This week on Arizona Illustrated…we profiled local restaurants Gus Balon’s and Karichimaka at the height of the pandemic, we check back in to see how they are faring in a changed world; catch some of the southwest’s most iconic birds soaring right overhead during the Raptor Free Flight Program at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum and a mind-bending story about one of life’s biggest mysteries, consciousness and how theories being developed at the University of Arizona by Stuart Hameroff and Dante Laureta could change our understanding about the origins of life.
Two Restaurants 2
What became of two Tucson restaurants after the pandemic changed everything? In Two Restaurants 2, we revisit the local chefs we first met during the height of COVID. Years later, their kitchens are open—but not everything is back to “normal.” A story of resilience, reinvention, and what it takes to keep going in uncertain times.
Free Bird
The Raptor Free Flight Program at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum lets visitors see hawks, owls and other raptors fly free, sometimes a couple of feet overhead. We go behind the scenes of this decades old spectacle.
Quantum Consciousness and the Origin of Life
Consciousness: it’s a mystery that has confounded philosophers, psychologists, and scientists throughout human history. Where does our first-person sense of experience come from? One of the leading theories today comes from Stuart Hameroff, an anesthesiologist at the University of Arizona. Back in the 1990’s, he had a clandestine meeting with Nobel Prize-winning physicist Sir Roger Penrose, and together they came up with a profound – and controversial – new hypothesis that our brains construct conscious experience from quantum mechanical processes laced into the very fabric of the universe. Now 30 years later, evidence in favor of their theory is mounting thanks to incredible new findings by Director of the Arizona Astrobiology Center, Dante Lauretta, who also recently captained NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission. That mission collected pristine samples from an asteroid that dates to the dawn of the solar system, and inside they’ve found clues that the quantum nature of consciousness might have preceded the formation of life on Earth. Lauretta thinks that further study could solve another great scientific mystery: the origin of life.
AZPM is a service of the University of Arizona and our broadcast stations are licensed to the Arizona Board of Regents who hold the trademarks for Arizona Public Media and AZPM. We respectfully acknowledge the University of Arizona is on the land and territories of Indigenous peoples.
By submitting your comments, you hereby give AZPM the right to post your comments and potentially use them in any other form of media operated by this institution.