Eating Broccoli May Give Harmful Chemicals the Boot

"We get a little suspicious when we hear the claims that it's possible to get rid of the gunk that accumulates in our cells by doing a cleanse with 'clean' foods."

"But what if some foods actually do help detox the body?"

"The results of a recent clinical trial suggest that compounds in cruciferous vegetables like broccoli (and kale) prod cells to get rid of certain air pollutants. The intriguing randomized control trial of about 300 Chinese adults found that consuming a beverage made with broccoli sprouts every day for three months lead to high rates of excretion (in urine) of two harmful chemicals: benzene and acrolein."

Is Collecting Animals For Science a Noble Mission or Threat

"Behind the scenes at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, there's a vast, warehouse-like room that's filled with metal cabinets painted a drab institutional green. Inside the cabinets are more than a half-million birds — and these birds are not drab. Their colorful feathers make them seem to almost glow."

"'The birds are showing their beautiful plumages; they're laid out like little soldiers in a row,' says Helen James, the curator in charge of the bird division, as she points to some special finds. 'We have some of the most amazing hummingbirds. Here is one with a long, straight bill that's longer than the bird itself. Here is the smallest species of a raptorial bird — a tiny little falcon.'"

"Probably every hour, she says, someone reaches into a cabinet here and pulls out a bird. Maybe a visiting scientist wants to know all the places a species has been collected, to understand its geographic range. Or a paleontologist needs help identifying a fossil to reconstruct the evolution of birds. Sometimes a researcher wants to take a bit from a specimen to do a lab analysis that could reveal what the bird ate, or whether it was sick, or if it was exposed to a toxin."

Eccentric Capable Lucid Heiress Belongings Head to Auction

She had three apartments on New York's Fifth Avenue, all filled with treasures worth millions, not to mention a mansion in Connecticut and a house in California. But the enigmatic heiress Huguette Clark lived her last 20 years in a plainly decorated hospital room — even though she wasn't sick.

It's just one of many curiosities about Clark, the late heiress to the fortune of copper magnate Sen. Andrew Williams Clark. For years, even friends and family thought she was living on Fifth Avenue. Her lavish gifts to her nurse prompted a police investigation. And now, three years after her death at age 104, Clark's artwork and antiques are heading from her abandoned apartments to Christie's auction block.

Father Devises A Bionic Pancreas to Help Son With Diabetes

"An alarm sounds on Ed Damiano's night stand in the middle of the night. He jumps out of bed and rushes into his son's room next door."

"His son, David, has Type 1 diabetes. The 15-year-old sleeps hooked up to a monitor that sounds an alarm when his blood sugar gets too low. If it drops sharply, David could die in his sleep."

"'The fear is that there's going to be this little cold limb, and I screwed up. It's all on me,' Damiano says."

"But when he touches David's hand, he's warm. He's OK. Damiano says, 'That's the moment of relief.'"

"The father has been doing this night after night since his son was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes when he was 11 months old."

The Turing Test Is Not What You Think It Is

"Whether or not you caught wind of the excited announcement that 'Eugene Goostman,' a computer program ('chatbot') devised by Vladimir Veselov, Eugene Demchenko and Sergey Ulasen, had passed the Turing Test this past week, there's a good chance you've noticed the widespread public denunciations of the claims."

"So noted a champion of artificial intelligence (AI) as Ray Kurzweil dismisses the assertion (and will not, presumably, pay out the money he has promised to the first team to actually pass the test). Gary Marcus, writing in the The New Yorker, is similarly critical."

California Teacher Tenure Ruled Unconstitutional

"A California judge today ruled the state's laws governing teacher tenure and the firing of public school teachers unconstitutional, saying they interfere with the state's obligation to provide every child with access to a good education."

"The plaintiffs in the case, Vergara v. California, argued that the tenure system for public school teachers in California verges on the absurd, and that those laws disproportionately harm poor and minority students. In his ruling, Judge Rolf M. Treu agreed."

"'Evidence has been elicited in this trial of the specific effect of grossly ineffective teachers on students,' Judge Treu wrote. "'The evidence is compelling. Indeed, it shocks the conscience.'"

Spiders Tune In To Webs Music To Size Up Meals and Mates

"Some of the toughest stuff in nature is spider silk — as strong, ounce for ounce, as nylon. And a silk web makes a great trap for prey, as well as a nice place for a spider to live."

"But scientists have learned that spiders can do something else quite extraordinary with their webs. They can "tune" them, like musical instruments."

"This revelation comes from a scientific team in England called the Oxford Silk Group. No, membership isn't about school neckties or silk undergarments. The group studies silk from animals, such as spiders. Why?"

'Downton Abbey' Craze Serves Up a Demand For Butlers

"Butlers in American pop culture tend to provide comic relief — think The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air or The Birdcage. Or, like Batman's Alfred, the butler is more of a friend than an employee."

"But one show has brought back the classic butler, with a vengeance. Since the British period drama Downton Abbey made its debut on PBS in 2010, the demand for butlers in some parts of the world has surged."

"In a piece for GQ, contributor David Katz wrote about the increased demand for high-class assistance among the '.001 percent.'"

"'Thirty-five years ago,' he writes, 'there were only a few hundred butlers left in Britain; today there are roughly 10,000, plus thousands more abroad.'"

A Horse and A Horse Story For the Ages

"It's hard not to fall for a horse like California Chrome, a foal bred of ordinary parents who beats all odds and wins at the sport of kings. With Saturday's running of the Belmont Stakes, he has a shot at the Triple Crown and a fairytale ending to his Cinderella story."

"We've heard many reasons why the odds are against winning the Triple — no horse has done it since Affirmed in 1978; the track is a brutal mile-and-a-half long (the Kentucky Derby is 1 1/4 miles; the Preakness 1 3/16 miles); and the grueling schedule demands three intense races in just five weeks."

"But California Chrome seems like just the horse to surmount those odds. So many aspects of his story seem extraordinary."

The Secrets in the Sugar: Lower Alcohol Wines Are Taking Off

"Big, bold wines have their fans. But with the arrival of summer, make room for a bumper crop of lighter, more subtle wines."

"'Low-alcohol wines are super hot right now,' says wine writer Katherine Cole."

"There's Txakoli, or Txakolina, wines from the Basque region of Spain, Rieslings from Germany and New York state, and Vinho Verde from Portugal, to name a few."

"These wines typically hover in the 9 percent to 11 percent alcohol range. This compares to about 13 percent to 14 percent in a typical California chardonnay."

How Chocolate Might Save Planet

"When you unwrap it, break off a piece and stick it in your mouth, it doesn't remind you of the pyramids, a suspension bridge or a skyscraper; but chocolate, says materials scientist Mark Miodownik, 'is one of our greatest engineering creations.'"

"True, it begins with a cocoa bean plucked from a tree. But no one would eat a raw cocoa bean. "It tastes revolting," Miodownik says in his new book, Stuff Matters."

"But cut it, leave it, roast it, tinker with it for a couple of centuries (and add sugar) ..."

How Atomic Particles Became the Smoking Gun In Wine Fraud Mystery

"In a laboratory, deep under a mile-high stretch of the Alps on the French-Italian border, Philippe Hubert, a physicist at the University of Bordeaux, is testing the authenticity of a bottle of wine."

"'We are looking for radioactivity in the wine,' says Hubert. 'Most of the time the collectors send me bottles of wine because they want to know if it is fake or not.'"

"By taking the bottle in the hand and putting it close to a detector, Hubert records the gamma rays. The level of those gamma rays emitted can often tell him something about when the wine was bottled. For example, it was bottled before about 1945, there shouldn't be any Cesium 137 — radioactive evidence of exploded nuclear bombs and the Atomic Age — in the wine."

SpaceX Unveils a Sleek New Ride to Orbit

"Yesterday, entrepreneur Elon Musk sauntered on to stage and unveiled his latest product: not a smart phone, but a spaceship."

"The Dragon V2, as it's called, looks like a giant shuttlecock with feet. It's set to be the first all-new U.S. spacecraft to take astronauts into orbit since the Space Shuttle took flight in 1981."

"The new vehicle is a major upgrade to the Dragon capsule, which Musk's company SpaceX uses to carry cargo on resupply missions to the International Space Station. Dragon V2 is outfitted with the company's SuperDraco engines, which will allow it to slow its re-entry, hover and set down with pinpoint precision."

After Decades of Silent Wandering, NASA Probe Phones Home

"You might call it the ultimate long shot — a group of space enthusiasts trying to reestablish contact with a wayward satellite launched in 1978. Figuratively speaking, it's been off the radar for decades."

"No more."

"'The initial contact was a tone followed by specific commands,' project organizer Keith Cowing told NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce by email. "We learned a lot simply by being able to talk to it and get it to do things."

"'May not sound like much but that was a huge unknown,' he adds."

As Portraits Became Passe: These Artists Redefined Face Value

"'Walk softly and carry a big fish' was one curator's take on a humorous self-portrait of a tall woman, holding an enormous yellow fish and a paintbrush, with a black cat lurking below."

"Bay area artist Joan Brown's image is the first thing you see at a new National Portrait Gallery exhibition called "Face Value: Portraiture in the Age of Abstraction." Brown's painting, like so many in this Smithsonian show, is powerful and funny."

"In a nearby sculpture, Hugh Hefner — the Playboy poo-bah — holds a painted pipe in one hand, and has another pipe — a real one — poking out of his painted mouth. (You can see this 1966 work by Marisol Escobar here.)"

Google Is Becoming A Car Manufacturer

"Google is taking a detour into the world of automobiles, by becoming a  carmaker."

"But not just any car: a car that drives itself. In an effort to create a fully, 100 percent self-driving vehicle — something that needs no human being at the steering wheel — the company is building a car without a steering wheel."

"Scientists at the company's research wing, Google X, have been working on this project hush-hush for the last year."

"Today's Self-Driving Car"

"As it stands (or drives) now, the self-driving car of today is plenty futuristic."

A Simple Elegant Invention That Draws Water From Air

"When Italian designer Arturo Vittori and Swiss architect Andreas Vogler first visited Ethiopia in 2012, they were shocked to see women and children forced to walk miles for water."

"Only 34 percent of Ethiopians have access to a reliable water supply. Some travel up to six hours a day to fetch some or, worse, resorts to using stagnant ponds contaminated by human waste, resulting in the spread of disease."

"Worldwide, a whopping 768 million people — two and a half times the U.S. population — don't have access to safe drinking water. So just imagine if we could just pull water out of thin air?"

Sushi's Secret: Why We Get Hooked On Raw Fish

"Raw fish is sizzling hot right now."

"Los Angeles has brand new bars devoted to an Italian style of raw fish, called crudo. President Obama kicked off his visit to Asia last month noshing nigiri at Jiro's famous sushi bar. And back in December, The New York Times named Sushi Nakawaza as its top restaurant of the year."

"But why do so many of us find utter bliss in eating raw sea creatures but aren't so inclined to chow down on uncooked birds, cows or pigs?"

"A big part of it is gravity — or the effective lack of it in the ocean, says biophysicist Ole Mouritsen, author of Sushi: Food for the Eye, the Body and the Soul."

Impressionists With Benefits: The Painting Parnership of Degas and Cassatt

"In her novel I Always Loved You, author Robin Oliveira imagines a passionate scene between Edgar Degas — a French artist known for his paintings of dancers — and Mary Cassatt — an American painter known for her scenes of family life. The kiss in the novel is pure fiction, but then again, "nobody knows what goes on in their neighbor's house, let alone what happened between two artists 130 years ago," Oliveira says."

"A new exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., explores the tumultuous, passionate, artistic relationship between the two artists."

For Automakers Internet Connected Cars Are A Balancing Act

"The Internet is coming to your car. Later this year, General Motors will put Internet connectivity directly into its vehicles. It's the largest auto company to do so."

"Of course, safety advocates have some concerns about more distractions for drivers."

"The promise of technology is always the same one — that it's going to make our life easier. But anyone who's tried to make a hands-free call in the car knows that's not always true. A task as simple as asking your device to call your mom can be an exasperating experience."

"'When consumers buy a new car and they have difficulty pairing the phone to the vehicle, they almost always blame the car rather than the phone,' says Eric Lyman, with TrueCar.com."