Science

Beekeepers Reported Losing 42 Percent Of Honeybee Colonies Last Summer

6:58pm May 15, 2015

NPR's Audie Cornish speaks to Gene Brandi, vice president of the American Beekeeping Federation, about how beekeepers and farmers are coping with the large die-off of honeybees.

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'Not On My Land': Southern Residents Fight Building Of Palmetto Pipeline

6:58pm May 15, 2015

by Sarah McCammon

Kinder Morgan is proposing the pipeline to carry oil and natural gas through South Carolina, Georgia and Florida. But smaller oil suppliers are also concerned about markets like Savannah, Georgia.

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They hunt, they gather, they're equal! An elderly Agta couple in the Philippines was part of the study on how communities are formed.

Why We Can Depend On The Kindness Of Strangers

5:48pm May 15, 2015

by Thomas K. Grose

Our ability to get along with folks who aren't relatives could be a legacy of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. And it's rooted in the fact that those societies had gender equality.

A 2008 view of the leading edge of the Larsen B ice shelf, extending into the northwest part of the Weddell Sea. Huge, floating ice shelves that line the Antarctic coast help hold back sheets of ice that cover land.

Massive Antarctic Ice Shelf Will Be Gone Within Years, NASA Says

4:31pm May 15, 2015

by Scott Neuman

What's left of the Larsen B shelf, two-thirds of which underwent a spectacular collapse in 2002, will disappear by the end of the decade, according to a new study.

The view of the universe known as the Hubble Deep Field, presented in 1996, shows classical spiral and elliptical shaped galaxies, as well as a variety of other galaxy shapes.

Why Do Most Galaxies Die? It's A Case Of Strangulation, Scientists Say

3:09pm May 15, 2015

by Scott Neuman

A team in England looked at thousands of galaxies that had stopped forming stars and determined that the vast majority of them showed signs that their stellar fuel supply had been choked off.

Science

New NASA Space Engine Defies Physics

2:22pm May 15, 2015

by Shawn Fitzmaurice

SciWorks Radio is a production of 88.5 WFDD and SciWorks, the Science Center and Environmental Park of Forsyth County, located in Winston-Salem.

The internet buzzed recently with news that NASA is developing a Star Trek-like warp drive engine. That sounded neat, so I checked it out. It turns out we are not ready to fold space, but we may be a hair closer -- by developing new kinds of propulsion systems. To learn more,

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The bistro imagines the day when will be possible to culture "meat thread" made from long strands of muscle tissue. On a "special knitting machine," meat is thread into a steak.

Science
Arts

Bistro In Vitro: A Virtual Playground To Ponder The Future Of Meat

1:59pm May 15, 2015

by Tove Danovich

Dutch artist Koert van Mensvoort has created a virtual restaurant to help us imagine a future when alluring beef, poultry and fish dishes can be concocted with in vitro techniques.

In a study in Lesotho, the prospect of earning a cash prize in a lottery motivated young people to practice safe sex.

What Might Make Young People Practice Safe Sex? Lottery Tickets!

9:20pm May 14, 2015

by Shankar Vedantam

Researchers working in Lesotho found that offering lottery tickets to volunteers who test negative for sexually transmitted infections is a powerful motivator for safe sex.

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Seasons May Tweak Genes That Trigger Some Chronic Diseases

3:26pm May 14, 2015

by Rob Stein

Genes linked to inflammation are more active in winter, a study hints. That might partly explain why some diseases, including Type 1 diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis, are more likely to start then.

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The lowly zebra fish can make its own sunscreen.

Why Would A Fish Make Its Own Sunscreen?

3:25pm May 14, 2015

by Scott Hensley

Research suggests that genes that make a natural sunscreen jumped from algae to an ancestor of vertebrates hundreds of millions of years ago. Some animals kept the ability. Others didn't.