Could Detectives Use Microbes To Solve Murders?

"In the woods outside Huntsville, Texas, scientists are trying to determine whether they can use the microbes that live on the human body as microscopic witnesses that could help catch criminals."

"It's a strange scene at the Southeast Texas Applied Forensic Science Facility. At first, it's easy to miss the human bodies scattered among the tall pines, wild grass and weeds."

"'We hope microbes can tell crime scene investigators how long a person has been dead,' Sibyl Bucheli of Sam Houston State University explains, as she leads a group of researchers and visitors from NPR through a tall, chain-link fence surrounding the facility and down a dusty path to her research plot."

The Man Who Gets the Science Right On The Big Bang Theory

"Sure, Bob Newhart may have won his first Emmy for guest-starring as 'Professor Proton' on the hugely popular show The Big Bang Theory, about four young scientists at Cal-Tech. But behind the scenes is a real-life professor, Dr. David Saltzberg, of UCLA."

"Saltzberg studies high energy particle physics and high-energy neutrino astronomy, using radio detection techniques... when he's not working asThe Big Bang Theory's science consultant."

"'It's just like a physics lab!' Saltzberg exclaims as he maneuvers around the show's sprawling set. 'You have to watch where you walk. There are cables and everything everywhere.'"

"Every week, Saltzberg attends the show's live taping at the Warner Brothers lot in Burbank, California. He makes sure the whiteboards are correct. For every new episode, they're covered by a fresh scrawl of formulas dreamed up by Saltzberg and admired by physicists for their scrupulous accuracy—and occasional shout-outs to what's happening in the world of science."

Atheists Start Pac To Elect Non-Religious Candidates

"Americans who count themselves among the "nones" — as in atheists, agnostics or those of no definite religious affiliation — have launched a new political action committee."

"The goal? To support the election of like-minded lawmakers or, at a minimum, candidates committed to upholding the constitutional separation between church and state."

"'The Freethought Equality Fund will work to elect the nones ... in addition to those who will work for our rights so we can finally have the representation in Congress we deserve,' said Maggie Ardiente of the American Humanist Association, at a Washington news conference Wednesday where the new PAC was rolled out."

Just What the Doctor Ordered Med Students Team With Chefs

"For the past few weeks, the culinary arts students at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, R.I., have been working with some less-than-seasoned sous chefs."

"One of them, Clinton Piper, may look like a pro in his chef's whites, but he's struggling to work a whisk through some batter. 'I know nothing about baking,' he says."

"Luckily, he's got other qualifications. Piper is a fourth-year medical student at Tulane University School of Medicine, and he's here for a short rotation through a new program designed to educate med students and chefs-in-training about nutrition."

Remote Antarctic Glacier Is Disappearing From Below

"Scientists watching Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier from space have noticed with some alarm that it has been surging toward the sea."

"If it were to melt entirely, global sea levels would rise by several feet."

"The glacier is really, really remote. It's 1,800 miles from McMurdo, the U.S. base station in Antarctica, so just getting there is a challenge. Scientists have rarely been able to get out to the glacier to make direct measurements."

"'This was a granddaddy of a problem,' says Tim Stanton, oceanography research professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif."

"Stanton not only wanted to get to it, he wanted to get to it with 20,000 pounds of gear, so they could drill into it."

Rivers On Rolaids: How Acid Rain Is Changing Waterways

"Something peculiar is happening to rivers and streams in large parts of the United States — the water's chemistry is changing. Scientists have found dozens of waterways that are becoming more alkaline. Alkaline is the opposite of acidic — think baking soda or Rolaids."

"Research published in the current issue of Environmental Science and Technology shows this trend to be surprisingly widespread, with possibly harmful consequences."

"What's especially odd about the finding is its cause: It seems that acid rain actually has been causing waterways to grow more alkaline."

"The story started back in 1963 in a New Hampshire forest. A young scientist named Gene Likens found a stream there that was as acidic as tomato juice."

Why Painting Tumor Could Make Brain Surgeons Better

"Perhaps one of the most uncomfortable things a doctor has to tell patients is that their medical problems are iatrogenic. What that means is they were caused by a doctor in the course of the treatment."

"Sometime these iatrogenic injuries are accidental. But sometimes, because of the limits of medical technology, they can be inevitable. Now, a medical researcher in Seattle thinks he has a way to eliminate some of the inevitable ones."

"James Olson is a physician at the Seattle Children's Hospital, where he primarily takes care of kids with brain cancer. He's also a cancer researcher at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle."

From Birth Our Microbes Become As Personal As A Fingerprint

"Look in the mirror and you won't see your microbiome. But it's there with you from the day you are born. Over time, those bacteria, viruses and fungi multiply until they outnumber your own cells 10 to 1."

"As babies, the microbes may teach our immune systems how to fight off bad bugs that make us sick and ignore things that aren't a threat."

"We get our first dose of microbes from our mothers, both in the birth canal and in breast milk. Family members tend to have similar microbiomes."

"'The mother's microbiome has actually poised itself over nine months to basically become the prime source of microbes to the infant,' says Lita Proctor, director of the Human Microbiome Project at the National Institutes of Health."

Has Voyager 1 Left the Solar System

"The Voyager 1 spacecraft launched in 1977 on a mission to Jupiter and Saturn. It kept on going. Today it's billions of miles from Earth, and scientists have been predicting it will soon leave the solar system."

"NPR has been on Voyager watch since at least 2003, when longtime science correspondent Richard Harris provided this warning of Voyager's impending departure."

"But now Marc Swisdak, a physicist at the University of Maryland, says the spacecraft may have already left. "Late July 2012 is when we think it [left]," Swisdak says."

"How did we miss that? As it turns out, it wasn't entirely our fault. Researchers thought the solar system was surrounded by a clearly marked magnetic field bubble."

How Many Cups of Coffee Per Day Is Too Many?

"That morning cup of Joe is a daily, practically sacred ritual for many of us. A large body of research has confirmed that a coffee habit is perfectly fine for most people, and may even have some health benefits – from fighting depression in women to lowering the risk of stroke and prostate cancer."

"But is there too much of a good thing?"

"A study published this week in Mayo Clinic Proceedings suggests that when it comes to coffee, too much appears to be more than 28 cups per week, at least if you are under 55."

"The researchers found that younger men who passed the 28 cup weekly threshold – which works out to about 4 cups per day – had a 56 percent increased risk of death from all causes. Younger women who were heavy coffee drinkers had a greater than two-fold increased mortality risk."

NASA Deems Kepler Space Telescope Beyond Repair

"There's some sad news from NASA: The space agency says its Kepler space telescope is beyond repair."

"The $600 million planet-hunting probe whose mission was to search other solar systems for Earth-like planets has lost its ability to keep its gaze on target."

"Two of the four gyroscope-like reaction wheels that keep Kepler pointed in the right direction have broken down and can't be fixed, but NASA is still hoping it can find some less-stressful work for the orbiting observatory."

"The four-year-old telescope had been looking for planets in the "goldilocks" zone — where the planet is neither too close to its star, where it's too hot for life, nor too far away, where it's too cold."

Haunting Images Chronicle 165 Years of a World At War

"D-Day soldiers landing on Omaha Beach. A naked Vietnamese girl running from napalm. A Spanish loyalist, collapsing to the ground in death. These images of war, and some 300 others, are on view at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in an exhibition called WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath. Pictures from the mid-19th century to today, taken by commercial photographers, military photographers, amateurs and artists capture 165 years of conflict."

"One of the best-known war pictures of all time was taken by AP photographer Joe Rosenthal in 1945. Five Marines and a Navy corpsman, raising the American flag on Mount Suribachi, Iwo Jima."

"'It's such an important and historic photograph, but I don't know who any of those guys are,' says documentary photographer Louie Palu — who found inspiration in the iconic Rosenthal image. 'I wanted to meet the guys in that photograph. I wanted to know the name, the age, how young or how old they looked. I didn't want it to be an anonymous set of people raising a flag.'"

The Beauty and Calm of Thinking In Numbers

"There are numbers all around us. They are in every word we speak or write, and in the passage of time. Everything in our world has a numeric foundation, but most of us don't see those numbers. It's different for Daniel Tammet. He's a savant with synesthesia, a condition that allows him to see beyond simple numerals — he experiences them."

"Tammet drew attention around the world about a decade ago when he recited, from memory, the number pi. It took him five hours to call out 22,514 digits with no mistakes."

"He spoke to the Weekend Edition Sunday host Rachel Martin about his new book, a collection of essays called, Thinking in Numbers."

Why Aren't More Girls Attracted to Physics

"You don't need to be a social scientist to know there is a gender diversity problem in technology. The tech industry in Silicon Valley and across the nation is overwhelmingly male-dominated."

"That isn't to say there aren't women working at tech firms. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook have raised the profile of women at high-tech firms. But those prominent exceptions do not accurately portray who makes up the engineering ranks at those and other tech companies."

"Visit Silicon Valley and you will hear many people talk about the need to increase the number of female hackers. The conventional wisdom about why there are so few female coders usually points a finger at disparities in the talent pool, which is linked to disparities in tech education. In fact, starting as early as adolescence, girls and boys often choose different academic paths. When the time comes for young people to elect to go into engineering school, serious gender disparities become visible."

Paying Till It Hurts: Why American Healthcare Is So Pricey

"It costs $13,660 for an American to have a hip replacement in Belgium; in the U.S., it's closer to $100,000."

"Americans pay more for health care than people in many other developed countries, and Elisabeth Rosenthal is trying to find out why. The New York Times correspondent is spending a year investigating the high cost of health care. The first article in her series, "Paying Till It Hurts," examined what the high cost of colonoscopies reveals about our health care system; the second explained why the American way of birth is the costliest in the world; and the third, published this week in The Times, told the story of one man who found it cheaper to fly to Belgium and have his hip replaced there, than to have the surgery performed in the U.S."

"Rosenthal has also been investigating why costs for the same procedure can vary so much within the U.S. — by thousands of dollars, in some cases — depending on where it's being performed. Before becoming a journalist, Rosenthal trained as a doctor and worked in the emergency room of New York Hospital, now part of New York-Presbyterian Hospital."

Long Awaited Grown Burger Is Unveiled In London

"After three months, $330,000 and a high-profile media blitz, the world's first hamburger grown in a lab made its worldwide debut Monday."

"The unveiling of "cultured beef," as the burger is branded, was a production worthy of the Food Network era, complete with chatty host, live-streamed video, hand-picked taste testers, a top London chef and an eager audience (made up mostly of journalists). Rarely has a single food gotten such star treatment."

"But this was no ordinary food launch, of course. The burger, which began as just a few stem cells extracted from a cow's shoulder, represents a technology potentially so disruptive that it has attracted the support of Google co-founder Sergei Brin."

Worms Bright Blue Death Could Shed Light On Human Aging

"Last year, researchers at University College London's Institute of Healthy Ageing were looking through their microscopes when they saw something amazing."

"David Gems, professor of biogerentology, was part of the team looking for answers to big questions about human aging in small, squishy little creatures nearing the end of their lives. Their official name: Caenorhabditis elegans. You and I know them as worms. As they neared the end of their life, the tiny worms moved more and more slowly."

"Suddenly there appears a sort of ghostly blue fluorescence," Gems tells Jacki Lyden, host of weekends on All Things Considered. "And then it spreads in a kind of flashing wave from the front end to the back end. ... It's really quite a sort of eerie phenomenon because it's reminiscent of the soul departing the worm."

Research Says Actually Where You Go To College Matters

"There are lots of questions for high school grads: Should you go for an associate degree or a bachelor's? A community college or a four-year university? Does it really matter where you go? If we're comparing top-tier schools with open-access ones, then yes. It matters a whole lot, and it has long-lasting effects."

"A study published this week by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce says that African-American and Latino students are underrepresented at the nation's 465 "most well-funded, selective four-year colleges and universities." They're also overrepresented at 3,250 open-access two-year colleges. The researchers, Anthony Carnevale and Jeff Strohl, looked at 4,400 different institutions over 15 years, between 1994 and 2009. Carnevale spoke with Tell Me More's Michel Martin earlier this week. The researchers argue that the "racial stratification" that occurs in K-12 — and that is pervasive in society in general — gets confirmed in college."

"The numbers aren't pretty. Carnevale and Strohl found that more than 240,000 high-achieving high school students who come from low-income families don't go to elite colleges or earn two- or four-year degrees after graduating. And 1 in 4 of these students — about 60,000 — are black or Latino."

Our Once & Future Oceans Taking Lessons From Earth's Past

"One of the most powerful ways to figure out how the Earth will respond to all the carbon dioxide we're putting into the atmosphere is to look back into the planet's history."

"Paleontologists have spent a lot of time trying to understand a time, more than 50 million years ago, when the planet was much hotter than it is today. They're finding that the news isn't all bad when you take the long view."

"About 10 million years after the dinosaurs died out, the Earth suffered another huge ecological shock: Carbon dioxide levels in the air soared and the oceans turned more acidic as carbon dioxide dissolved in the water and turned into carbonic acid. And that's happening again, thanks to our use of fossil fuels."

To 60s Civil Right Hero Math is Kids Formula For Success

"Bob Moses is 78, but he has the same probing eyes you see behind thick black glasses in photos from 50 years ago when he worked as a civil rights activist in Mississippi. The son of a janitor, Moses was born and raised in Harlem. He's a Harvard-trained philosopher, and a veteran teacher."

"He started a math training program — the Algebra Project — with a MacArthur "Genius Grant" 30 years ago. The goal is simple: Take students who score the worst on state math tests, double up on the subject for four years, and get them ready to do college-level math by the end of high school."

"Where many teachers want students to work quietly and individually with pencil and paper, Moses encourages students to talk through tricky concepts because he says being conversational in math is a key to understanding it."