Broadcast Story

Kaitlynn McShane here from Morningside college. We have interesting stories about innovations in technology!

Cell phones are used for about everything: directions, recommendations, communicating.

Now, Cellphones can help us register to vote. The elections took place this last week, and many were encouraged to register and as vote on different forms of social media.

Snapchat and Instagram added features to encourage you to vote this election. Research has shown the young generations feel less inclined to vote. Social media apps want to change that this election.

We talked to Morningside student, Sterling Stecker, who is the social Media chair for Morningside Activites Council, on the use of social media for this election.

“it definitely pushed me to go to the polls. On the day of voting, Snapchat sends out a mass-snap to everyone, encouraging everyone to get to the polls”

“I think voting is a very good thing. I think it was good that the pushed it and marketed it on different social media platforms.”

“I noticed this election that snapchat was pushing hard to make sure that everyone was voting”

He described how social media is a great tool for MAC.

“Literally everyone I know has a smartphone, it is a good way to communicate to literally everyone on campus if they want to know whats going on with MAC, and all the fun activities we have going on.

Instagram added “I Voted” stickers, and Snapchat added new filters to help you to display voted. Instagram also added a “We Voted” story to see the community story of who voted in your area. This idea called “peer-sharing” they view has highly effective to target potential voters.

Snapchat also sent a video to remind of age users to vote. Snapchat also sent them their polling locations on their Snap Map. Snapchat reported more than four-hundred-thousand users had already voted after they launched the voter registration feature.

With these different ways to connect to potential voters, We hope that more and more register and vote each year, thanks to social media.

It is amazing how much technology is changing, and the part it plays in our daily lives. Cars are a main source of transportation for people in the United States. Many use cars get to work and carry out our errands. In the future, we may not be driving our own cars.

Would you put your life in the hands of a robot? Or rather, a self driving car?

According to PHYS.org, self-driving cars are safer than human-driven cars. There are One-million car crashes from human-error every year. Research suggests self-driving cars can cut the fatality rate of car-crashes by ninety-nine point nine percent.

We asked Madi Person, a Morningside college student who often commutes home on the weekends on her thoughts on driver-less cars.

“I know for me, especially long distance drives, commuting back and forth from home, which is about 3 hours. Especially if I have had a long week at school, I worry about drowsy driving, and having ‘mini-sleeps’ while I am driving, I know there is a high possibility of that causing crashes”

She did admit some worries she had, “The thought of not having anybody there to control it is scary”.

We are right with you there Madi, that’s why Mobieye and Intel are actually letting people try out the cars themselves to help normalize the idea. Passengers felt that the cars behave better than they do. One thing that they pointed out, is that self driving cars are typically safer than the risky driving you see everyday. Self driving cars are in the near future, are you ready to let go of the wheel?

You have a new reason to look up at the sky at the night time. You might know familiar constellations such as the Big and Little dipper. Now Hulk, The Little Prince, TARDIS from “Doctor Who”, Godzilla, Star Trek, U.S. Enterprise, and Hulk are all now constellations. NASA declares New unofficial constellations to celebrate the ten-year anniversary of Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.

We asked Jennifer Hernandez, Morningside student to recall some memories from her childhood when she learned about constellations, and what she thinks about the new constellations.

“In first or second grade we briefly talked about it I remember going on a field trip with my class to the community that was close to my elementary. They had a constellation room and they would project constellations. “

“The ones that are well known are the big dipper and the little dipper.”

“It would be cool to look up Hulk in the sky rather than the big dipper”

“It gives us another opportunity to look up at the stars and look up at the different figures that these new constellations are making”

Julie McEnery, the Fermi project scientist for the telescope explained how they wanted to bring to light excitement of the accomplishments of this telescope. Thanks to this telescope, we now have mapped three thousand gamma-ray sources. That is ten times the number we knew before.

Elizabeth Ferrara, who led the project, explained that the number of gamma-ray sources is comparable to the number of bright stars in the sky, and that is why they decided a new set of constellations would be the perfect way to convey and illustrate the success of this telescope. The other twenty-one constellations include: famous landmarks across the globe, and scientific ideas or tools.

This telescope, officially called Fermi’s Large Area Telescope or LAT, has been scanning the sky each day. This telescope measures sources of the highest-energy light, gamma ray’s. The energy this telescope picks up comes from pulsars, nova outbursts, the debris of supernova explosions, gamma-ray bubbles, supermassive black holes, and gamma-ray bursts. These are important to map out and monitor because some of these are the most powerful explosions in the cosmos.

Thanks to technology and innovation like this telescope, we can track energy and explosions in space that could cause potential harm to our planet.

I am Kaitlynn McShane from Morningside college, thanks for listening.