Listen Some people have genetic diseases so rare or unusual that doctors can’t even diagnose them. This means, a patient comes in with problems — sometimes several serious, seemingly unrelated problems — and no one can figure out what gene is causing it. It can be frustrating, if not downright scary, for someone whose health […]
Nashville Housing Officials Drawing Up Blueprint To Get Low-Income Kids Online
Listen In the next step of a federal initiative called ConnectHome, Nashville officials are trying to come up with an Internet access plan to get more families in public housing online. Metro’s housing agency, MDHA, is essentially writing up a blueprint of everything that could be done to provide more low-income school-aged children with Internet access. MDHA’s chief […]
Chattanooga Reclaims Crown For Tennessee’s Fastest Internet, With 10-Gigabit Speeds
Listen Call it a battle of internet speeds. The public utility in Chattanooga is now offering 10-gigabit internet, which is 10 times faster than Google Fiber and AT&T Gigapower and five times faster than Comcast’s speediest option. In 2010, when Chattanooga’s power company, EPB, started offering gigabit speed, it touted itself as the first city in […]
New Research Shows Promising Reduction In Tennessee Prescription Drug Use
Listen Andrew Shinar meets a lot of people in pain. He performs hip and knee replacement surgery at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and in 2011, he decided to start tracking how many of his patients coming in for joint replacements were taking painkillers.
Google Fiber Gets Its ‘Time At The Podium’ To Pitch Nashville Businesses On Ultra-Fast Internet
Listen This has been the year of the telecom companies. Comcast, AT&T and Google Fiber have not only announced their plans to deploy competing gigabit-speed Internet services in Nashville — they’ve also been vying for the attention of the city’s business, nonprofit and political leaders. Wednesday morning brought another example of that, when Google Fiber gave […]
Tullahoma Firm Primes Tech Startups In The Business Of Public Safety
Listen Middle Tennessee is already home to business accelerators for startups in health care technology and music technology. For the next two months, an accelerator in Tullahoma will work with a dozen new companies that are creating technology for law enforcement, prisons and public safety.
Nashville Just Got Another $300,000 To Boost Internet Access To Low-Income Households
Listen A Nashville nonprofit now has at least $400,000 to help solve the digital divide — a term the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee uses to refer to the lack of internet access in some parts of Davidson County, especially low-income areas. Earlier this year, Metro Nashville had set aside $100,000 in its budget for […]
Nashville’s ‘Discoverers’: A Vandy Engineer On Cotton Candy, Failure And The Eureka Moment
Listen When movies portray a scientific discovery, it’s usually some version of that one Eureka moment — a flash of insight at an unexpected time. Vanderbilt University engineer Leon Bellan says while that does happen occasionally, failure and frustration are also an intimate part of the discovery process. He talked to WPLN’s Emily Siner in our live series […]
Nashville’s ‘Discoverers:’ Tech Investor Sees Lucrative Opportunity In Making Health Care Cool
Listen Nashville entrepreneur Marcus Whitney knows what opportunity looks like. He has helped build several successful tech companies — including Emma and Moontoast — and now he invests in other people’s startups. He talked to reporter Emily Siner during WPLN’s live series Movers & Thinkers about discovering the next big idea — and how he’s changed that discovery process over […]
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