Plants may be stationary but they're rarely still, says biologist Roger Hangarter, creator of the website Plants in Motion. Researchers are using time-lapse photography to study the biomechanics of plant movement. For example, this week in the journal Science, physicist Sharon Gerbode, of Harvey Mudd College, and biologist Joshua Puzey, of Harvard University, explain how they used time-lapse, mathematical modelling and a prosthetic plant to understand how cucumber tendrils twist.

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This video is part of Science Friday's #CephalopodWeek 2015! Join the cephaloparty starting Friday, June 19th. http://cephalopodweek.tumblr.com

Crawling, swimming, squeezing, jetting—the range of movement available to an octopus is impressive. Yet some species occasionally choose to stand up on two arms and "run" backwards. Chrissy Huffard, a Senior Researcher at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, explains the pros and cons of this seemingly silly behavior and why an octopus might find looking foolish useful.

"I have always emphasized the willingness to discard," says psychologist and Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman, professor emeritus at Princeton University. That philosophy works on two levels -- forget desk trinkets, Kahneman doesn't have a desk -- and he doesn't hoard ideas either, he says. If an idea doesn't work, he lets it go. Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize in economic sciences for his research with Amos Tversky on how people make decisions, is retired and works from his New York City apartment.

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Musk oxen are not the only charismatic creatures perfectly suited to the wind-blasted, tundra of the Alaskan Arctic. Meet Joel Berger, Wildlife Conservation Society senior scientist, Colorado State University professor - as well as expert on hoofed mammals. In addition to gathering photos to track how fast musk oxen are growing, Berger conducts a seemingly hazardous test: He dresses up as a grizzly bear, approaches the herd, and gauges their reactions. Berger uses this unusual technique to find out whether the presence of more male oxen makes the herd safer from bears.
Produced by Luke Groskin
Filmed by Christian Baker and Luke Groskin
Music by Audio Network
Production Assistance and Guide by Erik Snuggerud
Additional Stills and Video by the Joel Berger/WCS , Shutterstock , Musk Oxen Hunt shots © GSSafaris
Special Thanks to Joel Berger, Erik Snuggarud, Ellen Cheng, Jenny Shalant, and Jessica Brunetto

NOTE: This is a 360/VR video but you do not a VR viewer to experience the 360 viewpoint- just click around the video!
In 1977, NASA launched Voyager 1 and 2 to explore and document our solar system and the interstellar space beyond. The craft will drift for billions of years in the emptiness, each carrying a Golden Record inscribed with our message to any intelligent spacefaring civilization that discovers it.
Produced by Luke Groskin
VR/360 Direction by Jason Drakeford
Narrated by Annie Nero
Music by
Audio Network
Dark Was the Night – Blind Willie Johnson
Tchenhoukoumen – Charles Duvelle
Original Golden Record Images and Diagrams
F.D. Drake, Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan, NASA, United Nations, Hale Observatory,
Wayne Miller/ Magnum Photos, David Harvey / Woodfin Camp Inc.,
1955 Life Magazine © Time Inc. 1947
The Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum
The World Book Encyclopedia © Harper & Row Publishers Inc.
Ruby Mera / UNICEF, David Carroll, Stephen Dalton
F. D. Drake, Herman Eckelmann/ NAIC, Jon Lomberg
Gaston Rebuffat, Ray Manley/ Shostal Associates,
Isaac Newton, Lennart Nilsson, David Wickstrom
National Geographic Society Images
H. Edward Kim, William Albert Allard, Gordon W. Grahan,
James P. Blair, Thomas Nebbia, David Doubilet, Donna Grosvenor,
Joseph Scherschel, Goerge F. Mobley, Jodi Cobb

Go into Jason Hackenwerth's studio and watch him bend balloons into giant flowers.

You don't need a time machine to marvel at the hot broth of quarks and gluons that made up all matter a microsecond after the Big Bang. You just need a ticket on the Long Island Railroad. Using massive feats of engineering, Brookhaven National Laboratory has devised a recipe for cooking up tiny ephemeral batches of this quark-gluon soup, a fluid which physicists Paul Sorensen say is the most "perfect" fluid ever discovered.
Produced by Luke Groskin, Music by Audio Network, Additional Footage and Stills by Brookhaven National Laboratory NASA and Shutterstock

Want to see the biggest ant collection in the world? Welcome to ant central! In the latest installment of Science Friday's Desktop Diaries series, ecologist Edward O. Wilson takes us on a tour of his office, located in Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology. Wilson, who has studied ants for 60 years and has won two Pulitzer prizes for his writing, shows off Harvard's ant collection (the largest in the world with about a million specimens), plays a backwoods fiddle and explains how he looks to Darwin (a bobble head doll, in this case) for encouragement.

Water bears, also known as tardigrades, can survive boiling, freezing, the vacuum of space and years of desiccation. Biologist Bob Goldstein, of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, describes water bears and explains why he studies them.

Imagine what you might do if you could print your own solar panels. That's kind of the dream behind Shawn Frayne and Alex Hornstein's Solar Pocket Factory -- although they see it more as the "microbrewery" of panel production rather than a tool for everyone's garage. With over $70,000 of backing from a successful Kickstarter campaign, the inventors are now working on refining the prototype. If all goes well, by April they'll have a machine that can spit out a micro solar panel every few seconds. In the meantime, Frayne stopped by Flora Lichtman's backyard with a few pieces of the prototype to explain how the mini-factory will work.

Cockroaches are constantly grooming themselves, says entomologist Coby Schal of North Carolina State University. To clean its antenna, a cockroach will grab ahold of it with its front leg, bring the antenna to its mouth, and run the antenna from base to tip through its mandibles like a piece of floss. Publishing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Schal and colleagues investigate the benefits of clean antennae.


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The Tuvan throat-singing band Alash Ensemble has toured the world demonstrating both their cultural heritage as well as their vocal mastery. Their incredible ability to sing low and high notes simultaneously has inspired wonder and a deep appreciation for their craft. But how they achieve these otherworldly sounds hasn't been extensively explored. With the help of speech pathologist Aaron Johnson, we'll look inside the human vocal tract to see how these talented singers create their signature sounds.
Produced by Luke Groskin
Audio Recording by Alexa Lim
Music by Alash Ensemble ( http://www.alashensemble.com )
Additional Stills and Video by
Steve Sklar / Skysong Productions - http://skysongpro.com/
Pond5
NYU Langone Voice Center
The Chevy Chase Show , Fox Network
Special Thanks to Rachel Bouton!

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Footage courtesy of Prelinger Archives, Bernard Wilets' "Discovering Electronic Music"
Music by Ego Plum and Paul Rothman
Produced by Luke Groskin
This video was not sponsored by LittleBits.

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Just as humans utilize roads and freeways to move cars and resources around our cities, fungus utilize fluid networks to move nutrients and nuclei through their cells. Dr. Marcus Roper of UCLA explains how these networks function with remarkable efficiency and prevent microscopic traffic jams.
Produced by Christian Baker
Music by Audio Network
Additional Footage Courtesy of Marcus Roper and UCLA

Find out why this special ice cream stretches like silly putty. It's all in the molecules.

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Have you ever noticed that it's easier to walk without spilling a foamy beer versus walking around with regular cup of coffee? Have you ever wondered why? To solve this everyday physics phenomenon, a team of fluid mechanics researchers at Princeton University's Complex Fluids Lab investigate the anti-sloshing abilities of foam.
Produced by Luke Groskin
Music by Audio Network
Additional Footage Provided by Alban Sauret, Emilie Dressaire, Francois Boulogne, Howard Stone, Jean Cappello
Dusty Wobbls (C.C. 3.0), and Jake Millie (C.C. 3.0)

From the SciFri Archive: This toilet floats. It's an outhouse and sewage-treatment plant in one, processing human waste through a "constructed wetlands." Adam Katzman, the inventor and builder of the toilet-boat, says it's meant to be more inspirational than practical. "Poop and Paddle" demonstrates how sewage and rainwater can be converted to cattails and clean water.

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Although it's well known that seahorses and their cousins the pipefish are the only vertebrates where males become pregnant, researchers have only begun to understand how this unique adaptation works. By studying the behavior of these charismatic fishes and sampling the RNA within the male's pouch, biologist Tony Wilson and his lab at Brooklyn College have found that seahorse pregnancy may have a deeper genetic link to other forms of pregnancy than previously thought.
Produced by Luke Groskin
Music by Audio Network
Additional Stills and Video by
Tony Wilson, Pond5, SeahorseConservancy.org , Randy Perry (C.C. BY 2.0), Elaine Blum, Shutterstock, Horsepower the Movie (CC. BY 2.0)

Special thanks to
Natalie Cash, Jeff Morey, Tony Wilson, Sunny Scobell,
and Frieda Sutton

A mystery of the animal kingdom: How do owls turn their heads 270 degrees without damaging their blood vessels? At last an answer, published this week in Science, as the winning poster in the 2012 International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge. Fabian de Kok-Mercado, of Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and Philippe Gailloud, of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, dissected and X-rayed owls to discover how the birds do the twist.

Carve first, scoop later--that's just one of the tips from Maniac Pumpkin Carvers Marc and Chris. Based in Brooklyn, these professional illustrators switch to the medium of pumpkin during October. They carve hundreds of pumpkins each fall, which go for a few hundred bucks and rarely end up on stoops. They gave us some tips for how to bring our pumpkins to the next level this Halloween.