Viewpoints Radio
Award-winning reporting on current issues featuring America's leading experts.
For many decades, scientists have been trying to decode this disease with no avail. Instead, more questions keep popping up as we learn more about this complex disease and face dead ends in treatment exploration. Two experts in the field join Viewpoints this week to shed some light on modern Alzheimer’s research.
Many people are worried that non-native plants and animals are invading the U.S. and preventing native species from thriving. Each year, a lot of money and time is spent trying to rid the land of these aliens - often to no avail. But, are these species present because they’re the only ones that can exist in that environment?
How often do you skim a headline and feel like that’s all you need to know? Or gather your daily news from a Twitter or Facebook feed? Economist & journalist Tim Harford joins Viewpoints this week to share the impacts of sensationalized or one-sided information and how we can all become more inquisitive consumers of content.
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has developed a quick and affordable saliva-based test that makes it possible for students, faculty and staff to get checked twice a week for COVID-19. We speak with one of its creators, Dr. Martin Burke about the largescale implementation of this method and the upcoming challenges with flu season quickly …
Being a teenager is tough these days – but being a parent to a teenager can be even be tougher sometimes. Over the last five years, two researchers, who are parents themselves, traveled across the world to observe several different animal species and their socialization out in the wild. The focus? To possibly better understand our own adolescence and …
Did you know that dogs can smell up to 100,000 times better than the average person? Most of us are familiar with service or police dogs using their nose to sniff out a particular scent, but researchers have been recently harnessing the power of a dogs nose to find malaria, diabetes and even some of the hardest-to-detect cancers.
Journalist and author Dahr Jamail exposes how climate change is affecting our ecosystems and natural landscape, including the melting and disappearance of massive ice glaciers. We discuss the long-term consequences of global warming and what we can do as a society to reverse the damage.
We’ve all seen how our fiction portrays cybercrime, but what does it really look like? Jonathan Lusthaus, the director of the Human Cybercriminal Project at the University of Oxford, joins the show to talk about the real crimes committed online and what, if anything, we can do to protect ourselves.
We know about the planets within the Milky Way Galaxy, but what about planets outside of our neighborhood? We talk to Dr. Donald Goldsmith about “exoplanets” and where science stands on the issue of life thriving somewhere else in the universe.
The recent shooting in Parkland, Florida has ignited a public debate over gun reform, but what are the real facts about gun violence in America? And, who is actually researching the phenomenon? Researcher Adam Pah says one thing missing from the gun reform debates are the essential data points that should be informing future policy decisions.
We talk to two experts about the need for average citizens to be the eyes and ears of big data collecting projects.
We explore the importance of high-quality pre-k schooling, and tips for parents on how to spot a good program from a bad one.
We talk to two “citizen scientist” advocates about the importance of having average citizens be the eyes and ears of large research projects.
Our guest has studied animal intelligence and discusses how neuroscience and biology are coming up with new definitions of what it means to be an intelligent animal.
