Innovation Hub

Talk to anyone who lived in New York City in the 1970s, and they will probably highlight the city’s widespread crime. Times Square wasn’t yet Disney-fied and Brooklyn hadn’t been taken over by hipsters. Most people agreed that New York was a dangerous place. But then something happened: murders, and violent crime in general, began to drop. And that trend wasn’t unique to New York: It happened in many places across America. So who do we have to thank for the crime decline? To find out, we talk with NYU sociology professor Patrick Sharkey about his book “Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence.”

Unless we’re relaxing on it at the beach, or kicking it out of our shoes, we probably don’t think too much about sand. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t important. Sand is a vital ingredient in concrete. And glass. And asphalt. It makes our modern, urban life possible. And our hunger for it is causing more and more trouble. Vince Beiser, author of “The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization,” explains why sand matters, and how the quest to extract more of it is shaping the world.  

When you think of evolution, you probably imagine a slow process, one that happens in some verdant jungle or plain. For example: Homo Sapiens gradually evolving over millions of years on the savannah. Or the finches of the Galapagos adapting to their unique environment. But Menno Schilthuizen, a biologist and author of “Darwin Comes to Town: How the Urban Jungle Drives Evolution,” says that evolution can hapen a lot faster, and a lot closer to us, than we might think. And humans, along with the cities we build, drive a lot of it.

What were pregnancy tests like in the 1940s? Well, they involved cutting up rabbits. How the science of hormones changed pregnancy, diabetes, and so much more. If you want to track down the first telecommunications hack, you have to go back in time. All the way to the 1830s. America is aging. And so are the people who control our money. How that’s going to upend our economy.

Doctor Randi Hutter Epstein likes to compare human hormones to the internet. And if you think about it, it makes sense. The brain sends messages to the testes in the same way that someone in Paris can send an email to someone in Tokyo. There’s no apparent infrastructure that connects the senders and receivers. Just a message floating out there, knowing what its target is. But it took a very long time before we had this kind of basic understanding of hormones. And, even today, most people doesn’t understand the power of these chemicals. We talk to Epstein, author of, “Aroused: The History of Hormones and How They Control Just About Everything,” about how we came to understand the endocrine system.

What was the world’s first telecommunications hack? Some sort of electronic banking theft in the 80s? Perhaps it was the “phone breaks” of the 1960s, who used tricks to make calls for free? Or the scientific hooligans who hacked Marconi’s wireless? Well, according to Tom Standage, Deputy Editor of The Economist, you have to go back even further than that. To 19th-century France, and a new technology called the mechanical telegraph.

The United States is about to face a “silver tsunami;” a retirement crisis; a health care dilemma. At least, that’s what it seems like, if you read articles about America’s aging population of baby boomers. And the increased number of older Americans *is *going to transform the country. The US Census bureau says that “older adults will outnumber chil­dren for the first time in U.S. history” in just a few decades. And they will transform the economy to fit their needs and wants. This presents both challenges and opportunities, according to Joseph Coughlin, author of, “The Longevity Economy: Unlocking the World’s Fastest-Growing, Most Misunderstood Market.”

Are college kids becoming more fragile? Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt says yes. And he explains why. How a Coney Island sideshow helped save infants lives. Termites! They may be super gross… but we can also learn a lot from them.

For the last few years, free speech has been hotly debated on college campuses around the country. There have been protests over controversial speakers. And confrontations around the cultural sensitivity of halloween costumes. Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at NYU and co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, sees deeper issues at play. Issues that he thinks are going to impact an entire generation.

In the early 20th century, a premature baby was considered as good as dead. But Dr. Martin Couney — who wasn’t actually a doctor — made it his mission to save these babies by putting them neonatal incubators. And Couney had a flair for the dramatic. He would put incubated babies on display at Coney Island, and at World’s Fairs, where people could see them — IF they paid a quarter. We talk to Dawn Raffel about her new biography, “The Strange Case of Dr. Couney: How a Mysterious European Showman Saved Thousands of American Babies.”

Termites get a bad rap. Ask pretty much anyone on the street, and they’ll likely say that termites are gross, and you definitely don’t want them in your house. And while it may be true that you don’t want them in your house, termites are also so much more than structure-destroyers. At least according to Lisa Margonelli, whose new book Underbug: An Obsessive Tale of Termites and Technology explores the surprisingly wild world of the much-maligned bug. Because it turns out, there’s a lot we can learn from termites.

Work defines all of our lives, but in a myriad of different ways. On this week’s Innovation Hub we take a step back and think about work’s payoffs, its pitfalls, and its future. First, Stanford’s Jeffrey Pfeffer argues that our jobs are literally hurting us - and that work environments have to be rethought. Then, Liza Mundy tells the incredible story of female WWII vets whose work was absolutely vital… but who never got the credit they deserved. And finally, chess champ Garry Kasparov says: we shouldn’t hate robots; we should work with them.

When you think of dangerous work, you probably conjure up images of crab fishermen braving the frigid Atlantic, lumberjacks operating chainsaws, or truckers navigating icy roads. You probably don’t think of late nights at the office, or working overtime at the cash register. But maybe you should. Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University, argues that seemingly-innocuous workplaces have become increasingly bad for our health over the past few decades. He’s the author of “Dying for a Paycheck: How Modern Management Harms Employee Health and Company Performance — and What We Can Do About It.”

During World War II, a flurry of coded messages were sent by the Axis powers. Data on troop movements, supplies, ship locations... all transmitted via code. But these messages didn't necessarily stay coded for long. The Allies were able to intercept, decode, and learn the vital wartime secrets contained within many of these transmissions. These codebreaking efforts were vital in ending the war. And the people who actually did a lot of this work were women - over ten thousand of them. Liza Mundy is the author of “Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II,” and she tells us about this little-known part of American history. 

For more than a 30-year span, chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov was nearly unbeatable. But, in 1997, he faced an unlikely competitor: the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue. Kasparov lost the final match, which ended up being a turning point both for him and for our understanding of artificial intelligence. We talk with Kasparov about his new book, “Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins.”

Willpower isn’t the only thing dictating what you eat. Neuroscientist Rachel Herz says the color, shape, and presentation of food has a major impact on our diet. Then, there’s not as much evidence-based decision-making in medicine as you might expect. We take a look at why. Finally, we talk with physics professor Robbert Dijigraaf about why funding basic scientific research can yield powerful results down the road.

We know that our brain plays tricks on us, but did you know the size of your plate can dictate how much you eat? Or that a bowl filled with jelly beans in a variety of colors will induce you to eat more than a series of bowls with the jelly beans separated out by color? Rachel Herz, a neuroscientist at Brown University and the author of “Why You Eat What You Eat: The Science Behind Our Relationship With Food,” describes the psychology that influences our eating habits.

Nearly half of medical procedures may not be based on sound science. That’s according to Eric Patashnik, director of Brown University’s public policy program. And he says it’s not necessarily your doctor’s fault. How did we get to this point? We put that question to Patashnik, who is co-author of the new book, “Unhealthy Politics: The Battle over Evidence-Based Medicine.”

Back in the 1990s, the Digital Libraries Initiative from the National Science Project supported a small project out of Stanford University. It sounded obscure, and a lot of people thought it wasn’t exciting, and would have little real-world application. But on that team were two graduate students – Larry Page and Sergey Brin – the founders of Google.  The modest grant ended up paying off very well, according to Robbert Dijkgraaf, a physics professor and the director of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton. He recently wrote a companion essay to Abraham Flexner’s 1939 piece, “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge,” explaining why Flexner’s ideas are even more relevant today. We talk with Dijkgraaf about why governments should fund more basic research that doesn’t necessarily have immediate results, like the project at Stanford – and how it can actually reap huge rewards in the long run.

First, if you think about the design of the human body, it’s not actually all that intelligent. We have tailbones, but no tails. We swallow food through the same tube we use to breathe. And don’t get us started on tonsils. Biologist Nathan Lents explains these human errors. Then, P.T. Barnum is probably best known for his outrageous exhibits and larger-than-life personality. But he also shaped our idea of what it means to be an American. Finally, can someone really be guilty of committing a crime if their brain isn’t fully developed? There’s no easy answer to that one. But the emerging field of neurolaw is trying to figure out those types of questions.