Men & Women Use Different Scales To Weigh Moral Dilemmas

"You find a time machine and travel to 1920. A young Austrian artist and war veteran named Adolf Hitler is staying in the hotel room next to yours. The doors aren't locked, so you could easily stroll next door and smother him. World War II would never happen."

"But Hitler hasn't done anything wrong yet. Is it acceptable to kill him to prevent World War II?"

"This is one moral dilemma that researchers often use to analyze how people make difficult decisions. Most recently, one group re-analyzed answers from more than 6,000 subjects to compare men's and women's responses. They found that men and women both calculate consequences such as lives lost. But women are more likely to feel conflicted over what to do. Having to commit murder is more likely to push them toward letting Hitler live."

Drug Resistant Food Poisoning Lands In the US

"This time last year, a painful new virus was knocking on our doorstep. Travelers were bringing chikungunya to the U.S. And eventually, the mosquito-borne virus set up shop in Florida."

"Now the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says another nasty pathogen is hitching a ride to the U.S. with travelers: multidrug-resistant Shigella."

"Shigella is just about as bad as the word sounds. The bacteria infect your intestines and trigger crampy rectal pain, bloody or mucus-laced diarrhea and vomiting."

"Multidrug-resistant Shigella has caused several outbreaks over the past year in the U.S., the CDC reports Thursday in the journalMorbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. At least 243 people have gotten sick and about 20 percent were hospitalized."

After Nazi Plunder, A Quest To Bring The Woman-In-Gold Home

"Maria Altmann was 88 when I first met her by phone in 2004. 'Would it be possible to call back in a few minutes?' she asked. 'I'm feeling a little dizzy and would like a cup of coffee to revive myself.'"

"'Of course,' I said, imagining Mrs. Altmann as a somewhat frail grandmother. Old she was, but frail she was not."

"This week, Mrs. Altmann's amazing and triumphant story comes to the big screen in Woman in Gold, a film about one of the great legal battles in art history. The movie, starring Helen Mirren and Ryan Reynolds, begins with the Nazi takeover of Austria in 1938. Newlyweds Maria Altmann and her husband are wealthy Jews fleeing for their lives, leaving her family's famous artworks behind."

Bringing Internet To The Far Corners Of The Earth

"About 2 billion people on earth have a smartphone with a decent Internet connection, but 5 billion are largely or entirely offline, according to global figures by the ITU."

"That gap is (surprise, surprise) a big opportunity for Silicon Valley. Google and Facebook are already on high-profile campaigns to connect the unconnected. And they're betting they can make billions of dollars getting people without electricity or toilets to pay for the Internet."

"You could call the Google approach inspiring — or bizarre."

"'I'm a balloonatic, and that's a self-coined term,' says Pamela Desrochers, a product development engineer at Google. 'We believe that balloons are going to be the way of the future and we're going to bring Internet to everyone.'"

How One Nation Didn't Become Under God until the 50s Religious Revival 

"The words 'under God' in the Pledge of Allegiance and the phrase 'In God we trust' on the back of a dollar bill haven't been there as long as most Americans might think. Those references were inserted in the 1950s during the Eisenhower administration, the same decade that the National Prayer Breakfast was launched, according to writer Kevin Kruse. His new book is One Nation Under God."

"In the original Pledge of Allegiance, Francis Bellamy made no mention of God, Kruse says. Bellamy was Christian socialist, a Baptist who believed in the separation of church and state."

"'As this new religious revival is sweeping the country and taking on new political tones, the phrase 'one nation under God' seizes the national imagination,' Kruse tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "It starts with a proposal by the Knights of Columbus, the Catholic lay organization, to add the phrase 'under God' to the Pledge of Allegiance. Their initial campaign doesn't go anywhere but once Eisenhower's own pastor endorses it ... it catches fire.'"

How Singapore Became One of the Richest Places On Earth

"Singapore has been called the 20th century's most successful development story."

"'I don't think any other economy' says Linda Lim, an economist at the University of Michigan, "even the other Asian tigers, have that a good a statistical record of rapid growth, full employment, with very good social indicators — life expectancy, education, housing, etc. — in the first 20 years," she says."

"Lee Kuan Yew, the man who founded modern-day Singapore and died last week at age 91, led that economic transformation. One of the most influential leaders of the 20th century, Lee was an autocrat whose tiny island-state became one of the richest places in the world, and a role model for other governments in Asia and beyond."

A Day's A Day The World Around But Shorter On Saturn

 "Researchers have answered a question that has been nagging them for years: Exactly how long is a day on the planet Saturn? The result (10 hours and 32 minutes or so) was published this week in the journal Nature, and could teach scientists more about the giant, ringed planet."

"A day is simply how long it takes a planet to spin all the way around. On Earth, one rotation takes 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4 seconds — though earthlings round up to 24 hours even."

"Measuring a day on rocky planets like Earth is fairly simple, according to Ravit Helled, a planetary scientist at Tel Aviv University in Israel: 'You can, you know, identify a mountain or a stone or whatever it is, and just check how long it takes it to come back.'"

NASA To Study A Twin In Space and His Brother On Earth

"Later today, a Russian rocket is scheduled to carry a Russian cosmonaut and an American astronaut to the International Space Station, where they will live for a full year, twice as long as people usually stay."

"No American has lived in space for longer than 215 days. Only a few people have ever gone on space trips lasting a year or more — the longest was 437 days—and they're all Russian cosmonauts. The last year-plus stay in space occurred nearly two decades ago."

"What's more, NASA's upcoming mission offers scientists a unique opportunity to study the effect of spaceflight on the human body. That's because the astronaut making the trip, Scott Kelly, has an identical twin brother, Mark Kelly, who's a retired NASA astronaut."

Super Termite Could Be Even More Destructive Than Parent Species

"Termites are among the world's most destructive pests, causing more than a billion dollars in damage each year in the U.S. alone. Scientists in Florida have tracked the development of a new hybrid species of termite — one whose colonies grow twice as fast as the parent species."

"Researchers say the new "super-termite" is even more destructive than other species and may carry a significant economic cost."

"Thomas Chouvenc, a researcher and entomologist with the University of Florida, moved from France to South Florida for one reason: to study termites. "I come to work every day and I get surprised every day. Termites will do things you just don't expect," he says."

"South Florida is one of the few places in the world — along with Taiwan and Hawaii — where the two most destructive termite species coexist. Neither the Asian nor the Formosan subterranean termite is native to Florida."

Vanilla and Nutmeg Spice Everything Nice On A Zanzibar Farm

"Let's start with a spice quiz. One is a bean discovered in Mexico. One's a tree native to India. One's the seed of a fruit discovered in Indonesia."

"Today vanilla, cinnamon and nutmeg can all be found in any spice farm in Zanzibar — the East African archipelago that was used as a spice plantation by the 18th century Omani Empire."

"Our guide to Zanzibar is Fadhil Mohammed, and he's starting with vanilla because vanilla is a prima donna. A type of orchid, it flowers only once a year. So there no time for a bee to find it. A farmer has to pollinate it by hand, with a stick, flower by flower."

Koreans have An Insatiable Appetite For Watching Strangers Binge Eat

"Move over, cooking shows. In Korea, the big food fad is eating shows, or mukbang. Korean viewers are so glued to watching strangers binge-eating that the live-streamers consuming calories in front of webcams are becoming minor celebrities in Korean culture."

"Rachel Ahn, who goes by "Aebong-ee" on her broadcasts, is kind of a big deal in the mukbang world. In fact, when we went to meet her, she wore a mask for fear fans would recognize her on the street."

"Every weeknight at 9 p.m., Ahn sits down with enough food to feed a family of six. The night we visit, it was spicy noodles, spicy shrimp, steamed dumplings, fried dumplings and another platter of even spicier noodles, called fire zha jiang myeon."

Top Beijing Scientist: China Faces Huge Impact From Climate Change

"China's top weather scientist has made a rare official acknowledgement: climate change, he says, could have a "huge impact" on the country's crop yields and infrastructure."

"Zheng Guogang, the head of China's meteorological administration, tells Xinhua news agency that China is already experiencing temperature increases that outpace those in other parts of the world."

"As a result, China — the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases — faces a possible "ecological degradation," he says."

"'As the world warms, risks of climate change and climate disasters to China could become more grave,' Zheng said."

A New 3-D Printing Method Is Rising Out of the Ooze

"One of the presentations at the TED Conference in Vancouver this week that had much of the tech elite oohing and ahhing was something called CLIP (no relation to Microsoft's reviled animated helper) or Continuous Liquid Interface Production."

"It's a new way of 3-D manufacturing introduced by a company called Carbon3D. CEO and co-founder Joseph DeSimone says what we've been calling 3-D printing is actually 2D printing. It's like ink printing a line over and over again until a little structure emerges, except instead of ink it's, say, plastic. This type of printing is mostly useful for making prototypes, but not really a part that could withstand regular use."

John Urschel, Raven's Offensive Lineman Publishes Math Paper

"John Urschel is an offensive lineman for the NFL Baltimore Ravens whose Twitter handle is @MathMeetsFball. He has bachelor's and master's degrees in math, both with a 4.0 grade-point average. And this week he tweeted:"

"My paper, A Cascadic Multigrid Algorithm for Computing the Fiedler Vector..., has been published in the Journal of Computational Mathematics."

"Now, journalists are notoriously poor at math (or at least this one is), so we'll provide a link to the paper. And for those of you who are mathematically inclined, here's the abstract:"

"In this paper, we develop a cascadic multigrid algorithm for fast computation of the Fiedler vector of a graph Laplacian, namely, the eigenvector corresponding to the second smallest eigenvalue. This vector has been found to have applications in fields such as graph partitioning and graph drawing. The algorithm is a purely algebraic approach based on a heavy edge coarsening scheme and pointwise smoothing for refinement. To gain theoretical insight, we also consider the related cascadic multigrid method in the geometric setting for elliptic eigenvalue problems and show its uniform convergence under certain assumptions. Numerical tests are presented for computing the Fiedler vector of several practical graphs, and numerical results show the efficiency and optimality of our proposed cascadic multigrid algorithm."

We Experience the World We Infer Not the World As It Is

"If you want to understand the human mind, you have to reject the idea that we directly perceive and remember the world as it is. Our perceptual experience isn't simply a passive impression of the input received by our senses — and our memory isn't like a photobook or a video, comprehensively recording the details of our experience."

"Take an example from visual perception. The image below seems to depict a woman behind a small girl, where the woman is much larger than the girl. But measure on the screen, and you'll discover that each figure is precisely the same height and width."

Scientists Catch Up On the Sex Life of Coral to Help Reefs Survive

"For the first time, biologists have caught a rare type of coral in the act of reproducing, and they were able to collect its sperm and eggs and breed the coral in the laboratory. "

"The success is part of an effort to stem the decline in many types of coral around the world."

"To understand how this works, you need to know that coral reefs are actually colonies of tiny organisms encased in hard skeletons. In many kinds of coral, the whole colony reproduces at once, in a spectacular event called 'broadcast spawning.' Males eject clouds of sperm into the water, and then females do the same with eggs. The sea creatures cross their fingers (or whatever the coral equivalent of that is) and hope for the best."

25 Years After Art Heist Empty Frames Still Hang In Boston's Gardner Museum

"Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum houses a world-class art collection. But in the last two decades it's been better known for the art that isn't there — half a billion dollars of masterpieces that disappeared from its walls 25 years ago."

"That robbery — which included the loss of three Rembrandts, a Vermeer, a Manet, and sketches by Degas — has haunted Boston, law enforcement and the art world ever since.Boston Globe reporter Stephen Kurkjian has spent the last two decades investigating the heist. He's the author of the book Master Thieves: The Boston Gangsters Who Pulled Off the World's Greatest Art Heist. He tells NPR's Renee Montagne how it happened:"

"'Two men dressed in police uniforms rang the bell to the employees' entrance of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum," he says. "They showed up on the monitor screen of one of the two night watchmen who were on duty that night. ... They said, 'We're here to investigate a disturbance,' so he buzzed them in.'"

Are Humans Really Headed To Mars Anytime Soon

"With recent news headlines proclaiming that dozens of people have been selected as finalists for a Martian astronaut corps, it might seem like a trip to this alien world might finally be close at hand."

"But let's have a little reality check. What are the chances that we really will see people on the Red Planet in the next couple of decades?"

"Most people just don't get how hard this would be, says Mary Lynne Dittmar, an aerospace consultant in Washington, D.C. 'The distances that are involved and the complexities that are involved in going and staying there are really enormous,' she says."

The Fate of the World's Chocolate Depends On This Spot In Rural England

"Walk into a row of greenhouses in rural Britain, and a late English-winter day transforms to a swampy, humid tropical afternoon. You could be in Latin America or Sub-Saharan Africa. Which is exactly how cocoa plants like it."

"'It's all right this time of year. It gets a bit hot later on in the summer,' says greenhouse technician Heather Lake as she fiddles with a tray of seedlings — a platter of delicate, spindly, baby cocoa plants."

"Since she started working here at the International Cocoa Quarantine Centre, eating chocolate doesn't feel the same."

Gather Ye Rosebuds: Citizen Kane Screened At Hearst Castle

"Citizen Kane has been called the best film ever made. It was also at the center an epic battle of egos."

"The main character was modeled after media titan William Randolph Hearst, who in real life tried ruthlessly to keep the movie from being released."

"Almost 75 years later, the family has called a truce, of sorts: This weekend, Citizen Kane was screened for the first time inside the millionaire's legendary home, the Hearst Castle."