Matthew LaPlante

All across the world’s oceans, you can find creatures known as larvaceans – free-swimming invertebrates with a superpower, of sorts. 

They make huge structures out of snot. 

And that might sound gross, but it turns out that there’s a lot we can learn from these animals, and this week we’ll talk to a researcher who has just made a breakthrough in our ability to do just that.

We all know that exercise is good for us — that’s sort of a given. But have you ever thought about whether one sort of exercise is better than others? Is cycling better than golf? Is golf better than baseball? Is running really the gold-standard for exercise that everyone thinks it is? Demographic sociologist Connor Sheehan thinks he’s got the answers — and they might surprise you.

  As it was becoming clear that the United States was going to be one of the epicenters of the COVID-19 pandemic, I was asked to talk to a group of climate adaptation students about crisis communication — and I worried at first that I wouldn’t be able to draw lines between two very different crises. It turns out, though, that these crises have a lot in common.

We’re talking to three researchers who came together, across very different disciplines, to try to do something to address a problem that affects millions of American children: how can we make the experience of visiting an incarcerated parent a little bit less traumatic?

We’re talking about an ancient ancestor of modern anchovies, a fearsome fish that swam the seas about 55 million years ago — and, like so many other ancient creatures, it was a lot scarier back then that it is now.

  Since the unification of the northern and southern dynasties in China 1,500 years ago, Chinese chefs have been making fried rice. And if you have never stopped to watch a master chef go to work preparing this dish, you are missing out.

Fried rice is prepared in a wok using a tossing technique that enables food to cook without burning at temperatures of 1,200 degrees Celsius — that’s 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit.

And there is a deep, beautiful, ancient art to this. But as our guest will explain, there’s a whole lot of science, too.

We all know that meals bring people together. But when it comes to building trust and cooperation, it turns out that not all meals are created equal. And this week on the program, we're talking to a researcher whose work has shown that people eating from shared serving plates are more likely to work together rather than compete. 

We're talking to two mathematicians who have harnessed the power of numbers to solve one of the biggest challenges of the kitchen: how to cook a perfect steak. And yes, this is a fun and whimsical use of math, but it's also a true accomplishment in macromolecular science.

Today on the program, we are talking to Jill Suitor, one of the founders of a nearly 20 year old study focused on the relationships parents have with their adult children and, in particular, their favorite children. Yes, it's true parents have favorites. And children are often wrong about who that favorite is.

This week on Undisciplined, we’re talking about the ways in which being innocent of a crime could make someone more likely to confess. And if that sounds like something that might only happen under really extreme circumstances, consider this: in nearly a third of the convictions that are later overturned by DNA evidence, the person who was convicted had at some point confessed to the crime.

This week on Undisciplined, we’re talking about one of the world’s most poisonous creatures. Now, maybe right now you’re thinking of a snake. Or a jellyfish. Or a little yellow frog. And those are all good guesses. But the toxin that Charles Hanifin is studying might be even more powerful than the toxins that come from any of those animals. And its source might surprise you.  

This week on Undisciplined, we’re talking about jargon — specialized words or expressions that are used by people in a particular profession and which are difficult for other to understand. The sciences are particularly replete with these words, and that’s not a small problem. Our guest this week is a communications professor who says that insider language tells people that they don’t belong.  

This week on Undisciplined, in the wake of the devastating wildfires in Australia, we’re talking about setting fires to avoid fires. And if that sounds counterintuitive and even dangerous to you, then you’re not alone. Because even though prescribed burning has been shown to be very effective at reducing wildfire risks, it remains an underutilized tactic, in part because of the perceived risks.  

This week on Undisciplined, we’re going to talk about climate solutions. And here’s the curveball: while you might think that politically conservative states are an unlikely place to find a science-backed roadmap for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, that might not be the case.   

When we told psychologist Joshua Jackson that we were going to ask him to have a discussion with an expert in tree genetics, he wasn’t sure how it would go. But after the conversation, Jackson marvelled at just how interconnected their two worlds of research were. 

We think you will, too.

This week on the program, we’re talking about how to use genetics to reduce pollution. Then we’re going to talk about how words that convey emotion overlap and diverge as they evolve in different languages. And then, as we’re wont to do, we’re going to bring these two very different areas of research together.  

This week on Undisciplined, we’re talking about “Project Iceworm,” a secret U.S. government project to build nuclear launch sites in northern Greenland back in the 1960s. Now the project site is getting a renewed look by scientists, thanks to a 1.3-kilometer-long ice core sample that was extracted from the site and kept in storage for more than 50 years. What secrets does it hold?

This week on Undisciplined, we’re talking about the impact of sports on human behavior and impact of chaos on plants, with guests whose fields couldn’t be more different. Or, at least, that’s what it looks like at first.

This week on Undisciplined, we’re talking about the black market exchange of diabetes medications in the United States and the evolution of vocal traits of a small, nocturnal primate in Indonesia, with guests whose work is very different, but whose drive to ask and answer complicated questions is very much the same.

The focus of this best of Access Utah is science.  Tom William's guest for the day is Matthew LaPlante, associate professor of journalism at USU and host of Undisciplined, which airs Friday's at 2pm on UPR.  We hear excerpts from Access Utah interviews with Timothy Winegard, author of "The Mosquito," and Wayne Wurtsbaugh, Professor emeritus of watershed science, where we discuss the Great Salt Lake.

What if aging wasn't inevtiable? What if being 90 felt pretty much the same as being 40, just with a few extra decades of life experience? And what if the science that gets us to that point in human history wasn't the subject of speculative fiction — what if it was real? 

A half century after Lloyd Eaton coached the Wyoming Cowboys football team, he isn’t remembered for his gridiron prowess or ability to win. 

The world's largest land mammal could help us end cancer. The fastest bird is showing us how to solve a century-old engineering mystery. The oldest tree is giving us insights into climate change. The loudest whale is offering clues about the impact of solar storms.

For a long time, scientists ignored superlative life forms as outliers. Increasingly, though, researchers are coming to see great value in studying plants and animals that exist on the outermost edges of the bell curve.

On this special pledge drive edition of Access Utah. My co-host is Access Utah founding host and former UPR Program Director Lee Austin. We’ll feature new conversations with USU Associate Professor of Journalism Matthew LaPlante and BBC host Dan Damon. We’ll be talking about the media landscape in the U.S. and the U.K. We’ll also talk about all the latest twists and turns in the Brexit saga.

In UnDisciplined's first ever monthly science news roundup, we're joined by three researchers, plus a fellow science enthusiast, to take a look at recent science news through a bunch of different perspectives.