Featured image: A Kodiak bear from southern Alaska enjoys a plant. In a strange twist of fate, they may actually prefer eating some plants to salmon.

Join us for this week’s news roundup: trees benefit megacities to the tune of $500 million a year! Kodiak bears may prefer elderberries to salmon. And, shipwrecks are slowly shifting under the ocean, due to mudslides caused by hurricanes (obviously) and winter (what?).

In other news:

• In a new medical development, we may be able to replicate human cancers in zebrafish and use these “avatars” to test our cancer drugs. Each fish would have a specific person’s cancer—radical, sadistic, but probably helpful for cancer patients.
• A team at Purdue University has invented a medical exam that fits on a piece of cardstock, including microfluid channels, a power supply (activated by the pressure of your fingers), and tests for anemia and liver function.=

The full playlist can be found at WPRB.com or below.

 

 

 

 

 

Featured image:  An artist’s rendition of a dwarf star, delicately balancing the forces of gravity and electron degeneracy pressure. (courtesy Montgomery College)

This week, we’ll cover a swath of new science stories: What happens when supernova swallow up stars, and what enables us to watch this process evolve in real time? How are Americans’ opinions on gene editing evolving? Is baldness over?

In other news:

• Audio levitation is on its way, with engineers at the University of Bristol producing 3D-printed speakers that make small objects float (see right).
• Researchers have confirmed that regal jumping spiders can occasionally devour lizards and frogs, chiefly by scouring Google and other online sources for evidence.

The playlist for the show can be found at WPRB.com or below.

In this episode of These Vibes, Stevie discusses measuring neutrino that were produced just one second after the Big Bang singularity in our early universe with Princeton University professor and high energy physicist, Chris Tully. In the interview, Professor Tully explains what a neutrino is, why they’re so difficult to measure, and why we should have a bath of neutrinos sitting at just a couple of degrees above absolute zero all around us today. Then, he tells us about the early universe when that bath of neutrinos, called the Cosmic Neutrino Background, were produced, and how he plans to measure them with his instrument PTOLEMY (Princeton Tritium Observatory for Light, Early-universe, Massive-neutrino Yield – currently in the prototype stage).

Additionally, Ingrid Ockert tells us about the 1980s book “Mindstorms” by Seymour Papert, which outlines Papert’s ideas on how computers can help unlock people’s ability to learn through play.

Science News:

• “Mystery of Greek Amphitheater’s Amazing Sound Finally Solved.” An older piece of news that describes research discovering how a 4th century BC theater in Greece  could seat 14,000 people such that even those in the back row of the architectural masterpiece could hear actors and musicians — unamplified.
• “First Human Embryos Edited in the US.” A piece in MIT Technology Review describes the first known attempt at creating genetically modified human embryos in the United States. It has been carried out by a team of researchers in Portland, Oregon led by Shoukhrat Mitalipov of Oregon Health and Science University. The procedure involved changing the DNA of a large number of one-cell embryos with the gene-editing technique CRISPR.

---