President Trump Takes Aim at Social Media (0:33)

Guest: Kate Klonick, Assistant Professor of Law, St. John’s University School of Law

“When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” President Trump tweeted that ominous line on Friday morning in reference to protests turning violent in Minneapolis. He’s since said he didn’t know it was a phrase used by white supremacists during the Civil Rights movement. Regardless, Twitter determined that the President’s words violated its rules against “glorifying violence” and placed a warning on it. It was the first time Twitter’s done that on a tweet from President Trump. And days earlier, Twitter had placed a fact-checking notice on some of the President’s tweets about voting by mail. That too, was a first. So, on Friday, President Trump issued an executive order intending to punish social media sites he says unfairly target his free speech and other Republican voices.

 

New Method of Dehydrating Blood to Improve Shelf Life (19:49)

Guest: Jonathan Kopechek, Professor of Bioengineering, University of Louisville School of Engineering

If you’ve ever given blood, you’re probably now on the email distribution list for the organization you donated through and get frequent requests to come in and give again. That’s because a pint of blood expires after about six weeks in a refrigerator and so far there’s no alternative to donated human blood for treating a very sick person in need of a transfusion. If only freeze-drying were possible. Then blood could be stored at room temperature for much longer – just think how that could be helpful for war zones and even astronauts in space.

 

Former Art Forger Now Sells His Fakes as Reproductions (34:25)

Guest: Ken Perenyi, Art Forger, Author of “Caveat Emptor: The Secret Life of an American Art Forger”

For decades, until about 1998, American painter Ken Perenyi copied famous artists and passed his fakes off as the real thing. Some even ended up in fine art auction catalogs at Christie’s and Sotheby’s. They’re undoubtedly still hanging on the walls of galleries and art collectors around the world. But after the FBI came knocking, Perenyi decided to go legit. He still paints fakes, but he sells them as fakes – doesn’t try to pass them off as real. Which begs the question, why would anyone knowingly buy a fake?

 

Rewriting the Timeline of Indigenous History in America (52:48)

Guest: Sturt Manning, Professor of Archaeology, Cornell University 

Pretty much everything we know about what was going on in North America before the British colonies were founded comes from the travelogues of European explorers like Christopher Columbus, Ponce De Leon, Jacques Cartier. Historians and archaeologists have used the reports of those explorers to piece together the history of indigenous people who were already in North America in the 1500 and 1600s. So, the problem here is that we’ve written the history of indigenous people through the lens of the colonizers. And now more scientific techniques – like carbon dating – are revealing just how wrong that history is.

 

Human Challenge Trials for the COVID-19 Vaccine (1:07:37)

Guest: Matthew Memoli, MD, Director of the Laboratory of Infectious Diseases Clinical Studies Unit, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases

Would you be willing to get intentionally infected with the virus that causes COVID-19 if it would speed up development of a vaccine? An initiative called “1 Day Sooner” has already found 25,000 people willing to get sick for science. And crazy as it sounds, it’s not entirely unusual for healthy humans to be voluntarily infected with a virus in vaccine research. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has been doing it with influenza virus for about ten years.

 

Parent Previews (1:22:03)

Guest: Kirsten Hawkes, ParentPreviews.com

Kirsten talks about movies that celebrate families.