Agave plants, probably best known as the source of tequila, were important as a food crop long before the invention of margaritas. Wendy Hodgson, botanist at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix, says the plants were cultivated as far back as 800 AD in some parts of the Southwest. Trek through the Arizona desert to see where agaves were cultivated centuries ago and what remains of the ancient gardens.

Originally published on ScienceFriday.com May 14, 2009

Ice can be hard to get a handle on, literally and figuratively. It can be cloudy or clear, as hard as concrete or as soft as a snowflake. Ice experts Erland Schulson, head of the Ice Research Lab at Dartmouth College, and Shintaro Okamoto, founder of Okamoto Studio in Queens, New York, have staked their livelihoods on the slippery material. We asked them what fascinates them about frozen water. (Originally published Jan 27, 2012)

For Navajo hydrologist Karletta Chief, water is sacred. When a mine spill contaminated a vital river in the Navajo Nation, she decides to investigate the potential environmental and health impacts it had on her community.

A film by Science Friday
Produced in collaboration with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Produced by Emily V. Driscoll and Luke Groskin
Directed by Emily V. Driscoll
Edited by Emily V. Driscoll and Luke Groskin
Filmed by Brandon Swanson
Animations by Luke Groskin
Music by Audio Network
Additional Photos and Video by Hayden Ferguson, Pond5. US Environmental Protection Agency

Project Advisors:
Laura A. Helft, Laura Bonetta, Dennis W.C. Liu and Sean B. Carroll - Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Special Thanks to
Karletta Chief, Black Mesa United, Shiprock Chapter, Dennis McQuillan, Xiaobo Hou, Janene and Chili Yazzie, Yoshira Ornelas Van Horne, Allison Scott Majure, Danielle Dana, Chistian Skotte, Ariel Zych
and Jennifer Fenwick

Science Friday/HHMI © 2017

Bacteria and viruses hitch a ride inside droplets of all kinds—sneezes, raindrops, toilet splatter. By reviewing footage of different types of drops, applied mathematician Lydia Bourouiba records and measures where they disperse in order to better understand how diseases spread. Watch how Bourouiba designs tests—some inescapably humorous and awkward—to study infectious disease transmission.

Publications References:

Bourouiba, L. (2016) A Sneeze. New England Journal of Medicine. 357(8):e15.
Wang, Y. and Bourouiba, L. (2016) Drop impact on small surfaces: thickness and velocity profiles of the expanding sheet in the air. Journal of Fluid Mechanics. 814:510-534.
Gilet, T. and Bourouiba, L. (2015) Fluid fragmentation shapes rain-induced foliar disease transmission. Journal of the Royal Society Interface. 12:20141092.
Gilet, T. and Bourouiba, L. (2014) Rain-induced ejection of pathogens from leaves: revisiting the mechanism of splash-on-film using high-speed visualization. Integrative and Comparative Biology. 54:974–984.
Bourouiba, L., Dehandschoewercker, E., and Bush, J. W. M. (2014) Violent respiratory events: on coughing and sneezing. Journal of Fluid Mechanics. 745: 537-563.
Scharfman, B. E., Techet, A. H., Bush, J. W. M. and Bourouiba, L. (2016) Visualization of sneeze ejecta: steps of fluid fragmentation leading to respiratory droplets. Experiments in Fluids. 57:24--1-9

A film by Science Friday
Produced in collaboration with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Produced and Directed by Emily V. Driscoll and Luke Groskin
Filmed by Luke Groskin
Editing and Animations by Jason Drakeford
Music by Audio Network
Additional Photos and Video by
Lydia Bourouiba, Yongji Wang, Tristan Gilet, Sophie Lejeune, Claire Lu, and Eline Dehandschoewercker
Alamy, Pond5, Shutterstock

Project Advisors:
Laura A. Helft, Laura Bonetta, Dennis W.C. Liu and Sean B. Carroll - Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Special Thanks to:
Lydia Bourouiba, Christian Skotte, Danielle Dana, Ariel Zych, Jennfier Fenwick, Timothee Jamin, Stephane Poulain, and Maxime Inizan

To learn more about her research you can visit https://lbourouiba.mit.edu/

Blue whales can grow to 90 feet -- that's longer than a tennis court. Getting that big requires a lot of fuel, says Jeremy Goldbogen, a postdoctoral researcher at the Cascadia Research Collective. That's why Goldbogen studies the whales' dining habits. They feed on krill, slurping in millions of the mini crustaceans along with hundreds of thousands of pounds of water in a single gulp. With the help of data tags and a National Geographic Crittercam, Goldbogen and colleagues found that blue whales do underwater acrobatics while they eat -- specifically a move they coined "the blue whale barrel roll."

Chris Tack made seven trips to Goodwill to get rid of his stuff, before moving into the 140-square-foot home he and his wife Malissa Tack designed and built. Constructed on a trailer bed and parked in Snohomish, Washington, the house is more than enough space for them, the couple says. And one advantage of a home on wheels, the 29-year-olds say, is that you can always move.

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Although the praire outside of Choteau, Montana is best known as the fossil quarry that provided definitive paleontological insights into the parenting habits of dinosaurs, it’s also the perfect place to hunt less famous fossilized treasures, namely dino poo (known as coprolites). The same flood event that occurred some 70 million years that buried huge numbers of hadrosaurs and their nests also preserved their feces for posterity. Using the coprolites found in the region, paleontologist Karen Chin has discovered unique insights into the climate, ecology, and behavior of the species who created it. In her lab at the University of Colorado in Boulder, Chin and collaborators examine the poop in microscopic detail using state of the art chemical analyses. Their findings have revealed the unusual dietary habits of hadrosaurs in the area as well thriving populations of invertebrates.
Produced by Luke Groskin
Article by Lauren J. Young
Music by Audio Network
Additional Footage and Stills Provided by Pond5, Karen Chin, James Super
Huge Thanks to the Two Medicine Dinosaur Center, Karen Chin, Frank Garrett Boudinot (Julio Sepulveda laboratory), the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History, the Museum of the Rockies, and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

July Fourth: A day for picnics, parades and chemistry. Bassam Shakhashiri, chemistry professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, explains some of the science of fireworks.
Video footage courtesy of KaterJames. Music from Prelinger Archives. Produced by Flora Lichtman.

In her new book, Bones Books and Bell Jars, physician and photographer Andrea Baldeck documents the collection of medical texts, instruments, and specimens at Philadelphia's Mütter Museum.

Biology graduate student Tom McDonagh is taking shadow puppetry to the next level. One of his latest productions is based on the (true) story of an American doctor and French inventor who took to the skies in a hydrogen balloon and made the first trip -- by air -- across the English Channel. McDonagh, whose Ph.D. project at Rockefeller University has centered on building a microscope, is also experimenting with shadow puppet production -- from laser cut puppets to 3D shadows. McDonagh and puppeteers Jo Jo Hristova, Arlee Chadwick and Emma Wiseman will be performing several of his pieces at Puppet Festival rEvolution on August 6th, 2013 in Swarthmore, PA.

How beasts of burden do the locomotion.

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The idea of mining Mars, the moon, or an asteroid for its mineral or water resources isn't far-fetched. NASA, the ESA, and several commercial enterprises already have missions in various stages of planning - all to test technologies and probe off-planet terrain for resource extraction. But before you go and land your finely-tuned space drill on an asteroid and suck out the water and carbon, you need to test it out here on earth. And before you do that, you need something to stand in for the rocks and soil of these interplanetary bodies. Using existing data from previous missions, a pinch of geology and chemistry, and and whole lot of jerry-rigged pressure cookers, researchers at Deep Space Industries are cooking up these simulants by the bucket full.
Produced by Luke Groskin
Music by Audio Network
Videography and Production Assistance by Brook Eschenroeder
Additional Videos, Stills and Animations by Shutterstock, Brandon Swanson, Deep Space Industries, Brian Versteeg, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Kennedy Space Flight Center, Goddard Space Flight, Johnson Space Center, Resource Prospector Mission , JAXA Hayabusa Mission, European Space Agency
Special Thanks to Philip Metzger, Danielle Dana and Ariel Zych

http://www.sciencefriday.com
Up and down the West coast of the U.S., bees are leaving their hives, flying around at night and then suddenly dropping dead. Learn all about this parasitic horror that quietly zombifies these insects and how you can become a real-life zombee hunter.

Back in 2012, Raul Oaida, 18-years-old, attached a LEGO shuttle, a video camera and a GPS tracker, to a huge helium balloon and sent them into space. Oaida says flight time was just about three hours and the shuttle reached an altitude of 115,000 feet before heading back to Earth. According to Oaida, designing the spacecraft wasn't so hard (compared to the jet engine he designed and built before this) but getting a flight clearance was.
Video from Raul Oaida, additional editing by Flora Lichtman, music by SYNTHAR

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As a choreographer who often collaborates with dancers with disabilities, Merry Lynn Morris has long thought that traditional manual and power wheelchair designs were constraining. Her work in integrative dance, along with her experience growing up with a father who relied on a wheelchair, inspired her to invent a power wheelchair designed for artistic expression. Equipped with omnidirectional movement, a rotating seat, and a hands-free control, the chair enables dancers to explore new movement techniques, and may one day provide greater mobility in everyday life, too.

A hawk moth (Manduca sexta) feeds by hovering in front of flowers and slurping nectar through a proboscis, basically a body-length straw. To understand how these moths keep such a precise position in the air, Tyson Hedrick, a biomechanist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, tried destabilizing moths in a variety of different ways and tracked their responses using high speed cameras.

It's crunch time for the 'balloonatics' at Macy's Parade Studio. The balloons themselves, which are designed and fabricated in a warehouse in New Jersey, are getting their final checkup before the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. John Piper and Jim Artle take us around the studio and spill the secrets of inflation, explain how to calculate whether your balloon will float, and explain why the balloons look better after a little time in the sun. (Broadcast Nov 2011)

Scientists are experimenting with pumping CO2 deep beneath the sea floor. See the borehole where they practice.

Tips on mushroom hunting from the president of the Mycological Society of America.

http://www.sciencefriday.com
Join the Museum of Modern Art's Senior Curator of Architecture and Design, Paola Antonelli on an exclusive tour of the video games in their collection.