The State of Things

A few years ago, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Sociology Professor Judith Blau and her teaching assistant Rafael Gallegos were at Abbey Court Apartments complex in Carrboro, NC. They were passing out flyers on behalf of the Latino cultural organization El Centro when they were nearly run off by the police. The irony of the situation – that the Abbey Court neighborhood has a high density of immigrants who need support and services and that Abbey Court had the highest crime rate in Carrboro and a hostile relationship with the police department – was not lost on Blau.

In his heyday in the 1940s and '50s, jazz guitarist Greensboro native Tal Farlow wowed the Down Beat crowd, playing with Charles Mingus, Red Norvo and the like. His large hands and his intrinsic sense of harmony distinguished him from his contemporaries. Farlow walked away from the jazz scene in the late 1950s, but he never let go of his love for the music.

Drilling for natural gas contained inside of a sedimentary rock called shale has taken off in recent years in some states. But a team of environmental scientists at Duke University recently released a report to illustrate how that process can contaminate groundwater supplies with methane. Their research is calling more public attention to the shale gas drilling process, known as hydraulic fracturing or "fracking."

Jon Gosier and Jonathan Kuniholm don’t seem to have much in common at first glance. One built a company that helps East Africa's budding software entrepreneurs, and the other created an open-source prosthetics nonprofit. But both are speaking at Chapel Hill's TEDx event tomorrow at the Varsity Theater. Gosier and Kuniholm are part of a panel called "Global Health: What's Technology Got to Do with It?" They join host Frank Stasio to talk about their innovative work and TEDx.

We think of our bodies as being our own private property, but in reality, that privacy is often violated. According to Duke University professor Karla Holloway, it is often women and African-Americans who suffer from that violation. In her new book, “Private Bodies, Public Texts: Race, Gender, and a Cultural Bioethics" (Duke University Press/2011), she uses case studies to explore the ways in which the law and medicine have overlooked rights of personal privacy.