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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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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/

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)

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.

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

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.

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

When two pendulums are attached to each other, their motion is impossible to predict. This swinging pendulum demonstration is brought to you by Science Friday

An audio slideshow of “Malamp Reliquaries”, featuring artist and biologist Brandon Ballengée's haunting memorials of frog deformity.
Produced by Annie Minoff
Edited by Luke Groskin
Photos by Brandon Ballengée

Can you predict which song is going to be a hit? The answer may be yes.

Scientists engineered a butterfly with glow in the dark eyes. The purpose is to figure out how butterfly eyespots develop.

Science Friday investigates the secret life of cheese. We visited Hendricks Farms and Dairy in Telford, PA--home to award-winning cheese-maker Trent Hendricks. He walks us through how he makes a hybrid cheese he calls cheddar blue.

http://www.sciencefriday.com
Science Friday attended the 2014 Sundance Film Festival and had a conversation with Shosh Shlam and Hilla Medalia, the directors of the feature documentary film, "Web Junkie." Their film follows several teenage boys in a Chinese "Internet addiction" rehabilitation camp.
"Web Junkie" directed by Shosh Shlam and Hilla Medalia.
All footage from Web Junkie © Dogwoof Global.
Produced by Annie Minoff
Interview filmed by Manjula Varghese
Edited by Luke Groskin

We stopped in at Columbia University for a quick fMRI.

The horn of a Japanese rhinoceros beetle (Trypoxylus dichotomus) can grow to be two-thirds the length of the rest of its body. And size matters. The male beetles use their horns to battle over feeding sites, where they also get access to female beetles. The longer the horn, the more reproductive success. So what limits horn-size? And why do some beetles have big horns and others puny ones? Biologists Doug Emlen and Erin McCullough of The University of Montana are looking into it.