Matthew LaPlante
Matthew LaPlante is host of the science show Undisciplined, heard on Utah Public Radio every Thursday at 10:30 a.m.Matthew 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 donned on him: Maybe the news doesn't have to be brutally depressing all the time. Today, he balances his continuing work on more heartbreaking subjects by writing books about the intersection of science, human health and society, including the New York Times best-selling Lifespan with geneticist David Sinclair and the Nautilus Award-winning Longevity Plan with cardiologist John Day. His first solo book, Superlative, looks at what scientists are learning by studying organisms that have evolved in record-setting ways, and his is currently at work on another book about embracing the inevitability of human-caused climate change with an optimistic outlook on the future.
LaPlante is host of the science show Undisciplined, heard on Utah Public Radio every Thursday at 10:30 a.m.
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Slavery in the United States is often thought to be an institution of the American South, but western states played a part as well. In Utah, a law passed in 1852 made slavery and the slave trade legal, and this law was passed under the urging of the first territorial governor, Brigham Young. Historian Paul Reeve joins the program to discuss newly unearthed documents about Brigham Young and Utah's history.
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Water crises are nothing new. Indeed they’ve influenced the very course of human history again and again but we’ve never had a planet with 10 billion people on it before, and so can we solve the water crisis at a global scale?
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If we are going to go to Mars, we’re going to need to bring a lot of things that we need to live that the red planet, so far as we can tell, just doesn’t have... and that includes bugs.
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Autism Spectrum Disorder exists on a continuum of behaviors, capabilities, and deviations from norms — and for a very long time, that spectrum didn't include much space for girls.
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Almost all large organizations — from government entities to universities to private businesses — engage in sexual harassment prevention training. And yet the problem persists.
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The recent disaster in Maui was the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than a century, and it has highlighted a gaping hole in the country's disaster response.
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Consider for a moment what our world would look like without seeds.
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There are no openly gay players in any of the five major men's sports leagues in the United States. But that's not because there are no gay players in those leagues.
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Personalized medicine sounds like a good idea. But what sounds like a good idea in theory might not be working in practice.
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There's a force that people don't think much about — the existential terror of accepting the truth about global warming. But what if we didn't have to be afraid?