Distillations #139 – Your Brain on Sports

Dedicated to my sports-crazed husband. J-E-T-S! (maybe next year) From the Distillations website: Whether it’s football season, baseball season, or basketball season, one thing is constant: a good chunk of the population has sports on the brain. On today’s episode of Distillations we explore why this is the case. First, producer Lindsay Patterson follows a…

Distillations #138 – Your Genome

The latest Distillations is all about the genome. This from the Distillations website: “Each of us is made of more than 20,000 genes that determine everything from our tendency towards baldness to our likelihood to suffer from Alzheimer’s disease. On today’s episode of Distillations we look at how researchers have sought to identify our individual…

Improv and Emergency Response

I reported this piece over the summer and it’s finally out in the world! It’s about an RPI engineer who studied how jazz music can help teach first responders to improvise better under pressure. It was produced for IEEE Spectrum Radio in collaboration with the NSF, and was mixed (beautifully) by Dennis Foley. You can…