Disruptions and delays to the postal service have prompted concern since so many people are planning to vote by mail this year. We break down what’s behind the delay, and how to ensure your vote is counted.
Congress still can’t agree on how to structure unemployment benefits in the next relief bill. Midwestern states like Missouri, Illinois, and Wisconsin are emerging as coronavirus hotspots.
And in headlines: NASA astronauts safely return to Earth aboard SpaceX’s shuttle, three hackers charged in July Twitter breach, and over 750 criminal cases are under review after LAPD officers are charged with falsifying documents.
A cybersecurity battle is raging. In recent weeks, Chinese hackers stole, or attempted to steal, terabytes of data from the U.S. government, businesses, and private individuals. Digital predators gained access to the Twitter accounts of Elon Musk, former President Barack Obama, and other high-profile individuals. And President Donald Trump says he is considering banning the Chinese-made app TikTok over security concerns.
Klon Kitchen, director of The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Technology Policy, joins the podcast to explain the severity of America’s cybersecurity threats, what actions the government should take, and how you can keep your personal information safe from hackers.
Also on today’s show, we read your letters to the editor and share a good news story about a mom who won a little money playing the lottery but decided to give it all to a police officer in Kansas City, Missouri, who recently was shot in the line of duty.
For years a story had circulated that the rock and roll group Van Halen had a contract that required that a bowl of M&Ms be left backstage wherever they performed, with all the brown M&Ms removed. If there were any brown M&Ms in the bowl, they would use it as an excuse to trash the room.
Is this just an urban legend, or was there something behind the story?
NASA launches its new robotic mission to Mars. The rover, Perseverance, will land in a 50 kilometre wide crater which looks like it was filled by a lake about 4 billion years ago - the time when life on Earth was getting started. Mission scientist Melissa Rice explains why this is one of the most promising places on Mars to continue the search for past life on the red planet.
Japanese and US scientists have revived microbes that have been buried at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean for 100 million years. Sampled from compacted mud 70 metres below the seafloor and beneath 6 kilometre of water, Yuki Morono and Steve D'Hondt admit they struggle to understand how the bacteria have survived for so long.
Science in Action celebrates the little unknown oceanographer Marie Tharp who in the late 1950s discovered the mid-Atlantic ridge which helped to launch the plate tectonics revolution in earth sciences. It would be Tharp's 100th birthday this week.
New research this week suggests that coronaviruses capable of infecting humans have been in bats for 40 to 70 years, and that there may be numerous and as yet undetected viruses like the Covid-19 virus in bat populations with the potential to cause future pandemics. Their message is that we should be sampling and testing wild bat colonies much more extensively than currently. Their findings provide further evidence against the unfounded claim that the Covid-19 virus originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. Roland Pease talks to Dr Maciej Boni at Pennsylvania State University.
Listener Avalon from Australia wants to know why people use conspiracy theories to explain shocking events. Are we more likely to believe conspiracy theories in times of adversity? What purpose do conspiracy theories serve in society?
Marnie Chesterton speaks to the scientists to explain their popularity, even in the face of seemingly irrefutable evidence.
(Image: NASA's Perseverance Mars rover. Credit: Illustration provided by Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. NASA/JPL-Caltech/Handout via REUTERS)
Bitcoin started as a rebellious, anti-establishment technology. In many parts of the world, and for many people, it remains exactly that.
At the same time, however, there is a wave of traditionalists and institutional players moving into the space.
Are they buying into the revolution, or are they trying to capture value while fitting the disruption into a box that maintains the current power structure they lead?
Those are the key questions explored by Meltem Demirors in her new essay “Unintended Architecture.” The piece is our selection for this week’s “Long Reads Sunday.”
Do we have enough data to know what?s happening on the continent? We talk to Dr Justin Maeda from the Africa Centre for Disease Control and Ghanaian public health researcher Nana Kofi Quakyi about tracking Africa?s outbreak. Producer: Jo Casserly Picture: Volunteers wait to feed local people during the weekly feeding scheme at the Heritage Baptist Church in Melville on the 118 day of lockdown due to the Covid-19 Coronavirus, Johannesburg, South Africa, 2020. Credit: EPA/KIM LUDBROOK
In 1927, Professor Thomas Parnell of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia created an experiment to demonstrate to his students the concept of viscosity and how some substances which appear to be solids are actually liquids.
That experiment is still running 90 years later.
On this week’s edition of The Breakdown Weekly Recap, NLW argues the big story of the week was actually a set of smaller stories that preview the faultlines and economic debates likely to absorb us in the coming months.
These include:
The Federal Reserve signaling that fiscal stimulus needs to do more
The beginning of the battles on fiscal stimulus
The introduction of the “not safe to vote” narrative
