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Collier County is a wealthy county. According to data from the financial technology company SmartAsset, Collier County is the second wealthiest county in Florida. But, alongside that wealth many country residents are struggling. According to the Collier County Community and Human Services Division nearly 53,000 people commute to work every day from outside the county, and 35% of jobs in the county pay less than $35k a year. We talk with the Collier Community Foundation’s President & CEO to go over the highlights of a new community assessment that identifies the challenges county residents are facing, and the challenges the community foundation faces in trying to support them.

New legislation passed during the 2024 session modifies the rules by which the state commission, and local ethics boards, can operate. Critics say these changes will gut the effectiveness of the state commission and local boards. Supporters say the changes will prevent the state and local ethics boards from having to spend their time investigating politically motivated accusations. We dig into the details on Senate Bill 7014, which has yet to be signed by the governor, with two people who have spent their lives focusing on politics in Florida and its ethics system.

The Philadelphia A’s were the first Major League Baseball team to spring train in Fort Myers, beginning in 1925. Over the decades were followed by teams from Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Kansas City. The Minnesota Twins arrived in 1991, and the Boston Red Sox moved their spring training operations here two years later in 1993. We dig into the City of Palm’s rich baseball history with two men who just love digging into rich baseball history. They’ll be two of the presenters at the upcoming fundraiser for the Southwest Florida Historical Society called “What it was, was baseball. An evening of Fort Myers history as told through the prism of diamonds…baseball diamonds.”

When OpenAI launched ChatGPT on Nov. 30, 2022 and made it accessible to the public for free, a new season of AI began around the world. But, what it all means for individuals, our communities, our countries, and the world remains to be seen. There will undoubtedly be benefits in many fields, but there is also great concern that such power could bring problems that we may not even be able to imagine yet, including job and industry disruptions. We get some context from Dr. Chrissann Ruehle, She is an Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning Researcher, and Strategist, and she is a Management Instructor in Florida Gulf Coast University’s Lutgert College of Business, and she is Provost Faculty Fellow for AI at FGCU.

Earlier this year FGCU named its new Director of Intercollegiate Athletics, Colin Hargis, to take over the role after the past director, Ken Kavanaugh, stepped down in December, 2023 after serving about 15 years in the role. Hargis comes to FGCU after spending about a decade at North Carolina State University, where he worked his way from associate athletics director for ticket sales and operations to senior associate athletics director for external relations. Hargis takes the helm of a young athletics program with 15 intercollegiate athletics teams and about 300 student athletes. And he brings with him his knowledge of the world of Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) which he managed at North Carolina State University, and part of what he’ll focus on here at FGCU.

Bertha Vasquez spent most of her career in the classroom teaching science to middle schoolers in Miami-Dade County. She’s a passionate advocate for the scientific method and the many ways it’s made life better for humanity. And she’s a strong believer in skepticism when it comes to understanding the world around us, especially when extraordinary claims are made. These days Ms. Vasquez has taken on the role of Director of Education at the The Center for Inquiry, and Director of its Teacher Institute for Evolutionary Science. The CFI’s roots go back to the 1970s when Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, and other critical thinkers began seeing the need to mitigate growing belief in pseudoscience and paranormal claims using rational means and methods.

Conservation photographer Ian Wilson-Navarro was born in Miami but has lived his entire life in Key Largo. He got his first camera as a teenager, and first visited the Dry Tortugas around that same time camping and fishing with his father. In 2021, he and a friend were chosen for a National Parks Arts Foundation artist residency in the Dry Tortugas on Loggerhead Key. His proposal for the residency pitched the idea of capturing images to create a book, and that book is now out. "Dry Tortugas: Stronghold of Nature" was published last month by University Press of Florida. It features about 200 of his photographs along with essays by people with intimate knowledge of the park who explore its history, culture, and environment.

The Midwest Food Bank was founded on a farm in Illinois in 2003 and has grown ever since, adding branches around the country including one that covers Florida. The Midwest Food Bank Florida branch opened in Fort Myers in 2014 and has been providing food to its more than 200 partner agencies ever since. These days they’re providing tens of thousands of meals every month. They pretty much runs on volunteers — they had about 2000 last year — and they only have six paid employees so they’re able to turn every dollar donated into 34 meals. We meet their new Executive Director to get to know him and better understand what they do.

We get some insight into the world of dementia caregiver support — and we we learn about a relatively rare form of dementia called Frontotemporal Degeneration (FTD). It’s a type of dementia that affects the areas that control behavior, personality, language, and decision-making. People with FTD might start acting differently, like becoming rude or impulsive, or they may have trouble speaking and understanding language. It usually appears in people younger than 65, and unlike other forms of dementia, memory problems aren't usually the first sign, but instead changes in behavior or communication skills are more noticeable early on.

While lots of research has been conducted on how being in space affects plant biology, no research had ever been done on exactly what the trip up into space does to a plant and its genes. That is, until Aug. 29, 2024 when UF Space Biologist, Dr. Rob Ferl, loaded himself and some small tubes with plants in them that are specially designed to allow him to freeze their genes in place at specific times — which he did at certain points of the flight on the Blue Origin New Shepard rocket. This process will allow him and his research team to see exactly how that transit up into space, and then back down again, causes the plants to turn certain genes on or off to adapt to that voyage. We talked with him just a few hours after he returned to Earth.