Today's guest is Christopher Robertson, Associate Dean for Research and Innovation and Professor of Law at the University of Arizona. His background and research interests overlap several academic disciplines, including bioethics, health law, incentives, behavioral economics and more. His CV includes a PhD in philosophy and a law degree from Harvard.
Colin Miller and Dr. Keith Mankin host the popular medical podcast, PeerSpectrum. Colin works in the medical device space and Keith is a retired pediatric orthopedic surgeon.
Supreme Court Justice and gender equality pioneer Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away at the age of 87 on Friday. The immediate response online and elsewhere was a mix of grief, fear, gratitude and determination.
Within 24 hours of her passing, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and President Trump both said they would move forward to replace her, despite her dying wish as well as past precedent set in 2016. We talk to constitutional law professor Leah Litman about Ginsburg’s legacy and what’s next for the court.
And in headlines: Tiktok and WeChat live to die another day, the US passes 200,000 Covid-19 deaths, and why people are buying flights to nowhere.
Antifa claims to be an anti-fascist organization that fights white supremacy and discrimination. But the group's true aim is to overthrow the American government, says Martin Scott Catino, a Fulbright scholar and member of the nonprofit Anti-Communist Action Team, which exposes communism's lies through research and personal stories.
Catino, who has spent over 20 years studying terrorist organizations, joins the podcast to explain Antifa's tactics to gain support and how its spread its propaganda.
Also on today’s show, we read your letters to the editor and share a good news story about a new pro-life documentary featuring former NFL tight end Benjamin Watson.
Located approximately 100km east of Rotterdam, the city of Nijmegen is a mid-sized Dutch city situated on the Waal river that few people outside of the Netherlands are familiar with.
For the last several years, every single day regardless of the weather, people of Nijmegen have honored events that took place in the city 76 years ago.
Learn more about the city of Nijmegen and the daily Sunset March on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Some East Africans have a genetic mutation which gives them resistance to Malaria. Investigations into how it works have produced a surprising finding. As researcher Silvia Kariuki explains it’s all to do with the surface tension of the red blood cells.
SARS-CoV- 2 can pass from people in the very early stages of Covid -19, before they show symptoms. New research shows identifying cases at this early stage is crucial to controlling the pandemic. And yet most testing regimes require symptoms to show before testing. Luca Ferretti did this latest analysis.
And how about getting up close with virus? That’s what Camille Ehre has done, using an electron microscope to produce remarkable pictures of the virus as it attacks lung tissue.
Carl Wunsch tells us of a technique he developed in the 1970s to measure changes in global ocean temperatures using sound waves. Revisiting this method may give us insight into the impact of climate change on the deep ocean.
And Many of us willingly subject ourselves to pain and irritation by eating chilli. CrowdScience listener Tina wonders what’s driving this apparent masochism: why does ‘feeling the burn’ make so many of us feel so good?
It’s just one of several tasty questions we tuck into in this episode. Also on the menu is stew: why does it taste better the next day? Listener Helen’s local delicacy is Welsh cawl, a meat and vegetable concoction. Tradition dictates it should be eaten the day after it’s made, but is there any science behind this?
And we finish the meal with cheese. Listener Leander asks what makes some cheeses blue, some hard and crumbly, and some run all over your fridge. How is milk transformed into such radically different end products?
This week Kraken Financial became the first crypto company to receive a banking charter under Wyoming's Special Purpose Depository Institution statute. On this Speaking of Bitcoin episode, Join CEO David Kinitsky for a look at what it all means and how it'll work with hosts Adam B. Levine, Andreas M. Antonopoulos and Stephanie Murphy.
In the early days of Bitcoin, there were no rules, or at least none that people understood. The first batch of companies were focused entirely on functionality; Simply making things possible that before crypto had been impossible.
In the aftermath of the collapse of first MTGox and then later TheDAO, it became obvious that rules did apply, or at least would moving forward. But what wasn't very clear was how they'd apply as different regulatory bodies claimed authority in confusing and often conflicting ways.
As law, if not order, came to the industry, much of crypto's first wave of US based exchanges were crushed as they struggled to get legal, a challenging task with different rules and unique compliance burdens for each state and territory they'd operate in. New York famously introduced the Bitlicense, which in the five years since it's introduction has approved just 25 companies to operate in the U.S. financial hub.
On today's show Kraken Financial CEO David Kinitsky joins the discussion of just how much things have changed as Kraken becomes the first crypto company to receive a banking charter under Wyoming's Special Purpose Depository Institution statute. And more importantly, what happens next.
Credits
This episode was edited by Adam B. Levine, with music provided by Jared Rubens.
The highly-anticipated launch of Ethereum 2.0 is expected to have little to no impact on users and decentralized applications (dapps) currently operating on Ethereum. But in the years after its launch, Ethereum developer Danny Ryan expects the upgrade to radically improve network performance and security.
There will be what Ryan calls a “precise point of transition,” where at one block the Ethereum blockchain is progressed and secured through the activity of mining and at the next block it is secured through validating. These two systems of block creation and transaction validation are called proof-of-work (PoW) and proof-of-stake (PoS), respectively.
The Ethereum 2.0 upgrade is the technology and multi-year roadmap intended to transition the world’s second largest blockchain by market capitalization from PoW to PoS.
There are several security concerns that still need to be addressed by Ethereum developers to ensure that at this point of transition, there is no possibility for 51 percent attacks, block reorganizations, and other edge cases jeopardizing user funds and network data.
To this end, Liz Steininger, CEO of blockchain security company Least Authority, recommends additional audits of Ethereum 2.0 code in preparation for what developers are calling Phase 1.5 of the upgrade roadmap. However, even with multiple audits on top of the ones already completed for the launch of Ethereum 2.0, Steininger foresees inevitable “hiccups and bumps in the road.”
“[Flaws in code] isn’t necessarily a failure but it’s a learning opportunity for everybody in the industry to see how these things work at such a large scale,” said Steininger. “If we can overcome the bumps in the road that are undoubtedly going to happen during this large transition then I think that shows a kind of resiliency to the greater world of what blockchain and cryptocurrency and the development space is capable of.”
Ryan has high hopes that after the “hot swap” from Eth 1.0 to Eth 2.0, users and dapp developers will begin to see noticeable improvements to transaction efficiency and throughput on the merged network immediately.
“We want to increase the layer one capacity of the [Ethereum] system by approximately 100x. The benefits we hope to bring to developers is more capacity, cheaper transactions and a better environment for users to interact with and build dapps on,” said Ryan.
For more information about Ethereum 2.0, you can download the free research report featuring additional developer commentary about the upgrade on the CoinDesk Research Hub.
Tim Harford speaks to Israeli researcher, Tomer Hertz, about how the mathematical magic of pool testing could help countries to ramp up their Covid-19 testing capacity.
