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From NPR: in-depth reports on medicine, the environment, space and more. The best of Morning Edition, All Things Considered and other award-winning NPR programs. Primary Format : Health Language : Unknown Also Listed as: City : Unknown State/Province : Unknown Country : Unknown Region : XX User Tags: User Votes: RSS Feed Website People found this Podcast Searching for: View this Podcast on a Google Map. Podcast iTunes Link Text Only listing of NPR Health Podcasts Methings.com listings of NPR Health Podcasts If you like this podcast, you might also like:

20 Million Years Later, Russians Work To Drill Into Lake Russian researchers in Antarctica are on the verge of piercing a hole through two miles of ice into an ancient lake, untouched by the light of day for some 20 million years. But it'll be a delicate process to break through without disturbing the pristine waters. Guest host David Green speaks with Antarctic researcher John Priscu about the process. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website New USDA Map May Mean Earlier Planting In North A new map from the USDA has some northern gardeners hoping to grow plants that used to be considered too fragile for cold weather zones. The hardiness zone chart is about a half zone warmer than the last one issued in 1990. The USDA says the changes are not due to global warming, but to more sophisticated mapping methods. Seed sellers and buyers say that, whatever the reason, the warmer temperatures expand possibilities for planting this spring. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 'Arctic Oscilliation' Behind Season's Mixed Winter Weather For snow fans in the contiguous US, this winter has left much to be desired. The warm and mild season in the lower 48 and the wild snow dumps and cold weather up north in Alaska can be blamed largely on a weather pattern called "arctic oscillation." Audie Cornish gets an explanation of the weather phenomenon from meteorologist Jeffrey Masters. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Drone Technology Reaches New Heights Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are replacing boots on the ground in some wars. Commercially, UAVs are being used for things like crop-dusting and flood mapping. Experts discuss advances in drone technology and how to address legal and privacy concerns that stem from their use. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Addicts' Brains May Be Wired At Birth For Less Self-Control A study of cocaine addicts finds that they have abnormalities in areas of the brain involved in self-control. And these abnormalities appear to predate any drug abuse. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Could Cheap Gas Slow Growth Of Renewable Energy? The relatively clean gas is replacing dirty coal-fired power plants. That's good news for the environment. But in the long run, cheap natural gas might delay the transition to even cleaner sources of energy, such as wind and solar power. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Clean-Tech Industry Facing Lean Times After Solyndra The once-booming clean-tech industry is facing hard times, in part because of cheaper natural gas, the effects of the financial crisis, China's growing solar industry and the Solyndra bankruptcy. Reporter Juliet Eilperin, who covers the industry's struggles in Wired's February issue, explains. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website New Silica Rules Languish In Regulatory Black Hole Last year it looked like stricter controls would be put in place to limit workers' exposure to dangerous silica dust. But for almost a year, the proposed regulations have been stalled at the White House Office of Management and Budget. Worker safety advocates are growing frustrated, but industry stakeholders say current regulations are sufficient. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Pythons Blamed For Everglade's Disappearing Animals The Florida Everglades is infested with Burmese pythons. To keep them from spreading, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is making it illegal to import the pythons into the country, or transport them across state lines. Scientists have discovered the pythons are doing more damage than ever imagined. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 'I Wanted To Live': New Depression Drugs Offer Hope For Toughest Cases The anesthetic and club drug ketamine seems to lift depression symptoms in a matter of hours. But how does it work? Researchers are searching for the answer in an attempt to make a new class of depression medications. "We can take care of a migraine in hours," one researcher asks. "So why do we have to wait weeks or months with depression?" Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Invasive Pythons Put Squeeze On Everglades' Animals Burmese pythons have been slithering around south Florida for decades, but scientists now say the invasive constrictors are so bad, they're eating their way through the swamps. The snakes have decimated populations of mammals like raccoons, possums and white-tailed deer. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Could A Club Drug Offer 'Almost Immediate' Relief From Depression? Currently, there's no quick fix for severe depression. Antidepressants usually take weeks to work, if they work at all. But patients who received experimental doses of ketamine — long used as an anesthetic, and an illegal club drug — report an astounding relief from their symptoms in less than a day. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Can Science Be Done Without Secrecy? In his book, Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science, Physicist Michael Nielsen discusses why scientists jealously guard their data and are slow to adopt online tools for collaboration. Nielsen talks about why attempts to create science wikipedias have failed. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Ancient Skull Holds Clues to Dog Domestication A 33,000-year-old skull of a "wolf on the way to becoming a dog" was found in a Siberian cave. Evolutionary Biologist Susan Crockford, co-author of a study about the skull in PLoS ONE, discusses why the discovery challenges common beliefs about dog domestication. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Magnetic Soap May Help Clean Up Spilled Oil BP released millions of gallons of dispersants to break up oil from the Deepwater Horizon disaster. But what if dispersants could be sucked up again after doing their job? Chemist Julian Eastoe talks about an iron-containing soap he's created that can be recaptured using a magnet. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website How 'Space Weather' Affects Planes And Power Grids This week solar flares sent a huge blast of X-rays and charged particles screaming towards the Earth. Solar astronomer David Hathaway and physicist Doug Biesecker discuss the sun's explosive behavior, and how that 'space weather' affects satellites, airplanes and the electric grid. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Ode To Ice Discover the secret life of ice--what makes it cloudy or clear, why cracks form on ponds. Science Friday visited Queens ice sculptor Shintaro Okamoto in his studio and spoke with ice researcher Erland Schulson, of Dartmouth University, to find out why ice is an interesting subject for artists and scientists. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Stem Cell Eye Therapy Shows Promise Reporting inThe Lancet, researchers write that a preliminary study shows embryonic stem cell therapy in two patients with macular degeneration was safe. Results suggest the patients' vision improved slightly. Dr. Robert Lanza, Chief Scientific Officer of Advanced Cell Technology and co-author of the study, discusses the trial. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website How To Find A New Nuclear Waste Site? Woo A Town Community opposition helped sink plans for a nuclear waste repository in Nevada's Yucca Mountain. Meanwhile, thousands of tons of radioactive waste are piling up at temporary storage sites around the country. As the U.S. once again looks for a new permanent storage site, an expert panel says local buy in will be key. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Obama Discusses Details From His Energy Agenda The Obama administration released more details Thursday about the energy plan he previewed at the State of the Union this week. He announced an oil-and-gas-lease sale on nearly 38 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico — and proposals for new incentives to increase the use of natural gas in heavy trucks and buses. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Vucetich Discusses Long-Running Predator-Prey Study Melissa Block speaks with John Vucetich, a wildlife ecologist from Michigan Technological University who is leading the wolf-moose winter study at Isle Royale National Park. The park is located in the northwest corner of Lake Superior. The study is in its fifth decade. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Want To Make A Giant Telescope Mirror? Here's How Astronomers want increasingly large telescopes to peer into the depths of space. To build a solid telescope mirror nearly 30 feet across, you need an oven that heats to 2,100 degrees Fahrenheit and spins around like a top. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Next Frontier For Florida's 'Space Coast' NASA ended the U.S. shuttle program in 2011, leaving roughly 9,000 workers at the Kennedy Space Center without jobs. Many in Cape Canaveral hope the private space industry will blossom, and lead the way back into space, and back to work. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Is The Booming Natural Gas Industry Overproducing? Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, was once a small part of the natural gas industry. Then the technology improved and the production rush started. Now, there's so much gas on the market that the prices are at a 10-year low and producers are scaling back. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Foreign Oil Imports Drop As U.S. Drilling Ramps Up President Obama's critics say he has blocked domestic oil production. But under his administration, a steady uptick in U.S. drilling operations, combined with falling overall consumption, has led to a steep drop in the percentage of oil the U.S. imports. Analysts say by 2035, the U.S. will import a little more than a third of its oil, down from 60 percent in 2005. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Common Chemicals Could Make Kids' Vaccines Less Effective Researchers found that children whose blood contained high levels of chemicals used in nonstick coatings and stain-resistant fabrics were less responsive to vaccination. The finding suggests, but doesn't prove, that these chemicals may make some children more vulnerable to infectious diseases. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Op-Ed: The Verdict Is In On Climate Change California became the only state to implement greenhouse gas emission controls in January 2012, but the debate there over climate change continues. University of California history and science professor Naomi Oreskes says the time for bickering over whether or not climate change is real is over. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Op-Ed: Canada Must Change XL Pipeline Debate President Obama rejected Wednesday a proposal to build the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada to the U.S. Gulf Coast — generating intense debate in both countries. Murray Mandryk, political columnist for the Leader-Post of Sasketchewan, offers a Canadian perspective on the controversy. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Dog-Gone Genetics: A Few Genes Control Fido's Looks Humans have complicated genetic structures — not so dogs. Almost every physical trait in canines is controlled by just a few genes, which means custom-breeding a dog is only a matter of flipping a few genetic switches. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Wait A Second, And What Else To Do With It Every few years, official clocks around the world repeat a second. It's not much, but in an age of atomic clocks it's time enough to give the matter a second thought. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Defending Climate Science's Place In The Classroom The National Center for Science Education has long defended educators' right to teach evolution in public schools. Now climate science too is under attack. NCSE executive director Eugenie Scott talks about how teachers and parents can fight the push to get climate change denial into the classroom. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Be Here Now: Meditation For The Body And Brain In his book Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World, Oxford University clinical psychologist Mark Williams talks about the brain and body benefits of mindfulness meditation, a cognitive behavioral therapy that can be as effective as drugs at staving off recurring bouts of depression. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Newly Fallen Meteorites Offer Fresh Look At Mars Scientists have confirmed that rocks collected recently in the Moroccan desert came from the Red Planet. University of Alberta meteorite expert Chris Herd, who has acquired one of the chunks, talks about how scientists analyze space rocks, and whether organic compounds might be found inside. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Synthetic Windpipe Transplant Boost For Tissue Engineering Surgeons in Sweden replaced an American patient's cancerous windpipe with a scaffold built from nanofibers and seeded with the patient's stem cells. Lead surgeon Dr. Paolo Macchiarini discusses the procedure and the benefits of tissue-engineered synthetic organs. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Innovative Projects Tap Renewable Energy Sources Two projects aim to harness renewable energy using cutting-edge technology and engineering. AltaRock's Susan Petty discusses plans to turn hot rocks at a dormant volcano into a source of power. University of Maine's Habib Dagher talks about the potential of deepwater floating wind turbines. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Science Diction: The Origin Of The Word 'Moon' Science historian Howard Markel discusses the origins of the word moon and some of the lore surrounding it, including a 1638 book by the English bishop Francis Godwin entitled The Man in the Moone, which recounts a science fiction-style voyage to the moon. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Cheap Chinese Panels Spark Solar Power Trade War U.S.-based solar panel manufacturers say inexpensive panels from China are hurting their business and want a tariff slapped on the imports. But other parts of the industry, such as installers, say the cheaper panels are driving a solar power boom in the U.S. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Rejected Pipeline Becomes Hot-Button Election Issue The Obama administration has rejected a Canadian company's permit request to build the Keystone XL pipeline. The president said he turned down the proposal because congressional Republicans gave him a 60-day deadline that did not allow for a thorough review of the project. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Man Who Studies The Fungus Among Us Botanist Nicholas Money's book Mushroom takes readers inside the world of the fungal organisms that appear overnight on lawns, are occasionally poisonous and appear in everything from Alice in Wonderland to some lifesaving medications. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Man Who Studies The Fungus Among Us Botanist Nicholas Money's book Mushroom takes readers inside the world of the fungal organisms that appear overnight on lawns, are occasionally poisonous and appear in everything from Alice in Wonderland to some lifesaving medications. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Blocking Keystone Won't Stop Oil Sands Production Oil from the Canadian north is already making its way into the U.S. market through existing pipelines and tanker shipments. Energy experts say even if President Obama blocks the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, it may already be too late to stop Americans from relying on this dirty source of fuel. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Spanish Town Cheers New Nuclear Waste Plant You know Spain's unemployment rate is bad when villagers cheer the arrival of a nuclear waste facility in their backyard — because of the jobs it will bring. That's the case in one tiny Spanish hamlet. The town has been chosen to host a nuclear waste plant that's expected to create much-needed jobs. The mayor calls it "magnificent news." Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Deciphering Mixed Messages On Drinking And Health The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has found that binge drinking, usually associated with young people, is an issue among adults as well. And the University of Connecticut recently found Dr. Dipak Das, who studied an ingredient in red wine, had falsified data on its benefits. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Labs Size Up New Guidelines For Rodent Cages Mice and rats are the most common lab animals. That's why some influential new guidelines on how to house mother rodents and their babies have created an uproar. Some experts at research centers say there's no evidence that making costly changes will really benefit the animals. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Sleep Apnea Business Is Booming, And Insurers Aren't Happy Sleep apnea is a condition that can raise the risk of several serious illnesses, including heart disease. Testing for the condition is a lucrative business, and sleep labs have sprung up across the country. But as spending skyrockets, insurers are rethinking how they pay for testing to curb costs. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Ski Resorts Blow Fake Snow For A 'Brown' Winter Normally at this time of year, about 50 percent of the U.S. is snow-covered.These days, the figure is now more like 20 percent. It's hurting ski resorts and the local economies that thrive on seasonal winter tourism. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Mega Mirror To Power Massive New Telescope One upon a time, the largest glass telescope mirror was 100 inches in diameter. Today, scientists are casting a mirror 27 feet in diameter that will be part of one of the most powerful telescopes on Earth. NPR's Joe Palca speaks with weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz from the mirror laboratory, located under the football stadium at the University of Arizona. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Kepler Telescope Spots Tiniest Exoplanets Yet At a meeting of the American Astronomical Society, scientists talked about mapping dark matter, measuring the 'graininess' of spacetime, and discovering the smallest exoplanets ever, using the Kepler space telescope. Ron Cowen, who reported on the meeting for Nature, discusses those findings. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Lawrence Krauss On 'A Universe From Nothing' Why is there something rather than nothing? That's the question cosmologist Lawrence Krauss tackles in his new book, A Universe from Nothing. In it, he surveys the discoveries that have led to scientists' current understanding of the universe, and explores what the future of the universe may be. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website New Tuberculosis Strain Thwarts All Antibiotics Physicians in India have discovered a strain of tuberculosis they call 'TDR' for 'Totally Drug-Resistant'--meaning there is no antibiotic available to fight it. Maryn McKenna, author of Superbug, discusses the possible origins of the strain, and what options--if any--doctors have to treat it. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Making A Computer From Bubbles Stanford professor Manu Prakash explains how bubbles can be used as bits to make a computer. By directing the bubbles through etched pathways, they act like electrons traveling through circuits. In this system, however, the computer is powered by gravity and the bubble bits can carry things inside of them as they compute. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Get Inked For Science Writer Carl Zimmer became an "unintentional curator" of science-themed tattoos after noticing a double helix on a friend's arm. Sensing a trend, he asked his blog readers to send photos of their science tattoos. Some of those images are gathered in his new book Science Ink. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website A Doctor Tells All in 'Confessions Of A Surgeon' In a new book, surgeon Paul Ruggieri reveals the "good, the bad, and the complicated" about being a surgeon, and operating on patients. From cutting into a man who just killed his wife, to the headaches of running a small business, Ruggieri candidly discusses his career. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Talking Science With Arianna Huffington The new year marks the creation of a science section at The Huffington Post. The Internet newspaper's editor-in-chief, Arianna Huffington discusses the story selection and vetting process. And why the launch coincides with what she calls the explosion of medieval thinking. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website To Slow Climate Change, Cut Down On Soot, Ozone While carbon dioxide is indisputably a significant factor in the planet's changing climate, scientists and policy experts have faced major troubles in limiting production of the greenhouse gas. Now, some are focusing on other things that warm the planet, especially ozone and black carbon. And the tools to fight them are familiar. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Exploring The Real 'Conflict': Science Vs. Naturalism Whether it's creationism vs. evolution, miracles vs. magic tricks, or faith vs. fact, religion and science have long been pitted against one another. But in a new book, Where the Conflict Really Lies, philosopher Alvin Plantinga argues that religion and science share more common ground than you might think. He discusses the book with NPR's Rachel Martin. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Project's Promise Of Jobs Has Appalachia Seeing Stars Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia are waiting to hear which state Shell Oil will pick to host a huge new chemical refinery. The project would turn ethane gas, produced through "fracking," into ethylene, which is used to make plastics. The venture could be the biggest investment in the region in decades. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website NPR's Science Desk Experiments With Twinkies The NPR science desk was inspired to take part in the fine, and longstanding, tradition of experimenting with Twinkies. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Study Links Water Wall, Legionnaires' Disease Uptick Audie Cornish talks with Thomas Haupt, respiratory disease epidemiologist for the Wisconsin Division of Public Health. He's the lead author of the study that helped uncover the source of a mysterious and large uptick in Legionnaires' disease cases. The study, "An Outbreak of Legionnaires Disease Associated with a Decorative Water Wall Fountain in a Hospital" was published in the online journal Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Coast Guard Tries To Lead Fuel Tanker To Nome Melissa Block speaks with Capt. Beverly Havlik, from the Coast Guard ice-breaker Cutter Healy, who talks about the challenges of helping a Russian tanker make its way through the Arctic ice to Nome, Alaska. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Interior Announces Grand Canyon Mining Moratorium The U.S. Department of the Interior is placing a 20-year moratorium on new mining claims in and around the Grand Canyon. Environmentalists say the ban is crucial to protecting the region. However, the mining industry and some Republicans say the moratorium will be harmful to Arizona's economy and the nation's energy independence. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website FAA Rules May Interrupt Endangered Crane Migration Operation Migration uses ultralight planes to guide whooping cranes in migration from Wisconsin to their winter home in Florida. But a Federal Aviation Administration investigation has grounded a flock of whooping cranes and an ultralight guiding plane. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Dog Trained As Ultimate Whale Pooper Snooper Scientists aren't sure what's wrong with the orcas in Puget Sound, but they're hot on the trail. A team of researchers is relying on a secret weapon with a killer nose to sniff out the mystery. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Collapsing Honey Bee Colonies: Blame The Parasites? The honey bee population of North America is declining and new research may help answer why. It shows the bees can become hosts of a fly parasite, which causes them to become disoriented and leave their nests. Scott Simon talks with San Francisco State University's Andrew Core, who authored the study. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Near Icy Waters, Marine Life Gets By Swimmingly Researchers say they have found previously unseen sea creatures, like hairy-chested yeti crabs, near Antarctica. How do they survive in such a harsh environment? These specimens congregate in heaps near hot underwater geyserlike vents. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website One Scholar's Take On The Power of The Placebo A placebo can take the form of a sugar pill or even a fake surgery. It's often used to test the effectiveness of a trial drug. Ted Kaptchuk, director of Harvard University's Program in Placebo Studies and the Therapeutic Encounter, discusses potential applications for the healing power of placebos. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Debate Persists Over Publishing Bird Flu Studies A federal advisory board has urged scientific journals not to publish the research from two labs that have developed an airborne flu virus. Microbiologist Vincent Racaniello discusses why the move sets a bad precedent. Biosecurity expert D.A. Henderson talks about the risks of publishing the research. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Levitating Fruit Flies To Learn About Space Travel Physicist Richard Hill and colleagues at the University of Nottingham have a powerful magnet that they have used to levitate fruits, beer and most recently, fruit flies. It's a low-cost way to study the effects of zero gravity on biological systems, Hill says. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Parasitic Fly Threatens Honey Bee Populations Honey bee colonies around the United States are in decline, threatened by several different diseases and parasites. John Hafernik, a professor of biology at San Francisco State University, describes how a parasitic fly that was thought to prey upon bumblebees may pose a new threat to honey bee populations in the U.S. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website FDA Agrees To Limit Antibiotics In Livestock The FDA is increasing regulations on a class of antibiotic drugs commonly used by livestock producers. The drugs are great for treating infections in animals and humans. Food safety advocates say the over-use of cephalosporin in animals has contributed to the development of diseases that tolerate the antibiotic. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Zoo Crafts Love Nest To Save Ozark's Salamanders The large, flat, slimy, river-dwelling hellbenders are among the world's largest salamanders — and they're quickly disappearing. But thanks to a new conservation program and a high-tech ecosystem at the Saint Louis Zoo, scientists say 2012 could be a year of resurgence for the animals. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Race To Dig Deeper Ports For Bigger Cargo Ships Many environmental concerns are starting to surface as East Coast cities plan to dredge their ports — like in Miami, where engineers would drill for two years to deepen Biscayne Bay's limestone bottom. But like many cities, Miami wants business from new cargo ships from the Panama Canal. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website How Fracking Wastewater Is Tied To Quakes Small earthquakes in Ohio and Arkansas associated with hydraulic fracturing for natural gas have taken many people by surprise. Gas industry executives say there's no hard evidence that their activities are causing these quakes. But some scientists say it's certainly possible; in fact, people have been causing quakes for years. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Keystone Oil Pipeline Deadline Puts Obama In A Pinch Congress gave the White House a tight, 60-day deadline for approving or rejecting the controversial pipeline, which would carry oil from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. If the president rejects the project, he's likely to be assailed on his commitment to job creation. But approving it raises real legal concerns. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Fracking Byproducts May Be Linked To Ohio Quakes Melissa Block interviews John Armbruster, a seismologist with Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, part of Columbia University, about why he believes the waste from fracking in Ohio has led to the earthquakes there. He says the injection of waste water from the fracking process created pressure on nearby faults, and he expects the quakes to continue — even after the process is stopped. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Exploring Stephen Hawking's 'Unfettered Mind' The scientist is known as much for his contributions to theoretical cosmology and quantum gravity as for his willingness to make science accessible for the general public. His work is the topic of a new biography by science writer Kitty Ferguson. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Exploring Stephen Hawking's 'Unfettered Mind' The scientist is known as much for his contributions to theoretical cosmology and quantum gravity as for his willingness to make science accessible for the general public. His work is the topic of a new biography by science writer Kitty Ferguson. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Double-Blind Violin Test: Can You Pick The Strad? Researchers presented a group of professional violinists with a set of violins and asked them to play and then determine — based on sound alone — which were made by the famed Italian violin-maker Stradivari. The results surprised everyone, including the pros themselves. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Op-Ed: 364-Day Calendar Intriguing But Unnecessary It's 2012 — time to throw out the 2011 calendar. But professors Richard Conn Henry and Steven Hanke say it's time to trash the Gregorian calendar altogether. The Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar would make holidays fall on the same day of the week each year. Wired's Brandon Keim explains why he thinks the plan is not a good idea. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Twins Data Reshaping Nature Versus Nurture Debate Scientists have long pointed to identical twins to show that genes reign supreme in the battle of nature versus nurture. But a growing body of research suggests another factor, called epigenetics, may change how those genes are expressed. National Geographic's Peter Miller explains what science is learning from twins. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Biotech Firms Caught In Regulatory No Man's Land Companies making genetically modified animals face a regulatory morass in this country. It's not always clear which federal agency has responsibility for regulating a particular animal, and even when one agency does take the lead, the approval process can drag on for years. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website What Vietnam Taught Us About Breaking Bad Habits In the 1970s, a sizable number of U.S. servicemen in Vietnam self-identified as heroin addicts. But when they returned stateside, the number of these soldiers who continued their addiction was surprisingly low. Why? Turns out a massive disruption in their environment and routine played a big role in helping them change their behavior. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website New Year? How About A New Calendar? Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have devised a different way to count our days — with a leap week every few years to keep the calendar on track. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website For Lab Mice, The Medical Advances Keep Coming Before therapies are tested in people, they are often tested in mice. This year, scientists reported progress in melting away all sorts of tumors in mice, as well as promising treatments for a variety of other ailments. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Year in Review: Science Stories of 2011 From the tsunami-damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant to the end of NASA"s shuttle program, a great deal of science stories made headlines this year. Science writers Mariette DiChristina, Matt Crenson, Steven Levy, and Paul Raeburn join Ira Flatow to discuss the year's top stories in science. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website NASA Probes Set To Orbit The Moon Over New Year's Twin GRAIL spacecraft on a mission to study lunar gravity are nearing the end of their almost four month journey. The probes are expected to reach the moon on New Year's Eve and New Year's Day. GRAIL's principal investigator, Maria Zuber of MIT talks about the data they hope to collect. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Making Resolutions That Stick In 2012 Many have fallen of the new year's resolution bandwagon soon after adopting a new diet or quiting smoking. So how can you achieve year-end goals and start the year on a positive note? Roy Baumeister, co-author of Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength , has some tips. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Google Science Fair Winner Discusses Her Project Robert Siegel speaks with Shree Bose, the winner of this year's Google Science Fair. Bose investigated why cancer cells become resistant to the chemotherapy drug Cisplatin. Through her research, she discovered a specific protein that makes cancer cells resistant to the drug. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Debunked Science: Studies Take Heat In 2011 In the world of science, 2011 may go down as the year of the retraction. Lots of highly publicized discoveries got debunked this year. And many of those discoveries involved findings that both scientists and the public really wanted to believe. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website New England Fishermen Brace For Cod Restrictions Three years ago, scientists found plenty of cod in the region but data this season indicates just the opposite. Federal regulators say stocks are at such dangerously low levels, cod fishing might need to be shut down. Fishermen say they don't believe the reports. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 60 Years After Leaving, Porpoises Again Play In SF Bay Harbor porpoises are showing up in growing numbers under the Golden Gate Bridge. Six decades ago, they were driven away in part by wartime activities and poor water quality; now, researchers are trying to understand why they're returning. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Endangered Turtle Survives Trans-Atlantic Journey The Kemp's ridley sea turtle, which hopped a ride aboard floating seaweed, made the 4,600 mile journey from the Gulf of Mexico to the shores of Portugal in 2008. Nicknamed Johnny Vasco de Gama, after the Portugese explorer, the now-rehabilitated turtle will be reintroduced into Gulf waters Tuesday. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Wisdom Of Trees (Leonardo Da Vinci Knew It) Some 500 years ago, Leonardo da Vinci noted that branches on trees split with mathematical precision. Recently, physicists studying this phenomenon have discovered it has important implications for the way wind flows around and through trees. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Trees In Trouble: Grim Future For Frankincense The wise men would be one gift short at the manger — frankincense, one of the gifts given to the baby Jesus, is now in short supply. The trees from which the fragrant resin is produced are declining, and in 15 years, frankincense production could be cut in half. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website A Pigeon's Potential: Learning Abstract Numbers Damian Scarf at New Zealand's University of Otago reports in the current issue of the journal Science that experiments he conducted with colleagues show that pigeons can learn abstract rules about numbers. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website To Flirt In Cities, Birds Adjust Their Pitch A big part of being a bird is singing, often to attract other birds. Sometimes it's hard to do that amid all the noise in a city, so urban birds are changing their tune. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website After Fukushima: A Changing Climate For Nuclear Nuclear power had enjoyed 25 years of relative quiet, but the Fukushima accident reminded people that despite improvements in safety, things can still go horribly wrong. The accident is unlikely to affect U.S. nuclear policy, experts say, but countries like Germany and Japan are looking to alternatives. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Heroes Of The Taj Hotel: Why They Risked Their Lives When a Mumbai hotel was besieged by terrorists in 2008, something extraordinary happened: Workers didn't flee. They stayed behind to help save guests at the risk of their own lives. What could possibly explain it? A new study attempts to answer that question. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Kepler Telescope Narrows Hunt For Earth's Twin By tracking the blinking light of distant stars, NASA's Kepler space telescope has identified the first Earth-sized exoplanets, and another which orbits its star in the "Goldilocks zone," where liquid water--and possibly life--could exist. Principal investigator William Borucki talks about the newly discovered worlds. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The War On Cancer Turns 40 Forty years ago, President Nixon signed the National Cancer Act, beginning the War on Cancer. Harold Varmus, director of the National Cancer Institute, discusses four decades of scientific progress in preventing, detecting and treating cancer--and the mysteries that still remain. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Building Bridges From Plastic Shampoo Bottles Discarded plastic shampoo and juice bottles are finding new life in unlikely places--as bridges, railroad ties and pilings. Jim Kerstein, CTO and founder of Axion International, talks about how his company transforms plastic waste into structures strong enough to support trucks, trains and tanks. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Science Behind 'Breaking Bad' Cooking crystal meth is just "basic chemistry" for Walter White, the fictional chemistry teacher and anti-hero of the TV drama "Breaking Bad." Organic chemist Donna Nelson serves as science adviser to the show; she explains how the series' writers work to get the science right. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Searching For A Ghost Bird No one is sure whether the Imperial woodpecker is extinct--the two-foot-tall relative of the Ivory-billed woodpecker lives in a remote mountain range in Mexico, and was last credibly spotted in the 1990s. Tim Gallagher, editor of Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Living Bird magazine, describes a hair-raising expedition to try to save the woodpecker and make it home unscathed. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Birders Fan Out to Count Feathered Friends The 112th Audubon Christmas Bird Count is underway. Citizen scientists armed with binoculars are recording data vital to monitoring bird health and conservation. But before you can count a Snowy Owl or a Rufous Hummingbird, you need to identify it. Birder Richard Crossley has some tips. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Myth Busting: The Truth About Animals And Tools Birds and wasps do it. So do octopuses, otters, polar bears and dolphins. A surprising number of animals use tools, and scientists say there are some widespread misconceptions. Among them: Using tools isn't a sign of intelligence, and animals don't need fingers to be crafty with tools. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Turbulence As EU Court OKs Fee On Plane Emissions A European court ruled Wednesday that airlines flying into and out of European airports will have to pay a price for the carbon dioxide they emit when they burn jet fuel. U.S. carriers had been fighting the plan in court, arguing they've already done their part by becoming more fuel-efficient. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website U.S. Says Details Of Flu Experiments Should Stay Secret In a landmark decision, an expert panel that advises the government on research security says key details of work on the contagiousness of flu viruses should not be published openly. I Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 'The Onion' Of Medical Journals Pokes Fun At Studies For the past 13 years, North America's medical community has had its own version of The Onion. The Canadian Medical Association Journal's "Holiday Reading" segment in its December issue brings satire and spoofing to its medical studies, with some unintended consequences. Host Audie Cornish talks with Barbara Sibbald, editor of the Canadian Medical Association Journal. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Treating Stress, Speech Disorders With Music More and more hospitals and clinics now offer music therapy as a supplementary treatment for everything from anxiety to Alzheimer's, but its efficacy varies for different conditions. Neurologist Oliver Sacks and several music therapists discuss the science and practice of music therapy. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Science Diction: The Origin Of The Petri Dish In 1887, Julius Petri invented a simple pair of nesting glass dishes, ideal for keeping specimens of growing bacteria sterile--the 'Petri dish.' Science historian Howard Markel recounts the history of this ubiquitous lab supply, and the serendipitous discovery of the stuff in it, agar. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Physicists Find 'Hints' of Elusive Higgs Boson Two teams of scientists at CERN say they may have glimpsed the long-sought Higgs boson while studying particle collisions. Physicist Joe Incandela discusses how the teams are closing in on data that may prove the theoretical particle, considered a building block for the universe, exists. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Exploring The Science Of Flying, From Your Window Seat From identifying river deltas to understanding how an aircraft achieves lift, there's a lot of science to keep you busy on an airplane. In Inflight Science, science writer Brian Clegg explores the science and technology of airplanes, and the world as seen from your window seat. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website What Makes Wings Work? Researchers at New York University are studying flight with a speaker, a soup pot, straws and a box full of paper aircraft. Emeritus professor Stephen Childress describes the experiment and what he and his colleagues have learned about flight from their homemade flying objects. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Ornithologist Discusses Causes Of Bird Downings Melissa Block speaks with Kevin McGowen, ornithologist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, about the phenomenon of bird downings. Approximately 1,500 migratory birds died on Monday night after crashing into a Wal-Mart parking lot in Utah. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Biomedical Research Using Chimps Curtailed Following an expert panel's recommendations, The National Institutes of Health announced it will not issue new awards for experiments using chimps until a new set of strict criteria is in place. The panel also recommended setting up an independent oversight committee that includes members of the public. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website U.S. Nuclear Agency Suffers Leadership Meltdown Four of the top commissioners of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission are locked in a feud with the fifth — the chairman, Gregory Jaczko. In a letter to the White House and in a congressional hearing on Wednesday, they called Jaczko a bully who is destroying their ability to do their job. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website No 'God Particle' Yet, But Scientists Say Stay Tuned New data from the world's largest particle physics lab offer "intriguing hints" about the Higgs boson. The Higgs is a key part of some beautiful math that would explain why things have mass — if scientists can find concrete evidence that the particle really exists. Alas, "we have not found it yet," physicists said today. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website EPA To Unveil Stricter Rules For Power Plants The rules, which come two decades after Congress ordered the agency to regulate toxic air pollution, would give power plants nationwide just three more years to slash mercury and other harmful emissions. But some big power plants are angling for more time. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Who Are The Young Farmers Of 'Generation Organic'? There's a surge of youthful vigor into American agriculture — at least in the corner devoted to organic, local food. Thousands of idealistic young people who've never farmed before are trying it out. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website In Pa., Drilling Comes Into Focus The vast, untapped natural gas reserves in Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale are the subject of much debate. Scientists who are trying to shed light on the safety of drilling are facing a host of obstacles, including lack of funding and data. Susan Phillips Scientists who are trying to shed light on the safety of drilling are facing a host of obstacles. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Climate Talks Go Longer Than Expected The United Nations climate conference in Durban, South Africa, was scheduled to wrap up Friday, but the negotiations have gone into overtime. Host Scott Simon talks with NPR's Richard Harris about what is still under discussion. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Newly Discovered Black Holes Are Largest So Far Astronomers at the University of California, Berkeley, recently discovered two massive black holes more than 300 million light-years away and 10 billion times the size of the sun. Host Scott Simon talks with Professor Chung-Pei Ma, who led the team that published the study. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Climate Strategists: To Cut Emissions, Focus On Forests The basic idea is to have rich countries that emit lots of climate-warming gases pay poorer countries to keep their forests, or even expand them. That's because forests suck carbon from the atmosphere. But there's not yet a global system to make a plan like this work. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Rats Show Empathy, By Freeing Trapped Companions Reporting in Science, researchers write of an experiment in which rats worked to open the cages of trapped rats, but not empty or dummy-filled cages. Author Peggy Mason discusses empathy in non-primates, and the value rats place on freeing a companion--about equal to that of a stash of chocolate chips. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website US Military Keeps Wary Eye On Asia's Space Race In Asia's Space Race: National Motivations, Regional Rivalries, and International Risks, Naval Postgraduate School professor James Clay Moltz discusses the potential militarization of fast-growing space programs in China, India, and Japan--and why US military officials are keeping watch. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Inbreeding To Blame For Bedbug Renaissance Presenting at a meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, researchers said bedbugs can survive many generations of inbreeding, allowing one pregnant female to cause a building-wide infestation. Biologist Rajeev Vaidyanathan discusses that study, and another on pesticide resistance. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Engineers Give The Jump Rope A Spin When they both worked at Princeton, Howard Stone and Jeff Aristoff used to play basketball at lunchtime. One day, when Dr. Stone was warming up with his jump rope, the two wondered if anyone had mathematically modeled the shape of the rope. The two researchers decided to give it a whirl. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Debating Genetically Modified Salmon Biotech company AquaBounty has not yet received FDA approval for its fast-growing, genetically-modified salmon. Biotechnologist Alison Van Eenennaam and environmental scientist Anne Kapuscinski discuss the food safety and environmental concerns associated with transgenic fish. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Python Could Help Treat Heart Disease Adult Burmese pythons can swallow prey as large as deer. Now, researchers from the University of Colorado, Boulder say the way the python's heart balloons after it eats could help treat human heart disease. Molecular biologist Leslie Leinwand discusses her team's python experiments. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website At Climate Talks, Frustration And Interruptions Frustrated by what some see as U.S. foot-dragging on climate policy, an American college student interrupted U.S. envoy Todd Stern Thursday during his remarks at the climate conference in South Africa. Later, Stern emphasized that the U.S. has been working hard to advance global climate policy into the 21st century. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website EPA Connects 'Fracking' To Water Contamination For the first time, a government study has tied contamination in drinking water to an advanced drilling technique commonly known as "fracking." EPA scientists found high levels of chemicals commonly used in hydraulic fracturing in the ground water of a small Wyoming town. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Cagebreak! Rats Will Work To Free A Trapped Pal Calling someone a "rat" is no compliment, but a new study shows that rats actually are empathetic and will altruistically lend a helping paw to a cage mate who is stuck in a trap. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Grass Mattress Was A Stone Age Bed And Breakfast Scientists have found what they say is the world's oldest bed: a 77,000-year-old grass and leaf mattress in a cave in South Africa. And the people who made it were crafty: Atop layers of sedge grass were leaves from a plant known to repel insects — key for living in buggy, dank caves. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Can 'Carbon Ranching' Offset Emissions In Calif.? Climate experts are thinking about growing dense fields of weeds to help soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This would require flooding dense, carbon-rich wetland soils of the San Joaquin Valley, and farmers hope money they make from capturing greenhouse gases would make up for the lost acreage. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Mine Settlement Is In, But Closure Is Tougher The Justice Department announced a $210 million settlement Tuesday with the owner of the Upper Big Branch coal mine, where 29 miners died in an explosion last year. The federal mine safety agency, meanwhile, issued a final report on the blast. But families of the miners are still trying to make sense of the disaster. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Students Grossed Out By School Water Fountains New California rules are meant to get school kids to drink fewer sugary drinks and more water. But many students don't want to drink out of public water fountains. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Calif. Takes Big Step Toward Greenhouse Gas Limits California's radical new law will put a statewide cap on the amount of greenhouse gases coming out of smokestacks and tailpipes. Utility costs will no doubt rise, but advocates of the law say it will also create new businesses and spur development and deployment of green technologies. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Found: Earth-Like Planet That Might Be Right For Life The planet, dubbed Kepler-22b, isn't much larger than Earth and is orbiting a star in a region that's not too hot and not too cold — just the kind of place that could be home to liquid water, and maybe even life. But don't pack your bags just yet: It's 600 light-years away. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website For Creative People, Cheating Comes More Easily "It's all about telling stories," says the author of a new psychological study, "so creative people are likely to be able to tell themselves better stories, which would allow them to cheat more on the one hand, but not feel worse about it on the other." Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Deep-Sea Find That Changed Biology The depths of our oceans are dark, punishingly cold and utterly devoid of life. Or so scientists thought, until a team of researchers in the late 1970s stumbled upon squishy, rubbery worms, up to 7 feet long, living 8,000 feet below the surface of the Pacific. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Milwaukee's 'Misery Index': Infant Mortality As the city lost industrial jobs, its infant mortality rate skyrocketed. In one particular ZIP code, one baby dies for every 59 that make it. That's a rate that's worse than in parts of rural China. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Name That Tune: Identifying Whale Songs For Science Researchers need your help to unlock the secrets of whale songs. A new online experiment is recruiting citizen scientists to study killer and pilot whale calls from around the world. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Tough Work Lies Ahead In Climate Talks In Durban, South Africa, thousands of men and women poured into the streets in front of the International Conference Center, where United Nations talks about climate change are taking place. Host Audie Cornish speaks with NPR's Richard Harris, who is at the conference. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website After 10 Years, Segway Falls Short Of High Hopes Melissa Block and Guy Raz mark the 10th anniversary of the public unveiling of the balancing scooter called the Segway — a device that was predicted to change our world. It only did 10 percent of the volume expected and became something of a joke. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Hitting The 'Off' Switch On Antibiotic Resistance Doctors are running out of effective antibiotics, as bacteria evolve ways to evade one drug after another. Now DARPA has called for alternatives to conventional antibiotics. Nanotechnologist Chad Mirkin discusses one such weapon--tiny globs of DNA and RNA that can switch off the bugs' antibiotic resistance. Nanotechnologist Chad Mirkin discusses next-generation antibiotics that target a bacterium's DNA. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Combating Depression With Meditation, Diet In his book Spontaneous Happiness, Dr. Andrew Weil writes of an 'integrative' approach to mental health, warding off mild and moderate depression with an anti-inflammatory diet, exercise and activities such as yoga and meditation, rather than antidepressants. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Flight Of The Wild Pigeon Pigeons may not be known for their flying prowess, but they are actually pretty good at maneuvering right angles. Andrew Biewener and colleagues at Harvard's Concord Field Station caught pigeons in a parking garage, made a flying course in the lab and filmed the birds with high speed cameras to see how pigeons make tight turns. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Deconstructing A Skyscraper In her new book, The Heights: Anatomy of a Skyscraper, author Kate Ascher sheds light on the infrastructure and services that make life and work possible in a modern skyscraper. She examines everything that goes into designing, building and maintaining these towering buildings. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Beauty and Brains Behind 'Hedy's Folly' In a new book, Pulitzer Prize winning writer Richard Rhodes tells the behind-the-scenes story of movie star--and inventor-- Hedy Lamarr, "the most beautiful woman in the world." Lamarr invented "frequency hopping," a concept that's still used in today's wireless technology. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website U.S. Weighs Sanctions Targeting Iran's Central Bank Iran may soon face economic measures tougher than anything it has encountered before: The U.S. Congress is considering sanctions against the central bank of Iran, with the likely effect of limiting Iran's oil exports. But some analysts say the move could lead to a dangerous spike in oil prices. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Big Solar Project Moves Forward Without Uncle Sam SolarCity says it will install solar systems on the roofs of up to 120,000 military homes, with financing coming from Bank of America Merrill Lynch. It's the first time a project of this scale has been launched without the federal government basically co-signing the loan. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website A Debate Over Who Regulates Gas 'Fracking' In Pa. As the natural gas industry booms in Pennsylvania, drillers are encountering a hodgepodge of local rules on hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking." State lawmakers are considering changes that would limit the way a local community regulates what happens in its own backyard. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Search For Analysts To Make Sense Of 'Big Data' Businesses' desire to make sense of vast troves of data means mathematicians are in high demand, creating a recruiting war for talented analysts. DJ Patil, a "big data" expert who now recruits for a venture capital firm, compares raw data to clay: shapeless until molded by a gifted mathematician. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Complaint Tests Rule Protecting Science From Politics A 2009 White House memorandum protects federal scientists from political interference. But a watchdog group alleges that federal officials allowed politics to affect the design of a scientific study — exactly the sort of abuse the directive was designed to prevent. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website As Kyoto Protocol Ends, An Uncertain Climate Future The 1997 treaty was supposed to be a first step toward more ambitious actions on climate change. But it's now on the brink of fading into irrelevance as unified, global actions on climate policy have been almost nonexistent. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 'Physics Of The Future': How We'll Live In 2100? Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku describes some of the inventions he thinks will appear in the coming century — including Internet-ready contact lenses, space elevators and driverless cars — in his book Physics of the Future. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 'Physics Of The Future': How We'll Live In 2100? Theoretical physicist Michio Kaku describes some of the inventions he thinks will appear in the coming century — including Internet-ready contact lenses, space elevators and driverless cars — in his book Physics of the Future. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Baker Discusses New Smart Meters Smart electric meters are being installed in homes across the country. The wireless devices replace old meters and transmit electricity usage data wirelessly to utilities. But there are concerns about accuracy and safety. Guy Raz talks to David Baker, energy reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle, for more. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Ahead Of Climate Talks, U.S. Leadership In Question A presidential pledge to reduce emissions two years ago went nowhere in Congress. Today, the U.S. is spewing more carbon dioxide than ever into the atmosphere. Without meaningful U.S. action on emissions, a global pact seems unlikely to emerge from U.N. climate talks under way in Durban, South Africa. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website An Amnesia Patient's Strange Power Of Recall A 71-year-old amnesiac in Germany has become well known in medical circles there. Even though the patient has lost nearly all memory of his past and has difficulty planning anything in the present or for the future, new research shows the former concert cellist is still able to learn new music. Audie Cornish speaks with Dr. Carsten Finke, a neurologist at The Charite university hospital in Berlin, about the unique patient. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website New Roving Science Lab Charts A Course For Mars Launched Saturday morning, the six-wheeled Mars Science Laboratory boasts a suite of high-tech instruments to study the planet's geology. It will land on the planet in August 2012, lowered gently to the surface on a cable by a rocket-powered helicopter. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Why Do We Give? Not Why Or How You Think New findings in the science of charity reveals some counter-intuitive results. For instance, people will give more money to a single suffering person than to a population of suffering people, and also give more when some type of physical discomfort — for example, running a marathon — is involved. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Building 'The Big Roads' In his new book The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways writer Earl Swift looks at the history and people behind the world's largest public works project — the U.S. interstate superhighway system. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Giant Pumpkin, But Forget About Pie Some pumpkins just aren't meant for the pie pan. Robert Sabin has been growing "Atlantic giant" pumpkins for ten years and says they are more like children than fruit to him. He raises his pumpkins for competition--the heavier, the better. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website A Tale Of Two Addicts: Freud, Halsted And Cocaine In his book An Anatomy of Addiction: Sigmund Freud, William Halsted, and the Miracle Drug Cocaine, medical historian Howard Markel tells the story of how Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, and Halsted, the acclaimed surgeon, fell under the addictive spell of cocaine. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Science Diction: The Origin Of 'Stethoscope' The first stethoscope, invented by the French physician René Laennec, was simply a hollow wooden or ebony tube. Laennec named the device using the Greek roots stethos, or chest, and skopein, to look at or to observe. Medical historian Howard Markel discusses how Laennec came up with the invention. Unlike the stethoscope familiar to patients today, the original device was a simple tube. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website IgNobel Prizes Salute The Silly In Science This year's 21st First Annual IgNobel Prize Ceremony featured the science of sighs, inquiries into the yawning habits of the red-footed tortoise, and songs about the chemistry of coffee. Ira Flatow and Ig master of ceremonies Marc Abrahams present some of the highlights from this year's festivities. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Beer Or Sugar Water? For Flies, The Choice Is Pale Ale If a fly walked into a bar, he'd chose beer, and scientists think they've figured out why. The secret? A molecule that tastes sweet but isn't sugar. The research could help create more powerful insect repellents. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website A Push To Make Gasoline Engines More Efficient Technology exists for gas cars to get 55 miles per gallon — the fuel economy goal set by the Obama administration for the year 2025. But all the extra comforts consumers are used to — including automatic transmissions and power windows — can drive fuel economy down by half. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Automakers Set To Steer Customers To Hybrids Some auto executives say customers may not be ready for hybrids yet, but now it's time for the car companies to lead them there. For companies to meet new rules that will nearly double average fuel economy by 2025, hybrids will have to play a much bigger role than they do now. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Test Driving The Nissan Leaf Robert Siegel test drives the Leaf, Nissan's electric plug-in vehicle, with Carlos Ghosn, chief executive officer of Nissan and Renault. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Seaway Pipeline Tweak Could Change Oil Market Oil prices briefly rose above $100 a barrel last week on news of a pipeline deal that would cut a glut of U.S. inventories. There are plans to reverse the flow of the Seaway pipeline. Prices have dipped since then, but not enough to soften historic highs for diesel or home heating oil. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Boston's Leaky Gas Lines May Be Tough On The Trees Using a mobile gas sensor, researchers have found more than 4,000 significant natural gas leaks while driving through Boston-area roads. The city's gas infrastructure is currently being fixed up, but methane in the leaked natural gas has the potential to harm trees and dry out soil. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website In India, Spreading A Green Gospel Among Pilgrims Every year, millions of Sikhs flock to the holy city of Amritsar in northern India, adding heavily to the city's carbon footprint. Now, officials and activists are encouraging environmentally friendly practices such as using solar energy and reducing waste. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website In Baltimore, Mapping The World Of Addiction Researchers in Baltimore are tracking the way the character of a neighborhood — its violence, its vacant houses, its appearance of obvious drug use — can affect an addict's decision to use drugs. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Arson Forensics Sets Old Fire Myths Ablaze At the ATF fire lab in Maryland, setting houses on fire is all in a day's work. As researchers learn more about how fires start, they're shattering assumptions and shedding new light on old cases. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Perhaps Scientists Like Lab Mice TOO Much The lab mouse is the most ubiquitous animal in biomedical research, but that doesn't mean it's always the best subject for researching disease. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Scientists Claim Neutrinos Are Faster Than Light Scientists at the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics are now touting a successful second experiment that may challenge Albert Einstein's long-held theory of relativity. The results show that neutrinos could travel faster than the speed of light. Guy Raz talks to Brian Greene, professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University, about the findings. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Geron To End Embryonic Stem Cell Research Citing "capital scarcity" the Geron Corporation said it will abandon its research into using human embryonic stem cells to treat spinal cord injuries. Stem cell expert Leonard Zon discusses the announcement and what it means for the future of embryonic stem cell research. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Is A Moon Necessary For A Planet To Support Life? For years, a theory has held that Earth's large moon played a critical role in stabilizing the planet's tilt, damping down differences between the seasons. Now, astronomer Jason Barnes says that life on our planet would endure even without a moon, a finding that might increase the number of potentially habitable planets in our galaxy. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Solar Sector At War Over Cheap Chinese Panels Seven solar companies have filed a trade complaint with the federal government, accusing China of dumping artificially cheap solar panels on the US market. But solar installers welcome the low prices. Ira Flatow and guests discuss what's best for the domestic solar industry--and US jobs--in the long run. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Strangers Can Spot Genetic Disposition For Empathy Reporting in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers write that complete strangers are capable of spotting individuals with a genetic predisposition to empathy and sociable behavior. Author Sarina Saturn discusses the study, and how sociability has evolved across cultures. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Balloonatics Prepare For Thanksgiving Day Parade With the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade less than a week away, it's crunch time for the balloon technicians. Science Friday goes behind the scenes at Macy's design studio to find out about the final preparations for the parade. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Building A Better Toilet Toilets, as most of us know them, haven't changed much since the 1800s--they use a lot of water, and require an infrastructure that many communities can't afford. Ira Flatow and guests look at the problem of access to sanitation, and how engineers are making toilets better. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Scientists Worry About Impact Of Bird Flu Experimen Scientists are worried about the deadly bird flu called H5N1 which sometimes infects people. It's never acquired the ability to transmit easily between humans, but researchers would like to know if that could happen. Recently, they've essentially been altering the genes of H5N1 to make the virus spread more easily between lab animals — raising concerns about biosafety and how this research is regulated. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Why Brain Injuries Are More Common In Preemies Each year more than 60,000 babies are born weighing less than 3.3 pounds. As scientists learn more about how brain injuries occur among these very premature infants, it could point the way to possible prevention and repair strategies. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Solyndra Highlights Long History Of Energy Subsidies Energy Secretary Steven Chu will face scrutiny on Capitol Hill Thursday over loans to the failed solar firm. But the government has a long history of subsidizing many kinds of energy, from coal to oil to wind. Still, different sectors disagree on whether tax deductions should be considered a subsidy. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Fluoride In Drinking Water? No Thanks, Says Florida County Public health officials say the evidence is solid that fluoridated drinking water helps protect teeth. But that hasn't stopped opponents from lobbying local governments against the practice. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Exploring Supernovae Leads To Physics Nobel Prize Astrophysicist Saul Perlmutter is part of the team that was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics for the discovery that the expansion of the universe is not slowing down but is accelerating. The results of that research suggest the universe is filled with dark energy. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Veterans To Create World's Largest Medical Database The Department of Veterans Affairs is way ahead of the curve when it comes to electronic medical records, which it's been collecting for 25 years. The Million Veteran Project launched this year is an effort to pair the records with blood samples — which contain DNA — from 1 million veterans. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Polka-Dotted Horses? Cave Art May Not Be Fantasy There is art beyond price in the caves of southwestern France. The paintings date back to the Paleolithic period and depict spotted horses, which, according to new research, may actually be how horses looked at the time. Guest host Linda Wertheimer speaks with Professor Terry O'Connor of the University of York in the United Kingdom about the ancient art. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Air Pollution: Bad For Health, But Good For Planet? In addition to carbon dioxide, power plants also spew chemicals like nitrogen and sulfur into the air. This complicated soup actually offsets some global warming by reflecting sunlight into space and pulling carbon dioxide from the air. But the long-term effects of reducing these emissions aren't fully understood. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Meet The MythBusters Discovery Channel's MythBusters have taken on more than 700 myths, from how hard it is to find a needle in a haystack (it's hard) to whether toothbrushes have fecal matter on them (they do). Series hosts Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage talk about the show with host Ira Flatow. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Cure Winter Blues With Light Therapy Or The Beach — Seasonal depression, or seasonal affective disorder, affects some five percent of Americans in the winter as daily sunlight hours dwindle. Psychiatrist Richard A. Friedman discusses the evolutionary origins of the winter blues, and treatments ranging from light therapy to a trip to the beach. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 'Steve Jobs': Profiling An Ingenious Perfectionist For years, Steve Jobs courted biographer Walter Isaacson to write the definitive story of his life. When Isaacson learned how sick Jobs really was, he accepted. Here he discusses profiling the tech visionary, a task that often involved reconciling Jobs' recollections with those of his friends, family and colleagues. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Hunt For A Vanishing Woodpecker In 1956, dentist and amateur ornithologist William Rhein captured the rare Imperial woodpecker on 16 mm color film. Although this 85 second clip is the only known photographic record of the bird, Rhein kept the film to himself until after he died. Writer and bird fanatic Tim Gallagher tells the story of Rhein's expedition to look for the bird, and his own trip to the same mountains over 50 years later. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Rethinking How Kids Learn Science How important are museums, TV shows and after school clubs to teaching kids science? Ira Flatow and guests look at "informal science education" and what researchers are learning about learning science. Plus, what's the best way to keep undergraduate science majors in science? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Receding Sea Ice Helps Storm Hammer Alaska's Coast The villages on Norton Sound are right at the water's edge, and with the ice developing progressively later each season, Carven Scott says meteorologists worry storms like this one will become a more regular occurrence. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Credit Controversy: Who Made Key Cosmos Discovery? A letter found deep in archives in London has helped settle the debate over who deserves credit for what many say is the most important astronomical discovery of the 20th century: the realization that the universe is expanding. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 'Power For The Planet': Company Bets Big On Fusion Inventor Michael Laberge is building a machine that aims to generate electricity through nuclear fusion — the same process that powers the sun. His goal is "insanely ambitious": He thinks he can do it using a much cheaper approach than that used by existing multibillion-dollar fusion labs. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Why Nails On A Chalkboard Drives Us Crazy Robert Siegel talks to Michael Oehler, a professor at the University of Media and Communication in Cologne, Germany, about why people find the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard so irritating. Oehler was one of the researchers who presented a paper on the subject at the recent Acoustical Society of America conference. He says the most obnoxious frequencies of the noise are amplified by the shape of the human ear canal — making people cringe when they hear it. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Biofuels Start To Take Off In The Airline Industry This week, a Continental flight from Houston to Chicago used a biofuel blend made in part from algae, and Alaska Airlines will fly passengers using a fuel made in part from cooking oil. The fledgling environmental effort has many hurdles, as biofuel costs nearly six times as much as regular jet fuel. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website IAEA Suggests Iran May Be Developing Nuclear Arms The International Atomic Energy Agency has issued a new report on Iran's suspect nuclear program. It says Iran has conducted experiments that could only be useful in the development of a nuclear weapon. Guy Raz talks to NPR's Mike Shuster for more. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website How Dogs Evolved Into 'Our Best Friends' Naturalist Mark Derr says our friendship with dogs and wolves goes back thousands of years more than previously believed. His new book explores how the relationship between humans and wolves developed. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website How Dogs Evolved Into 'Our Best Friends' Naturalist Mark Derr says our friendship with dogs and wolves goes back thousands of years more than previously believed. His new book explores how the relationship between humans and wolves developed. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Plutonium Problem: Who Pays For Space Fuel? NASA has relied on a special kind of fuel, called plutonium-238, to power robotic space missions for five decades. that it sometimes seems easier to chart a course across the solar system than to navigate the budget process inside Washington, D.C. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website For Copernicus, A 'Perfect Heaven' Put Sun At Center In 1543, when Nicolaus Copernicus made the astounding claim that Earth revolves around the sun, not the other way around, his ideas were met with scorn. "It went against everything that your senses tell you. It went against common sense," says author Dava Sobel, who wrote a new book about the astronomer. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Nobel Prize-Winning Physicist Norman Ramsey Dies If you want to know what time it is, a smart way to find out is call the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. We owe this accurate timekeeping to a man named Norman Ramsey. Ramsey died Friday at 96. It was his scientific research in the years following World War II that revolutionized how we keep track of time. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website How The World's Tallest Skyscrapers Work How do skyscrapers withstand 100-mph winds? How does air circulate inside tall buildings? And what happens when you flush a toilet on the 100th floor? Those questions and more are answered by Kate Ascher in her new book exploring the inner workings of skyscrapers. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Nebraska May Play Key Role In Canada Pipeline Battle TransCanada's proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline would cut through the Ogallala aquifer, a major water source that supplies about 80 percent of Nebraska's water for drinking and irrigation. Legislators have introduced bills preventing pipelines in environmentally sensitive areas. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Fake Mission Accomplished For Mars500 This week marked the end of the Mars500 experiment, a 520-day simulation of a trip to the red planet that sealed six men inside windowless modules in a Russian laboratory. The crew dealt with fake emergencies and communications blackouts, and finally suited up to "land" on a fake Martian landscape. NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce reports. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Peering Into The Brain, But At What? Modern brain-imaging techniques have given researchers an unprecedented level of detail about the structure of the brain, but are they any closer to puzzling out how the brain really works? Harvard neuroscientist Jeff Lichtman talks about the limitations of brain imaging, and the challenges of trying to use imaging techniques to decode the brain's behavior. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website A Researcher Asks: Are Dolphins Self-Aware? Like chimpanzees, dolphins are large-brained and highly social animals, but can they recognize themselves in a mirror? Psychologist and dolphin researcher Diana Reiss discusses her work with dolphin communication and cognition. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Pondering the Possibility of Non-constant 'Constants' What if the laws of physics aren't the same all over the universe, but vary from place to place? Michael Murphy of the Swinburne University of Technology discusses research published in the journal Physical Review Letters indicating that the value of one basic physical property, the fine structure constant, may vary with location in interstellar space. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website How An Elegant Moth Stays Aloft To feed, the hawk moth unrolls a long proboscis, sticks it in a flower like a straw, and slurps up nectar. It looks like a hummingbird feeding. Like the hummingbird, the moth has to be stable in the air to get a drink. Biologist Ty Hedrick filmed the moths with high-speed video to try to understand how they hold steady. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Mosquitoes Engineered To Kill Their Own Kind Reporting in Nature Biotechnology, researchers write of genetically engineering mosquitoes to pass lethal genes to their offspring, in hopes of crashing populations of one dengue-transmitting species. Science writer Bijal Trivedi talks about recent tests of the bugs, and the concerns of critics. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website In Scott's Race To The Pole, Science Beat Speed A hundred years ago, two teams were racing to the South Pole. The Norwegian team led by Roald Amundsen made it first, beating British explorer Robert Scott. But only Scott did pioneering science--and photography--along the way. Ira Flatow and guests discuss the achievements of the first Antarctic expeditions. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Climate Change Has Calif. Vintners Rethinking Grapes Familiar French varieties aren't well-suited to high temperatures, so some researchers suggest cross-breeding to make the grapes more heat tolerant or drought-resistant. But once you breed pinot noir with something else, you can't call it pinot noir anymore. And marketing new wines is a challenge. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website How Fear Drove World Rice Markets Insane No one can guarantee that the rice crisis of 2008 won't happen again. A lot of damage remains from the disaster that sent rice prices soaring even while there was plenty of rice. And there's still some of the fear that produced the crisis in the first place. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Exploring 'The Hidden Reality' Of Parallel Worlds It is possible that there are many other universes that exist parallel to our universe. Theoretical physicist Brian Greene, author of The Elegant Universe, explains how that's possible in the new book, The Hidden Reality. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Stuxnet Raises 'Blowback' Risk In Cyberwar The Stuxnet computer worm successfully damaged centrifuges at a nuclear facility in Iran. Now, officials responsible for defending U.S. infrastructure fear that Stuxnet may have provided a blueprint for adversaries who may want to sabotage industrial operations in this country. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Miss. Set To Vote On Measure Defining A Person A personhood amendment on the state ballot would declare that life begins at conception. There is support for the measure in the conservative state but opposition from groups that say its broad language could limit contraception and threaten fertility treatments. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website As Population, Consumption Rise, Builder Goes Small As the world's population tops 7 billion people, population experts are worried about inevitable increases in cars, computers, bigger homes and a drain on resources. In an effort to combat this, one California company is producing small, energy-efficient homes — some as tiny as 300 square feet. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Entrepreneurship Lessons For The Academic-Minded A new program is teaching university researchers how to make their promising new technologies a reality. They're mentored by entrepreneurs who help them rethink their strategy, and are told to treat everything they think they know about business as nothing more than a hypothesis. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Automakers Want To Cut The Cord On Electric Cars Plugging in an electric car — or parking it on a charging mat — may soon be a thing of the past. Robert Siegel talks to Rachel Kaufman of Scientific American about the new developments to boost car batteries on the go. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Paranormal Technology: Gadgets For Ghost-Tracking Electromagnetic field detectors measure signals from faulty wiring and radio waves — but some paranormal investigators say they can also sense spirits. Temperature guns to track cold air in haunted sites are another key component in a ghost-hunter's toolkit. Scientific sense can be made of it all. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Invasion Of The Mind-Controlling Zombie Parasites A few months back, something terrible happened to millions of flies around Washington, D.C. They were attacked by a fungus that basically made them zombies, unable to control their behavior. and flies are far from the only vulnerable creatures out there. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Spy Satellite Engineer's Top Secret Is Revealed Phil Pressel designed film cameras for a U.S. spy satellite program that was declassified last month after 46 years. His cameras captured Soviet missile sites and enabled President Nixon to sign an arms reduction treaty with the Soviet Union. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Eating Your Way To A Healthy Heart (If You're A Python) Pythons can eat up to quarter of their body weight, or 40 pounds, in one meal. It turns out those huge meals are good for their hearts and may offer insight into how to treat heart disease in humans. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website After Scandal, Solar Industry Looks On Bright Side At an international solar convention, companies were optimistic about their future and new products. There are certainly causes for concern in the industry — like a looming controversy over China's subsidization practices — but industry executives point to fast growth and new ideas in the market. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Romney Seemingly Shifts On Climate Change Thursday in Pittsburgh, Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney appeared to shift his position on climate change. Speaking at the Consol Energy Center, he said, "My view is that we don't know what's causing climate change on this planet." In his book No Apology and in earlier public appearances, Romney has said that he believes climate change is occurring — and that humans are a contributing factor. At a campaign appearance in New Hampshire back in Augu ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Analysis Questions Flu Shot Effectiveness A new report in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases says evidence that the flu shot offers protection in adults aged 65 years or older is lacking. Host John Dankosky and guests discuss the report, the upcoming flu season, and whether seniors should get the flu vaccine. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Brian Greene Explains 'The Fabric Of The Cosmos' In a new four-part television special based on his best-selling book, physicist Brian Greene takes on the nature of time and space, multiverses, and other hard-to-wrap-your-mind-around concepts in cosmology. Greene talks with guest host John Dankosky about the new series. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Scientific Case Still Open On 2001 Anthrax Attacks Army microbiologist Bruce Ivins, the FBI's prime suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks, died before his trial in an apparent suicide, and the case is now closed. John Dankosky and guests discuss new investigations that question whether scientific evidence against Ivins was conclusive enough to hold up in court. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Does Probiotic Yogurt Really Affect Digestion? Reporting in Science Translational Medicine, researchers write that the bacteria in yogurt affect people's digestion--but not by repopulating gut flora. Microbiologist Jeffrey Gordon talks about these findings and the future of using bacteria as therapy for digestive disorders such as diarrhea. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Global Coal Trade's Complex Calculation Increasing U.S. coal exports to China doesn't necessarily mean global emissions will rise. As demand abroad drives up coal prices at home, it could prompt U.S. utilities to switch to cheaper and more environmentally friendly natural gas. And that might alter the politics of climate change in the U.S., an expert says. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Scientists Say Texas Agency Edits Out Climate Change Scientists and conservationists accuse the state environmental agency of editing references to climate change and sea level rise out of a public report — because the agency, like Gov. Rick Perry, is skeptical of global warming. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Used Lab Equipment Finds A Second Home Overseas A nonprofit called Seeding Labs ships surplus scientific lab equipment to universities and research facilities in developing countries. "There are talented people everywhere in the world, but they don't have equal access to the resources to do great science," says the program's founder. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Boeing's 787 Makes Its Inaugural Flight Earlier Wednesday, Boeing's 787 made its inaugural flight from Tokyo to Hong Kong. The plane boasts greater fuel efficiency and a smoother ride, but also has a number of creature comforts — like larger windows, better lighting and more overhead space. The plane is expected to be a game changer for aviation. Michele Norris speaks with AP aviation reporter Scott Mayerowitz, who was on the flight. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website In Northwest Town, A Local Fight Against Global Coal Plans are afoot to build new coal terminals on the West Coast to ship the lucrative commodity to China. But the mayor and activists in Bellingham, Wash., want to keep the city's green image and move beyond its industrial past. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Cold War Bomb To Be Dismantled The last B53 bomb is supposed to be dismantled Tuesday. Michele Norris speaks with Hans Kristensen from the Federation of American Scientists about the historical climate surrounding the B53 bomb. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Northern Lights Glow In Southern States Melissa Block talks to Robert Moore of the University of West Georgia's physics department about a surprising display of the northern lights Monday night that went as far south as Mississippi, Arkansas and Georgia itself. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Expedition Looks For Crude In Sunken Oil Tanker The oil tanker S.S. Montebello was sunk by a Japanese submarine during World War II off the coast of California. A recent expedition to the wreck found that oil believed to still be in the ship is not there. It's full of seawater. It's the Al Capone's vault of the sea, if you will. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 142 Square Miles Swept For Every Living Thing In a single 24-hour period, the National Park Service and National Geographic led a "treasure hunt" to catalog all the species in Arizona's Saguaro National Park. NPR's Ted Robbins takes us to the "BioBlitz." Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 1,000-Year-Old Viking Found Buried In His Boat Archaeologists announced this week that they have found a 1,000-year-old Viking burial site in the Scottish Highlands of Ardnamurchan. Host Scott Simon takes note of the find, which has been called "one of the most important Norse graves ever excavated in Britain." Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Scientists Find Youngest Planet Ever Observed Astronomers have come across the youngest planet ever observed, at just 2 million years old. It's called LkCa 15 b, and it's still in the early stages of forming. Melissa Block talks to Adam Kraus of the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy about the discovery. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Did Giant Stars Feed Blue Stragglers? In a letter to the journal Nature published this week, astronomers Aaron Geller and Robert Mathieu offer an explanation for the origin of blue straggler stars in a star cluster called NGC 188. Geller suggests the stars fed on neighbor stars, leaving behind white dwarfs. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Exploring Multiple Personalities In 'Sybil Exposed' In a new book writer Debbie Nathan digs into archived material documenting the experiences of a patient known as "Sybil," who reportedly suffered from multiple personality disorder. Ira Flatow and guests discuss MPD, and its modern equivalent--dissociative identity disorder. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Predicting When Space Junk Will Come Home To Earth This weekend, a defunct German satellite is scheduled to crash to Earth, just a month after a NASA satellite did the same. NASA orbital debris scientist Mark Matney and Phil Plait, author of the Bad Astronomy blog, discuss whether engineers on Earth have any say when--or where--objects fall. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Reinventing Fire: Getting Beyond Fossil Fuels In his bookReinventing Fire, Amory Lovins lays out his blueprint for freeing society of its addiction to fossil fuels, by saving energy with more efficient vehicles, buildings and manufacturing plants, and producing it with renewable options like windmills and rooftop solar. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Science Diction: The Origin Of 'Bunsen Burner' Every high school chemist has no doubt fiddled with a Bunsen burner--but where did the apparatus get its name? Science historian Howard Markel talks about the German chemist Robert Bunsen, and why his experiments necessitated the invention of the gas burner still in use today. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 'Living Fossils' Just A Branch On Cycad Family Tree Though dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago, there are still thought to be a few species left over from those days. Plants called cycads, the so-called "living fossils," have remained mostly unchanged for 300 million years. But a new study suggests that glamorous title may not be deserved. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website What Slew An Ancient Mastodon? DNA Tells Tale CT scans and new DNA technology indicate that a bone sharpened into a spear was used to kill a mastodon in the northwestern U.S. 13,800 years ago. The research revisits an old debate about the evidence for an early hunt in North America. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Some Question Ohio Animal Abuse Laws Ohio authorities spent much of Wednesday tracking down a pack of wild animals, including lions, tigers, bears and wolves. They'd been let go by their owner, who then committed suicide. Many questions are surfacing about why Ohio has such lax laws that allow a convicted criminal to have dozens of exotic animals. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Medal Recipient Champions Diversity In Mathematics Rice University mathematician and researcher Richard Tapia is among seven recipients of the nation's highest honor in science, the National Medal of Science. Tapia, the son of Mexican immigrants, has been a longtime champion of diversity in education. He speaks with NPR's Michel Martin about winning the award, and his family. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website IQ Isn't Set In Stone, Suggests Study That Finds Big Jumps, Dips In Teens A new study documents significant fluctuations in the IQs of a group of British teenagers. The findings bolster the theory that the IQ test isn't a measure of a person's "fixed" intellectual capacity but rather, a gauge of acquired knowledge that progresses in fits and starts. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website FDA Probe Points To Cantaloupe Packing Plant As Source Of Listeria The outbreak of listeria in fresh cantaloupe has been blamed for at least 25 deaths and 123 illnesses in 26 states, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports. Casualties have slowed since September, but the outbreak is far from over, officials say. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Voters Pass Initiative Aimed At Stopping Alaska Mine Voters in southwest Alaska have narrowly passed an initiative aimed at stopping an open pit copper and gold mine. The proposed Pebble Mine is near one of the largest sockeye salmon spawning areas. But whether digging continues will likely be decided in the Alaska State Supreme Court. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Six Miles Offshore: The Wreck Of Montebello More than 3 million gallons of crude oil from a sunken tanker may be threatening California's Central Coast. The SS Montebello sank in 1941 after it was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine. A group is now trying to determine just how much of an environmental threat the Montebello poses, 900 feet below the waves. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Kinder Morgan Announces Plans To Buy El Paso A huge deal in the energy business is just the latest signal that natural gas is a hot commodity. One of the largest natural gas pipeline operators, Kinder Morgan, is buying its rival El Paso for $21 billion. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website What Is The Future Of Natural Gas Use In The U.S.? The Kinder Morgan deal will likely make the company the largest natural gas pipeline operator in North America. This comes at a time when more people in the U.S. are becoming reliant on the fuel. For more, Robert Siegel speaks with Daniel Yergin, chairman of IHS Cambridge Energy Associates and author of The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Chance To Spot Rare Supernova Fading Fast One of the brightest supernovas in the last century is now visible. Discovered shortly after its light reached Earth in August, the supernova will last for more than a decade, but it won't stay in view for amateur astronomers for much longer. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Bones Of Aussie Outlaw Legend Rise Again Ned Kelly was tall, manly, often on horseback, chivalrous to ladies, a sucker for babies, a revolutionary, a bank robber and even an Irish nationalist. And now, 130 years later, Australia's legendary outlaw hero has been found. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Perry Unveils Energy Policy GOP presidential candidate and Texas Gov. Rick Perry unveiled his energy policy Friday morning in a speech in West Mifflin, Pa. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Video Pick: Space Eggs If you try to spin a raw egg on a table, you will notice that it doesn't twirl very well--at least compared to a hard boiled egg. Astronaut Don Pettit wondered what would happen if you repeated the experiment in space. Any guesses? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Seeing A Cephalopod In Ancient Bones The origins of a stash of 220-million-year-old, 40-plus-foot-long ichthyosaur bones at a Nevada site have long puzzled paleontologists. Paleontologist Mark McMenamin explains his controversial theory that the bones were put there by a giant, ancient octopus-like creature. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website When Politics Meets Science In his new book, Fool Me Twice, writer Shawn Otto tells why he thinks science is under assault in America. Otto, CEO and co-founder of Science Debate 2008, also explains why his "American Science Pledge" for candidates might bring more science into political decision making. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website More Reasons To Eat Your Fruits And Veggies In a new study, researchers from McMaster University found that in people with a certain gene that elevates heart attack risk, a diet high in fruits and vegetables can help lower the risk. Dr. Sonia Anand explains the study, and what still needs to be learned about the gene. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Using DNA To Shape Nanostructures Chemists and materials scientists are trying to learn to build ultra-small, precisely ordered structures for use in optics, electronics, and other applications. Writing in the journal Science, Chad Mirkin and colleagues describe a way to use snippets of DNA to tailor the shape and size of crystal structures, tweaking them to fit specific uses. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Searching For Meaning In A Cheap Toaster Carl Sagan once said that if you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. In his book The Toaster Project, author and artist Thomas Thwaites describes his effort to build a cheap plastic toaster from scratch, and what the project taught him about material goods, self-reliance, international commerce, and globalization. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Contest Seeks To Launch Student Space Projects The YouTube Space Lab competition is asking high school students to submit video proposals for space-based science experiments. Zahaan Bharmal, a Google executive who envisioned the competition, says that the winning entry will be performed on the International Space Station and streamed live on YouTube to the world. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website In African Cave, An Early Human Paint Shop Scientists have unearthed a tool kit for making paint in a South African cave. At 100,000 years old, it looks to be the oldest evidence of paint-making to date, and indicates higher-order thinking. "I think we're going to find that these early people were smarter than we think," an anthropologist says. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Naked Mole Rat's Genetic Code Laid Bare The piggy-nosed, coldblooded animals are neither rats nor moles. But scientists hope the naked mole rat's newly sequenced genome may offer insights not only into aging but also cancer and other diseases. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Facing Planetary Enemy No. 1: Agriculture A new study looks at whether we can feed the world without destroying the Earth. The answer is yes, but how to make it happen is complicated, and will require big changes in the way we practice agriculture. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Decoded DNA Reveals Details Of Black Death Germ While the results are a technical tour de force, the researchers did not find any genetic feature that could explain why the Black Death was so virulent. In fact, the germ behind the medieval plague isn't much different from the one that causes bubonic plague today. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website How Crossword Puzzles Unlocked An Artist's Memory In 2007, artist Lonni Sue Johnson contracted viral encephalitis, leading to severe brain damage and amnesia. But language and crossword puzzles have unlocked Johnson's ability to remember how to play the viola and create simpler, childlike art — and that intrigues scientists at Johns Hopkins University. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Pain At The Plate: Heat Increases Pitcher Retaliation It's been known for years that when temperatures are hotter, pitchers are more likely to hit batters with pitches. A new study finds that heat also increases a pitcher's likelihood of retaliating by hitting an opposing batter when players from his team were hit earlier in the game. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Inside Namibia's Rural Communal Conservancies The southwest African country of Namibia is trying a controversial approach to preserving its wildlife. Rural people control the animals and profit from them. But they have also found they must shoot some of the animals to cull the herds. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Climate Activist Visits Wilderness Before Prison Term Tim DeChristopher was to go to prison, convicted of disrupting a government sale of oil and gas leases. He called his actions an act off civil disobedience against climate change. Prosecutors called them felonies. Ahead of his confinement, DeChristopher wanted to go on a final wilderness adventure. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Brain Maturity Extends Well Beyond Teen Years Under most laws, young people are recognized as adults at age 18. But emerging science about brain development suggests that most people don't reach full maturity until the age 25. Guest host Tony Cox discusses the research and its implications with Sandra Aamodt, neuroscientist and co-author of the book Welcome to Your Child's Brain. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website To Save Wildlife, Namibia's Farmers Take Control Imagine the U.S. government saying to the people living around Yellowstone, "You know what? All those wild animals in the park — the grizzlies, the bison, the wolves — they belong to you." This is exactly what the government of Namibia has done in a radical experiment to save wildlife — and the people who share their land. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Caterpillar Fungus: The Viagra Of The Himalayas It's known as the Viagra of the Himalayas, and it can cost as much as $50,000 a pound. The world's most expensive fungus is known in Tibetan as yartsa gunbu and has become a status symbol in China. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website A Bird Flies Into A Hurricane. Does It Fly Out? Many migratory birds travel thousands of miles every year, over land and sea and, sometimes, through hurricanes. Host Scott Simon talks to Dr. Bryan Watts from the College of William and Mary, who used satellite transmitters to track shorebirds as they flew through Hurricane Irene. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Mars Rover Peers Into The Endeavour Crater Opportunity, one of two rovers launched in 2003, has traversed thirteen miles in the three years it's been on Mars. It's now at the lip of a 14-mile-wide crater named Endeavour. Project leader Steve Squyres discusses the rover's findings and what NASA hopes to learn. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Physics Nobelists Observed An Accelerating Universe In 1998, two teams of physicists looking at distant supernovae noticed something surprising--the supernovae were not only moving outwards but also accelerating. These observations have won three Americans the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics. Nobelist Adam Riess discusses how physicists are now looking at the universe. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Remembering Steve Jobs Steve Jobs, co-founder and longtime CEO of Apple Inc., passed away this week at the age of 56. Technology writer Steven Levy, author of the book Insanely Great remembers the life and contributions of the technology titan, from pioneering personal computers to the iPhone. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Video Pick: Mapping Flames Tadd Truscott and Dale Tree, engineers at Brigham Young University, are videoing fire with high speed cameras to try to make a 3D reconstruction of a flame. Poetic and practical, they say: quantifying flames could help us burn fuel more cleanly and efficiently. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Is Human Violence On The Wane? Considering the Norway shootings, drug wars in Mexico and ongoing conflicts in the Middle East, this era may seem as violent as any. But as Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker argues in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, this may actually be the most peaceable period in human history. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website A Virtual Arm That Talks With The Brain Scientists have created a virtual arm that monkeys can move with their thoughts--and the arm can send information back to the brain about the textures of what it touches. Neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis talks about how this may lead to a full-body suit that helps paralyzed people move and walk again. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Assessing The National Cathedral's Quake Damage Guy Raz talks to Joseph Alonso, head stonemason at the Washington National Cathedral, about the damage the building suffered from the Aug. 23 earthquake. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Nobel-Winning Chemist Fought Hard For Acceptance Daniel Shechtman's 1982 discovery of quasicrystals fundamentally changed how scientists thought about solid matter. His finding cost him his job at one lab and the eternal ire of chemistry great Linus Pauling. But it also won him the 2011 Nobel Prize for chemistry. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Researchers Advance Cloning Of Human Embryos The embryos would not be used for reproduction, but rather for the creation of embryonic stem cells. Many scientists believe that human embryonic stem cells made this way could revolutionize medicine. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Cloning Research Gives Way To Bioethics Questions Researchers in New York are reporting that, for the first time, they've used cloning techniques to successfully create human embryos in the lab. Guy Raz talks about the ethical implications of this research with Insoo Hyun, associate professor of bioethics at Case Western Reserve University. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Israeli Wins Nobel Chemistry Prize For Quasicrystals Israeli chemist Daniel Schectman's discovery of how atoms fit together inside of crystals changed the way chemists look at solid matter. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Three Scientists Win Nobel Prize In Physics T.S. Eliot wrote in a poem that the world will end not with a bang but a whimper. He was spot on. The Nobel Prize for physics will go to three scientists who discovered that, after the Big Bang, the universe has been expanding at an accelerating rate. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Massive Observatory Provides A Look Back Guy Raz interviews Alison Peck, deputy project scientist for ALMA — the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array project in Chile. ALMA is expected to be the world's biggest and most powerful observatory in the world. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Fossils Help Rev Hard-Hit Newfoundland Fishing Area On the craggy bluffs of Mistaken Point in Newfoundland, the wind and waves are licking away the rocks to reveal the oldest animal fossils on Earth. Locals are promoting the fossils, and the creatures are drawing a crowd. And now they are an economic engine for an area that had hit tough times. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 3 Astronomers Win Nobel Physics Prize Three U.S.-born scientists won the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for their studies of exploding stars that revealed that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. The three will share $1.5 million. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Eating Meals With Men May Mean Eating Less Both women and men eat less when their dining companions are men, according to new research in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website After Solyndra, Other Energy Loans Draw Scrutiny The now-bankrupt solar company Solyndra was just one of the clean energy businesses that got loan guarantees from a federal program that ended Friday. In all, the Department of Energy program financed 28 projects with $16 billion. A Republican leading hearings on Solyndra says loans were rushed out the door. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Steinman Dies Days Before Receiving Nobel Prize Ralph Steinman won the Nobel Prize for medicine days after he died of cancer. However, the Nobel committee, which typically only awards the prize to living scientists, didn't know Steinman had passed away. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Son Of Nobel Winner Remembers His Father Guy Raz speaks with Adam Steinman, the son of the Ralph Steinman, who won the Nobel Prize for medicine days after he died of cancer. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website When Scientists Fail, It's Time To Call In The Gamers For more than a decade, Researchers were stumped by the structure of a tiny protein that causes AIDS in rhesus monkeys. Eventually they turned to computer gamers, who figured out the protein's structure in just 10 days. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Flying Telescope Makes An Out-Of-This-World Find A NASA telescope mounted inside a 747 is giving astronomers and physicists eagle-eyed glimpses of outer space. On a recent trip, scientists found a special molecule that gives new clues to the temperature of interstellar gas. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Tevatron Machine Will Smash Particles No More On Friday, officials shut down the giant machine designed to smash tiny bits of atoms together to reveal fundamentals of the universe. For a quarter century, the Tevatron, located in a lab near Chicago, was the most powerful and productive machine of its kind in the world, but a new machine in Europe has made it obsolete. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Science Diction: The Origin Of The Word 'Epilepsy' Humans have long suffered from epilepsy, the neurological disorder hallmarked by sudden seizures. Medical historian Howard Markel discusses the condition's names through the millenia, from the "sacred disease" of ancient texts to its description as "the falling sickness" in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Real Virologist Behind "Contagion" In the new movie "Contagion" virologist W. Ian Lipkin served as both a technical advisor for the film, and as the inspiration for one of its main characters (a virus hunter named "Ian"). Lipkin discusses his role in the film and his own work identifying real-life viruses. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website David Attenborough Takes Wing With Pterosaurs David Attenborough has produced dozens of shows and books about how plants and animals live. But his latest, Flying Monsters 3D, takes a look at creatures that have been extinct for around 65 million years--pterosaurs, or flying reptiles--and examines why they may have evolved to fly. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Physicist Lisa Randall On Cosmology And The LHC Harvard physicist Lisa Randall talks about her new book, Knocking On Heaven's Door, an examination of the latest findings in cosmology and the history of scientific thought, and discusses a report that suggests neutrinos can travel faster than the speed of light. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Living In A Geodesic Dome Home Kevin Shea is a retired New York City firefighter with an unorthodox home. He lives in a 93,000 cubic-foot-geodesic dome, equipped with solar panels, a wind turbine, and a geothermal system. The home is on the grid, but outside the box. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website China Launches A Space Laboratory China launched an experimental spacecraft from the Gobi desert this week. The unmanned Tiangong-1 (which means "Heavenly Palace-1") is expected to orbit Earth for two years. Journalist Miles O'Brien discusses planned docking missions for the craft and China's space program. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Could A Lack Of Empathy Explain Cruelty? Can neuroscience and psychology explain cruelty? In his new book, The Science of Evil, Cambridge University professor Simon Baron-Cohen explains the empathy spectrum we all lie on and that an erosion of empathy can explain why some commit cruel acts. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Asteroids Pose Less Risk To Earth Than Thought NASA's most accurate census yet of near-Earth asteroids suggests that astronomers already know the location of more than 90 percent of the largest asteroids that could cause mass extinctions. The survey also suggests there are far fewer midsize asteroids than expected, but scientists don't know where most of these are. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Solar Titan Faces Funding Worries After Solyndra Analysts say manufacturer First Solar needs federal support to keep its competitive edge and to drive down the cost to produce solar panels, a key factor to industry success. But the kind of federal loan guarantees given to failed energy company Solyndra are increasingly unpopular in Washington. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Using Twitter To Tap Into The Mood Of The Planet Analyzing the tweets of millions of users suggested cross-cultural, Earth-wide trends in peoples' moods across days and weeks: We're more positive in the morning and late evening. The results point to new ways that academic research might tap into social media. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Trouble With Health Problems Near Gas Fracking Many people who live close to gas drilling sites complain of serious illnesses. But there are few concrete data to help explain why they're getting sick. Investigative reporter Abrahm Lustgarten says weak industry regulations also make it hard to establish a clear connection between gas drilling and health effects. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Chicago-Area Skunk Population Raises A Stink Though the Illinois Department of Natural Resources can only guess at the number of skunks in the state by counting roadkill, officials and residents of Chicago say they see — and smell — a dramatic increase in the number of skunks. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Proposed Alaska Mine Faces Fierce Opposition In Alaska's picturesque Bristol Bay region, developers are looking to build an enormous copper and gold mine. They promise the effort will be carried out in an environmentally responsible way — and provide area jobs. But fisherman, conservationists and native groups have joined efforts to thwart the mine, fearing it will pollute fish and wildlife. Melissa Block talks about the battle for Bristol Bay with reporter Daysha Eaton of member station KDLG in Dillingham, Alaska. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website More Realize They Face Pricey Long-Term Care A new poll by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health finds that more people than ever are becoming aware of the likelihood that they will need potentially expensive long-term care health services as they age. But they still don't understand how that care gets paid for. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Texas Authorities Find Massive Shark Kill This past weekend, wildlife officials in Texas came across a huge illegal fishing operation. They found about 3,000 dead sharks, tangled in miles of nets off the coast. Michele Norris talks with Sgt. James Dunks with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department who found the sharks. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Wanna Live Forever? Become A Noun Joseph Guillotin, Henry Shrapnel and Jules Leotard became immortal — by entering the English language. But when your entire life is reduced to a single definition, the results are sometimes upsetting. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Engineers Survey Damage Of Washington Monument The Park Service is undertaking a painstaking inspection of the Washington Monument to assess damage from the Aug. 23 earthquake that hit the area. The temblor opened up cracks in the 555-foot obelisk, and the Park Service says it will remain closed indefinitely while repairs are made. There are no serious structural problems, but concerns remain that debris could cause a safety hazard. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website How Psychology Solved A WWII Shipwreck Mystery In November 1941, two warships from Australia and Germany clashed off the coast of western Australia. Both sank. Despite extensive search efforts during and after World War II, the ships weren't found until 2008, after a team of psychologists analyzed the statements given by the surviving German crew members. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website New York's New Shipping Plan Sparks Feud New York state is poised to implement new rules that could have a major impact on the global shipping industry. Invasive species sometimes move from place to place in "ballast water" — that's the water ships suck in and discharge to level their loads. Officials in New York want all that ballast water treated to kill any "living pollution" before it reaches their harbors. But the treatment technology is expensive and untested. Because the state serves as a gateway to the Great Lakes and p ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Ark. Archivist Finds Missing Moon Rock Last week, an archivist in Arkansas was sifting though boxes of papers from President Bill Clinton's gubernatorial years when he came across a surprise — a piece of the moon. The moon rock had been missing for about 30 years, and it was just one of about 180 moon rocks that are currently at-large. Melissa Block talks with retired senior special agent for NASA Joseph Gutheinz about the other missing rocks. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Kids' Sugar Cravings Might Be Biological Research shows children are hardwired from birth to prefer sweets, which may have once been an evolutionary advantage. But it appears they begin to scale back on their sugary preferences once they stop growing. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website New Boom Reshapes Oil World, Rocks North Dakota Breakthrough technology is allowing previously untapped oil to be drilled in the U.S., Canada and South America. And experts say that's moving the global energy supply's center of gravity away from the Middle East and toward the Americas. In a decade, they say, that could make the U.S. a bigger oil producer than Saudi Arabia. Small towns like Williston, N.D., are reaping the benefits — and bearing the burdens — of the boom. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Launch Logistics: Speedy Rocket, Slow Electronics The Delta II rocket that launched earlier this month carrying satellites to study the moon sent NPR science correspondent Joe Palca on a mission of his own: to find out why the rocket had two extremely precise lift-off windows, each just one second long. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Italian Scientists On Trial Over Deadly Earthquake The trial of seven Italian scientists began this week. They are charged with manslaughter for failing to adequately warn the residents of L'Aquila, Italy, about the risk of an earthquake in 2009. Host Scott Simon speaks with Rick Aster, president of the Seismological Society of America, about the trial. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Bones From The Badlands Belong To New Dinosaur Paleontologists made quite a find this week in Utah: a new species of raptor dinosaur. The ancient creature, a meat-eater, was small and fast, with talon-like toes. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Solyndra's Execs Take The Fifth Top executives of Solyndra, a bankrupt solar-energy company, have declined to testify in a congressional hearing Friday, invoking their Fifth Amendment rights. The company is under investigation for a half-billion dollar government loan guarantee it received. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website NASA: Satellite's Rate Of Descent Has Slowed We reported on the variables that make it hard to, even at this late date, predict exactly when and where a dead 6-ton NASA satellite will fall to Earth. The Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite, or UARS, will be the biggest NASA spacecraft to crash back to Earth, but it's now baffling scientists as its descent toward Earth slows — delaying its ultimate crash until the early part of the weekend. The space agency is now predicting the satellite will crash down to Earth late Friday or early ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website New Data Put Cosmic Speed Limit To The Test A fundamental rule of nature is that nothing travels faster than the speed of light. Now, physicists working in Europe say they may have discovered a subatomic particle that breaks that speed limit. But that extraordinary claim is being greeted with a healthy dose of skepticism. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Managing Forests To Manage Wildfires Record breaking fires in the Southwest have burned thousands of acres, disrupting people and animals, and leaving muddy, flood-prone landscapes in their wake. Ira Flatow and guests discuss fire ecology, and how new forest management strategies may help stifle the blazes. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Flagstaff Throws A Science Party The Flagstaff Festival of Science gets underway this week. Ira Flatow talks with two festival participants about some of the highlights: Astronaut John Grunsfeld previews a talk on the Hubble Telescope and archeoastronomer Bryan Bates tells what the Mayans knew about 2012. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Solving The Riddle Of The Grand Canyon's Formation The Grand Canyon may seem to be a simple case of "river carves rock," but to geologists, its formation is still puzzling. Ira Flatow and guests discuss the canyon's mysteries, and the scientific sleuthing being done to solve them--millions of years after the Colorado River carried off the evidence. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Still Cataloging The Skies, Long After 'Planet X' Perched on a mesa just above Flagstaff is the historic Lowell Observatory, founded back in the days of the Wild West. Observatory director Jeffrey Hall talks about landmark discoveries made there, like 'Planet X'--later renamed Pluto--and the exoplanets astronomers are spotting there today. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Zebra And Cattle Make Good Lunch Partners, Researchers Say In Africa, some ranchers shoot wildlife to keep them from eating the grass out from under their cattle. But it turns out some wildlife, like zebra, actually help cattle graze — by clearing fibrous grass stalks away and promoting the new shoot growth that cows crave. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Christians Divided Over Science Of Human Origins The story of Adam and Eve is a primary belief for many Christians. Some Christian scholars argue that research on the human genome shows that modern humans did not descend from the Biblical couple, and that Christianity must find a way to reconcile modern science and religious beliefs. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Air Force And Navy Turn To Biofuels The military is trying to make big changes in what fuel it uses. The Air Force and Navy have been testing their aircraft — everything from fighters to unmanned spy planes — on fuel made from vegetable oil or even animal fat. One catch: It costs 10 times the price of traditional fuel. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Where Falling Satellite Lands Is Anyone's Guess Sometime this week, a school bus-sized satellite will fall to Earth after two decades in orbit. Most of it will burn up in the atmosphere, but some pieces — and one possibly as large as 300 pounds — are expected to hit the ground. But there's little risk that they'll hit a person. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Study: Women's Memory More Receptive To Low Voice Melissa Block and Lynn Neary learn from researcher Kevin Allan of the University of Aberdeen King's College in Scotland that women remember better when spoken to in a low-pitch voice. This helps women to pick a suitable partner. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Quays Focus 'Weeping Glass' On The Mutter Museum Philadelphia's Mutter Museum invited Stephen and Timothy Quay to capture the collection of medical oddities in the filmmakers' signature moody, avant-garde style. "We never walk through the front door," the Quays say of their approach to film. "We insist on coming through the side door or the back door." Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Explorers Push The Limits, Despite The Risks Archaeologist Constanza Ceruti braves blistering winds and altitude sickness to research ancient Andean civilizations. Environmental anthropologist Kenny Broad dives deep into ocean caves to study fresh water reserves. The two explorers explain the limits, risks and rewards of their work. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Daniel Yergin Examines America's 'Quest' For Energy In his new book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and energy expert looks at how the need for energy is shaping the world. He joins NPR's David Greene to discuss the global implications of natural gas production in the U.S. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website NASA Satellite Expected To Collide With Earth According to NASA, a retired U.S. research satellite the size of a school bus has been sucked into the Earth's gravitational pull. The space agency expects the satellite to break into pieces on entry to the atmosphere, and for some of those pieces — some as heavy as 300 pounds — to rain down later this week. Donald Kessler, who served as NASA's senior scientist for orbital debris research, tells Michele Norris that an event of this nature is highly unusual — and odds are slim that the ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Lucretius, Man Of Modern Mystery In his new book, author and Harvard literature professor Stephen Greenblatt explores the 2,000 year-old writings of Lucretius and his "spookily modern" creation tale. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Lucretius, Man Of Modern Mystery In his new book, author and Harvard literature professor Stephen Greenblatt explores the 2,000 year-old writings of Lucretius and his "spookily modern" creation tale. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Documenting The Sound Of Fallen Trees (And Planes) Researchers at Crater Lake National Park in Oregon have been documenting the park's soundscape. But human-caused noises, like airplanes, are making it harder to hear. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Glowing Kittens Help In Fight Against AIDS Millions of cats suffer and die from feline AIDS every year. Scientists have found a way to prevent infection by injecting cat eggs with monkey genes that block HIV infection. And to help identify cats with the special genes, they added jellyfish genes to the mix. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Obama Signs Patent Overhaul Bill Hoping it will spur innovation, President Obama signed a bill Friday overhauling the nation's patent laws. The law switches to a "first to file" rule for granting patents. It also allows new challenges to existing patents. But critics say it will not help individual inventors get their ideas to market. Melissa Block talks to NPR's Laura Sydell for more. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Balancing Budgets And R&D With all forms of federal spending under the microscope, spending on scientific research, technology development, and science education is facing deep cuts. In an editorial in the journal Science Congressman Rush Holt argues for keeping research and development as a key part of the federal budget. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Science Looks At The Sibling Effect Are you a first-born? A middle child? A twin? An only child? In his new book The Sibling Effect: What the Bonds Among Brothers and Sisters Reveal About Us, author Jeffrey Kluger describes current scientific research into the effects of siblings on human behavior, from birth order studies to sibling rivalries and fighting. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Exploring the Tech DIY of 'Hackerspaces' When the humble garage workshop just isn't enough, or basement tinkerers tire of trying to go it alone, some turn to 'hackerspaces,' organizations that provide space, tools, and like-minded colleagues for unusual do it yourself projects. Kelly Maguire of NYC Resistor and Sean Auriti of Alpha One Labs discuss the 'hackerspace' movement. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website How Google Grew Into An Online Goliath Google's founders built a giant company based on certain principles: Make decisions based on data. Search should be fast and automatic. Keep as much company information private as possible. In his book In the Plex, Steven Levy discusses how these values shaped Google into what it is today. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Probing Poop For Cellulose-Chomping Microbes In the search for ways to break down tough plant material like cellulose into biofuel, researchers are looking in odd places--like the feces of pandas, zebras and giraffes. Biochemist Ashli Brown and microbiologist David Mullin discuss the microbes that inhabit the guts of herbivores. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Cultivating A Wastewater Treatment System The New York Department of Environmental Protection installed a prototype "algal turf scrubber" at one of its wastewater treatment plants in Queens. The scrubber--two 350-foot metal ramps coated with algae that grows naturally--is designed to use algae to remove nutrients and boost dissolved oxygen in the water that passes through it. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website EPA Postpones Power Plant Emissions Rules The Environmental Protection Agency has decided to delay new rules that would limit emissions of climate-warming gases from power plants. It's the second time this month the EPA has either withdrawn or postponed new pollution rules that industry didn't like. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Arctic Ice Hits Near-Record Low, Threatening Wildlife Ice on the Arctic Ocean has melted to its second-lowest level on record. The summertime melt coincides with a dramatic warming over the past decade, and it's already affecting wildlife in the area. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website This Machine Can Suck Carbon Out Of The Air While carbon dioxide streams into the atmosphere from tailpipes and smokestacks around the world, one man is building a machine to suck it back out. And some heavy-hitting investors are betting that it's going to work. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Here Come The Suns: New Planet Orbits Two Stars NASA's Kepler mission has found a new solar system where a Saturn-like planet spins around twin stars 200 light-years away from us. It's the first direct observation of such an arrangement, and astronomers say they're not sure why the planet is there. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Workers Start Dismantling Dams In Wash. Work crews Thursday begin dismantling the two dams on the Elwha River, on Washington's Olympic Peninsula. By some measures, this is the largest dam-removal project ever — and, at 210 feet, one of the dams is certainly the tallest dam ever taken down. The process is an extremely tricky one — in terms of engineering, ecology and politics — but environmentalists hope this project heralds the beginning of the end of the age of big dams in the American West. Those who like big dams, for ec ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 'Deer Capital' Of Texas Struggles With Drought Melissa Block talks with Llano, Texas, Mayor Mike Reagor about the ongoing drought in his city. The river that runs through town is extremely low. Llano has been dubbed the "deer capital of Texas" — and Reagor says the deer, with little to drink, are withering in the heat. Reagor is also a rancher, and he says he's selling cattle because of the drought. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Checking In On Gulf On Heels Of BP Spill Report A government report has found BP responsible for the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. In the months since the accident, drilling has returned to near-normal levels and many local residents say life has largely returned to normal. Environmental scientist Ed Overton shares an update on the health of the Gulf. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Md. Teachers Must Promote Environmental Literacy The start of a new school year in Maryland brings a new requirement: All schools in the state must develop plans to promote environmental literacy. The new requirement is creating some challenges for teachers. The goal is to integrate environmental concerns into science, social studies and other topics. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Post-Irene Cleanup May Damage Environment Towns and villages in Vermont and upstate New York are beginning to recover from Tropical Storm Irene. But scientists say the widespread chemical and sewage spills, and the cleanup's effect on trout streams, could cause lasting environmental damage. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Al Gore's '24 Hours' On Climate Change Former Vice President Al Gore's 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth helped raise awareness around the issue of climate change. Gore returns in the lead up to the 2012 election with 24 Hours of Reality, a new project designed to "broadcast the reality of the climate crisis." Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website How To Help Your Child's Brain Grow Up Strong In a new book, neuroscientists Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt detail how parents can help their children learn the ABCs and self-control. The book, Welcome to Your Child's Brain, explores how the human brain develops from infancy to adolescence. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Bone To Pick: First T. Rex Skeleton, Complete At Last Discovered in 1902 by the "Indiana Jones" of fossil hunters, the first Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton fascinated the public. It was sold off during World War II, but a lone rib bone remained forgotten in the archives of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Now, a century after it was unearthed, T. rex is finally whole. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Tornado Technology Spotted owls in the Western U.S. face a new threat — not from loggers, but from another owl. Many scientists say more advanced detection and forecasting technology for tornadoes could help save lives; workers at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant are struggling to deal with radioactive water; and social scientists try to determine how TV ads affect habits of children and teenagers. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website A Natural Lab In The Amazon A city in Peru is serving as a natural laboratory to study dengue fever; the Hubble Space Telescope's replacement is running into budget trouble, but researchers are still optimistic; a new study reveals why nicotine reduces appetite; nuclear engineers are scaling down reactors in hopes to revive the industry; and decreasing snow pack in the Rocky Mountains is tied to global warming. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website When Robots Attack, Kids Learn Robot wars, searching for autism in brain waves, obituary for a spunky Mars rover, and the largest land-based self-propelled vehicle in the world. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Honeybee Democracy Robert Krulwich explains how honeybees lobby for the best locations for new hives. We delve into reasons behind why tornadoes are so hard to predict, and researchers are studying the shape of electrons. Are they really spherical? Finally, scientists study cultural differences and find that war, disease and other challenges are predictors of social rules. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Nose Knows On this week's show, changing life - from the depths of evolutionary history to the depths of space. We'll hear about an ancient shrew-like creature that made the first step towards large mammalian brains and a modern rat, deemed extinct, who made a surprise re-appearance. Some scientists are sending creatures into space, while other's search for life that's already out there. And, a new study shows that negative gossip can change the way we see someone - literally. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Species on the Brain In the first half of this week's show, we've got stories about the brain. Traumatic brain injuries are common for modern soldiers and some spend months in brain fitness centers, rehabilitating their mental muscles. Others head to mock battlefields, testing if they are ready to return to combat. And in the second half the program — new species. We'll hear about destructive new species in San Francisco Bay — foreign invaders who are dramatically changing the estuary ecosystem. And, we ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website A Very Emotional Podcast What Makes Something Funny? Why Do We Cry? What Makes Us Afraid? So ANNOYING! Cicadas Poised To Swarm The South Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Straight As A Whale? During their seasonal migrations, humpback whales swim thousands of miles across the oceans. Tracking devices show that they do so in remarkably straight lines, but researchers aren't sure how the whales keep such a steady course. Also: rising seas are threatening coastal habitat in a wildlife reserve in North Carolina, and land managers are struggling to fight back erosion; a study supports the grounding of planes during the eruption of the volcano in Iceland last year; we look back at the ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Gulf Of Mexico Oil Spill, One Year Later It's been a year since the Deepwater Horizon oil rig caught fire and sank to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, causing more than 4 million barrels of oil to spill into the waters. This week, we'll see how research into marshland is progressing, and we'll find out how money for other research projects is — or isn't — being distributed. Also: what sleep scientists have to say about working the overnight shift, and it's Mathematics Awareness Month. How much do you know about complex syste ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website And The Shuttles Go To... This week, NASA announced which four museums will be the final homes for the retiring fleet of space shuttles. We retrace the steps of a biologist from the 1930s who was trying to breed hamsters. Also: we explore why our fears about radiation are bigger than the actual risk; and we have a close look at what cleanup efforts at Fukushima Dai-ichi will entail. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website How Safe Is Safe Enough? In some parts of Tokyo built on land reclaimed from the sea, liquefaction has been a problem following the March 11 quake. That's the phenomenon where extended shaking causes water and sand to rise from underground, and things on the surface settle. The nuclear accident has renewed interest in spent nuclear fuel at U.S. reactor sites; When engineers build things, must first decide "How safe is safe enough?" Finally: following food from northern Japan to Tokyo to San Francisco. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Japan Conversations NPR Science correspondents Richard Harris and Christopher Joyce are just back from two weeks in Japan, and they talk about the ongoing nuclear crisis at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant. Also: geothermal heat pumps to warm and cool your home, and biologists who study ecosystems are doing something new: listening to the environment. It's a burgeoning field called "soundscape ecology." Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Send In The Bots Challenges in Japan continue as the country faces an ongoing nuclear disaster. Robots may soon be sent in to provide video feeds and radiation detection from areas of the plant where people still can't go. Also: Tokyo will likely continue to face rolling blackouts for some time; NPR science Correspondent Christopher Joyce explores why many Japanese aren't connecting this nuclear disaster with the atomic bombs of World War II; and Joe Palca reports on a new study that finds humans may have c ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Crisis In Japan This week, the Science Desk focused its coverage on the nuclear crisis that followed the massive magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan. We explain how spent fuel rods are handled at reactors and see how nuclear accident experts think this event stacks up against Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. All Things Considered host Michele Norris speaks with an engineer who worked at Three Mile Island; and NPR reporter tells her story of getting checked out for radiation. Finally, th ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Earthquake Aftermath And Discovery's 'Final' Voyage A magnitude 8.9 earthquake hit right off the coast of Japan, sending a massive tsunami inland and across the pacific. Christopher Joyce explains the science behind studying tsunamis. Also: the space shuttle Discovery landed for the last time and museums across the country are vying to get a shuttle to display; Robert Krulwich wonders how flamingos ended up in the middle of Siberia; and Richard Harris brings us the story of oobleck — the cornstarch and water mixture — and how it just mig ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Plastic's New Frontier As political strife besets North Africa and the Middle East, calls are renewed for friendlier sources of oil supplies. Also: The GOP budget plan may hobble Obama's environment policy; debate continues over how to define "organic" food; a company takes on plastics without scary chemicals; and turtles find their way in the ocean without GPS — they use the Earth's magnetism as a guide. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Plastic's New Frontier As political strife besets North Africa and the Middle East, calls are renewed for friendlier sources of oil supplies. Also: The GOP budget plan may hobble Obama's environment policy; debate continues over how to define "organic" food; a company takes on plastics without scary chemicals; and turtles find their way in the ocean without GPS — they use the Earth's magnetism as a guide. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Discovery, 'This Is Your Life' Space shuttle Discovery launched on its final flight this week, and correspondent Nell Greenfieldboyce has a "This Is Your Life"-inspired tribute to the workhorse of the shuttle fleet. Also: A "fog of research" clouds the study of oil's effects in the Gulf of Mexico; the world's coral reefs face serious threats; a company in California has begun to lease solar panels; and a study finds that electromagnetic waves from cell phones actually excite brain cells. Finally: sounds from outer space. ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Elementary, My Dear Watson On "Jeopardy!" it's computer vs. humanity, but what we learn will have implications far beyond the game show. Also: news about bear hibernation; fish in New York and New Jersey rivers didn't die when pollutants were introduced into the water — they actually evolved; scientists have linked extreme rains to global warming; and research into a population of Ecuadorians with a genetic mutation that keeps them short might also be responsible for low incidences of disease. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Droughts In The Amazon Major Amazonian droughts in 2005 and 2010 have had a major impact on the forest, scientists say. They're trying to understand why they're happening and what their global effects will be. Also: coverage of a DIY-endangered species plan for plants; a study links the importance of language to understanding large numbers, and a great mystery is solved — how do fleas jump off the ground? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Tools Never Die? This week, Robert Krulwich wonders if any technology ever goes extinct. We explore a Russian effort to drill two miles through Antarctic ice to reach a lake that hasn't seen light in 35 million years. Also: researchers sequence the genome of the water flea and finds it has more genes than a human; NASA's Kepler space telescope finds planets that could be in the "habitable zone" around their stars, and new legislation to to protect high school athletes from brain-damaging concussions. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website How Challenger Changed Us Twenty-five years after the Challenger accident, Joe Palca examines how the first major spaceflight accident has changed American attitudes toward science. New stone tools found in the Arabian Peninsula suggest humans may have left Africa earlier and by a different route than previously thought. Also: weather may be responsible for the striped bass decline; it's organic vs. genetically engineered seed farmers in Oregon; and new perspectives on climate change and the fall of the Roman Empire ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website How Challenger Changed Us Twenty-five years after the Challenger accident, Joe Palca examines how the first major spaceflight accident has changed American attitudes toward science. New stone tools found in the Arabian Peninsula suggest humans may have left Africa earlier and by a different route than previously thought. Also: weather may be responsible for the striped bass decline; it's organic vs. genetically engineered seed farmers in Oregon; and new perspectives on climate change and the fall of the Roman Empire ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website New Language Discovered: Prairiedogese This week, the story of black kites, a predatory bird that decorates its nest with white plastic. Radiolab brings us the story of prairie dog's remarkable communicative abilities, and scientists reveal the bedbug genome and conclude that the pests have developed remarkable pesticide resistance. Also: plants in northern California are moving down hill to wetter climates, despite slightly warmer temperatures. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Earthquake Engineering In Haiti This week, we examine earthquake engineering in Haiti, a tiny marine creature that is inspiring new biomaterials, and we hear that last year was the hottest year on record (again). Also: how certain types of bands on penguin flippers is dragging down population numbers. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Sounds Of The Large Hadron Collider This week, an investigation by The British Medical Journal concluded that the British doctor who became famous for linking autism to a childhood vaccine committed scientific fraud. Also: bacteria digested most of the natural gas leaked from the Gulf oil well, human tears may contain chemical signal mechanisms, and two stories from the Large Hadron Collider. One researcher there is turning data from the massive physics machine into sound. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Year In Science - 2010 We've made our lists. On this week's podcast: Joe Palca discusses some of the year's major stories, Jon Hamilton recaps "The Year In Fear" -- stories that scared us (and a few that we overreacted to), and Dan Charles covers major advancements in astronomy. 2010 was also a good year for Neanderthals and DNA, and we'll travel back to a Missouri town that was evacuated 30 years ago because the chemical dioxin was found. Three decades later, the EPA can't decide how dangerous dioxin really is. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Spintronics This week, researchers announce they're able to store digital data in an atom's nucleus. That technique might one day revolutionize computing power and speed. Also: a project using data from Google Books has analyzed 500 billion words. The findings, researchers say, are windows into our culture. And how will our electric grid stand up to a growing fleet of electric cars? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Reporting From The Gulf Seafloor NPR's Richard Harris dove to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico aboard the deep-sea submersible Alvin and shares stories from the expedition. Also: discussion with NPR science correspondents Christopher Joyce and Dan Charles about an article from The New Yorker about the scientific method and publication of data. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Arsenic-Loving Bacterium This week: NASA reveals a bacteria that can live by substituting toxic arsenic for chemical cousin phosphorous, previously though to be essential to all life. NPR's Richard Harris takes a dive to the sea floor of the Gulf of Mexico to explore how oil is impacting the ecosystem, and parasites may be key for patients suffering from ulcerative colitis. Also: the link between overeating and drug use, and a green revolution in the African nation of Malawi. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website A Thanksgiving Archival Feast A trip to the archives brings us stories of flexitarians and Punkin' Chunkin'. Joe Palca and Steve Inskeep sing about moray eels; and research into waterproof rice that can survive flooding. Also: the story of a young girl who trusts nearly everyone she encounters. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Neanderthal vs. Human This week, we examine how accents play a role in how humans (and animals) make judgments on each other. The birth of a nearby black hole is helping astronomers understand how black holes form and evolve over time, and we compare humans and Neanderthals. Is it better to live fast and die young, or live slow and die old? Evolutionarily, of course. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Toad-Friendly Brothel This week: Robert Krulwich explores the connections between life and rocks, the journal Science publishes the definitive paper on how cats lap and scientists explore a connection between chimp immunity and human brain size. And finally: an unlikely coalition of ranchers, miners, off-road racers, opponents of big government, and the local brothel in Beatty, Nev., unite to save the Amargosa Toad. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Climate Conversations This week: diplomats met to put a moratorium on geoengineering, or controlling climate with tools like sulfur dioxide or algae. Christopher Joyce and Dan Charles join the conversation to talk about the the science and politics behind environmental policy. Also: the U.S. government issues a surprising court filing about patenting genes, and some coral near the blown-out BP well isn't faring to well. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Wet Dog Shake This week: a new look at endangered species, a story on how folks with scientific minds might have an edge at the poker table, and dropping curveballs might be more of an optical illusion. Also: a scientist finds out how fast animals need to shake themselves to get dry. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website To Infinity And...Right Back To Earth This week: Space Tourism. Pack your bags (and your checkbooks). Companies are taking reservations for commercial spaceflight, but the trips are still years off. Also: at the molecular level, some plastics look like steel; a new study finds that certain acquired traits like obesity could be passed onto offspring, and a special breed of lab mouse can "smell" light. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Bombs and Brains In this week's episode: lessons from the football field are applied to the battlefield, scientists study whale dung (seriously), bomb-grade uranium goes on a road trip from Poland to Russia, and we speak with a NASA expert about the mental health of the 33 rescued Chilean miners. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Nobel Prize Roundup It was Nobel week, and researchers won for in vitro fertilization, the discovery of graphene, a new form of carbon, and an organic chemistry reaction. Hear stories about each of the awards. Also: stories on novel ways that neurons communicate; and corn -- one of America's most important crops. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Water And Ice Robert Krulwich pulls out his scale to measure how much a hurricane weighs while Jon Hamilton flies above Hurricane Karl with researchers to learn what makes some storms gain strength and others weaken. Then, Joe Palca explains the discovery of a "Goldilocks" planet whose temperature is just right for liquid water and possibly life, and Christopher Joyce tours an ice cooling utility company in Baltimore. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website It's All Relative This week, we tackle head injuries and concussions in football, from the NFL down to the high school level, we explore a resurgence of Florida panthers, and we try (really hard) to explain Einstein's theory of relativity. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website T. Rex Renaissance This week, learn how confidence in your mind factors into decision making, take a trip in the car that won the Automotive X Prize, swim with giant sharks, and see how one dino's telegenic charisma has led to new discoveries about its life, body and habits. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Measuring the Spill The Human Edge: Evolving Culture Measuring the Real Impact of the Spill New Tools to Detect Brain Disorders in Children Windpower Wanes in the US Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Human Edge: The Stories Our Brains Tell More Human Edge Series: Evolution and God Evolution and Storytelling Evolution and the Quest for Meaning Russian Scientists Close to Losing Storied Institute Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Crying, Social Skills and Oil Eating Bacteria In this week's show we'll explore the reasons why humans cry and get an interesting perspective on our social behavior. Also, we have oil-eating bacteria and not one, but TWO new solar systems. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Evolution and Oil In this week's episode we will explore the origins of language and find out how humans evolved their sense of fairness. Also, we'll take a look at how scientists are mobilizing to study the effects of the Gulf Oil Spill and try to figure out just how bad the damage is. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Human Impact This week we took a look at how humans have changed and how they have changed the world around them. Jon Hamilton explores the evolution of the human brain, Geoff Brumfiel investigates genetically modified canola, Sabri Ben-Achour travels to an oyster santuary and Guy Raz marks the thirty-fifth anniversary of the phrase "global warming". Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Guts, Brains and Quantum Mechanics In this week's edition of On Science, Tovia Smith tells us about BP's attempt to "buy" scientists. Then Chris Joyce tells us how our diet helped humans evolve bigger brains. Also, we'll learn how brain chemicals can make people impulsive and hear about scientists who are making strides towards quantum teleportation. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Earth and Space In this week's show we'll investigate the evolution of the human hand and learn something new about caterpillar locomotion. Also, we have a stories about disappearing phytoplankton, the largest star on record and a do-it-yourself satellite kit. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Built to Run This week we'll look at why humans evolved into endurance runners, how ants have adapted to the city and whether NASA's mars rover will survive the winter. Also, we'll take a look at an ancient beer recipe and remember a famous climatologist. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Bug Highway Robert Krulwich travels the bug highway then explains what the vuvuzela and alligator pits have in common. Christopher Joyce turns back the clock to find out how, when and why humans began to walk. Lauren Sommer reveals that clearer water in San Francisco Bay might not always be a good thing, and Joe Palca puts a spin on the smooth new soccer ball used in this year's World Cup. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Fish in You Joe Palca explores how to understand human evolution with ancient fish. Chris Joyce provides a preview of the Human Edge. Richard Harris reports about a long term forecast for the oil spill in the gulf. Scott Simon interviews an official about rescuing sea turtles. Guz Raz chats with a scientist about butterflies inspiring engineers. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Farewell to the "Mozart Effect" Alix Spiegel speaks with the author of the paper that found the Mozart Effect and Jon Hamilton tours a NASA plane designed to stargaze. Fossil hunters in Europe discover one of the biggest predators that ever lived, Chris Joyce reports. And Joe Palca reports on genetic indicators that may predict longevity. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Farewell to the "Mozart Effect" Alix Spiegel speaks with the author of the paper that found the Mozart Effect and Jon Hamilton tours a NASA plane designed to stargaze. Fossil hunters in Europe discover one of the biggest predators that ever lived, Chris Joyce reports. And Joe Palca reports on genetic indicators that may predict longevity. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Basil blight - you louse! Joe Palca talks about the suprising nature of the louse genome, an underwater robot studies an Antarctic glacier, and in our plant package - basil faces a blight on the East Coast, and the Supreme Court weighs in on genetically modified alfafa. Join hosts Alison Richards and Gisele Grayson for this week's science highlights from NPR News. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Oil, arts and medical marijuana Joe Palca hosts this podcasts that starts with a story about whether it's worth it or not to clean off brown pelicans caught in the oil slick. An engineer explains why deep sea drilling falls in the category of too big to succeed. A meteorologist figures out information about a Monet painting, and Richard Knox looks into the science of marijuana. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Gladiators & Oysters A big week in archeology - Roman Gladiators in Britain and what oyster shells tell about Jamestown. An invasive fish in Maine threatens the blueback char. Finally, what to do with the oil that's cleaned up! Join Science Editor Alison Richards and producer Gisele Grayson. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Einstein's brain in a mayonnaise jar! And space, oil and mutants at the movies Joe Palca hosts this podcast that starts with Jon Hamilton's look at the journey of Einstein's brain after he died. Nell Greenfieldboyce has the implications of the Falcon 9's liftoff, and Guy Raz talks to Victoria Samson about the space junk it might see there. From the archive, an Elizabeth Arnold piece about the extensive of the Exxon Valdez oil spill damage. And finally, Splice hits theatres. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Oil, Oil Everywhere... Richard Harris and Jon Hamilton track the oil spill and how a hurricane might possibly affect the Gulf. Patti Neighmond reports on tanning beds and cancer, and Joe Palca introduces us to a man on the quest for the perfect tomato. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Artificial Life, Oil Spill, Climate Change and more Stories in this episode: 1) Scientists Reach Milestone On Way To Artificial Life 2) Scientist: BP's Oil Spill Estimates Improbable 3) U.S. Scientists Urge Action On Climate Change 4) Study Finds Dads Suffer Postpartum Depression 5) N.M. Salt Beds Could Become Nation's Nuclear Dump Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website NPR oil spill exclusive, and wooly mammoths live again - sort of NPR's Richard Harris asks experts to calculate how much oil might be flowing into the Gulf of Mexico. It's probably more than the original estimates. Also, Neil Armstrong criticizes Obama's NASA plan, some lizards may be going extinct, and scientists resurrect wooly mammoth hemoglobin. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Neanderthals and Soaping Up For Your Mental Health In this week's podcast: 1) Scientists are trying to figure out how physical and mental exercise protects the brain. 2) Scientists say modern humans did more than simply coexist with our evolutionary cousins. 3) Offshore drilling loses support after Gulf oil spill 4) A new study finds that hand washing can help relieve stress from inner conflict. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Water On Asteroids, Mourning Chimpanzees and more Stories this week: 1) Genome Seen As Medical Crystal Ball 2) Scientists Discover Frosty Asteroids 3) Chimps May Mourn Lost Ones, Study Suggests 4) The Colorful Secret Of the Pea Aphid Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Spring Edition: Dust, Allergies and Ash Do Mind Games Strengthen The Brain? Eyjafjallajokull Reporting: The Best Takes, A Town Bans Trees With (More) Pollen, And Spring, Is it Coming Earlier? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Multitasking, Backpacked Birds Real? Is Nuclear Alternate Clean Option? Genetically Modified Plant Boosting Yield? Are Random Numbers Real? Multitasking Possible Past Three? Birds With Backpacks Explain Flocking Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Space, And Bacteria Eating Sushi, In Your Gut First Hand Account of The Shuttle Launch, For Astonauts, Life After Space Program? Another Piece In The Hominid Puzzle A Bacteria Evolved to Eat Sushi In Your Gut, And Visiting a Nuclear Reprocessing Plant Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website A Week of 'Essentials' Attempts At Recreating The Big Bang Federal Ruling Against Patenting Genes A Million Year Old Pinky Discovered Roots of Bird Song and Human Speech Ethics of Human Research Subjects Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Where The Quantum World Stops How Climate Change Pushed Evolution, When Babies Begin Recognizing Voices, Where The Quantum World Stops, Blue Fin Tuna: An Archived Soundscape Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website News Of The Small And Fantastic Policy Update on Stem Cell, Bacteria, Can it Solve Crime? An Amoeba with A Split Personality, Algebra In Alice In Wonderland Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Giant Snakes and Hibernating Mosquitoes Stories in this episode: Days Shorter After Chilean Earthquake; Snake Eating Sauropod Freeze Frame; Mussel's Beard an Industrial Material?; Hibernating Mosquitoes; Antarctic Ice Sheet Shrinking; Your Skin Can Hear. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Earth Shudders, King Tut Sickly Chances of Another Earthquake in Haiti? Snowstorms and climate change, An Indian village displaced by the sea, Picturing earth from space, The sound of sun storms, Egyptian King Tut was rich, sickly too? Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website A Valentine: Storms and Mating signals El Nino season; How to forecast storms; Using math to detect forged art; US Destiny space lab gets new windows; Why we gamble; Are blue whales' mating calls changing? Cavemen, farming and Y chromosomes Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Running Bare and Solar Storms NASA Develops Space Taxis Sun Storms Change Flight Routes Water Vapor's Impact on Climate Texting - 1000 Feet Under Running on Bare Dogs Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Earth's Asteroid Defense Team Methane's effect on climate, a look at global coal markets, climatologists reflect on hacked email, Earth's asteroid defense team, 30 million year old virgin and a DNA analysis of a fish stick Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Earthquake Analysis and Deermouse Sperm An analysis of Latin American earthquakes NASA keepsakes and why sperm fight Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Smart Meters and Absolute Zero Haitian Quake Not a Surprise to Geologists The country's only earthquake engineer 'Beautiful' symmetry near absolute zero Do smart meters really work? Male chromosome still evolving Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Careful Counting After 6 years on Mars, in what was originally supposed to be a three month mission, Rover Spirit's days are numbered. Also, the total number of Blue Fin Tuna allowed to be fished this year is less than previous years. It's been 150 years since the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin's of the Species, President Barak Obama's skin tone proves subjective; and apparently, ants can count. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Hearing the Aesthetic It's all about the visual this week. Stories include the examinations of both dust and ancient dung fungus, salvaging Hubble and a restoration of eyesight. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Major Revisions The EPA studies the Chesapeake Bay water and makes moves to better manage the U.S.'s largest estuary. Also one new study shines light on why some people just can't loss weight, while another suggests that children with Autism may also suffer from poor motor skills. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Ice Heats Up and Leaves Fall Down A baby's cry reveals the language of their parents, NASA takes pictures of melting ice, the pig genome gets sequenced, and who leaves fall off trees. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Carbon, You Are My Shinning Star Carbon is this week's star at the Science Desk. Congress evaluates both the pros and cons concerning planting forests to remove carbon dioxide, and trys to quantify the carbon dioxide a car produces when running on biofuels; plus the taste of carbonation is revealed. Also, the desk explores why musicians hear better and samples some wild cricket sounds. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Accolades and Millstones NASA makes a big mess on the moon, NPR tracks down this year's Medicine or Physiology and Physics Nobel winners, and decomposition never felt so good. Oh yeah, that's science baby... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Frogs Find Love and Other Modern Marvels NASA orchestrates a major collusion on the Moon, neuroscientists find that it takes the human brain about half a second to process speech, some Australian frogs' mating calls jump a few octaves higher, and cap-and-trade may not be the perfect answer to regulating greenhouse gas emissions after all. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website As the World Turns Causes behind this week's geologic tragedies are investigated. Also, NASA needs a plutonium fix, the hominid family tree finds a long lost relative, and some fun bird noises during intimate moments. NPR's Science Desk delivers. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website As the World Turns Causes behind this week's geologic tragedies are investigated. Also, NASA needs a plutonium fix, the hominid family tree finds a long lost relative, and some fun bird noises during some intimate moments. NPR's Science Desk delivers. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Looking Forward, Looking Back Despite its urgency, climate diplomacy is slow going in New York at the UN. Thanks to growing global demand for refrigerators and air conditioners HFC's, a low profile greenhouse gas, may soon be causing large problems for the atmosphere. Three new studies show that the Moon is covered with a very thin film of water and another new discovery in China of a mini T-Rex, called Raptorex, reveals information about the famous dinosaur's evolutionary history. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Problems Solved In Unexpected Ways A proposal for NASA regarding a nautical mission to sail the super cold nitrogen seas of Saturn's moon of Titan surfaces; a surprising new study claims to have cured color blindness in mature male squirrel monkeys shocks the neuroscience community, one researcher attempts to predict disastrous tipping points, and DNA cracks down on illegal poaching by testing fancy boats and hunks of meat. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Space Travel and Ancient Threads This week NPR's science desk explores Hubble's future and views pictures from space. Ancient Georgian textiles are uncovered, Congress tries to bury carbon and the kilogram is reweighed. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Music Written For Monkeys Strikes A Chord Stories in this episode: 1) Some scientists think no-till farming may not contain carbon better than conventional farming. 2) Music can alter our emotions, and a new study shows that it can move monkeys, too. 3) Scientists have big hopes for tiny lasers. 4) Babies and dogs make the same classic mistake: A new study reveals a link between the way dogs and infants think. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website A Shaggy Dog Story This week science reporters Richard Harris and Chris Joyce bring us stories of recent advancements in the genetics of both human diseases and dog's shaggy coats. We also hear about new data on the neccessary evil of agriculture: nitrous oxide. Listen to find out what laughing gas has to do with our increasingly flimsy ozone layer and why the kilogram has a weight problem. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website 'Super Rice' and Unicorn Tricksters of the Sea Boots sloshing through rice fields in Bengladesh, California sea lions jostling on California harbors, and the splish-splashing of the elusive Narwhal...just some of the sounds in this week's podcast. You'll also hear about one strategy to feed a planet of 9 billion people, and how scientists recently transformed bacteria into a completely different species. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website From Cave Dwellers to Flying Scientists This week it's been all about human successes and setbacks. We've learned that humans discovered the power of fire earlier than we thought, but that a mission to Mars isn't exactly in our stars. We've built science laboratories in airplanes, but that won't help us save the corals in the seas. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Colliders, Clunkers And Chimps, Oh My The world's largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, is on course to start up again in November after being broken down for a year. The "cash for clunkers" program may not be as environmentally beneficial as it seems. And scientists have found genetic evidence that a deadly form of malaria may have jumped from chimps to humans relatively recently. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Jellyfish Motion Mixing The Ocean While many world fisheries seem doomed to extinction, some fisheries are rebounding thanks to strict fishing laws. You'll hear one fish bring the ocean to life with its growls, hums and grunts. Some swimming marine life, including jellyfish, may affect climate change by stirring up ocean water. Meanwhile, climate change may be causing more frequent deadly rain-on-snow events that starve large arctic animals like oxen and reindeer. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website NASA: From Space Race To The Future On the 40th anniversary of the first voyage to the moon, we look at NASA, then and now. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin recall their historic moon walk and talk about the excitement surrounding their flight. These days, NASA wants to go to the moon again, this time with different motivations. But some say we should head for new destinations instead of going back to the moon. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Aerial Wars: Moths Click To Evade Bat Sonar The toucan's beak isn't just an attractive ornament, it cools the bird down. Of course, humans cool themselves a different way - and can withstand higher temperatures than you would think. Timing is everything for a flock of migratory birds that swoop in and feed on horseshoe crab eggs in Delaware. But climate change may be shifting the tight calendar that nature has set up for the birds. And a moth species has evolved to outsmart bats. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Alien Stowaways And Moonlight Love Scientists say that horses are running faster these days because jockeys make themselves light as air. Horseshoe crabs gather by the thousands at high tide to spawn under the full moon. Organisms transported in a ship's ballast water may become invasive species in other waters. And, despite loosened federal regulations, scientists still can't use federal dollars to create new stem cells lines, leaving the expensive task up to the private sector or states. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Robot Lawn Mowers and Dubious Brain Images Brain images may not tell us as much as we think they do. If your teenager won't mow the lawn, a robot will do the job. Obama's new stem cell rules will give scientists more freedom to do their research. Climate change was the subject of both the international climate talks at the G8 Summit in Italy and US Senate hearings this week. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Human Bones and Dinosaur Skin Scientists discover a rare dinosaur fossil with its skin intact. Genomic testing suggests the immune system plays a role in schizophrenia. A body farm uses donated human bodies to educate students in forensics. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Doesn't Your River Burn? Scientists may have found water on one of Saturn's moons. A river that was once so polluted it caught on fire is now all cleaned up. A California think tank says global warming will get more buy-in if people think of it as an economic opportunity. Archaeologists have found what they believe to be the world's ol