People have been trying to predict earthquakes (NOTE: Subscribers can still listen to this show) for thousands of years. Twenty-three hundred years ago,...

Who gets the blame?

Fully driverless cars are years away, but car manufacturers think they'll be in showrooms by 2020, and insurance agencies and lawyers want to be prepared. So far, only California, Nevada and Florida have passed laws about this. It's preferable for...

Chemicals used as flame retardants are present as environmental pollutants all around the globe, including remote sites in Indonesia, Nepal and Tasmania, where no one wears clothes that are treated with these chemicals.

Researcher Amina Salamova says,...

At least our genes are. The Nature website reports that establishing the age of each mutation in contemporary human populations is important to fully understand our evolutionary history and will help to us to develop new medicines for diseases caused by genes.

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It's not just cleaning up the mess they leave behind, it's the fact that by blowing away houses, they diminish the tax base that supports local schools.

In the January 25th edition of the New York Times, Alison Leigh Cowan writes: "(Superstorm Sandy)damaged tens of billions of dollars' worth of real estate, especially in coastal...

Minerals found in the subsurface of Mars, a zone of more than three miles below ground, make for the strongest evidence yet that the red planet may have supported life (NOTE: Subscribers can still listen to this show...

La Gomera is one of the smallest Canary Islands, and it's a place where its inhabitants communicate with each other by whistling. As you walk along the beach in La Gomera, you can hear the sounds of the Gomeran whistle, an ancient language that the locals still use, in which...

Couples fight over lots of things, including the TV news. Does she want to change the channel when stories about war and famine, while he's not bothered by them? It turns out that bad news articles in the media increase women’s sensitivity to stressful situations, but do not...

The ISS was launched in 1998, and now it's getting old and rusty and needs renovation. An addition will be added with a BEAM (Bigelow Expandable Activity Module), which is a kind of balloon that is carried up to space flat and blown up after it arrives. Robert Bigelow is the man...

Did we monkey around with our genes as different species of early humans interbred and produced offspring of mixed ancestry? In other words, are modern humans part Neanderthal, and is...

Sudden stratospheric warming has split the polar vortex in two. The polar vortex, which forms as the atmosphere loses heat to space in long Arctic winter night, was split in two by massive heating from below, as a series of intense storms...

As our Congress furiously debates gun control, it's interesting to see what happened in Australia when they banned certain types of weapons in 1996.

John Howard was prime minister of Australia from 1996 to 2007, and in the January 17th edition of the New York Times, he writes about his own experience with gun reform, following a...

For more than a century and a half, scientists and tourists have visited massive animal-shaped mounds, such as Serpent Mound in Ohio (NOTE: Subscribers can still listen to this show), created by the...

Is the human race getting dumber? geneticist Gerald Crabtree thinks that human intelligence peaked several thousand years ago and from then on, has been on a slow decline.

His argument is based on the fact that for more than 99% of human evolutionary history, we lived as...