The Spark

On Wednesday's Smart Talk, we're joined by Steven John, a writer and freelance journalist and founder of the online outdoor magazine Dad Gear Review, who has written about the history of St. Patrick's Day, to tell the story.

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Shipping Africans to be enslaved in North and South America was one of the cruelest and most inhumane aspects of slavery.

Some 36 thousand ships made that voyage and a thousand of them sank. Very few have been found.

That’s according to the cover story in the March issue of National Geographic Magazine.

It's called Into the Depths Searching for shipwrecks from slavery’s hidden past to help heal the present.

Tara Roberts is a National Geographic Explorer and Storyteller who is following a group of Black scuba divers, historians, and archaeologists as they search for and help document slave trade shipwrecks around the world. Tara Roberts appears on Wednesday's Smart Talk.

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Of all the mass shootings and shootings at schools in this country over the past 20 years, the December 14th, 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut perhaps elicits the most emotion, sympathy and compassion. That’s becaus...

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Inflation is something that has an impact on everyone and when prices for essentials like gas for our cars and food rise substantially in a short amount of time, it becomes hard to budget. Low to middle income wage earners are especially vulnerable whe...

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Polls show that most Americans have a negative perception of the nation’s economy right now.

The good news is the number of people being hired is way up and most workers are making more money.

PNC Chief Economist Gus Faucher appears on Monday's S...

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More than half of the 12,000 nurses issued licenses to work in Pennsylvania last year waited for three months or longer to get them, according to an NPR data analysis. Health care groups say the failure to promptly certify nurses added to a critical st...

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The video images Americans have seen from the Russian invasion of Ukraine are just devastating. What’s seared into our minds are scenes of cities being destroyed and millions of mostly women and children refugees fleeing the violence. Two weeks into th...

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High Industries – based in Lancaster – is one of Central Pennsylvania’s and the nation’s most successful businesses. High Companies employ nearly 2,000 workers in 11 infrastructure businesses at 38 locations in six states. The company’s 2021 revenues w...

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The FBI has been developing and providing profiles on unknown subjects — or unsubs — for last 50 years using science.

There’s a new book that describes the very first profile of an unknown subject. Shadow Man: An Elusive Psycho Killer and the Birth of FBI Profiling by true crime writer and novelist Ron Franscell, tells the story of David Meyerhofer, a Montana man who killed four people in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The FBI and police were unable to track down the killer for years and although the never used before profile didn’t solve the crime, it was very accurate in describing Meyerhofer.

Ron Francell discusses this fascinating case on Tuesday’s Smart Talk.

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A third of the world's researchers are women. However, women in Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics or STEM fields have been leading research into the COVID-19 virus, creating trackers and developing vaccines. Women also make up 70% of the w...

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