Among the things we take for granted in today’s America is knowing the time …which makes transportation, business and national events possible. This, however, was not always the case. Today, from building sewers to standardizing time, we’ll talk about the invisible innovations that got us where we are today. Then, more than 30,000 African elephants are poached every year, mostly out of East Africa. In an effort to understand the illegal ivory trade, a journalist commissioned a tusk made of fake ivory with a GPS tracker inside. We speak with the man behind that tusk.
Listen to the full show.
How We Got to Now
Steven Johnson is author of several best-selling books on innovation, most recently, How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made The Modern World, coming out in paperback later this month. He’s host of PBS series of the same name that is now available in its entirety online.
Tracing the Path of Illegal Ivory
George Dante is founder of Wildlife Preservations and one of the world’s premier taxidermists, whose clients have included the American Museum of Natural History and the Bronx Zoo. He’s the man the journalist Bryan Christy turned to when he needed an artificial ivory tusk so convincing he could use it to infiltrate the illegal ivory trade flourishing in East Africa.
You can read about Christy’s investigation in the September issue of National Geographic.
The Bionic Hand
In 2007 Eric Jones had his right hand amputated due to a disorder that cut off blood flow to his hands and feet. He was among the first ten people in the United States to be fitted with a bionic prosthetic. Eric, his daughter Lanie, and son Alex went to StoryCorps to talk about his life changing operation.
You can listen to this story again at StoryCorps.org.
Lucius Live at the Music Hall
Lucius is a five piece indie pop band from Brooklyn, playing tomorrow night at the Music Hall in Portsmouth. Lucius flips the script on the traditional pop configuration. Instead, a pair of identically-dressed women front the band, and the three guys mostly stay out of the limelight…one of them is guitarist Peter Lalish, who was born and raised in NH.
You can find more about Lucius and our conversation with Peter Lalish here.
