Pizza Lunch Podcasts
from the New York Times (Registration Required)
Not long ago, a woman in Tacoma, Wash., received a suggestion from Facebook that she "friend" another woman. She didn't know the other woman, but she followed through, as many of us have, innocently laying our cookie-crumb trails through cyberspace, only to get a surprise.
On the other woman's profile page was a wedding picture--of her and the first woman's husband, now exposed for all the cyberworld to see as a bigamist.
And so it goes in the era of what is called Big Data, in which more and more information about our lives--where we shop and what we buy, indeed where we are right now--the economy, the genomes of countless organisms we can't even name yet, galaxies full of stars we haven't counted, traffic jams in Singapore and the weather on Mars tumbles faster and faster through bigger and bigger computers down to everybody's fingertips, which are holding devices with more processing power than the Apollo mission control. Big Data probably knows more about us than we ourselves do, but is there stuff that Big Data itself doesn't know it knows? Big Data is watching us, but who or what is watching Big Data?
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Current therapies are very good at keeping HIV under control, but
they never completely cure it. That may change, if David Margolis and
his colleagues are successful. As a physician and researcher at the
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Margolis studies the
molecular biology of HIV infections. He is looking for ways to
completely eradicate the virus from infected individuals.
In this podcast, Margolis speaks with associate editor Elsa Youngsteadt
about what it will take to cure a person (or a mouse) of HIV.
Margolis spoke at Sigma Xi headquarters in January 2012.
Podcast music is “Spot,” by Ardent Octopus, courtesy of Mevio’s Music Alley.
Funding for Pizza Lunches is provided by the North Carolina Biotechnology Center.
In the scanning electron micrograph above, HIV virus particles appear as green spheres on a human immune cell (a lymphocyte, colored here in pink). (Image courtesy of the CDC Public Health Image Library.)
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Duke University geneticist Misha Angrist’s genome is a public document, thanks to his participation in Harvard’s Personal Genome Project. Angrist reflects on the medical and ethical implications of the project in his 2010 book, Here is a Human Being: At the Dawn of Personal Genomics.
In this podcast, he speaks with associate editor Cathy Clabby about his experience.
Angrist spoke at the Sigma Xi headquarters in October 2011.
Podcast music is “Spot,” by Ardent Octopus, courtesy of Mevio’s Music Alley.
Funding for Pizza Lunches is provided by the North Carolina Biotechnology Center.
Download the MP3 audio file for this podcast.
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North Carolina State University entomologist Coby Schal discusses the return of bed bugs, why pesticides won’t stop them and the best theories for why the tiny pests are spreading around the world. (Jan. 25, 2011)
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Phaedra Boinodiris, Serious Games program manager at IBM, explains how she designs computer games that teach students and trainees to solve complex problems in business management and city planning. (May 25, 2010)
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James Evans, a clinical researcher in genetics at the University of North Carolina and a member of the U.S. Secretary of Health's advisory committee on Genetics, Health and Society, urges us to support genomics medicine research, but asks us to temper our enthusiasm until it becomes a proven tool. (April 20, 2010)
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Total Records : 19