager at the Electric Power Research Institute.

Alena Grabowski, Assistant Research Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, and research scientists at the Department of Veterans Affairs in Denver, and Mike McLoughlin, Research and Exploratory Development at The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory describe the latest prosthetic design and technologies and how they allow amputees to regain mobility.

For this week’s Please Explain, director Steve James talks about his new film “Head Games,” a revealing documentary about the concussions in American sports, along with former Ivy League Football Player and WWE Wrestler Christopher Nowinski, author of the book Head Games. It covers eye-opening evidence and cutting-edge science on head trauma from the nation’s leading medical experts and gives first-hand accounts from the athletes, coaches, and parents.

Thomas Bjorkman, professor of horticulture at Cornell’s New York State Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva, NY, and Dr. Urvashi Rangan, Director, Consumer Safety and Sustainability Group at Consumer Reports, discuss what the organic label indicates about how food is grown, and what the various animal welfare labels indicate about how meat or eggs were bred and raised.

Monarch butterflies have started to make their long journey south to Mexico. On this week’s Please Explain, we’ll find out about the many different species of butterflies—from their coloring to their attraction to flowers to their cocoons. We’re joined by Bob Robbins, Curator of Lepidoptera, Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History, and Dr. Cole Gilbert, Associate Professor of Entomology at Cornell University.

Aaron Bobrow-Strain, author of White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf and professor of politics at Whitman College, explains the colorful history of white bread and tells us what makes it so soft, so white, and have such a long shelf life. He’ll also discuss how the kind of bread you eat has defined social status for centuries.

This week we'll take a look at the creepy crawly world of spiders. Dr. Norm Platnick, curator emeritus in the Museum’s Division of Invertebrate Zoology, and Hazel Davies, Associate Director of Living Exhibits at the American Museum of Natural History, talk about spiders, which are among the most versatile animals on the planet—they're able to inhabit every continent but Antarctica and are able to survive in environments that range from deserts to rainforests to crowded cities. There's an exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History called "Spiders Alive!" It's on view through December 2.

Pigeons seem to be everywhere in New York City, and they fill city squares in London and Venice. We’ll take a look at why these birds thrive in urban areas around the word and how they’re able to find their way home from hundreds of miles away. Andrew Blechman, managing editor of Orion magazine and author of Pigeons: The Fascinating Saga of the World's Most Revered and Reviled Bird, and Courtney Humphries, author of Superdove: How the Pigeon Took Manhattan…and the World, join us.