Science Friday Podcasts

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Weekly podcast of 'Science Friday,' a science and technology news discussion program heard on public radio stations across the USA. Primary Format : Science Language : English Also Listed as: City : New York State/Province : NY Country : USA Region : NA 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 Science Friday Podcasts Methings.com listings of Science Friday Podcasts If you like this podcast, you might also like:

View the full archive of Science Friday Building A Better Lightbulb The U.S. Department of Energy is offering $10 million to the first individual or company to develop an energy-efficient LED replacement for the standard 60-watt incandescent bulb. DOE lighting program manager James Brodrick discusses the L Prize, and what makes a better bulb. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Can Oceans Survive The Human Appetite For Seafood? Faced with declining fish stocks, many nations are looking for sustainable ways to have their fish — and eat it too. But how much fishing is too much? Oceanographer Sylvia Earle discusses this and other topics in her book The World is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean's Are One. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Students Build Living Microbial Machines At the 2009 International Genetically Engineered Machine competition, undergraduates from all over the world unveiled the living machines they'd created with snippets of DNA, from bacteria that change color when they detect pollutants to ones that secrete non-toxic superglue. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Giving Athletes A Heads-Up On Concussions Football players take a lot of hits, but when does hard-headed play go too far? New research suggests that head trauma can do lasting damage. Two brain researchers talk about what happens in the brain when a player gets hit, and how athletes can better protect themselves. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Considering Values In The Health Care Debate As health care legislation moves through Congress, bioethicist Thomas H. Murray asks if enough attention is being paid to concepts such as justice, fairness and liberty. Murray and health care economist Len Nichols discuss the role of values in the health care debate. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Examining Gene Therapy As Treatment For Blindness Reporting in The Lancet, doctors found success in treating Leber's congenital amaurosis, a rare type of blindness, with gene therapy. Study author Katherine High explains how injecting a gene-carrying virus into the eye has improved vision in a handful of patients. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Happy Birthday, Internet On Oct. 29, 1969, around 10:30 P.M., a message from one computer was sent over a modified phone line to another computer hundreds of miles away. Some say the Internet was born that day. UCLA computer scientist Leonard Kleinrock, who was there, gives his account. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Why Runners Like To Feel The Burn What compels hundreds of thousands of runners to compete in marathons every year? Ira Flatow and guests discuss running research — from how humans are adapted specifically for long-distance running to why working up a sweat might be good for the brain, as well as the body. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website People ... People Who Eat People In her book Dinner With a Cannibal, writer Carole Travis-Henikoff documents the long — and often hidden — history of cannibalism in humans. Travis-Henikoff notes that cannibalism wasn't always taboo, whether it be eating loved ones out of respect or eating enemies out of disdain. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Halloween: A Holiday For Gadgets For gadget lovers, Halloween is more geeky than spooky. Mark Frauenfelder, editor-in-chief of Make Magazine, talks about the geekiest do-it-yourself Halloween costumes and decorations, from spray foam guts and singing pumpkins to a fortune-teller costume built on a Segway. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website A Head-Shrinker Studies The Zombie Brain Psychiatrist Steven Schlozman recently expanded his practice from humans to the inhuman. Poring over his library of classic zombie films, he came up with neurobiological explanations for the behavior of the undead, such as lack of a frontal lobe and an overactive amygdala. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Neuroscientists And Magicians Mingle At Conference Thousands of neuroscientists gathered in Chicago this week at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. Science News writer Laura Sanders reports on the highlights, including a symposium where magicians and neuroscientists discussed their common ground: the mind. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Scientists Solve Mystery Of Ear-Splitting Sounds Reporting in Nature, researchers write that a rare type of neuron in the inner ear may process painfully loud sounds, such as the blast of a jackhammer. Study author Paul Fuchs discusses how his team solved a mystery that had stumped auditory scientists for nearly 50 years. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Searching For The Right Hand-Scrubbing Message Researchers tried various slogans to encourage travelers to lather up after using rest stop toilets, from the disgusting — "Soap it off or eat it later" — to the educational — "Water doesn't kill germs, soap does." Hygiene expert Val Curtis reports on the most effective messages. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Seeing Through The Eyes Of An Armadillo Sam Easterson has refined the art of the critter cam. He is the curator of the Museum of Animal Perspectives — an online repository of "remotely sensed wildlife imagery." All the footage comes from cameras implanted in the landscape or strapped to the backs of animals. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Natural Selection Works On Humans, Too Mining data from the Framingham Heart Study, scientists say they've been able to tease out the effects of natural selection on humans. Evolutionary biologist Stephen Stearns explains how evolutionary forces may produce shorter, rounder, more fertile women in the future. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Seeing The Softer Side Of Nature In his new book, The Age of Empathy, Frans de Waal says nature has been wrongly depicted to justify a "survival of the fittest" attitude in humans. Drawing on examples from his primate observations, de Waal says it's time for humans to rethink how we treat each other. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Did Algae Contribute To Mass Extinctions? Forget asteroids — a new theory says algae were the key to the dinosaurs' extinction millions of years ago. Ecotoxicologist John Rodgers details the evidence for the theory and explains why some algae can be harmful in large quantities, even to present day animal populations. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Making Memories With Fruit Flies By stimulating a specific set of nerve cells in the fruit fly brain, scientists have tricked the flies into behaving as though they felt a pain they never actually felt. Physiologist Gero Wiesenbock describes the experiments and explains why fruit fly memories matter. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Next Stop: The Moon The moon has been getting a lot of traffic recently. Missions from the U.S., India, and Japan have all flown by, or into, our lunar neighbor. Planetary scientist Paul Spudis explains how the data collected may help make the moon a pit stop for future planetary missions. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website