SparkDialog

There is not a new episode of SparkDialog Podcast this week due to Hurricane Florence. We'll be back in two weeks with a new episode. In the meantime check out sparkdialog.com for more episodes.

Transportation is responsible for 23% of global emissions. If we could make getting from point A to point B cleaner, it would go a long way in combatting climate change. Today, we talk to Dr. Ryan Allard, a transportation specialist from Project Drawdown. Project Drawdown is a no-profit organization focused on using existing technology to slow, and even reverse, climate change.

If someone didn’t like the same ice cream flavor as you, chances are you wouldn’t stop being friends with them. But you might if you found out that they were a Nazi sympathizer. What we see as moral choices are fundamentally different than other preferences. In today’s podcast with Dr. P. Kyle Stanford of UC Irvine, we discuss how they may have been a basis on which modern society was created.

Billions of years ago, the first star was born, and the Universe was never the same. How do we know what these first stars were like? Today we are joined by Dr. Harish Vedantham from the Netherlands Institute of Radio Astronomy to discuss these stars.

Noise is everywhere in our lives. Today we talk to Dr. Julia Buwaya, a mobile crowdsensing researcher, on how she utilizes smartphones to "crowdsense", essentially having hundreds or thousands of people help her gather data to understand the noise in our lives.

Humans are affecting the Earth on a global scale, and this change will be remembered in the rocks. I talk to Dr. David Grinspoon on how humans are affecting the planet: from new minerals to a shift in the climate to our presence in space. Humankind may be responsible for the planet entering a new geological time period: the Anthropocene.

Can science help us live forever?  Or maybe for just a really long time?  Death has always been with us, our last big adventure, the giant question mark that ends our lives.  Philosophers and religious have tried to understand it.  And many people fear it.  As long as we can remember, people have searched for the fountain of youth.  And while we live much longer and healthier lives than our ancestors, it’s still a far cry from immortality.

But what if science could change that?  What if, using our knowledge of the human body, we could combat aging, just like we would maintain an aging car?  If so, we could keep our bodies in excellent working condition, looking and feeling young well into triple digits.

Today, we are joined by Dr. Aubrey de Grey.  We discuss the questions – can science help us live forever and what can we do to combat aging?  Aubrey is the Chief Science Officer at the SENS Research Foundation, a research institution that seeks to develop new medicines to prevent aging.  Aubrey’s research is controversial, however, no one has yet to find a flaw in his logic.  We discuss why our bodies grow old and how regular maintenance rather than cures can help prolong our lives.  We also discuss what a world without aging would look like and the ethical issues associated with ridding the world of mortality.

You can follow Aubrey @aubreydegrey.

SparkDialog Podcasts is on summer hiatus.  Please check out some of our old episodes in the meantime!

Subglacial lakes far beneath the Canadian ice are defying all expectations. We are joined by Anja Rutishauser of the University of Alberta, who discovered these lakes. They could be a terrestrial analog to the under-ice oceans of moons like Europa, and could help us to understand any potential life that exists there.

Machine learning algorithms can make inferences about our habits. But can these algorithms be biased against certain people or groups of people? Where does this bias come from? And how can we improve these algorithms? We are joined by Dr. Joshua Kroll from the University of California at Berkeley to discuss bias in machine learning algorithms in everything from your grocery store’s frequent buyer card to the Trump administration’s Extreme Vetting Initiative.