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The United States was founded with three branches of government which were designed to act as checks on each others’ authority, and the role of the head of the Executive Branch — the President — was intended to be that of a head of state who would be a unifying force that stayed above the partisan fray. But the role of the president has changed greatly since George Washington left office, and has evolved to become more of a party head who makes bold promises in order to gain and maintain support for their policy agenda. Our guest says this evolution has not strengthened the United States and in many ways has led to the deeply partisan divide we’re living through right now.

Environmental and smart growth planning advocates are expressing concern over laws passed in Florida’s 2023 legislative session concerning citizens’ ability to challenge proposed changes to a local government’s comprehensive plan and pre-emption of local fertilizer restrictions. We hear details from Jane West of 1,000 Friends of Florida.

At the end of the Florida Keys lies The Dry Tortugas. The jewel of this Caribbean secret is the historic Fort Jefferson. The efforts to build the structure took tremendous ingenuity and effort.

Many companies are looking to Florida to be the leader in the future of space travel. To meet this growing demand, Charlotte County is looking to expand its educational aerospace program.

When OpenAI released the first publicly available, so-called ‘generative AI chat bot’ called ChatGPT, it didn’t take long for users — especially tech-savvy ones — to realize it was a game changer. While forms of artificial intelligence have been used in systems and applications for decades they weren’t this new form of generative AI that were being powered by what are called Large Language Models — or LLMs. As these systems have quickly become more powerful companies and organizations are finding ways to integrate them into all sorts of applications. We talk with two people from the Lastinger Center for Education at University of Florida to find out they’re using these rapidly advancing Large Language Models in the work they do.

During the first Republican presidential candidate debate Governor Ron DeSantis said he would use U.S. military special forces inside of Mexico to help stem the flow of illegal drugs like fentanyl into the United States. While this kind of rhetoric — the idea of using the U.S. military in a sovereign foreign nation to combat illicit drug production and distribution — might seem shocking, it’s not entirely new for a political candidate or even a sitting president to say something along these lines, but rather goes back decades. To get some context we sit down with Dr. Rick Coughlin, he’s an Associate Professor of Political Science at Florida Gulf Coast University who focuses on Mexican politics and culture.

Back in the mid-1960s Bill Strickland was a directionless public school student in Pittsburgh who didn’t really see a path for success for him or his fellow lower class, minority student friends. Then, one day he walked past a classroom and saw a teacher sitting at a pottery wheel — and that moment, and how he responded to it, changed his life. And since then has changed the lives of countless young people not only in Pittsburgh, but around the country and beyond. Manchester Bidwell Corporation (MBC) takes seemingly disparate elements — adult career training, youth arts education, jazz presentation and botanical sales (they grow orchids) — and combines them into a program with a proven record of positively changing the lives of underserved populations. Bill has helped start an additional 13 centers, including five in Pennsylvania, 6 in other US states, 1 in Puerto Rico, and 1 in Israel.

When it comes to the ways global climate change impacts the world’s oceans things like melting ice caps and glaciers, and what’s called thermal expansion — that’s when water takes up more volume as its temperature goes up — are probably what first come to mind. Or how increased water temperatures impact sea life, like recent, widespread coral bleaching events off Florida’s coast and around the world. Or even how changes in temperature and salinity can alter ocean currents, which are crucial for regulating global climate and weather patterns. But, an overlooked aspect of this story is how increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases the acidity — or the pH level — of the world’s oceans.

The Florida legislature passed SB 1084 during the 2024 session. It makes it a second-degree misdemeanor to sell or manufacture cultivated, or so-called ‘lab grown’ meat in the state. Gov. DeSantis signed it into law in May, and now, the California-based company Upside Foods has filed a lawsuit challenging the new law, arguing it gives an unconstitutional advantage to Florida farmers over out-of-state competitors. Shortly after lawmakers approved SB 1084, we spoke with a meat science and safety expert to get a better understanding of the science behind cultivated meat and its implications for our current agriculture system and economy.

While using nuclear fission has been well established and used commercially for decades to generate electricity, nuclear fusion has remained out of reach because of the extremely complicated engineering, and extraordinary power and resource needs required. There’s another branch of fusion research known as 'cold fusion’ which takes a different approach to fuse atoms together that does not require huge amounts of energy and resources. Our guest is working on his own approach to cold fusion and has achieved interesting, early results that have now been published in the May, 2024 edition of the journal Nature Scientific Reports.