Perfect pitch: Finding the notes among us

The honk of a horn or the rumble of a truck sounds like noise to most of us. But to Lucy Fitz Gibbon, and others with absolute pitch, there are notes embedded in that noise. Psychiatry professor David Ross, of the Yale School of Medicine, explains what’s known about how people acquire this mysterious ability

Patterns written by sound

Shake a metal plate covered in sand at certain frequencies and mysterious patterns appear. The demonstration, published in 1787 by Ernst Chladni, illustrates a concept known as “fundamental modes of vibration.” Jon Jacobsen, a mathematician at Harvey Mudd College, explains why the experiment still captivates scientists and students today. 

Oh, if you’re wearing a hearing aide - as I was when listening to this - turn it down.

Making bubbles

Dinosaur's: Why more colorful that previously thought?

Forget those drab grays and greens, dinosaurs might have been more colorful, according to a new study in Science. Yale graduate student Jakob Vinther and colleagues looked at the fossilized feathers of 150-million-year-old Anchiornis huxleyi and found melanosomes—the organelles that hold melanin. Vinther’s analysis suggests the dinosaur had surprisingly flashy plumage. En Español.

The physics of water under low gravity

This airplane is also referred to as the ‘vomit comet’ … fun huh?

Susan Solomon on climate change

Susan Solomon, a scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, gives the keynote address at the meeting of the Materials Research Society. Solomon discusses the evidence of changes in the Earth’s climate and the causes of those changes.

Video courtesy of a very generous Science Friday and the Materials Research Society

How to band migrating birds

video is courtesy of Science Friday, who cares more about you learning about science and our world than making money from this … unlike HBO. Sigh. It’s a long story.

How to create a river in the laboratory

Scientists have been trying to create a meandering river in the lab for nearly 100 years. Christian Braudrick and Bill Dietrich of University of California, Berkeley, have finally found a recipe. The researchers reported the finding this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Go into the lab to see the mini meandering river flow.

How to reform healthcare reform: Science Friday

Talk of the Nation, July 10, 2009 · 11 minutes 30 seconds

Writing in the New York Review of Books, former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine and retired M.D. Arnold Relman says President Obama’s health care plan won’t work. Relman outlines the changes he thinks are necessary for success but missing in the plan.

Relman makes the excellent point that as long as healthcare is exercised as a for-profit model, no plan, including Obama’s, will work.

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