Even before the COVID-19 pandemic there was a lot of misinformation about vaccines floating around on social media. Public health agencies have been trying to figure out what to do. It turns out that one of the most powerful remedies is also one of the simplest.

UnDisciplined

Undisciplined: Combatting Vaccine Misinformation

There is nothing more damaging to a nation’s economy than a war on its own soil. But the way we think about the long-term economic consequences of war is often tied up in political instability and reconstruction and the cost of care for veterans. That’s all correct, but my guest this week says we’ve overlooked something: The long-term damage to agriculture.

Undisciplined: Death In The Soil

As a counselor and a researcher, Stacey Litam had focused her career on helping victims of sex trafficking to work through their trauma. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and while Litam’s previous work didn’t become less important, she began seeing a growing need for trauma counseling — just about everywhere.

Undisciplined: COVID-19 And Compounding Trauma

Even if you’re a judge, a prosecutor or a police officer, you might not have given a lot of thought to the question of why we punish people. You might simply conclude that we punish people when they need to be punished. Developmental psychologist Julia Marshall isn’t satisfied with that sort of simplicity. We’ll talk to her about when and why we punish.

Undisciplined: Of Puppets And Punishment

What is your responsibility when you see injustice being done? For Amos Guiora, this is a deeply personal question stemming from his family’s experiences in one of the greatest atrocities in human history. And now he’s sharing that story.

Undisciplined: Innocent Bystanders?

The last time the United States Capitol was breached was in 1814, when British troops burned the building using furniture and books from the Library of Congress as fuel. Last week, the capitol was breached again – and that’s raising a lot of questions about the state of our nation. We’re going to work through some of those questions with former CIA analyst Jeannie Johnson.

Undisciplined: National Security Now

There are a lot of ways 2020 is going to be remembered and, to be honest, a lot of us will probably remember it as a pretty terrible year, for very obvious reasons. But here at Utah Public Radio, we’re also going to remember 2020 as a year in which we learned some amazing things about our world.

Undisciplined: 2020 Year In Review

No human has ventured farther than 250,000 miles from earth. So what we know about what lies beyond us is limited to what we can see through data collection. But why limit the potential of understanding data to what we can see in images? Why not turn it into something we can touch or something we can hear?

Undisciplined: The Sounds Of Space

In philosophy, the absurd refers to the conflict between the human desire to find meaning in life and the fact that the more you search, the harder it is to find. This is what makes universities such absurd places. And through the use of a fictional college called Payne University, author Julie Schumacher puts that absurdity on full display.

Undisciplined: The Absurdity Of Academia

Have you ever found it strange that one of the ways that we let people know we care about them is by gently making fun of them? Teasing is a weird sort of thing – a combination between aggression and play. And researchers from UCLA wanted to know where it came from. This week, we’re going to talk about what they learned.

Undisciplined: Oh, You Tease

This week on Undisciplined, we’re talking about monarch caterpillars, ancient big-game hunters, and of course we’ll be talking about the biggest news in science this month — two apparently effective vaccines for COVID-19.

Undisciplined: November Science News Roundup

Stopping the decimation of rainforests is unquestionably important to slowing climate change. But simply protecting forests often excludes and disenfranchises local communities. This week we’re talking about a different way of addressing this problem — a pairing of ecology with healthcare.

Undisciplined: Healthy Forests, Healthy People

Without having a really good reason for doing so, nobody in their right mind would put a dead fish into a ziploc bag, attach it to wires to an electric stimulator, and release it into a tank with an electric eel. But thankfully, Kenneth Catania had a perfectly good reason for doing all of that. Or maybe he’s not in his right mind. Either way, the result was a revelation about the eel — evidence that eels don’t just use their capacity to stun prey with zaps of electricity to kill, but also to sense the world around them.

Undisciplined: Senses and Sensibility

2020 has been rough. I don’t know about you, but there were a lot of times this year that I just wanted to go to sleep and wake up a few months later. Well, it turns out that someday we might be able to do that. Some scientists think humans might, in the future, be able to hibernate. And while that’s a long ways off, there’s a lot we can learn from hibernating species in the meantime.

Undisciplined: The Bear Necessities

Although the national election and COVID-19 pandemic continue to dominate the news cycle, there is other news out there — and the worlds of science, exploration and research are moving along with fascinating new discoveries. We’re discussing ancient hibernation, tiny robot surgeons, a new kind of thermometer, and the world-changing power of CRISPR. From the University of Utah, where she is the director of Marketing and Communications at the David Eccles School of Business, is Sheena McFarland, an immense science buff with a degree in biology teaching whose work as a journalist includes features on space exploration. And also with us for his third time on the round-up is Rodrigo Noriega. He is an assistant professor of physical and material chemistry, also at the University of Utah, with a research agenda focused on macro-molecular materials. And finally, Mirella Meyer-Ficca also first joined us in 2019 to talk about her team’s work to genetically engineer a mouse that is dependent on

Undisciplined: October Science News Roundup

Each week, UnDisciplined introduces its audience to two scientists, working in different fields – and then introduces them to each other. The result is a lively, informative and accessible discussion about the ways in which scientific research impacts all of our lives.

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UnDisciplined

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