Originally published on Fri December 14, 2012 1:03 pm
Alan Alda founded The Flame Challenge last year to promote better science communication, and he started by asking scientists to come up with a kid-friendly explanation for a flame. Now, Alda is back with round two of the popular contest, and kids want to know: What is time?
This is SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow. Of course we'll be following any updates in the school shooting in Connecticut that has left dozens of people dead, including children and the gunman. Any updates that are necessary, we'll break in and let you know.
Imagine one day, just one day, where the world you saw was upside-down: water poured up; smoke drifted down; balloons acted more like lead weights. It might be enough to drive you crazy. Could you handle two days? Three? How about 10 days with your vision turned completely on its head?
Nothing beats the smell of a live Christmas tree in your home, but how can you keep the needles on your tree and off your carpet? Rick Bates, professor of horticulture at Penn State University, offers tips for how to properly care for your Christmas tree this holiday season.
Originally published on Mon December 17, 2012 10:02 pm
Though we hear about them every holiday season in that famous song, chestnuts – whether roasting on an open fire or otherwise – have been noticeably absent from many American tables for decades, thanks to a deadly fungus that decimated the species near half a century ago. But a small army of determined growers have been on a seemingly quixotic quest to put chestnuts back on the American table, and they're just starting to see results.
A helicopter placed this inflatable tree raft in the forest canopy in Panama.
Credit Roger Le Guen / Panacoco
Jurgen Schmidl fogs the forest understory with insecticide to help in the collection of specimens.
Credit Courtesy of Maurice Leponce / Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences
Here, researcher Maurice Leponce hangs from the "canopy bubble."
Credit Jurgen Schmidl / University of Erlangen
Here, Dawn Frame and Alexey Tishechkin in the crane's gondola net insects attracted to the flowers of Nectandra purpurascens.
Credit Courtesy of Roger Le Guen
Researchers also used a hot air balloon-style system to collect arthropods from thie top of the forest canopy.
Credit Courtesy of Maurice Leponce
A construction crane was also built in the forest to allow access to different levels of the forest.
Credit Courtesy of Maurice Leponce
Researchers used the canopy, which in some places was as much as 13 stories above the forest floor, to collect insects.
Credit Courtesy of Noui Baiben
Researchers used this inflatable tree raft that sits atop the forest canopy to help them collect almost 130,000 arthropod specimens from a section of Panamanian rainforest about the size of a football field.
Credit Courtesy of Yves Roisin
This large moth, a Thysania agrippina, sometimes called the great gray witch, is one of the more than 6,000 species identified in a multi-year census of a section of Panamanian rainforest.
There are more species of insects than pretty much anything else in the world. And scientists know there are millions they haven't even identified yet. Now, in a tropical rainforest in Panama, a multinational team of scientists has just completed the first ever insect census.
Scott Miller, an entomologist at the Smithsonian who worked on the Panama, shows off one of the species from the survey that's at the National Museum of Natural History's insect zoo in Washington, D.C.
This picture received from North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency on Wednesday shows an orbit image of the satellite Kwangmyongsong-3, being monitored on a large screen at a satellite control center in Cholsan county, North Pyongan province in North Korea.
Originally published on Thu December 13, 2012 4:51 pm
Sputnik 1 just beeped. China's first satellite, launched more than a decade later, simply radioed a communist anthem back to Earth. So far, North Korea's first satellite appears to be less accomplished.
And that shouldn't be a surprise.
Given the history of first orbital space shots, North Korea's apparent struggle with its mission is fairly typical, says David Akin, an associate professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Maryland.
Originally published on Fri December 14, 2012 5:50 pm
Want to be more creative? Drop that iPad and head to the great outdoors.
That's the word from David Strayer, a cognitive neuroscientist who studies multitasking at the University of Utah. He knew that every time he went into the southern Utah desert, far from cellular service, he started to think more clearly.
But he wanted to know if others had the same experience.
This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington. We're in the worst drought since the 1950s, according to NOAA, and while we associated extended dry spells with summer, conditions out west have remained unchanged since the warm weather ended.
I'm Michel Martin and this is TELL ME MORE from NPR News. Coming up, those apps you've been downloading to keep the kids occupied during car rides and sports practices? It turns out, according to federal regulators, they are collecting all kinds of information that they aren't telling you about. So we will. In a few minutes.
