Science Friday Initiative
Science Friday: Meet the Newest Giant Elephant Shrew
Galen Rathbun, Francesco Rovero and colleagues discovered a new species of elephant shrew--named the grey-faced sengi (Rhynchocyon udzungwensis)--in pockets of the Udzungwa Mountains in Tanzania. The elephant-shrew, which is neither an...
Science Friday Initiative
Science Friday: Secret Life of Burrowing Owls
Get up close and personal with burrowing owls (Athene cunicularia). Mac Stone, wildlife photographer and field biologist for the National Audubon Society, hid his camera in a traffic cone and set it up outside of an owl burrow to capture...
Science Friday Initiative
Science Friday: 3 D Up in Flames
Humans are thought to have mastered controlled fire in the middle of the Paleolithic era. Half a million years later, engineers Tadd Truscott and Dale Tree, of Brigham Young University, are trying to quantify it. Using high speed cameras...
Science Friday Initiative
Science Friday: How Humpbacks Hunt With Bubbles
Scientists are studying how humpback whales catch schools of fish by casting a net of bubbles around them, a practice called bubble-netting. Aired Jun. 30, 2011. [3:51]
Science Friday Initiative
Science Friday: Rock Stars
In 1968, the New Jersey Senate decreed the town of Franklin a geological wonder: "The Fluorescent Mineral Capital of the World." Over 350 different minerals have been found in the area, ninety of which glow brilliantly under ultraviolet...
Science Friday Initiative
Science Friday: Young Inventors Soup Up a Wheelchair
In the basement of Staten Island Technical High School, a group of students meets regularly to build and invent. They are members of "Team TechSmart" and they recently won an award for a wheelchair prototype they created. It can spin in...
Science Friday Initiative
Science Friday: Ira Reads Your Letters Larkspur, Ca
Ira Flatow reads fan mail from Larkspur, Ca. He's in for a sweet surprise.
Science Friday Initiative
Science Friday: Physics of the Riderless Bike
It looks like magic. A bike traveling at the right speed will steer itself--popping back up when it starts to fall. But why? A new paper by Andy Ruina, of Cornell University, Jim Papadopoulos, of University of Wisconsin - Stout, and...
Science Friday Initiative
Science Friday: Glorious Footage of Pigeons?
Ivo Ros, a graduate science student, used high-speed cameras to examine how a pigeon is able to maneuver through the air and around obstacles. Aired Dec. 1, 2011. [3:01]
Science Friday Initiative
Science Friday: Bending Balloons Into Giant Flowers
Visit the studio of a balloon artist in Queens, and see how he constructs his inflatable art.
Science Friday Initiative
Science Friday: Extreme Diy: Homemade 3 D Printer
Jim Smith, 23, is taking citizen science to another level. He designed and built his own 3D printer, which sits in the corner of his living room. We made a house call, got a tour of the machine and did some printing. [3:21]
Science Friday Initiative
Science Friday: Lasers, Glowing Dye Illuminate Jellyfish
John Dabiri, bioengineer at Caltech, has developed new techniques for studying the motion of aquatic animals. In a recent study in the journal Nature, Dabiri and colleagues explain how swimming animals mix the ocean. Ocean mixing is...
Science Friday Initiative
Science Friday: Living Band Aid Beats Like a Heart
Jordan Lancaster and Steven Goldman, researchers from the Southern Arizona Veterans Administration and the University of Arizona, put rat heart cells on a piece of synthetic mesh and within a few days, it started beating. The hope is...
Science Friday Initiative
Science Friday: Taking Paper Airplanes to the Next Level
Leif Ristroph and colleagues at NYU are designing tiny paper aircraft and making them fly using a pot, a speaker and a bunch of straws. When the subwoofer plays a low-frequency tone, it pushes the air above it up and down, which is...
Science Friday Initiative
Science Friday: Hunting the Wild Lichen
A lichenologist explains what lichens are and how they can be found almost everywhere. They are an organism that have not been studied very much. Aired Nov. 12, 2010. [3:53]
Science Friday Initiative
Science Friday: Boost Your Bike
Maxwell von Stein, a 22-year-old graduate of The Cooper Union, built bicycle that uses a flywheel to store energy. Instead of braking, Max can transfer energy from the wheel to the flywheel, which spins between the crossbars. The...
Science Friday Initiative
Science Friday: Turtles on the Wrong Side of the Tracks
Michael Musnick is a citizen scientist who studies wood turtles in the Great Swamp -- a stretch of wetland about 60 miles north of New York City. He found turtles dying in the railroad tracks and proposed a solution to New York's...
Science Friday Initiative
Science Friday: Building for Mars, Sometimes Painful, Always Glorious
Mike Passaretti and Lee Carlson of Honeybee Robotics in New York City worked on and off for the last 8 years on a device on Curiosity called the Sample Manipulation System. What's it like to build something that ends up on another...
Science Friday Initiative
Science Friday: Seeing a Star in a New Light
NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), launched in February, has started to send back data. The instruments are giving solar scientists an unprecedented look at the sun, says Dean Pesnell, SDO project scientist. The hope is to better...
Science Friday Initiative
Science Friday: Build an Eye in the Sky
Need a new perspective on life? Try launching a video camera 50 feet in the air. This DIY sky-cam is one of many experiments outlined in Ken Denmead's new book Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects and Activities for Dads and Kids to Share.
Science Friday Initiative
Science Friday: X Rays as Art
Nick Veasey has looked inside everything from airplanes to oranges. Veasey is an x-ray photographer and recently published a collection of his work in the book "X-Ray: See Through The World Around You." We stopped by a shoot to see the...
Science Friday Initiative
Science Friday: Pollen Origami
Pollen starts to dry out when it leaves the flower, which can destroy the genetic material the grain is carrying. To combat dehydration, pollen grains have evolved a way of folding up to prevent water from leaking out. Eleni Katifori and...
Science Friday Initiative
Science Friday: Dead Bat Mystery
Science, technology, and other cool stuff from the folks behind public radio's Science Friday. It's brain fun, for curious people.
Science Friday Initiative
Science Friday: Read My Brain
A visit to a lab to see how a brain gets scanned in an MRI and how to read the scan. Aired May 12, 2008. [4:28]