Últimos
This summer, the #SciFriBookClub is reading Tracy Kidder’s 1981 true-tech tale of computer engineering heroism, The Soul of a New Machine. Join three of the engineers profiled in Soul, as they remember the effort to bring ‘Eagle’ to life. Ask a question using the Google Hangout Q&A feature, or tweet using the hashtag #SciFriBookClub
Learn more about #SciFriBookClub at http://sciencefriday.com/bookclub
Get a tour of General Motor's new concept car--the Chevy Volt. Plus Dinah Shore singing Chevy's praises.
We had the VP on the radio show that week too (April 6) along with some other green car experts. Lively show - you can listen here: http://www.sciencefriday.com/p....ages/2007/Apr/hour2_
Edith Widder has been exploring the deep sea for thirty years. When she descended for the first time, she turned off the lights of her submersible hoping to see marine organisms that make light--bioluminescent animals. Widder says she wasn't prepared for the light show she encountered and has been building tools to document bioluminescence ever since.
There’s a price we pay when we illuminate our cities. The light interferes with our sleep cycles and can have real and serious health consequences. There are a few remote places, though, where you can still find true darkness. One of those is Torrey, Utah, where amateur astrophotographer Mark Bailey has an observatory that he calls his “portal to the deeper cosmos.”
A RadioWest and Science Friday Film
Directed and Edited by Kelsie Moore and Doug Fabrizio
Produced by Elaine Clark
Cinematography by Kelsie Moore
Astrophotography Images by Mark Bailey
Music by Al Lethbridge and Audio Network
Don't just watch and listen. Support science!
http://www.sciencefriday.com/SUPPORT
This device smells. Using DNA, scientists built an electronic sniffing machine.
Sandor Ellix Katz, self-proclaimed "fermentation revivalist" and author of "The Art of Fermentation" (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2012) discusses the two "cultures."
Related:
Michael Pollan on Science Friday (May 3, 2013) http://www.sciencefriday.com/s....egment/05/03/2013/mi
In perhaps the cutest study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, psychologist Marcel Zentner and Tuomas Eerola found that babies will spontaneously boogie when they hear music and other rhythmic sounds. The findings suggest babies are not great dancers, but they smile more when they do hit the beat.
Each year, millions of Americans pay to have their eyeballs poked, prodded, suctioned, sliced and zapped with a laser. In exchange, their vision is corrected. In this video, we go inside an operating room at Acuity Laser Eye and Vision Center in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania to watch Dr. Steven Vale, who has done over 20,000 surgeries, perform lasik eye surgery. See for yourself!
Big and boisterous, Spotigy and Buri appear to be standard 1-year-old bulls. But a quick glance at their furry heads and closer examination of their genes would reveal that they're unique specimens—hornless Holsteins. The bulls are the result of a gene-editing experiment by Alison Van Eenennaam and colleagues at UC Davis, along with researchers at the biotech company Recombinetics, who aim to develop hornless cattle that might one day replace cows whose horns must be physical removed through expensive and painful methods. Van Eenennaam explains how the technique of "precision breeding" can be a faster and more effective means of de-horning cows compared to traditional breeding methods.
Produced by Luke Groskin
Music by Audio Network
Filmed by Christian Baker
and Luke Groskin
Additional Stills and Video by
Shutterstock
Pond5
Jack Wakeham (C.C. BY 3.0)
Cornell Alliance for Science
Find out how Lakefront Brewery, a small beer-maker in Milwaukee, WI, turns hops and malt into a bubbly beverage.
They look cuddly, but don't be fooled: red-eyed treefrogs (Agalychnis callidryas) have a secret dark side. When Michael Caldwell, of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, filmed the frogs under infrared light he saw a behavior had hadn't seen before -- the frogs started vigorously shaking the branches they were sitting on. Caldwell and colleagues, decode the meaning of the shakes.
A robot that's meant to swim with the fishes. Mechanical engineer Maurizio Porfiri, of the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, designs robot fish. A few years ago, he found that real fish would mill about his aquatic robot, and now he's trying to understand why. His research suggests that it has less to do with how the robot looks, than how it makes fish feel.
For honey bees, making is a new queens is a simple as adding royal jelly, a unique protein rich secretion, to the cell of a growing larvae. This fairly well studied addition causes a cascade of physiological changes in the growing larvae and voila! A queen is born. However, what causes a baby bumblebee (the fuzzier and more weather-hardy cousins to honey bees) to become royalty remains a mystery. They don’t produce royal jelly but they produce a unique barf for their young. Enter entomologist Hollis Woodard and her students at UC Riverside who hope that by understanding how queens are created, they can mitigate on-going extinction crises in bumblebees species. Woodard and company begin by heading up to San Bernardino mountains outside Los Angeles. Here, the researchers collect emerging queens as they buzz around the blooming Manzanita shrubs. These queens are brought back to the lab, where the establish their own (see through) honeypots. Lavished with food by the lab members, the queens lay dozens of larvae which become daughter drones. These drones are then “milked” for their barf which is analyzed for its chemical properties. Future larvae are hand fed the analyzed barf in various quantities and intervals to determine what factors lead to the generation of queen bees.
Produced by Luke Groskin
Filmed by Christian Baker
Audio Recording by Christopher Intagliata
Music by Audio Network
Additional Footage Provided by Woodard Lab, Creative Commons Media (C.C. BY 2.0),
Cees Van Hengstum (C.C. BY 2.0), Alex Murphy (C.C. BY 2.0),
Blue Line Apiary (C.C. BY 2.0), Pond5
Think oysters are good on the half shell? They may be even better whole. Oysters can restore marine habitats by cleaning water, creating homes for other sea life and preventing coastal erosion. But oyster populations around the world have declined, experts say. Find out how scientists in New York are working to replenish oyster populations in the waters around the city.
Photographer Colin Legg makes time-lapse movies of celestial scenes, from auroras to eclipses. Photographing mostly in remote parts of Australia, where human-made light doesn't compete with starlight, Legg describes some of the challenges of this type of photography -- from babysitting cameras for days and nights on end to running electronics in the backcountry.
Given their outlandish names and traits, imaginary companions might be dismissed as nostalgic relics of our ephemeral youth. Yet, research by psychologists has revealed that imaginary companions can provide glimpses into the development of critical creative, social, and cognitive skills of children. In the third episode of The Real Guide to Imaginary Companions, we'll see how developmental psychologist Tracy Gleason uses imaginary companions to study how children form relationships. We'll also learn how developmental psychologist Stephanie Carlson tests the role of pretend play, such as creating an imaginary companion, in a child's ability to exercise self-control.
Produced by Science Friday with generous support from the John Templeton Foundation
Produced, directed, and narrated by Luke Groskin
Filmed by Katie Graham, Luke Groskin and Patrick Pelham
Editor by Erika Sutter
Animations by Gabe Darling and Candice Aquino
Music by Audio Network
"Fairy Godmother" voiced by Annie Nero
Additional footage provided by
Pond5.com
Carlson Lab Experiment Footage Courtesy of Mind in the Making, Bezos Family Foundation.
Science Friday salutes a great science teacher. "Office hours are some of my favorite hours of the week," says professor Tom Carlson, a medical doctor, ethnobotanist and instructor of 1700 students annually at the University of California, Berkeley. One of Carlson's former students, SciFri associate senior producer Christopher Intagliata, told us that Carlson's class was the reason he got into science. Listen here: http://www.sciencefriday.com/s....egment/05/31/2013/te
By 1982, fewer than two dozen California condors lived in the wild. By 1985, only one wild breeding pair was known to exist. That's when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife service decided to capture any remaining condors and bring them to live--and breed--in captivity. The Peregrine Fund, in Boise, Id., houses the largest California condor breeding center in the U.S.--with nearly sixty California condors living on site. Bill Heinrich and Taiana Carvalho take us "behind the enclosure" for a tour of the condor compound.
