Many of us spend more time at our desks than anywhere else. Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson takes us into his office at the Hayden Planetarium in New York City for a tour of his office, in the fourth of Science Friday's Desktop Diaries series. From a Saturn lamp Tyson made as a kid to his van Gogh pillow, Tyson has a lot of universe-themed paraphernalia. Tyson highlights some of his collection, and talks about what his journey to science stardom has been like.

Crystal formation is essential in making smooth chocolate that's solid at room temperature and melts in your mouth. Richard Ludescher, professor of food science at Rutgers, and Rick and Michael Mast, of Mast Brothers Chocolate in Brooklyn, NY explain the science and art of chocolate making.
Produced by Emily V. Driscoll
Filmed by Stavros Basis, Ben Effinger, Jon Foy
Lighting by Tony Sur

Music by Audio Network
Narration by Christopher Intagliata

Additional Stills by
Shutterstock

Thanks to
Ken Branson
Robert Forman
Luke Groskin
Derek Herbster
Julie Leibach
Annie Minoff
Ariel Zych

The badminton birdie many Americans hit around their backyards can fly faster than 200mph in professional games! The key to the birdie's speed is its unique aerodynamic shape and materials combined with a complicated kinetic chain of movements by players.

Credits

Produced by Emily V. Driscoll

Filmed By
Jon Foy
Emily V. Driscoll
Chris Colton

Narrated by Luke Groskin

Music by Audio Network

Stills by Shutterstock

Special Thanks
The Boston Open sponsored by MIT
Michele Cruz
Alex Liu
Kota Morikawa
Nilay Nanavanti
New York City Badminton
Victor Ng
Beth Sopka
Peter Teuben
Xun Wang
Chibing & Vernoica Wu

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A new line of camouflage was designed with deer eyes in mind.

There are millions of specimens of ice age plants and animals in the Page Museum's collections. Yet excavators and preparators will continue to dig up, clean and catalog millions of more fossils for the foreseeable future. The Page Museum's Chief Curator, Dr. John Harris, explains how paleontological and climatological research at the museum relies upon on tar pit's prolific fossil deposits.
Produced by Luke Groskin
Music by Audio Network
Filmed by Luke Groskin and Christian Baker
Additional Stills and Video by The Page Museum
Shutterstock
Robin O'Keefe
Charles R. Knight
Rudyard Sadleir
David Berkowitz

www.sciencefriday.com
Why Spiders Don't Stick to The Web

William Eberhard, of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and the University of Costa Rica, and colleague Daniel Briceno film spiders in the lab, in the field and under a dissecting microscope to untangle this longstanding arachnological mystery. The secret to not getting stuck? Oily, hairy legs and delicate movements.

Produced by Flora Lichtman
Video footage: Daniel Briceno and William Eberhard.
Additional: archive.org, prelinger archives

SCIENCE FRIDAY'S CEPHALOPOD WEEK 2016 BEGINS May 17th!
http://www.sciencefriday.com/cephalopodweek
With thousands of chemically-sensitive suckers, color-changing skin, and a brain that literally stretches when they eat, octopuses seem like aliens living in our oceans. Understanding their physical adaptations and how octopuses might process their own sensations requires a flexible imagination. Thankfully, Frank Grasso of Brooklyn College is up to the task. He reveals some of the small biological and behavioral clues that researchers have uncovered as they try to understand these curious creatures.

If you spin a hard-boiled egg in a pool of milk, the milk will wick up the sides of the egg and spray off at the egg's equator. Engineer Tadd Truscott, of Brigham Young University, along with Ken Langley and others, launched an investigation to figure out why this happens -- complete with a custom-built spinning apparatus, billiard balls and high speed video cameras.

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Can you roll a ball without touching it? Mold an object simply by waving your hands? MIT's Tangible Media Group can. They demo two innovative projects as part their vision to make user interfaces more physical. Entitled "InFORM," this interactive shape-changing display boasts a myriad of functions and a mind-bending design. "jamSheets" combines pneumatic pumps and thin sheets of paper and fabric to enable users to mold surfaces, clothing or even furniture without the aid of a computer.
Produced by Luke Groskin
Music by Audio Network
Additional video by MIT's Tangible Media Group

"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.

The La Brea Tar Pits represent much more than world-renowned fossil sites - they're the mass graves of thousands of ice age creatures, each with a story to tell. Researchers at the nearby Page Museum clean the asphalt from the fossil remains, and using paleoforensics, recount the grim details of their deaths. In the process, clues emerge about what life was like in prehistoric Los Angeles.
Produced by Luke Groskin
Filmed by Luke Groskin and Christian Baker
Animation by Joshua Krause
Narrated by Shane Morris
Additonal Footage and Stills provided by The Page Museum, Shutterstock
Pond5, Getty Images, Miles Roberts/John Ososky, Smithsonian Institution
Kathleen Cantner, AGI, created for EARTH Magazine

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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.

http://www.sciencefriday.com
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!

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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

http://www.sciencefriday.com
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

http://www.sciencefriday.com
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