Matthew LaPlante
UnDisciplined HostMatthew LaPlante has reported on ritual infanticide in Northern Africa, insurgent warfare in the Middle East, the legacy of genocide in Southeast Asia, and gang violence in Central America. But a few years back, something occurred to him: Maybe the news doesn't have to be so brutally depressing all the time. These days, he balances his continuing work on more heartbreaking subjects with his work on UnDisciplined — Utah Public Radio's weekly program on science and discovery.
He is the author of "Superlative: The Biology of Extremes," the co-author of multiple other books on the intersection of science and society, and has led or contributed to more than 20 studies on climate variability and climate change. He earned a bachelor's degree in liberal arts from Oregon State University, a master's in education from California State University East Bay, and a doctorate in climate science from Utah State University.
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What happens when you take a 60-year-old American muscle car and replace its gas-powered engine with an electric motor? The result is a car that looks and feels like a classic, but drives like something from the future. This week, we take a ride in a newly electrified piece of automotive history and explore what it tells us about the future of transportation. -
You Can See Everything is earning widespread acclaim for pushing the boundaries between reality, performance, and fiction. But that doesn’t mean it’s doing anything new. In fact, documentary director and editor Genéa Gaudet has spoken on how filmmakers have been blurring those lines for a very long time.
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Throughout human history, civilizations have lost touch with knowledge, traditions, and practices that their ancestors developed over thousands of years — a phenomenon that has been called “the Great Forgetting.” Now, author June Cohen believes we’re overdue for a “Great Remembering."
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For centuries, we have tended to associate consciousness with the most sophisticated things our brains can do: thought, reason, language, memory. But Antonio Damasio argues that we should be looking somewhere much more ancient, and much more humble: Hunger. Thirst. Warmth. Cold. Pleasure. Pain.His argument is that consciousness begins with a living organism sensing the condition of its own body. At some point in the history of life, being alive began to feel like something.
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Moonshots are big, audacious ideas that have the potential to change the world. Today, they've become synonymous with Silicon Valley and vast corporations.But Salima Bhimani, who worked at Alphabet, Google’s parent company, helping its famous “Other Bets” arm, believes we've made the concept of moonshots too simple and too insular. Some of the most consequential innovations in human history didn't require billion-dollar startups, and some of the people with the most important ideas today may live thousands of miles from Silicon Valley, without access to its money, networks or privilege.
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Moonshots are big, audacious ideas that have the potential to change the world. Today, they've become synonymous with Silicon Valley and vast corporations.But Salima Bhimani, who worked at Alphabet, Google’s parent company, helping its famous “Other Bets” arm, believes we've made the concept of moonshots too simple and too insular. Some of the most consequential innovations in human history didn't require billion-dollar startups, and some of the people with the most important ideas today may live thousands of miles from Silicon Valley, without access to its money, networks or privilege.
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If you've lived in the United States for a long time, you probably know that when someone tells you a doctor is “out of network,” that’s important, or that having health insurance doesn’t necessarily mean your healthcare is free.But how did you learn all of that? There’s nothing particularly intuitive about it.Now imagine arriving in the United States from a country where healthcare works very differently. You’re given an insurance card, a link to a website and, if you’re lucky, a short orientation on healthcare terminology.This is often not enough in times of crisis, leading Akshata Balghare to investigate how much of the difficulty of navigating this system comes from the system itself… and how much comes from the way we explain it.
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There are a lot of rich and powerful people in Silicon Valley who have said some strange things about democracy.It would be easy to dismiss some of this as tech entrepreneurs doing what tech entrepreneurs have always done: dreaming about moving fast and breaking stuff, and making enormous claims about the future.But the journalist Gil Durán thinks that dismissing all of this as blather would be a mistake.In his new book, The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy, Durán argues that these ideas actually belong to an emerging political ideology — one that has moved from obscure books and blogs into some of the most powerful institutions in the United States.
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We tend to think that using something until it wears out is good for the planet. But what do we do if the thing we’re using up and wearing out is damaging our environment along the way? When does getting rid of something that still works become the more sustainable choice? -
We all know politicians, advertisers and social media algorithms are trying to influence what we believe. But what about our own brains? How do we know when our beliefs are helping us, and when we’re instead engaged in a form of inner propaganda? And how can we use this knowledge to our advantage?
