Tom Williams

Grunt tackles the science behind some of a soldier's most challenging adversaries—panic, exhaustion, heat, ​flies, ​noise—and introduces us to the scientists who seek to conquer them. ​Roach ​​visits a repurposed movie studio where amputee actors help prepare Marine Corps medics for the shock and gore of combat wounds. At Camp Lemmonier, Djibouti, in east Africa, ​she discovers that diarrhea can be a threat to national security. Back in the US, fashion design​ers at U.S. Army Natick Labs​ explain why a zipper is a problem for a sniper.

Salt Lake Tribune reporter Christopher Smart reports that “News is spreading across the country on the state of homelessness in downtown Salt Lake City — and it isn't pretty.

Just over the Fourth of July holiday, a professional baseball player was attacked and suffered a concussion. And a car plowed into a group of homeless people on a sidewalk, killing one and sending five others to the hospital.

Today’s program is by request. Aleq in Southern Utah emailed us to ask for more science on Access Utah and to suggest that we talk about the great work being done in Utah in paleontology.

Our guests today include State Paleontologist Jim Kirkland; and Andrew Milner and Jerald Harris, authors of “Tracks in Deep Time: The St. George Dinosaur Discovery Site at Johnson Farm.”

To call these unsettling times is an understatement: our political leaders are less and less respectable; in the realm of business, cheating, lying, and stealing are hazily defined; and in daily life, rapidly changing technology offers permission to act in ways inconceivable without it. Yet somehow, this hasn’t quite led to a complete free-for-all—people still draw lines around what is acceptable and what is not.

UPR listeners are avid readers, so our periodic question to you isn’t if you’re reading, but what are you reading? We hope you’ll share your booklist with us and we’ll compile a UPR list and post it on www.upr.org  You can share your booklist by email to upraccess@gmail.com or on Twitter @upraccess. We’re also asking if you have any suggestions for beach or camping or summertime reading. And what do your children read during the summertime?

With wildfires raging in Utah and other areas, we’ll turn to writer Gary Ferguson for a timely discussion about wildfires on Monday’s Access Utah. Wildfire season is burning longer and hotter, affecting more and more people, especially in the west.

In The Evolution of Beauty, Richard O. Prum’s award-winning career as an ornithologist and his lifelong passion for bird-watching come together in a thrilling intellectual adventure. Scientific dogma holds that every detail of an animal’s mating displays—every spot on the peacock’s tail—is an advertisement of its genetic material superiority to potential mates. But thirty years of research and fieldwork around the world led Prum to question this idea.

Republican leaders in the U.S. Senate have delayed a vote on their Obamacare repeal bill (the Better Care Reconciliation Act) until after the 4th of the July recess.

We’re going to talk about the U.S. health care system on Wednesday’s Access Utah. What do you think health care in the U.S. should look like?

Are you in favor of keeping the Affordable Care Act? Would you like to see the American Health Care Act, which passed the U.S. House, or the Senate bill, take its place?

Should the health care system be more market-based? What should government’s role be?

The 2017 Bennion Teacher Workshop and Literature of Protest: Civil Rights, Democracy, Social Justice is ongoing at USU. Sponsored by: The Mountain West Center for Regional Studies Utah State University.

Across Utah, nearly 70 mentally ill men and women who are supposed to be receiving mental health treatment are instead trapped in jail cells. They're getting sicker. They're being released without treatment. They're dying.

They're not supposed to be there.

Charges with crimes but too sick to answer for them in court, they are stuck, waiting for an opening at the only facility in the state that can prepare them to face the legal system - the Utah State Hospital in Provo. The

Craig Jessop, Dean of Utah State University’s Caine College of the Arts, Director of the American Festival Chorus and Orchestra, and former Music Director of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, has led an interesting life in the arts. He’ll join us today to talk about USU’s Year of the Arts which begins this month.

Cory Christiansen is a recording artist, writer, educator and performer. He has played and taught around the globe for the last decade alongside the likes of Dr. Lonnie Smith, Vic Juris, Danny Gottlieb, Jeff Coffin, James Moody, Steve Houghton, Jeremy Allen and other jazz greats. His last recording, "Lone Prairie" received critical acclaim for its blending of jazz, rock, blues and music of the American Frontier. 

It’s Summertime! The kids are out of school and life slows down for some of us and speeds up for others. Trips to favorite vacation spots and into the backcountry ramp up. Today on Access Utah, we came together as a UPR community to share ideas for summertime trips, activities, traditions and stories.

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has released his interim report on Bears Ears National Monument.

His recommendations include reducing the size of the monument and seeking congressional approval authorizing tribal co-management of the monument and designation of areas that fall outside the revised monument as national conservation or recreation areas. Sec. Zinke has extended the public comment period to July 10.

Having lost eight friends in ten years, Cooley retreats to a tiny medieval village in Italy with her husband. There, in a rural paradise where bumblebees nest in the ancient cemetery and stray cats curl up on her bed, she examines a question both easily evaded and unavoidable: mortality. How do we grieve? How do we go on drinking our morning coffee, loving our life partners, stumbling through a world of such confusing, exquisite beauty?

President Donald Trump's decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement was met with mixed reactions across the country and especially in Utah. While some climate scientists and government leaders including Salt Lake City Mayor Jackie Biskupski called the decision a mistake, others argued the decision could have positive economic consequences for the United States. 

Michael Patrick Lynch is featured in a TED talk about "Finding Common Reality." In his talk, Lynch explains the future of how we know information is true. Just because we can Google information does not mean the information is accurate. And even more  surprising, Lynch explains how we are not just polarized in our opinions or values, but in the facts we learn. 

After oil was discovered beneath their land in the 1920's, the richest people per capita were members of the Osage Indian nation in Oklahoma. They rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions and sent their children to study in Europe. 

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is preparing a ruling to roll back net neutrality rules enacted under President Obama, to, in part, spur innovation and investment. President Obama demanded that the FCC reclassify the Internet as a public utility under Title II of the Telecommunications Act. He wanted rules to ensure “that neither the cable company nor the phone company [would] be able to act as a gatekeeper, restricting what you can do or see online."

The Colorado River is an essential resource for a surprisingly large part of the United States, and every gallon that flows down it is owned or claimed by someone. David Owen traces all that water from Colorado's headwaters, to its parched terminus, once a verdant wetland but now a million-acre desert. HE takes readers on an adventure downriver, along a labyrinth of waterways, reservoirs, power plants, farms, fracking sites, ghost towns, and rv parks, to the spot near the U.S.-Mexico border where the river runs dry.

According to the Dessert News, "Some disaffected Republicans and Democrats who say extreme views are co-opting their parties have decided to carve out a middle ground in Utah politics. Taking a centrist approach, the group announced the formation of the United Utah Party.

Executive Director of the United Utah Party, Jim Bennet, and University of Utah associate professor of political science, Tim Chambless, come on the show to answer your questions and explain the new party.