Viewpoints Radio
Award-winning reporting on current issues featuring America's leading experts.
With the opioid epidemic raging on into 2022, what’s on the forefront of treatment research when it comes to better tackling substance use disorders? Dr. Anna Rose Childress, a professor and psychiatrist at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, joins us this week to breakdown the decades-long epidemic, the challenges of treating …
Dr. Susan Shaheen, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California-Berkeley, joins us this week to highlight the country’s current infrastructure and what more needs to be done to promote greater citizen mobility with bikes, scooters and other non-motor modes of transportation.
By 2030, 74 million Baby Boomers in the U.S. will be 65 or older. As people age, this means bigger burdens on the healthcare system, senior housing and care. But, what if one day, we could slow down this process of biological aging? Two researchers from Northwestern University join us this week to share some of the latest innovations in the anti-aging field.
In the U.S., there are roughly 19 million people with felony convictions. For this population, finding stable work can be a tumultuous and draining process. Without a job, it can be all too easy to slide back into a past life and end up behind bars once again.
Last minute emails. Gift buying. Traveling. Sometimes the holiday to-do list can feel never-ending. It can be a stressful period. We speak with psychiatrist Dr. Frank Anderson about the importance of setting boundaries and expectations this holiday season.
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.
Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson both made history last month as they rocketed out of Earth’s atmosphere and successfully reached space. This trip was many years in the making as both billionaires built their own respective companies, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, to transport them to space as private civilians. Now, people are lining up and paying hefty …
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?
Dr. Emmanuel Urquieta, from the Center for Space Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine, joins Viewpoints this week to help us understand some of the health impacts of spending time in space and the hurdles that come with longer missions like sending humans to Mars.
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.
Kids are always on their phones, tablets or computers – even when they’re sitting across from one another at the lunch table! Does communicating via screens hurt kids? We talk to two researchers who found that too much screen time at the cost of face-to-face communication could decrease our ability to recognize emotions, and possibly even shorten our lives.
One fact that was brought out during the onslaught of that Hurricane Sandy was the need to update our nation’s weather forecasting and emergency management systems. We talk to a journalist and author who conducted research on the storm, the systems that tracked it and found out how our weather forecasting, tracking and evacuation protocols and equipment need …
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