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For many of us, there are few creatures more nefarious and loathsome as leeches. But do these parasites deserve their bad reputation as mindless bloodsuckers? Dr. Mark Siddall a.k.a. "The Leech Guy," exposes our many misconceptions of these carnivorous worms and details his on-going research at the American Museum of Natural History into each species' unique cocktail of anti-clotting blood poisons.
Produced by Luke Groskin
Music by Audio Network
Additional Footage and Stills by Dr. Mark Siddall Shutterstock, Derek Morisson (C.C. 3.0), Alan Kuehner (C.C. 3.0), Rebecca VO (C.C. 3.0) Leo Kenney / Vernal Pool Association Steven Johnson, William Moser, Landcare Research – Manaaki Whenua

"I'm pure geek, pure logic," says Temple Grandin, author of many books on animal welfare and on autism. When Grandin is not on the road for speaking engagements, she can be found in the Animal Sciences Building at Colorado State University in Fort Collins--where she is a professor and scientist. We visited Grandin in her office to hear about her life and work, and to see which office ornaments will accompany her when the department moves to its new building on campus.

What can't 3D printers do? We've all heard news stories about 3D-printed food and medical prostheses—even cars and entire houses. But how does additive manufacturing, as it's also known, really work? And how can an at-home hobbyist get started? Ira teams up with Makerbot's Bre Pettis to present the ultimate beginner's guide to 3D printing.
Produced by Annie Minoff
Video by Luke Groskin

For USGS wildlife biologist Karyn Rode, tracking and tranquilizing polar bears from a helicopter are just the first thrilling steps in her research. After acquiring various samples from sleeping bears, Dr. Rode's unique understanding of what they eat and how quickly they metabolize nutrients allows her to determine the condition of each bear. Working with a team of scientists from the US Fish and Wildlife Service for nearly a decade, Dr. Rode's monitoring of polar bear health has helped reveal how well populations are adapting to the rapidly warming Arctic. 
A film by Science Friday
Produced in collaboration with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Produced by Emily V. Driscoll and Luke Groskin
Directed by Luke Groskin
Filmed by  Christian Baker, Luke Groskin, and Ryan Hawk
Edited by Sarah Galloway
Animations by Luke Groskin
Music by Audio Network
Color by Irving Harvey
Additional Photos and Video by
USGS, USFWS, NASA Goddard's Scientific Visualization Studio/C. Starr, Shutterstock, Pond5,  Oxford Scientific, and Pascale Otis (C.C. BY 3.0)

Project Advisors:Laura A. Helft, Laura Bonetta, Dennis W.C. Liu and Sean B. Carroll - Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Special Thanks to Karyn Rode, Michelle St. Martin,  Johnathan Larabee, The Staff of Red Dog Mine's Port Facility, Jenny Shalant,  Jessica BrunettoChristian Skotte, Danielle Dana, Ariel Zych, and Jennifer Fenwick
Science Friday/HHMI © 2016

From mantis shrimp to trap-jaw ants, some of the fastest organisms on the planet are ones you may never have heard of. Biologist Sheila Patek, of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, says the creatures she studies move at speeds that are hard for us to imagine, let alone perceive. Patek shared some of her high-speed video and explained how these organisms pull off their top speeds.

footage and images courtesy of sheila patek, patrick green, roy caldwell. music by philip lynch, freemusicarchive. produced by flora lichtman

By studying tiger and cat tongues, Alexis Noel of Georgia Institute of Technology has discovered some surprising uses for their infamously raspy licking apparatuses. Noel research has demonstrated that not only do their tongues tenderize meat, but the conical and scoop-like form of their papillae are optimized for depositing allergen infused saliva baths. So basically every time you pet your cat you are just rubbing your hand over their evenly-distributed saliva.
Produced by Luke Groskin
Filmed by Brandon Swanson
Music by Audio Network
Live Cats filmed at Happy Tabby Cat Cafe
Additional Footage ands Stills by Alexis Noel, Candler Hobbs, David Hu, Joseph Cebak,
Pond5, Youtube User Commissarius, Emmanuel Keller (C.C. BY 2.0), Shutterstock
Special Thanks to David Hu Lab and the Happy Tabby Cat Cafe
All tongues were donated post-mortem. No cats were harmed in the making of this video.
Although some were given a ton of catnip.

Here's the scoop on coffee's flavor: the taste comes from compounds locked into roasted coffee beans. Add hot water, and those flavors escape into your pot -- but not all flavors escape at the same time, says Harold McGee, food science writer and author of On Food and Cooking. For example, sour flavors, acids, come first and the plant carbohydrates responsible for coffee's body come later. Taste for yourself with this counter-top chemistry experiment.

Based outside of Seattle, Valid Cycles specializes in handcrafted bamboo bicycle frames. For bamboo to be bike-ready, it must be cooked in an oven, stripped, and sealed. But after that, the founders of Valid Cycles say the bikes last as long as metal ones. We stopped by their workshop -- a barn in Woodinville, Washington -- to see how the bikes are put together.

From Dipper, the celestial dolphin; to Alice and Jewel, the pink-skinned twins; to Jim Scott, the invisible man in the moon, children's imaginary friends come in innumerable shapes and sizes.

Categorizing these creations—while also trying to glean information about the mindset and personalities of their youthful creators—can be a daunting task for developmental psychologists.

Over the last two decades, researchers have pieced together unexpectedly diverse and nuanced profiles of the children who create imaginary companions. In the first episode of Science Friday's The Real Guide to Imaginary Companions, developmental psychologists Marjorie Taylor and Tracy Gleason describe how scientists study this playful phenomenon in order to understand the types of kids who have imaginary friends, why they create them, and what role these pretend pals play in childhood development.
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
"Alice and Jewel" voiced by Annie Nero
Additional Footage by
The Shining Footage ©Warner Brothers, Inc. 1980
Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson
Angry Boy, Affiliated Film Producers
Special Thanks to Danielle Dana, Jennifer Fenwick, Becky Geer, Tracy Gleason, Elizabeth Delucia Landon, Alex Riviello, Jenny Shalant, Christian Skotte, Marjorie Taylor, and Jacqueline Woolley.

Learn more and find out how you can take part at wnyc.org/streets.
Find out about this National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences Study here :
Avoiding belligerent bus drivers or unwitting tourists popping out of taxis are just a few of the more obvious risks of riding a bike through city streets.Yet there could be another inconspicuous and nearly unavoidable danger that could take a toll on your health: air pollution. Identifying how hazardous exercise can be in an urban environment filled with noxious particles in the air is the goal of a new study by Columbia University researchers Steven Chillrud and Darby Jack. Using biometric sensors, a wearable pollution monitor, and GPS, the study will detail participants' exposure to toxins as they cycle through city streets.
Produced by Luke Groskin
Music by Audio Network
Additional Stills and Video Provided by Zev Ross Spatial Analysis, Jen Connor, Recios Media Crew (C.C. 3.0), NACTO (C.C. 3.0), Vimeo User GCM (C.C. 3.0) , WNYC , Michael Phillips (C.C. 3.0), Darby Jack, Brewbooks EPA, Edison-Hannigan Lab

Our skin is teeming with microbes. Visit a lab to find out what's living on you.

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Since the founding of colonial Jamestown, cockroaches have scuttled through the dark spaces of our homes and our nightmares. But just recently, a new roach has appeared on the New York scene; one with ability to tolerate the cold. What is this hearty roach and where did it come from? Join Rutgers University roach researchers as they unravel the clues to identify this intruder and what its emergence represents.
Produced by Emily Driscoll
Filmed by Stavros Basis
Lighting by Ben Effinger
Music by Audio Network
Narration by Travis
Additional video and Still courtesy of
Oswin Ambrice , Barcode of Life Data Systems , ELearningExamples.com, Joseph Evangelista, Shutterstock
Sydney King and National Park Service, Reto Stockli, NASA Earth Observatory, Peter Vransky, and Dusan Chorvat

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Brett Grasse lovingly calls the Cephalopod Operations division at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) the “cephalopod empire.” The lab in Woods Hole, Massachusetts houses roughly 2,000 to 3,000 cephalopods—likely the largest collection of cephalopods of any research laboratory. And it’s possible that one day, these creatures will be as ubiquitous in labs as mice or fruit flies.

Produced by Luke Groskin
Music by Audio Network
Additional Footage and Stills Provided by Bret Grasse and Taylor Sakmar

Tucked into the midtown Manhattan headquarters of the General Society of Mechanics & Tradesmen of the City of New York, is the John M. Mossman Lock Collection. The locks and assorted items, most which were collected and donated to the museum by Mossman, show the evolution of bank and vault lock technology through the 19th and 20th centuries. The current curator of the locks, John Erroll, describes the collection and its significance.

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For writer Michael Pollan, the contents of his refrigerator is often on the forefront of his mind: "I do think about food a lot, and if I'm distracted it's with thoughts of what's in the fridge." In the latest installment of our Desktop Diaries video series, we'll take you into the home office (and garden) of the famous food and nature author to see how edible ornamentations can sometimes provide inspiration.  
Produced by Luke Groskin
Filmed by Christian Baker
Produced by Luke Groskin
Filmed by Christian Baker
Music by Claude Debussey as performed by Teppei Yamada-Scriba

http:/www.sciencefriday.com
It could be at least 15 years before NASA lands a mission on Europa, one of Jupiter's moons, to search for signs of life beneath its icy crust. In the mean time, a team led by astrobiologist Kevin Hand of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is using ultra-chilled vacuum chambers to simulate what Europa's surface might be like. Their work will inform future missions and give scientists clues to how they might detect life on a faraway moon.
Produced by Luke Groskin
Filmed by Christian Baker
Music by Audio Network

Additional Video by
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Caltech, Kevin Hand and Robert Carlson
Shutterstock, Sergio Martinez (C.C. BY 3.0)
Scratchikken (C.C. BY 3.0)
Special Thanks to
Chau Tu and Preston Dyches

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Did you know that most mammals, from a house cat to an elephant, take roughly the same amount of time to urinate? Researchers at Georgia Tech collected data, streamed via online video and in real life, and discovered that a combination of physiology and gravity enable this feat of fluid dynamics.

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“If you're a cephalopod, you're super easy to eat,” says Sarah McAnulty, a squid biologist. “You're basically a swimming protein bar.” McAnulty studies a species of cephalopod called the Hawaiian bobtail squid. While most cephalopods have flashy adaptations to stay off predators’ dinner menus this particular squid relies on something that many other cephalopods don’t—its bacteria BFF.



Produced by Luke Groskin
Edited by Erika Sutter
Music by Audio Network
Additional Footage and Stills Provided by Sarah McAnulty, Nyholm Lab, Pond5
Sacrificial Hemocyte Research Conducted by the Ruby-McFall-Ngai Lab

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After being hunted off of the mainland of New Zealand centuries ago, a new generation of the earth's rarest sea lions species has miraculously returned to the Otago Peninsula. Jim Fyfe, a ranger with the Department of Conservation, is tasked with watching over each new batch of sea lions pups and ensuring their safety as they usher in an era of hope for these charismatic creatures.
Produced by Chelsea Fiske and Brandon Swanson
Music by Audio Network
Stills provided by the New Zealand Sealion Trust, UW Freshwater and Marine Image Bank, The New Zealand Electronic Text Collection
Special Thanks to New Zealand's Department of Conservation

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The guests at the WorMotel check in with a plop. Each guest has a private room, cozy and controlled temperatures, and enough food to last a lifetime. There’s just one catch: They can never leave. Featuring a silicone plate with an array of 240 wells that host tiny nematodes, the WorMotel is the creation of researchers in the Fang-Yen Lab at the University of Pennsylvania. Researchers to study thousands of the worms at a time in the hopes of revealing which of their 20,000 genes control aging.

Produced by Luke Groskin
Music by Daniel Peterschmidt and Audio Network
Additional Stills Provided by Matt Churgin and Chris Fang-Yen
Special Thanks to the Fang-Yen Laboratory