Does Mountain Climbers Drive to Get to The Top Make Them Selfish?

Guest: Francis Sanzaro, Authorand Editor

“We cannot hold mortality’s strong hand,” says King John in Shakespeare’s tragedy.  Few know this better than climbers, who live constantly at the edge of mortality’s precipice.  Do they, and other extreme sports enthusiasts, have a responsibility to live safer and eliminate the risks they take so often? 

Why, After a Century of Research, We Still Know Very Little About Curing Mental Illness?

Guest: Anne Harrington, Professor of the History of Science, Harvard University, Author of“Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness”

We talk about outer space as the last frontier. Maybe we have another yet to conquer. Let’s call it inner space. Few of us, today, have not been touched in some way by mental health crisis, and few have not been beset with fears about what we could or should have done differently. Just like the families of those affected, the mental health profession has struggled for over a century to figure out causes and cures for depression, bipolar, schizophrenia, autism, and other brain maladies. The brain has still not yielded its secrets. And we still aren’t even really sure how the mind and brain –and even the soul connect. Even the human genome still mocks our futility on this front. At some level, we know that mental illness has biological roots. But we still don’t know what this means or what to do about it. 

Everyone Wants To Help You Help Yourself. Should You Let Them?

Guest: Joseph M. Reagle Jr. Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University and author of“Hacking Life: Systemized Living and its Discontents”

Ice cubes in the dryer gets out wrinkles; spicy food may help you lose weight; you can test if an egg is raw by spinning it. There are a million ‘hacks’ for making your life more efficient, but what happens when we view life as a system? Tune into Constant Wonder as we talk with Joseph Reagle Jr. About the joys and discontents of systemized living.

Reforestation with Robots

Guest: Irinia Fedorenko, Co-Founder BioCarbon Engineering

The end of the world is going to need a rain check, if the folks at BioCarbon Engineering have anything to say about it.  Instead of climate change and a robot apocalypse, they’re using drone technology to do some serious robot reforestation.