We Know Some Stuff

Land - important

Food - really important

People - incredibly important

But who is going to connect them all? That’s where Elisabeth Miltenburg comes in. She studies the connections between the foods native to the lands of the native people who settled in modern day Guelph many years ago. But why is the connection to food and land so important? Listen to what Elisabeth has to say:

Maybe you don’t produce honey, but that doesn’t mean you are not a bee. Furthermore that doesn’t mean you don’t deserve saving! Sage Handler saves the bees by studying the habits of cavity nesting bees. Listen to her buzz about bees

How do you convince someone to change the way they have done something for hundreds (maybe thousands) of years? Agricultural practices contribute a lot to climate change, so people like Lisa Ashton are working towards building bridges from science to policy and find incentives for farmers to adopt green practices to reduce their contribution to climate change. Listen to her build some bridges below!

Does wasted food scraps burn you up on the inside? Tara Allohverdi feels the same way! She burns food biomass (agricultural and food scraps) to make “biochar” a product similar to charcoal and great for giving plants nutrients they need to grow. Listen to Tara explain her burning passion for biochar.

Pumping iron and pumping blood! Your muscles need blood to flow through them when you exercise, and scientists want to know how, when, and why. Jeremy Cohen is one of those scientists and he is squeezing muscles to find out the answers to those questions.

Why do a job when you can program a computer to do it for you!? Even more so when you don’t even know if the answer to your problem is buried in a library of data. Bianca Lepe is the librarian behind telling a computer how to search for the right proteins to put into the next tuberculosis vaccine. She uses Natural Language Processing, but how about you just naturally process her spoken language by listening to the episode below.

Emotions! Who needs them!? Turns out you had emotions your whole life! But how does a child’s brain process emotions? Adaeze Egwuatu wants to see what kids are “thinking” when they see social images (pie vs. friends hugging). I’m thinking I want pie. Listen to how Adaeze is working to better understand this very expansive topic

Ever have a long stressful day at work? If so, you and squirrels may have more in common than you think. Alannah Grant studies squirrel stress. She is not a rodent therapist, but she does know a lot about the environmental factors that contribute to the stress levels of our furry neighbors. Who, what, where, when, and why? Let Alannah answer those question in this episode

Imagine you stepped through a portal into a parallel world that had all your same friends, family, and acquaintances. The two worlds are quite similar expect everyone is more extreme – they look better, seem to travel all the time, are deeply in love, etc. Do you think if you spent more time in this parallel, extreme world that it would have an impact on your thinking? Well most of us travel to this parallel world everyday through connecting to social media, and in today’s episode we explore how social media can change your thinking by the extreme content you view.

Wow that was well written! That’s because Josh wrote it! Listen to the episode to hear more!

Sara Striker does some real tear jerking work with onions. She fights the good fight against moldy onion leaves. But it turns out, finding the solution to eradicating onion mold is a moving target. So its a good think Sara never stops moving!