Word of Mouth

Revulsion kept early humans from eating spoiled meat, or snuggling up to people covered with oozing sores. Today, some cultures prize cheeses writhing with maggots, or drink liquor made from fermented saliva. This is not a trick to get you to “eeewww” but a way to evoke the visceral nature of disgust, which as Rachel Herz found, is powerful enough to convict suspects, incite genocide, and make us writhe and wretch within seconds. 

With developers pumping out an estimated 2,000 applications daily for use on smart-phones and tablets, reviewers and web-critics are keeping busy sorting out what’s worth downloading, and what’s worth squat. 

When you’ve got a few extra bucks burning a hole in that wallet, what better place to spend it than your local mall? These cavernous halls of commerce give us The Gaps, J-Crews, and Sunglass Huts we love so dearly. Ahhh, can you smell the Cinnabon?

One year after the Arab Spring, protestors in Syria are uploading videos and images of the Assad regime’s brutal crackdown of the opposition. The use of new technologies to spread messages and unify resistance against authoritarian regimes is by now familiar. Five centuries before demonstrators tweeted from public squares in the middle-east, an obscure minister and theologian named Martin Luther exploited the social media of his time to challenge entrenched power. We know, at least, how that revolution fared.

Between documents, e-mails, instant messages, news feeds, Facebook and browsers, on-screen real estate gets a little crowded. Multitaskers keep up with the deluge with bigger screens, riding hard on the tab key, and increasingly, a multiplication of monitors. Many data crunchers preach the benefits of having two, or even three screens operating simultaneously in their workspace.

“Critical infrastructure” once referred to things like roads, bridges and power plants. But today, the term includes the unseen digital networks that control our visible world. An easy way to protect this infrastructure from hackers is to simply keep it disconnected from the internet, but it turns out many of those systems indeed are connected to the web, unbeknownst to the people that operate them. Joining me to talk about this is Kim Zetter, senior writer for Wired.

 For some perspective, the Mariana Trench, a 2500 kilometer-long gash along the floor of the South Pacific, is as deep as Mount Everest is tall.  Recently, oceanographers from the University of New Hampshire discovered some new architecture lining the floor of the planet. With great precision, they’ve mapped vast bridges spanning the immense gap…and detected significant shifts in the walls of the trench.

Hallmark holiday or not, Valentine’s Day carries joy, expectations, sadness, and more than its share of tired tropes for just about everyone. What, we wondered, signals love in the age of digital-era dating? Synching calendars on Outlook? Downloading a marriage counselor app on your smart-phone?

As zealous consumers know, the sleek look and user-friendly feel of Apple’s high-end gadgets are big part of their sticker price. One man is rethinking form and function with a tiny, inexpensive, bare-bones computer called the Raspberry Pi …which he hopes will bring the power of programming to even the poorest corners of the globe. Eben Upton is the creator of the miniature machine – he’s also founder of the Raspberry Pi foundation.

Here's video of the Raspberry Pi in action:

We here on the low end of the FM dial are not known for our humor. But each weekend, public radio listeners who’ve paid attention to all the news programs, high-brow culture and balanced discourse are rewarded with the oddly informative, extremely funny Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!  

When William Broad held his first yoga pose in 1970, his intention was to attain better health, both in mind and in body. Now a practitioner of more than four decades, he’s looking at yoga from another perspective, trying to mete out the benefits of yoga from widely held myths, and along the way, revealing a downside of yoga that’s placed him firmly at the center of a decidedly un-zen firestorm of controversy.

Retaliatory killings, gang wars and a high murder rate are not Chicago’s problem alone. But it’s there that CeaseFire, a public health model based on science and street corner intervention, tracks volatile situations and cools them down.

By Danielle Lima

Well, I’ve been here for almost a month now! This week was about a 9.125 on the cool-o-meter. Let me give you a little description.