When a Beloved Pet Passes Away

Guest: Sy Montgomery, author, “How to be a Good Creature: A Memoir in Thirteen Animals”

Sy Montgomery shares tales of love and loss on her farm. She lost her 700-lb pig, Christopher Hogwood, and her beloved border collie, Tess, in the same season. She graciously counsels pet owners on dealing with grief. 

 

Boaty McBoatface Goes Where No Ship Has Gone Before

Guest: Russell Wynn, Associate Director and Chief Scientist of Marine Robotics at the National Oceanography Centre in the UK

The Natural Environment Research Council of the UK is the frontrunner for ocean exploration technology. They’re home to high-end research vessels like the RRS Discovery, the RRS Ernest Shakleton, the RRS David Attenborough, and of course, the long-range autonomous submarine Boaty McBoatface. Boaty McBoatface is a small but surprisingly accomplished autonomous unmanned submarine that’s helping scientists unravel the secrets of ice shelf. 

 

It’s a worm! It’s a mole! It’s a lizard! It's a snake! No, it’s a bipes!

Guest: Sara Ruane, Assistant Professor of Evolution at Rutgers University-Newark

What has the face of a lizard, the arms of a mole, the body of a snake, and the color of a worm? It's a bipes, and you'll be lucky to ever see one in the wild, even though they're really plentiful. 

 

The Dastardly Smart Kettle

Guest: Ken Munro, consultant, PenTestPartners

How safe, really, is our networked home, our personal assistant, our android device, or our smart car? It turns out the Cassandras may be right when they say: here be dragons. Ken Munro is a “Penetration Tester” who has spent a lot of time pulling apart smart objects and making them do things they are not supposed to do to keep the rest of us safe.

 

The Hoi Toiders Dialect of North Carolina

Guest: Walt Wolfram, Professor, Linguistics, North Carolina State University, Director, North Carolina Language and Life Project, and co-author, “Talkin’ Tar Heel”

The Outer Banks of North Carolina are home to the Hoi Toider dialect. After nearly 200 years of isolation, the community once consisting entirely of ex-pirates, has developed a dialect that in some ways resembles Elizabethan English more than colloquial American speech.