The Week in Philly from KYW Newsradio

In 2020, international student enrollment in the United States dropped 15 percent because of pandemic era travel restrictions, according to Higher Ed Dive. While numbers are slowly increasing, with 948,519 students enrolling in the 2021/2022 academic school year, they don't rival pre-COVID levels. What’s affecting international student enrollment? Why is it important for the U.S. to have internati...

Millions of Americans are dealing with anxiety, and much about anxiety is a mystery. However, recently researchers from the Universities of Bristol and Exeter in the UK released some fascinating discoveries from work with mice that could lead to a better understanding of the neural roadmap behind feelings of anxiety, and more importantly, might eventually help provide a better tool kit for treatin...

The app TikTok is wildly popular, and in some circles, wildly controversial. The state of Montana recently passed legislation that would ban the app in the state . What is it about TikTok that would lead to a state take a drastic action like this? How legitimate are the concerns? Is it even possible to enforce, and what could a move like this lead to? For this conversation, we caught up with Dr. H...

As far as we’ve come in medical and scientific research, sleep seems to be an area that we just can’t pin down. We might understand the stages of sleep and what REM sleep is - kind of - but there are still a lot of unanswered questions, or questions that we hear a variety of answers to. How much sleep do you really need? Do sleep aids like melatonin really help? What happens in our brains when we...

During the pandemic, households enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, received at least a $95 per month increase to their usual benefits. In March 2023, benefits were cut back, but many of the people who receive those benefits haven’t recovered from the financial loss. They’ve had to turn to food banks, which are now struggling to meet the increased need. How have foo...

We have all heard conversations of “why didn’t they teach us this in school?” or “why did I take calculus if I’ve never had to use it?” Now with a wide scope of possible career opportunities, it might not make sense for all students to take the same classes in high school. Why does this happen, and how could we update the math curriculum? Do we have the teaching capacity to make these changes? Dr....

There are many precedents in politics that aren’t necessarily based on law but on norms, like the fact that there isn’t an age restriction for politicians and that Supreme Court justices serve for life. What are some of the other norms in politics that we’ve accepted to be true? Do politicians have too much power when these norms aren’t regulated? Dr. Ben Berger is an associate professor of politi...

TV and movie writers represented by the Writers Guild of America went on strike last week . We’ve seen several writers strikes before, but producer and director Andrew Susskind says that with the growth of streaming, this time is different. Susskind teaches producing, directing, writing, and editing at Drexel University's Westphal College of Media Arts and Design. He joins us to explain the motive...

Worldwide, the COVID-19 pandemic triggered a 25 percent increase in anxiety and depression, especially in young people and women, according to the World Health Organization. What affects our mental health? Why are young people struggling? And what can be done to help them? Schroeder Stribling is the president and CEO of Mental Health America, a community-based nonprofit dedicated to addressing the...

We are seeing a serious situation in Sudan where violence has erupted between two factions of the military. Hundreds of civilians have been killed and there is significant concern about this leading to a humanitarian catastrophe. To learn more about what is happening, we caught up with Dr. Kelly Duke-Bryant, an Associate Professor of History at Rowan University in Glassboro, NJ, who teaches a vari...

When the pandemic disrupted the workforce, showing that lots of jobs can be done remotely and making workers rethink the values they want from their jobs, many people thought it would change the way we work forever. In 2023, a lot of those workers are back in the office and feeling high levels of burnout. So how much really changed? Morning Consult puts out an annual report on the state of workers...

Artificial intelligence is showing up everywhere. It’s the customer service chat box on websites. It’s the facial recognition feature in security cameras and phones. It’s even in filters on social media, and now, the workplace. But, 38 percent of Americans are cautious about how much AI is present in our everyday lives. Should we be worried about the expansion of AI? And, will increasing its usage...

We’ve heard a ton about medical advancements that happened really quickly in response to COVID - meanwhile, scientists and doctors have been working on a cure and treatments for cancer for decades. Where does that research stand today? Are we any closer to finding a cure…or is that the wrong thing to look at? Dr. Jonathan Chernoff, Cancer Center Director at the Fox Chase Cancer Center, talks us th...

On May 11, the Biden administration is ending the public health emergency that gave everyone, insured or not, access to free testing and vaccines for COVID-19. They said it’s because cases have decreased by 80 percent , but the United States has reported the highest death toll of any country at 1.1 million. Are we really in the clear? And, what does it mean now that we’re no longer in a public hea...

We are all way too familiar with the impact of a pandemic from the past three years dealing with the COVID-19 virus. But there is another kind of pandemic that's at the center of the hit video game and now TV show “The Last of Us”...a pandemic driven by a fungus that leads to zombies and the collapse of society. So this got us wondering - how much should we be worried about a fungal pandemic? How...

After more than 8,000 gallons of an acrylic polymer solution leaked into a tributary of the Delaware River , the city of Philadelphia panicked. But even after the all clear was given, many residents were still wary .  This is just one example of a growing mistrust of government messaging. What could officials on the city, state, and national level be doing better in times of crisis? Dr. Mike Smith...

It was August 2021 when the U.S. closed the door on its 20-year war in Afghanistan with a scattershot exit from the country as the Taliban took over. A new three-part documentary from PBS’s Frontline looks at the war from all angles and examines how things went so wrong. The first episode was released this week, with the other two coming later in April. Martin Smith is a long-time Frontline corres...

In recent years, autism rates have tripled due to advances in diagnostic capabilities and a greater understanding of autism. But how do you test for it? What goes into developing these tools? Dr. Diana Robins is the director of the AJ Drexel Autism Institute, and she developed the M-CHAT, or Modified Checklist for Autism in Toddlers. She tells us about the process of building this tool, how effect...

Protests in Israel have continued since January, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his party proposed judicial reforms. They say they want to reign in the Supreme Court, but many citizens think these reforms will remove checks and balances and dismantle the country’s democracy. There’s a lot to unpack to understand the situation, so we called on Rabbi Josh Weinberg , VP for Israel and Ref...

The global data intelligence company Morning Consult has a new report out called “A Brand’s Guide to Gen Alpha.” It’s a look at the next generation of consumers, a generation that is still taking shape. Joanna Piacenza, head of industry intelligence for Morning Consult, talks about the report and the fascinating trends it reveals. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: ...

Is it possible to examine the legacy of president without letting political beliefs get in the way? Ronald Gruner is the author of “We the Presidents” , a book that examines the presidencies over the last century, starting with Warren Harding. Gruner tells us how he uses the economy to examine presidential effectiveness, and how past policies shape the future of the United States.

Silicon Valley Bank, the nation’s 16th largest bank and a financial center for many tech startups, collapsed in mid-March. Startups across the country - including here in the Philadelphia region - are feeling the effects. But outside of the tech world, how big of a deal is this for everyone? Could this bank’s failure lead people to panic and push other banks to a tipping point? Dr. Samuel Rosen, A...

We’ve seen all kinds of jobs go virtual since the pandemic, but nursing? Actually, nursing started to go virtual in the acute care setting even before the pandemic. Now that remote work is increasing in popularity, some hospitals are looking to expand virtual nursing to different departments. Dr. Terri Hinkley, the CEO of the Medical Surgical Nursing Certificate Board and the Academy of Medical Su...

School board meetings across the country are increasingly becoming battle grounds in the American culture war. Do well-intentioned parents who want to shield their children from sensitive subject matter have legitimate concerns? And about those “sensitive” topics, how do we define what they are and what to do about them? When it comes to banning books and other forms of expression in schools, Cabr...

One of the worst nightmares for a homeowner? Finding out you've got lead water pipes. Not only is replacing them expensive, but lead in water poses a serious health risk, especially for young children. Identifying and removing lead water pipes is a decades-old problem, but Dr. Charles Haas, the LD Betz Professor of Environmental Engineering at Drexel University, has been working with a team to fin...