Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

UnDisciplined: Science News Roundup - October 2019

STEVE GSCHMEISSNER/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
One of the science news stories we're discussing this month is about the cool way tardigrades use their own DNA to stay alive.

It's the October science news roundup! This month, we're talking about the little tiny monsters of the present, the really big monsters of the past, the really scary things people do on Earth, and the even scarier stuff out there in outer space. 

We're joined this month by Sheena McFarland, science enthusiast and director of marketing and communication at the University of Utah's David Eccles School of Business; Lisa Aspinwall, a social psychologist and the University of Utah whose research focuses on the ways people plan, control, and revise their actions related to disease risk and chronic illness; and Oné R. Pagan, science writer and professor of biology at West Chester University in Pennsylvania. 

Links to the science news stories we discussed this month:

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.