WBEZ's Tech Shift

The nonprofit organization Sunlight Foundation has been keeping track of the tweets politicians didn’t want you to see anymore. The site, called Politwoops, saved the tweets deleted by lawmakers. For the past three years, it tracked thousands of blunders and position changes. It also helped track how Twitter was being used for political discourse. But last week, Twitter suspended Sunlight’s access to its information, shutting down Politwoops. The move raises questions about how the social network balances privacy with the public’s right to know what their politicians are up to online. WBEZ web producer Chris Hagan tells us more.

The tiny bombardier beetle is explosive. Literally. To fight off predators, it creates explosions inside its abdomen that allows it spray a stream of chemicals at its foes. Now scientists are studying this phenomenon in more detail to see if the bug’s defense mechanism might have practical applications for things like body armor and crash helmets. Dr. Wah-Keat Lee worked on this at Argonne National Laboratory in the south suburbs. He’s now a scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York.

In 2014 microbes collected from our favorite Chicago dinosaur, that would be the Field Museum’s Sue the T-Rex , were launched into space. It was part of an effort to send microbes from all kinds of earth environments into space to see how they grow. The point? To learn how microbes associated with everyday human life react in a closed, limited-gravity environment and what implications this may have for humans during long-term space travel. Now, the results are in. Dr. David Coil, Project MERCCURI researcher and a Project Scientist in the Microbiology Lab of Jonathan Eisen at the University of California at Davis, joins us with details on the experiment.

Thousands of people across the country are taking part in the third annual National Day of Civic Hacking. Groups in more than 100 cities will meet to design apps, websites and services to try to solve problems in their communities. Chicago is hosting four events in 2015, with goals from improving neighborhoods to creating more sustainable fisheries. Christopher Whitaker, the Chicago Brigade Captain for Code for America, and Steven Philpott, a Social Ventures Fellow at the Center for Neighborhood Technology, join us along with Kelly Borden, the Citizen Science Education Lead at Adler Planetarium, to fill us in on this year’s event.

The FCC proposes subsidizing broadband access for the poor; Google introduces some pretty fantastic technology; and the latest supercomputing news. Those are just a few stories we explore on our Tech Shift Week in Review. We’re joined by Argonne’s Deputy Director for its leadership computing facility, Susan Coghlan, as well as our WBEZ super digital guy, Tim Akimoff.

All week on Tech Shift we’re talking about opportunities for kids to boost their STEM skills over the summer. WBEZ digital producer and co-host of the Nerdette podcast, Tricia Bobeda, joins us in studio with some science, engineering, technology and math resources Chicago once school lets out.

All this week on Tech Shift we’re looking at summer camp options for kids that focus on science, math or technology. With dozens of camps out there - and some with tuition that costs about $1,000 a week - how do you know which one is worth the price? We thought we’d turn to the people at Chicago Tech Academy for some advice. They sift through many of these programs for their high school students. Principal Linnea Garrett joins us, along with one of her school’s programming language teachers, Kevin Musiorski.

Now that the Memorial Day weekend is over, students around Chicago are counting down to the end of the school year. And for some, that means coding camp is right around the corner. All this week on Tech Shift, we’re looking at different options kids have to explore science, technology, engineering and math over the summer. We examine a new program from the civic tech group Smart Chicago called Youth-led Tech. Its goal is to introduce students on the South and West sides to coding, and to teach them how to translate their new-found programming skills into a job. Joining us to talk about that is Smart Chicago Executive Director Dan O’Neil, and Dr. Toni Irving, Executive Director of Get In Chicago, a violence prevention and reduction program.

Questions about 1871’s success - a big win for local company Everpurse - and Washington’s working on helping modernize health care technology. It’s Tech Shift Week in review.

It’s a Robot revolution! At least at the Museum of Science and Industry. We took a field trip to the museum to see the exhibit aimed at introducing the public to the future of robotics. “Robot Revolution” starts here in Chicago then goes on a national tour. It runs at the MSI May 21 through January 3.