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For over 70 years, no one had seen the oblong rocksnail. Declared extinct in 2000, the species was considered to be another native Alabaman mollusk gone and forgotten. But one day in the spring of 2011, biology grad student Nathan Whelan picked up a tiny rock and got a big surprise.
Produced by Luke Groskin
Music by Audio Network
Additional Stills and Photos by Shutterstock, Thomas Tarpley, Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, Alabama Aquatic Biodiversity Center, Nathan Whelan, Boris Datnow, Alabama Power, Annals of Lyceum, Wild Side TV, Paul Johnson, Masood Lohar, Bermuda Conservation Services, Jefferson County Environmental Services

Brenda Tan and Matthew Cost, high school seniors from Trinity School in New York City, used a technique called DNA barcoding to find out what species were present in over 200 animal products. Their extracurricular experiment, which they completed with the help of Mark Stoeckle, of The Rockefeller University, suggests that buyers should beware!

Composer and instrument builder Paul Rudolph makes music from garbage. He combs recycling centers and scrap yards for what he calls "found object instruments"--propane tanks, film reels, artillery shells and other items that he likes the sound of. Rudolph sometimes modifies the objects and then uses the newly-minted percussive instruments in his music performance group GLANK, which has appeared at the Eagle Rock Music Festival in Los Angeles and Maker Faire in New York City. John Powell, physicist and author of How Music Works, chimes in on the physics of making music.

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Meet the farmers who want to make cheap, environmentally friendly kelp America's next favorite vegetable.

Produced by Luke Groskin
Music by Audio Network
Additional Footage Provided by Kurt Mann /NOAA

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In the third episode of our wine science series, Out of the Bottle, Dr. Brian Wansink, Director of Cornell University's Food and Brand Lab, explains how expectations, environment, and social cues can fool us into believing that our wine tastes better or worse than it is.
Featuring Dr. Brian Wansink, Director of the Cornell University Food and Brand lab
And author of Mindless Eating (mindlesseating.org), and Slim by Design
Produced by Luke Groskin
Music by Audio Network
Location provided by Corkbuzz
Prop Master: Phyllis Shalant
Wine Wrangler: Sam Flatow
Additional Stills: Shutterstock, Proxy Design, Derek Skey

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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.

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.

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

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Produced by Luke Groskin
By shrinking an entire museum into a 6 foot tall modular design, MICRO hopes that these tiny exhibits can go in all sorts of public areas, like shopping malls, waiting rooms, airports, and parks where they can integrate science and learning into people's day-to-day lives.

Edited by Sarah Galloway

Music by Audio Network

Additional Footage Provided by People’s Television and Science Sandbox, an initiative of the Simons Foundation

Special Thanks to Charles Philipp, Ruby Murray, and Amanda Schochet

Lightning -- one of the great unsolved mysteries.

A new study in Science investigates the wisdom of crowds... well, schools. Andrew Berdahl, graduate student at Princeton University, explains that Golden shiner minnows prefer shady habitat. And he and his co-authors found that large groups of fish are better at tracking shady habitats than smaller groups or individuals--a demonstration of collective sensing.How do fish pool their senses? The researchers filmed fish and digitized their movement to try to answer the question.

In 2011, comet Lovejoy traveled through the sun's corona and lived to tell the tale. But its tail was the most telling. Reporting in the journal Science, Cooper Downs, an astrophysicist at Predictive Science Inc. in San Diego, Calif., says that the wiggly path of the comet's tail helps explain the sun's magnetic field.

The Rockaways, a Queens, N.Y. neighborhood, is still recovering from Sandy. Debris from fires lingers on the streets, and buildings torn apart by the storm are crumbling on the beach. But at least for those with restored heat and power (7,000 customers in the area are still without power), there is yet another worry: mold. Peter Corless, a community organizer in the Rockaways, gives us a tour of the neighborhood, while Joan Bennett, a mycologist whose house molded after Katrina flooding, describes the species of fungi she found in her own home after that hurricane and in New Jersey homes post-Sandy.

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For more about this work head to Dr. Lydia Bourouiba's Webstie : http://lbourouiba.mit.edu
Although we all know that sneezes and coughs transmit infections, little research had been done to model how they work. To address this knowledge gap, Dr. Lydia Bourouiba and Dr. John Bush of MIT's Applied Mathematics Lab used high speed cameras and fluid mechanics to reveal why we've grossly underestimated the role of gas clouds in these violent expirations.
Produced by Luke Groskin
Music by Audio Network
Additional Video and Stills by
Lydia Bourouiba
John Bush
Shutterstock
Prelinger Archives

Why do your fingers get pruney after a swim? Only a handful of researchers, including Einar Wilder-Smith, Mark Changizi, and Tom Smulders, have looked into the phenomenon. Publishing in Biology Letters, Smulders lends a hand to the hypothesis, set forth by Changizi and colleagues, that finger wrinkles improve our grip of wet objects.

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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.

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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.

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)

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

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