Joe Palca

Asparagus Helps Lower Blood Pressure (At Least In Rats)

Joe Palca — Sat, 08 Jun 2013 12:35:00 +0000

Here's another reason to eat asparagus, in case you were looking for one.

Researchers at the Kagawa Nutrition University in Japan fed a diet consisting of 5 percent asparagus to rats with high blood pressure.

Beneath A Glacier's White, Researchers See Green

Joe Palca — Mon, 27 May 2013 21:17:00 +0000

In the news business, an evergreen is a story that doesn't have to run on a particular day, but can stay fresh for a long time.

This is an evergreen story about an evergreen. In particular, a group of plants called bryophytes. Turns out they may be evergreen quite a bit longer than most people thought.

The most famous bryophyte of them all is moss.

The Weight Of A Med Student's Subconscious Bias

Joe Palca — Thu, 23 May 2013 22:03:00 +0000

Quite a few medical school students have something against obese people, and most of those who have such a bias are unaware of it.

That's the conclusion of study appearing in the July issue of Academic Medicine. It was conducted at the Wake Forest School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, N.C.

Atop A Hawaiian Mountain, A Constant Sniff For Carbon Dioxide

Joe Palca — Fri, 10 May 2013 18:46:00 +0000

Climate scientists have a good reason to want to get away from it all. To get an accurate picture of the amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere, you have to find places where the numbers won't be distorted by cities or factories or even lots of vegetation that can have a major local impact on CO₂ concentrations.

Starting in 1958, scientists from the Scripps Institution for Oceanography have been using an instrument on the top of the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii to measure CO₂ in the atmosphere.

Wake Up And Smell The Tuna? Sunrise At Honolulu's Fish Auction

Joe Palca — Tue, 07 May 2013 16:04:00 +0000

If you are up at 5 in the morning in Honolulu and are wondering what to do, I have a suggestion: Head over to Pier 38 and watch the Honolulu Fish Auction. It's quite a scene.

Getting up at 5 may seem a bit extreme, but for recent arrivals to Hawaii from the East Coast of the mainland — as I was last Friday — the six-hour time difference makes waking up early easy, if not inevitable.

The auction takes place in a low-slung single-story building toward the end of the pier. At about 1 a.m., fishing boats start bringing in their catch.

Envisioning The Future With Cori Lathan

Joe Palca — Tue, 07 May 2013 06:59:00 +0000

Computers were created to be useful tools, but all too often it's still a chore to get technology to do our bidding.

Corinna Lathan imagines a future that's no longer a chore, where computers understand our wants and needs so well that we don't even have to think about telling them what to do. She's an inventor who has started her own company, AnthroTronix, to make that kind of intuitive technology part of our lives.

Kepler Telescope Spots 3 New Planets In The 'Goldilocks Zone'

Joe Palca — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 19:39:00 +0000

Astronomers have found three planets orbiting far-off stars that are close to Earth-sized and in the "habitable zone": a distance from their suns that makes the planets' surfaces neither too hot nor too cold, but just right.

One of the three planets orbits a star with the prosaic name Kepler-69.

"Kepler-69 is a sun-like star," says Thomas Barclay, a research scientist at the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute who uses the Kepler space telescope, which is on a mission to search for Earth-lik

Why A Hoosier State Scientist Is Stuck On Oysters

Joe Palca — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 10:21:00 +0000

How do oysters attach themselves to rocks? They need a glue, but a glue that can set in a watery environment. In this installment of "Joe's Big Idea," NPR's Joe Palca reports that glue could lead to medical advances.

Wanna Play? Computer Gamers Help Push Frontier Of Brain Research

Joe Palca — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 08:39:00 +0000

People can get pretty addicted to computer games. By some estimates, residents of planet Earth spend 3 billion hours per week playing them. Now some scientists are hoping to make use of all that human capital and harness it for a good cause.

Right now I'm at the novice level of a game called EyeWire, trying to color in a nerve cell in a cartoon drawing of a slice of tissue.

Cheesecake Factory, IBM Team Up To Crack The Code Of Customer Bliss

Joe Palca — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 15:58:00 +0000

Consider the following entirely fictitious but totally plausible scenario:

A diner at the Kuwait City branch of The Cheesecake Factory restaurant chain complains to his waiter that the pickles in his Americana Cheeseburger (American and cheddar cheese, crunchy potato crisps, lettuce, tomato, grilled onions, pickles and secret sauce) had a funny texture.