悠然作手Blogger: 六月 2026

2026年6月4日星期四

RP344 Do Facial Expressions Tell Us All

RP344 Do Facial Expressions Tell Us All?

If the eyes are the window to the soul, the face is the window to someone's mood. That's what people commonly believe, anyway. The expressions on one's face are the best indicators of the person's emotional state, right?

Yes and no. “There's some sense in which faces express emotion, but only in the sense that everything expresses emotion,” says psychologist James Russell, PhD. “Music does, posture does, words do, tone of voice does, your behavior does. The real question is: Is there anything special about faces?”

Indeed, facial expressions are part of a whole system of actions that result from an emotion. Doctors Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen theorize that emotions cause electrical activity to flow from the brain's emotion center, triggering involuntary facial expressions and other physical actions like changes in heart rate. The key word here is “involuntary.” Different cultures show emotions differently, and humans can learn to hide or mask their expressions. However, it seems that humans can't suppress microexpressions. These are extremely brief flashes of expression that represent a person's true feelings, even when he or she is trying to hide them. Luckily, microexpressions pass too quickly for people to notice them most of the time.

There may be something special about faces, though. Some research shows that facial expressions do more than show emotions. They are emotions. Researcher Carroll Izard says, “Emotion at one level of analysis is neuromuscular activity of the face.” Studies have shown that asking people to assume expressions of anger, fear, happiness, and other basic emotions actually triggers those emotional reactions. People who are asked to smile experience a positive mood change; people who frown tend to feel worse than they did before.

Perhaps there's something to the idea of “fake it till you make it.” Smiling when you' re unhappy may help you on your way to happiness. Pay attention to the look that's on your face. It may affect you more than you think.

RP343 Sun-Powered Skin

Losing a hand is a terrible thing to happen to anyone, and though prosthetics are available, they are a far cry from the real thing. Even when you do get all the joints moving correctly, a prosthetic hand is still unable to feel, and feeling is incredibly important. Without the ability to feel, prosthetic hands aren't able to know how much pressure to put on an object. Try picking up an egg with a prosthetic hand and all you'll get is messy fingers.

Now, however, there is some hope. Electronic skin is being developed that will allow people with prosthetic hands to actually feel. The skin is made from graphene, a super material made of a one-atom thick sheet of carbon. It is one million times thinner than paper and incredibly strong. Graphene can not only conduct electricity; it is transparent, too. This means that manufacturers are able to place solar cells into the material and power the skin with sunlight.

Currently, however, there is no way to store this energy, so the skin does not work in the dark. But researchers are working hard to build flexible energy storage devices into the design in order to solve the problem. When the bugs are ironed out, the end result will be a prosthetic limb with skin that can touch, feel heat, and sense pressure, all without a heavy battery pack.

And it's not only amputees who will benefit from the invention. Robots, too, will now be able to feel and sense the environment just like humans can. This will vastly increase robots' functions, allowing them to have a much greater understanding of what they're reacting with. This, in turn, will result in robots making far fewer errors.

There is hope, then, that losing a limb need not be the tragedy it is today. With the help of technology, prosthetic limbs may end up as good as, or even better than, the real thing.

RP342 The Slurp Heard Around the World

Ramen connects us. A food that instantly evokes Japan actually came from China. It was then revolutionized by a man from Taiwan, China, and is a staple of American college students.

Ramen is the name of both a type of noodle and a dish. Ramen noodles are thin and squiggly. They're made of wheat flour and a particular kind of alkaline mineral water. The properties of this water add to the flavor and the elastic texture of the noodles. Ramen is usually hand pulled, so it has to stretch.

These noodles go into a dish that has local variations all over Japan. Almost all ramen variations start with a chicken or pork broth. The four basic types of ramen are defined by their broth. Salty (shio) ramen has a clear, yellowish broth that may include seaweed and fish. Pork bone (tonkotsu) ramen has a white broth with a lot of fat, making it creamy. Soy sauce (shōyu) ramen broth is based on soy sauce. Miso ramen uses miso and oily chicken or fish broth, giving it a rich flavor.

To these bases chefs add different ingredients to make a meal in a bowl. Common ramen ingredients are eggs, seaweed, seafood, garlic, ginger, and even corn. Regions, restaurants, and chefs are very proud of their particular ramen and guard their recipes jealously.

Ramen as we know it was born in the 1900s. Back then, it was served in Chinese restaurants and was still called shina soba (Chinese noodles). These restaurants— and ramen—exploded during the 1950s. Then in 1958, the Chinese-Japanese inventor Momofuko Ando invented instant ramen. Packaged in brightly colored plastic packets, cheap but tasty ramen became part of the diets of college students and anyone on the run.

Ramen is such an important part of Japanese culture that there's now a ramen museum in Yokohama. Embracing a new idea and making it your own—isn't this the essence of our world?

RP341 The Deepest Place on Earth

Between Japan and Papua New Guinea, deep under the ocean, is a split in the earth. That is the mysterious Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the ocean. It has been measured at 11,033 meters deep at its lowest point. Qomolangma, the highest point on land, could be dropped into it and still have thousands of feet of sea water above it.

Pressure builds as you go deeper under the sea. The weight of water presses harder and harder. In the Mariana Trench, pressure reaches 16,000 pounds per square inch at the bottom. No human could ever survive it. Humans have, however, landed on the bottom of the trench. The *Trieste*, a U. S. Navy bathyscaphe ("deep boat") reached the bottom in 1960 with two men on board. It had been carefully designed to withstand the intense pressure. Still, the two men who went down in it must have been nervous!

Other creatures, however, can tolerate some of the pressure. Strange things live in the Mariana Trench. Light can only penetrate about 1,000 meters into water; after that, life is in the dark. Some fish make their own lights. The anglerfish has a bobbing, bioluminescent light dangling on a stalk over its head. The light shows other fish the way to their doom. The light hangs right over the anglerfish's nasty jaws. Fish that approach it get snapped up quickly.

The viperfish also has a light embedded in its body. It turns the light off and on to attract prey or a mate. Like the anglerfish, the viperfish uses light to lure meals to its mouth.

These fish can't reach the lowest depths, but mud samples from the bottom are full of microorganisms that can withstand the awesome pressure. As the last time humans reached the bottom was in 2012, the microorganisms will probably be able to live in peace for a long while yet.

RP340 Constructed Wetlands

Recently, humans have become more aware of our technological limitations. Instead of trying to invent new solutions to our problems, we' re looking to the natural world for guidance. One pressing problem is our need for clean water. The solution to protecting our water resources may be the soggy areas of ground we often take for granted: wetlands.

Wetlands may not look spectacular, but they perform amazing feats. One of them is filtering and cleaning water. Dirty water enters a wetland, passes through its parts, and emerges cleaner on the other side! They' re like biological water filtration machines. Around the world, people are constructing wetlands instead of building huge, smelly tanks to purify their waste water. A wetland can clean waste water enough to allow it to safely reenter a clean water source.

Wetlands use mechanical and chemical processes to filter water. The first steps are mechanical: Dirty water runs through the stones and plant stems, and solid particles are trapped. They fall to the bottom to become soil. Then, the chemical processes. If the particles attach themselves to stones or stems, the bacteria growing there break them down into harmless nutrients. Often, plants use the dangerous fertilizer or chemical pollutants and in return, give off beneficial oxygen!

Dangerous parasites that travel in water can also be destroyed in wetlands. Flatworms and other parasites are eaten by animals in the wetland, killed through lack of oxygen, or destroyed by sunlight. Constructed wetlands are designed to hold water long enough for most parasites to be killed through one of these processes.

Wetlands do require some work. They must be maintained and monitored, and they can be affected by season changes. But for the most part, wetlands are cheap, environmentally friendly, and sustainable solutions to the problem of polluted water. And in addition to the work they do, they can be designed to be beautiful natural spaces for people to visit and enjoy.

RP339 Tony Awards

In 1947, the American Theater Wing, which supports theater education and celebrates theatrical excellence, decided to celebrate even more. It decided that American theater needed a yearly award to honor the best performers, designers, directors, and other staff who help create plays and musicals. The Tony Awards was born.

The official name of the Tonys is the Antoinette Perry Award for Excellence in Theater. The award was named after Ms. Perry, an actress, director, and producer of plays. Ms. Perry worked tirelessly to create non-profit organizations to help support new artists. When she died in 1946, it seemed fitting to honor her by naming theater's biggest award after her.

The first award ceremony was held at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York. There was dinner, dancing, and entertainment, but there weren't any actual awards. Men got money clips as prizes. Women got gold bracelets and compacts. Even a scroll and a cigarette lighter were handed out! As with most entertainment awards shows, the recognition from colleagues was far more important than the value of the prizes.

By 1949, the Tony medallion was being awarded to winners. From the original 11 award categories, the Tonys has grown to include 26 competitive awards and several more special noncompetitive awards. Categories include best actor and actress, best play and musical, best music and lyrics, and technical awards for lighting, costumes, sound, and, of course, directing. The most awards ever won by one production is 12, awarded to the show The Producers in 2001. Producer and director Harold Prince has garnered the most individual awards, with 21.

His wins point to some criticism of the Tony Awards: that they are just a way for a few producers to promote their shows. Proponents of the Tonys insist that isn't the case. They say the awards honor great productions, give the theater community a chance to bond, and give theater the boost it needs to compete with movies, TV, and other entertainment.

RP338 The Raw Food Movement

Hey! Get that fire away from my food! Don't you know that cooking food is bad for you?

That, at least, is the point of view of raw foodists, members of the raw food movement. As you can guess from its name, the raw food movement encourages people to eat all or almost all of their food whole, uncooked, and unprocessed. Food can be heated a bit, but the cutoff falls between 100 and 118 degrees Fahrenheit. In addition, the food should not be processed or preserved in any way.

While raw foodists say their food is delicious, the point of the movement is good health. Eating raw foods is said to promote higher energy levels, clearer skin, better disease resistance, and weight loss. Proponents say this is because raw foods contain important elements that cooking destroys. They contain important enzymes for good digestion. They contain bacteria and sometimes parasites that can actually be good for our digestive system. They contain nutrients that cooking destroys. Raw foods are also free of the potentially cancer-causing black, burned areas of barbecue food.

Instead of cooking beans, raw foodists may soak them until they sprout. They may dehydrate food to change its texture. They may use raw foods to simulate other foods, such as using stringy spaghetti squash as "faster." Foods can be blended, like using chickpeas for hummus. They may be juiced, pickled, or fermented, but never cooked!

There is no strong criticism of the raw food movement. Most people simply think that it sounds difficult. Raw veganism—a raw diet containing no animal products—may not give children enough calories or vitamins to grow, according to some doctors. Food poisoning is a slightly elevated risk for raw food eaters. Overall, however, raw food is seen as very beneficial.

If you feel sluggish, low on energy, or just want to try something new, perhaps going raw for a month would help.

RP337 For the Many, Not the Few

Ya-wen, a 21-year-old student, had always wanted to visit England. She looked at the price of London hotels and worried she would never afford the trip. But then a friend suggested the Airbnb website. It offers rooms in private houses for short-term rent—much cheaper than hotels! Ya-wen was delighted.

Airbnb is a part of the "sharing economy" made possible by the Internet. The sharing economy allows people all over the world to get services at a reduced price. On Airbnb, users share their homes; on other sites, people share something else. Uber lets you get a ride across town for half the price of a taxi. TaskRabbit connects workers with clients offering one-off household jobs, such as building shelves. DogVacay, meanwhile, will find a loving home for your pet while you' re on vacation!

Thanks to technology, old ideas about companies and customers are changing. You might have heard of group buying, for example. Twenty strangers want to buy the same product. They find each other online and place a large, joint order to get a discount. Perhaps you have also heard of shared ownership. The cost of an expensive item is divided between several people, who take turns using it.

The sharing economy aims to reduce waste and build community. However, not everyone is in favor. Hotel owners and taxi drivers are concerned that Airbnb and Uber will take away their business. Sites such as eBay allow anyone to start a business, but they make it easy for people to sell stolen or faulty goods. Legal battles are common in the sharing economy. It is a new business model, and people need time to get used to it. These issues seem likely to decrease as time goes on.

Above all, the sharing economy is democratic. Anyone with an Internet connection can advertise their skills, or request the skills of others. This is the key to its popularity. The future of business is finally in the hands of the people.

RP336 For the Love of the Beautiful Game

You may know the sport as football, soccer, or simply “the beautiful game.” It's played worldwide, by rich people and poor people, in the freezing cold and tropical heat. And one tournament brings fans from around the world together: the FIFA World Cup.

FIFA, the International Federation of Association Football, organized the first World Cup tournament back in 1930. Since then, it has been held every four years, except for 1942 and 1946. Just try asking anyone who lives in Africa, Asia, or Europe. They will surely tell you that the World Cup is a big deal. FIFA estimates that one billion viewers worldwide watched the final match in 2014. That's enough to make it the most watched sporting event in the world.

Most viewers only pay attention to the final part of the World Cup tournament. But just getting that far is a long and difficult road for national teams. In the lead-up to the World Cup finals, smaller tournaments are held on six continents. These tournaments see up to 200 countries competing for a spot in the finals. Since there are so many teams, the tournaments end up taking a long time. Most of them kick off a full three years before the final game is even scheduled!

The final part of the World Cup involves 32 teams, and it lasts for about a month. It kicks off with the group stage. That's when groups of four teams all play each other, with the top two moving on. Then comes the knockout stage, when any loss will send a team home. Eventually, there will be two teams left standing. These two will clash in a thrilling final match for the title of World Champion.

The title has gone to Brazil five times, which is more than to any other nation. Brazil is also the only nation to have played in every World Cup. Italy and Germany are tied for second, with four victories each. Then comes Uruguay and Argentina, which have both won twice. England, France, and Spain have won once.

RP335 Giving Giants a Second Chance

Elephants are strong, sensitive, intelligent animals. They have been used for heavy work throughout Asia for centuries. Elephants have carried kings, felled trees, and hauled logs, among many other jobs. And since healthy trained elephants can work for decades, they have traditionally been seen as good investments.

Just like human workers, however, working elephants have lost much to technology. Logging has greatly expanded, destroying both the habitats of wild elephants and the livelihoods of domesticated ones. Many elephant owners have replaced their animals with machines, which work faster and are cheaper and easier to maintain.

Domestic elephants may have less work to do, but they still require huge amounts of food, water, and other care. Unable to survive in the rapidly shrinking wilderness, many have been retrained to perform for tourists. This can still occasionally be seen on the street in parts of Southeast Asia. Recently, however, most performing elephants have been moved into parks and camps where paying visitors can ride, bathe, and play with them. Some of these facilities exist for the good of the elephants and serve important conservational and educational functions. Others, unfortunately, severely abuse and exploit their animals in order to make money.

Elephants are wild and, unlike dogs, cannot be trained easily. Torture, starvation, and other forms of cruelty are employed in almost any training of wild animals anywhere. In 2017, the world-famous Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey circus closed after 146 years. Animal rights groups had long criticized the circus for its treatment of animals, especially elephants. This is, sadly, a truly global problem.

Elephant abuse is a global problem.

But there are signs of hope. Several programs are now actively working to help "retired" elephants and their caretakers, or mahouts. Some elephant camps offer training packages, allowing tourists to direct and control elephants themselves. Elephants and mahouts are even being trained to patrol forests to stop poachers and loggers. What could be more fitting than employing these gentle giants to help protect their own kind?

RP234 Art for the Masses

The word “kitsch” comes from German words for “taking out the trash” or “to make something cheaply.” That's not high praise for an art form! Yet Professor Thomas Kulka says, “If works of art were judged democratically— that is, according to how many people like them— kitsch would easily defeat all its competitors.” How are we going to understand and value kitsch?

The term “kitsch” came to be used in the modern sense in the 1860s in Munich. Munich art dealers called their cheap, marketable artistic goods “kitsch.” These goods were very popular among newly wealthy families seeking art to decorate their homes. Snobs looked down on these newly rich, who could afford real art but couldn't recognize it. Kitsch, then, refers to art appreciated by the uneducated or uncultured. It's art that isn't art.

The definition of kitsch relates to our way of evaluating art. Immanuel Kant, who influenced the Western definition of art, said that appealing directly to the senses was “barbaric.” Real art, high art, must be indirect. It must evoke complex, contradictory emotions. Kitsch is too straightforward. Kitsch takes the easy way out: sad kittens evoke pity, smiling children create happiness. It may be ugly because of poor production, but it's never ugly on purpose. Kitsch aims for cuteness.

Kitsch is also fundamentally democratic. It's mass-produced, widely available, accessible, and understandable. For some lovers of art and culture, some kitsch transcends its poor quality to become “so bad it's good.” Many kitsch objects are collectible and even valuable. They are valued not for their artistic quality but for their lack of it. Ironically, they become expensive, sought after, and appreciated. They are no longer democratic. They are objects for those who understand, who are cultured. They become real art. Perhaps kitsch is more complex than we think?

Tacky, cheap, sentimental, democratic, fair, accessible, cute. Kitsch challenges us to define the limits of art and examine our definitions of beauty, value, and taste.

RP233 Groupies

Power, fame, and celebrity are alluring. For some people, chasing fame or power themselves isn't satisfying, but chasing someone famous or powerful is. These people are groupies.

The word "groupies" is sometimes used to describe anyone who hangs around a certain group of people, usually celebrities. Primarily, however, groupies are women who attach themselves to musical groups. The era of the modern groupie seems to have begun in the sixties with big rock bands like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin.

Groupies would tell you that they are more than just unimportant playthings. They are nurses, friends, and support systems. They were sometimes called "road wives" for those reasons. Not all musician-groupie relationships are floating. Some groupies develop deep emotional bonds and even marry band members. Groupies pop up in songs: "Sweet Connie" in the song "*We' re an American Band*" refers to Connie Hamzy; "*Plaster Caster*" by Kiss is about Cynthia Albritton. And groupie Cassandra Peterson hung out with or was involved with some famous musicians, but only as a friend.

Author Pamela Des Barres is outspoken about her time as a groupie. "The groupie is just a girl who loves music and loves to be around the people who make it. She is the fan that takes it to the next level to experience the whole shebang, "she said at the screening of a documentary about one of her books.

For many groupies, forming a relationship with a musician is about getting close to the music. Des Barres says, "Any good groupie loves the music so much that it's part of the bloodstream. "Getting close to a band member was simply about trying to get as close as possible to the creative force behind the music they loved so much.

Of course, try telling that to their parents.

RP232 The Accidental Savior

Nowadays, if you cut your hand, you wash it with soap and water, put a bandage on it, and forget about it. You don't worry about developing a fatal infection. If you get a sore throat that doesn't go away, you go to the doctor and get an antibiotic. Minor illnesses don't scare us anymore, thanks to Alexander Fleming and his famous discovery—penicillin.

Before the 1940s, any infection could be fatal. Scarlet fever was a killer. Simple bacterial infections spread to the blood, bones, and brain, and easily turned deadly. Soldiers fighting in World War I feared gangrene (a wound infection) as much as enemy weapons.

Fleming had seen WWI soldiers die from infected wounds but also from dangerous, ineffective treatments. He was driven to find a cure for infections. In 1928, he was researching the bacteria staphylococcus. He went on vacation, leaving the petri dishes containing the bacteria in his laboratory. When he returned, one of them was contaminated with mold, and the mold had killed the surrounding bacteria!

Fleming spent the next twelve years studying that mold, from the genus Penicillium. It produced a chemical that killed many disease-causing bacteria. This substance was called "penicillin" by Fleming. Finally, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, among many other scientists, helped create a substance that could be mass produced.

Governments saw how significant penicillin could be to the war effort and helped support its production. Scientists raced to produce penicillin knowing they could save thousands of soldiers' lives by killing infections in their wounds. Penicillin is sometimes seen as a secret weapon of WW II.

Even at home, away from the fighting, the demand for penicillin was instant. Lives changed almost overnight. The fear of death by a simple infection was erased, and many childhood illnesses became merely inconvenient, rather than life-or-death struggles. Today, we live without worrying that our next scratch or cough might be our last.

RP231 From Shipwrecked to Samurai

In 1841, a teenaged boy made history by becoming one of the first Japanese people to enter America. Manjiro Nakahama helped define Japanese-American relations, but first, he was shipwrecked.

Manjiro was a young fisherman. He was only about 14 years old when he left his village of Nakahama with four friends. Their small boat was blown far out to sea by a storm, and the five young men were shipwrecked on Torishima Island. For six months, they barely survived until help arrived in the form of an American whaling ship.

The five men were taken aboard by Captain William Whitfield. Four of them were dropped off in Hawaii, but Manjiro wanted to stay. He stayed with the boat for two years, until it docked in Massachusetts, USA. There Manjiro(then known as John Manjiro or John Mung) went to live under the protection of Captain Whitfield. In Massachusetts, he studied English and navigation and went whaling with the captain. Later, he worked on whaling ships around the globe and made money in the California gold rush.

When he was about 23, Manjiro decided to try to return to Japan. This was dangerous. During that time, Japan was under the policy of Sakoku (locked country). It had been illegal for Japanese citizens to leave Japan. He might have been executed when he returned, but Manjiro decided to try. He picked up two of his old Japanese companions in Hawaii, and in 1851, reached Okinawa. They were questioned for a few months, but released. Manjiro was useful as a source of information about the outside world. In 1853, the government made Manjiro a samurai.

Manjiro interpreted for his country in 1853, when the commander of the U.S. Navy, Matthew Perry, forced the opening of Japan. Manjiro used his outside knowledge to help Japan modernize its navy. In later years, he traveled to Europe and even back to America to study, but he always came home to Japan. This poor fisherman went on to represent his country, and went from being shipwrecked to shaping history.

RP230 Insomnia

Sleeping: what could be easier? It's just doing nothing, after all. For people suffering from insomnia, however, getting precious sleep can feel impossible.

Insomnia is the inability to sleep. It is classified two ways, as primary and secondary. Secondary insomnia is caused by outside factors, such as pain, breathing problems, drugs, or jet lag. It isn't hard to treat once the cause is identified. Primary insomnia is trickier as it isn't caused by physical discomfort or substances. It is harder to cure because there's no cause to remove.

Insomnia can take many forms—trouble falling asleep, waking up in the middle of the night, and waking up too early in the morning. Most insomnia is transient (lasting a week or less) or short-term (lasting less than a month). This insomnia usually results from stress, noise, illness, pain, jet lag, or work-shift changes. The results are unpleasant: tiredness, irritability, difficulty concentrating or remembering, and muscle fatigue. Fortunately, these symptoms only last as long as the insomnia. There's no lasting damage.

Chronic insomnia—sleeplessness lasting longer than a month—is a different story. Chronic insomnia is usually caused by long-term anxiety, depression, or other psychiatric problems. Its symptoms are more intense than those of short-term insomnia. Plain sleeping is bad enough. Tired drivers frequently cause fatal accidents. On top of that, add serious depression, muscle aches, and increasing emotional instability. Chronic insomniacs may hallucinate. Nausea may set in, along with high blood pressure and erratic body temperature. Blurred vision is common. Chronic insomniacs have brain patterns that look like those of people with serious mental disorders.

Chronic insomnia is difficult to treat. Some medicines can induce sleep, but they are often addictive. Talk therapy and behavioral therapy are other options. The solution must be tailored to the patient as the causes of insomnia are so varied.

Insomnia is a very serious disorder. The next time you feel yourself start to drift away, remember to be grateful for a good night's sleep.

RP229 Rock Star

Uluru rises, huge and red, out of the vast center of Australia. The land spreads flat around it, making the colorful, humped rock look very dramatic. For the aboriginal Anangun u native to that area, Uluru is a sacred spot. It is central to their creation story and their history. To visitors, it is a breathtaking natural wonder.

Uluru (also called Ayers Rock) is an island, which means" island mountain." It is the remains of an ancient sandstone mountain range that gradually eroded around it. We can actually only see the tip of Uluru. The majority of it is underground. However, about 350 meters of it thrusts up out of the soil.

Uluru is remarkably cohesive, with few fractures; it appears solid and uniform. Most photos show Uluru at sunset, when it looks bright red, but the huge formation changes color with the seasons and times of day. It can look silver or even violet in the rain.

Aside from being astounding naturally, Uluru also safeguards the history of the most ancient cultures on Earth. Humans have lived near Uluru for more than 10,000 years. The Anangu people believe the shapes of Uluru and the rocks around it contain the stories of ancestors and gods. Areas of Uluru are decorated with rock paintings that have been updated for thousands of years.

Uluru was first spotted by Western explorers in 1873 and named Ayers Rock after Henry Ayers, Premier of South Australia at the time. By 1920, part of the area had been made into an aboriginal reserve. The land was later taken back, though. It wasn't until 1985 that the Australian government gave ownership of Uluru back to the local aboriginal people. They agreed to manage it jointly with the Australian park service. The natural and cultural wonder remains open for visitors. The aboriginal owners ask merely that tourists show respect for their sacred land and its stories.

RP228 Ghost Towns

Scattered across the American Great Plains are little pockets of buildings, clustered together. The windows are usually broken. No water comes from the taps. Sometimes there are old cars rusting, abandoned in the tall grass. No one comes, no one goes. No one lives there anymore. These are the ghost towns of the USA.

These towns were abandoned when the industries supporting them died. Many towns in the Northern Plains grew around the building of a railway line, which was never completed. Others were left when the highway system replaced the rail system. In other areas, mining towns were abandoned when the ore ran out. Residents moved on to other jobs and other industries, leaving behind the structures they had made. Now, many of these ghost towns are historical sites, run as open-air museums.

Bodie, California, is one of the most well-known ghost towns in the USA. It began as a mining camp in 1859 and grew quickly. By 1880, Bodie had perhaps 7,000 residents, a telegraph, a jail, several newspapers, and even a Taoist temple! However, gold found in neighboring states lured miners away from Bodie. The town began to decline after the 1880s, and by 1920, only 120 people lived there. The town, however, still stands. Its wooden buildings nestle under greenish hills and a vast blue sky. Though no one lives there now, about 200,000 people a year visit ghostly Bodie.

Bannack, Montana, was also built and abandoned over gold. Founded in 1862, the town was briefly the capital of the Montana Territories, but prosperity didn't last. By the 1930s, there was little work to be had in the mines. The last of the residents left by the 1970s, abandoning 60 historic log-and-frame structures. Visitors can explore most of them. Bannack, like Bodie, is experiencing a second life as a National Historic Landmark. Perhaps there is life after death, at least for ghost towns.

RP227 The Most Distinct Language

Any language other than your own is going to sound strange, funny, or even frightening. While many languages we encounter will have some similarity to our own, here are a few that are, perhaps, more unusual than most.

In Basque Country (parts of France and Spain), around 600,000 people speak Euskara. Euskara is the only pro-Indo-European language still spoken in Europe. Indo-European is the world's biggest language family. Euskara existed before the Indo-European languages came to Europe about 5,000 years ago. Euskara may be thousands of years older than that. Unlike most languages that surround it, Euskara is agglutative, meaning that grammar information is attached to an individual word as a suffix. This leads to longer words but shorter sentences, unlike Indo-European languages.

IKung (from southern Africa) has fewer speakers than Euskara, but has a larger language family. It's unique because of its huge variety of unusual sounds, including the "click" represented by the exclamation mark in the language's name. In addition to clicks (a sound made by tapping or snapping the tongue on different parts of the mouth and teeth), IKung also has about 30 different vowel sounds and many consonants. IKung speakers partially or completely close their throats to affect the sounds they make, and they distinguish between a murmured sound and a voiced one. The language even uses tones, like many Asian languages.

If IKung is unusual for having lots of sounds, Pirahã, or Hi' aiti' ihi', has the opposite distinction. This language, spoken by only a few hundred people, has only about three vowels and eight consonants. Pirahã is tonal, using pitch to change the meanings of sounds. The Pirahã do more than speak their language. They can hum, whistle, yell, or sing it. These, too, affect words' meanings. Pirahã also lacks many abstract terms, including numbers and many color descriptions. Pirahã focuses on action and immediacy.

Clicking, humming, adding on. There seem to be as many ways to express a thought as there are thoughts themselves.

RP226 A Brave New World for Mice and Men

You remember 3-D printing, right? That's when you create things out of various materials, like plastic or even metal. You just input a design into the 3-D printer, sit back, and wait until it's done. In the early days of this technology, many of us weren't putting it to good use. We'd print off little models of Game of Thrones characters or swords to hang on the wall. Luckily, the scientists have now stepped in, and 3-D printing is helping to benefit humankind.

Researchers from Northwestern University in the U.S. see 3-D printing as a way to recreate damaged organs. Their work focuses specifically on a reproductive organ: the ovaries. Many women lose or damage their ovaries due to cancer or other sicknesses. So the big question is: How can their ovaries be replaced? Using ovaries from another human is medically possible, but it can be dangerous. Bodies can reject a new organ from another person, and the patient can get sick and even die. Here's where 3-D printing can help make a difference.

The research team sought to prove their theory by experimenting on mice. First, they created little 3-D printed ovaries and implanted them in female mice. Then they had the mice mate with male mice. Three of their test subjects got pregnant and later had healthy babies. And just to be sure, the researchers waited for their children to give birth as well. All of the births went off without a hitch, meaning the procedure has no long-term side effects.

Following their first success, the team at Northwestern University is looking ahead to experiments on pigs. Pigs pose some different challenges because they have larger ovaries. If that experiment is successful, they might move on to humans. In another ten years, who knows what kinds of organs we'll be making with our 3-D printers.

RP225 Taking Land From the Sea

I bet you've never thought of the Dutch as mermaids, but it can be said that they live below the sea—well, below sea level, that is. About one quarter of the land of the Netherlands is actually below sea level. The Netherlands boasts the lowest point in Europe. One of its provinces is seven meters below sea level!

People in the Netherlands have been fighting the sea for 2,000 years. The first people to settle in the Netherlands began the tradition by building artificial hills to live on. They called them terpen. Over time, these terpen were connected by dikes—low walls usually made of earth. The dikes connected the terpen into villages and also stopped the flow of the sea and rivers. People began to use dikes to dam larger areas of land. These reclaimed areas were called polders. Water in the polders was drained into the sea or the rivers using windmills. The drained land was often used for farming.

After 1000 A. D., the Dutch population grew and they began to take land reclamation more seriously. Many monasteries helped build large-scale dikes, but the process hasn't always gone smoothly. A storm in 1134 destroyed some land reclamation projects. Then in 1287, a dike broke during another storm, causing a massive flood that killed between 50,000 and 80,000 people and left behind an inland sea in what had been a lake. In 1421, another polder was taken away. The last major flood in the Netherlands was in 1953. After this, the Dutch undertook the Delta Project, which aimed to eliminate the threat from the sea totally.

The dikes and polders are not a perfect system. When land is drained, the peat underneath often compresses, causing the land to sink lower. As the land sinks and the seas and rivers rise, the Dutch are in a position to be seriously affected by climate change. On their side, however, they have the 2,000 years of experience in fighting the sea.

RP224 Ernest Hemingway

The American writer Ernest Hemingway was an artist whose life seemed to fuel his work. While 1918 this helped him become a king of American literature, it also left him battered, conflicted, and depressed.

Hemingway was born in 1899 in Illinois. Though he lived in a suburb, he spent summers at the family's summer home in the wilderness, giving him a passion for nature and hunting. He published articles and poems in his high school newspaper. After graduating, he worked at a newspaper, but stayed just briefly before leaving to drive ambulances in Italy during World War I. That short stunt, however, influenced his writing forever. The newspaper's style stuck with him: "Use short sentences. Use vigorous English. Be positive, not negative."

Hemingway covered both World Wars and the Spanish Civil War, witnessing destruction, death, loyalty, and betrayal. He was injured; he fell in love. These experiences inspired works like *A Very Short Story*, A Farewell to Arms, and For Whom the Bell Tolls. Many of his heroes are soldiers or hunters. They are solitary, tough, but generally honest men in conflict with a brutal society.

Between the wars, Hemingway lived in Paris, which inspired The Sun Also Rises. He lived for some years in the USA and traveled to Spain and Africa, which would provide fodder for fiction and non-fiction. He married and divorced several times. That and his mostly male characters earned Hemingway a reputation for misogyny.

After WWII, with friends dying, Hemingway grew depressed. A holiday in Africa turned disastrous when he and his fourth wife were seriously injured in two plane crashes. The physical and emotional pain led Hemingway to drink more. Recovering in Cuba and in Europe, he continued to write, but mentally he declined. Even winning the Nobel Prize in 1954 didn't help. He left Cuba in 1960 for Idaho, where he committed suicide in 1961.

Hemingway believed writing was a lonely art. He and his characters sought companionship but struggled alone. Readers reap the benefits of their hardships.

RP223 In the Stream

Chances are you watch streamed television programs and movies on your smartphone or computer. Streaming has become so popular that the days of renting videos may soon be over. But what exactly is streaming, and how is it changing entertainment?

Basically, streaming means sending audio and/ or video content to a device in a continuous "stream." This content is not downloaded but can be played on the device as soon as it arrives. Unlike downloaded movies and shows, streamed content does not remain on a device after it has been watched. Most streamed video come from previously recorded files, but live broadcasts can also be streamed. These are known as feeds.

To watch streamed content, you must subscribe to a streaming service. This will allow you to access material from the service's video library. Three of the largest streaming services are Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime.

Netflix was founded in California in 1997 as a DVD sale and rental company. Its streaming service was introduced in 2007 and immediately caught on. Now a global entertainment provider, Netflix produces its own television series and films in addition to streaming other material.

Unlike Netflix, Hulu is available only in the United States and Japan. Co-owned by Disney, 21st Century Fox, Comcast, and Time Warner, it offers mostly television programs from those networks. Subscribers must pay extra to watch these programs without commercials.

The Internet shopping giant Amazon.com now has its own streaming service. Amazon Prime provides access to millions of songs, films, and television shows. Recently, Amazon has also begun producing original programs.

Streaming's popularity is easy to understand. It's cheap, fast, mobile, and offers viewers an almost endless variety of choices. So it's not surprising that many people binge-watch streamed content for hours or even days at a time. This has been linked to eye problems, obesity, depression, and other health issues, especially among the young. Like many other "great ideas," streaming may pose a danger to those with no self-control.

RP222 Mother, May I

RP222 Mother, May I?

In most of the developed world, power has been held almost exclusively by men for centuries. Male-dominated (patriarchal) societies aren't the only ones that exist, however.

The Negovisi of Papua New Guinea organize their society around women. Valuable heirlooms and land are passed from mothers to daughters, not fathers to sons. When a man and woman marry, the man usually goes to live in his wife's community. The most significant sign of female power in Negovisi society, however, is their control of the gardens. Producing food is the basis of wealth for the Negovisi, so gardens symbolize all the wealth of the society. Gardening is symbolic in other ways—Negovisi couples garden together to demonstrate their union. Refusing to eat from a wife's garden would be a sign of a divorce.

The Mosuo people of Yunnan and Sichuan, China, also live in a society in which females are central. Mosuo women are the heads of their households. Women live in houses with their children, grandmothers, aunts, uncles, and brothers. Husbands, however, do not join the household. Marriages are bonds of affection, in which sexual partners visit each other but do not share a home. Women control money, household affairs, and jobs. Men, on the other hand, handle livestock trade and slavery. They also wield more political power than women do.

In West Sumatra, Indonesia, Minangkabau women own and distribute all land and property. Houses are for women; boys leave their mother's house by the age of seven to begin school. Education is extremely important to the Minangkabau. Men enter their wives' households and leave in the event of a divorce.

The Minangkabau would tell you that women do not rule their culture. Instead, their society is governed by consensus. The other matriarchies mentioned here would probably also agree that women don't rule. They just aren't treated like property or slaves. Getting past the obsession with who the boss is may help other cultures rule more equally, too.

RP221 Saving the World by Seeing the World

Have you ever found a place that was so beautiful you didn't want to share it? Did you want to keep it hidden from other people who wouldn't appreciate it? Did you try to protect it by keeping it a secret, by preventing other people from walking all over it, changing it, ruining it?

Ecotourism tries to protect special natural places by doing the opposite: opening them up to visitors. However, instead of just building hotels, arranging transportation, and waiting for tourists to come, ecotourism controls how many and how tourists interact with their surroundings. We've discovered that unregulated tourism can bring in money, but it also brings environmental damage, disruption to local ways of life, the loss of old traditions, and other negative effects. Cruise ships, for example, bring tourists with money but also kill coral and fish, leak waste into the ocean, and contaminate beaches and shellfish beds. Many people would argue that these long-term damages outweigh the short-term cash.

Ecotourism focuses on the long term. It's designed to be sustainable to the environment and to local communities. Ecotourism ventures are usually small-scale and low impact, meaning they don't cause many changes to their surroundings. The point is to share the landscape without altering it. Ecotourism ventures promote recycling, energy efficiency, and land and water conservation. Accommodations are often built using local materials and with the help of local laborers. As much as possible, food and other goods are bought locally, and staff are often local as well.

Countries worldwide are exploring ecotourism. Costa Rica was one of the first to do so and is still a top destination for pristine jungles and beaches. Brazil has started to protect its natural areas rather than farm them and now has internationally recognized eco-lodges. Other developing nations, like Laos and Gabon, are limiting destructive mass tourism in favor of ecotourism, and saving their ancient landscapes and traditions.

RP220 Every Little Bit Counts

RP220 Every Little Bit Counts?

One of the weapons in the fight against poverty is microcredit (also called microlending). Microcredit is the practice of giving very small, short-term loans to poor people. In general, the loans are 100 USD or less, usually paid back within six months. The loans help the borrowers start or upgrade small businesses. Microcredit organizations assume that poor people can lift themselves out of poverty if they only have access to standard financial services.

Grameen Bank, started as a project in 1976, is a pioneer of microcredit. It has given out more than eight billion dollars in loans to people who could never borrow money otherwise. Borrowers often have no steady job, no other assets, and no one to cosign on the loan—common requirements for getting a loan elsewhere. Grameen Bank promotes credit as a human right, and with a 98% repayment rate, it seems to have helped its borrowers improve their lives and made a profit through interest in the meantime.

Successes like Grameen Bank and others caused governments and NGOs to rush to fund microcredit operations. How wonderful to imagine that the cure for poverty could be profitable However, recent studies question how effective microcredit really is. Critics say that poor people with enough entrepreneurial drive to get a loan would have succeeded anyway. Those without the drive don't end up in better circumstances after paying back loans, which aren't always used for businesses. They also say that without a basic education, poor borrowers aren't equipped to manage the businesses they create. And though microcredit is described as a way to empower women, some say the loans aren't causing any measurable improvement in women's lives.

The ideas behind microcredit are uplifting: that all humans are filled with potential and that one small bit of assistance can help a whole family live better. They may, however, ignore systematic causes of large-scale poverty. Time and close study will tell if microcredit is really the miracle it appears to be.

RP219 Killer Rabbits

You'd never think of rabbits as dreadful, destructive creatures, would you? Rabbits are cute and cuddly. However, Australians discovered how dangerous these cuties can be.

Rabbits were introduced to Australia in 1788 as food animals. By 1827, they were running around large estates, and in 1859, disaster struck. A man released 12 wild rabbits onto his property for hunting; harmful fun, he must have thought. But Australia has no predators adapted to killing rabbits and none of the diseases that kept their populations under control in Europe. The loose rabbits bred like, well, rabbits, and began to take over the countryside. Within a few decades, there were millions. By 1950, there were 600 million rabbits in Australia.

Six hundred million hungry rabbits can do real harm. They caused more devastation than any other species introduced to the continent. They ate native plant species until they disappeared. They competed for food and shelter with native animals. They caused the extinction or endangerment of numerous plant and animal species. And they were a nightmare for cattle and sheep farmers, whose animals couldn't get enough grass to eat and starved.

The rabbits did some good, of course. They provided food for poor families. They supported fur and felt industries. But their impact on the environment and major livestock economy was too negative to be ignored. People tried trapping them. They even built a huge wall against them. But the most effective weapon was a virus.

After much testing, the deadly myxoma virus was unleashed on Australia's rabbits in 1950. The virus had been very carefully developed to affect only rabbits. Nearly 100 percent of the rabbits who caught the disease died. Populations plummeted. It was a huge success. Cattle and sheep ranching bounced back, and threatened plants were better protected.

Eventually, rabbits became immune to the virus. Another virus was introduced, and it had good results. The rabbits are under control for now, and the continent has learned not to be reckless with new species.

RP218 The Great Connector Collagen

RP218 The Great Connector: Collagen

browse the beauty aisle of a pharmacy and you' ll see it on every other lotion or potion bottle: collagen. There are collagen pills and collagen creams. Doctors give collagen injections. What is collagen, and why is it everywhere?

Collagen is a kind of protein found in animals. We' re full of it. It makes up 25 percent or more of the protein in our bodies. It's in our muscles, tendons, ligaments, cartilage, bones, corneas, blood vessels, teeth, and especially skin. Our skin, without its water, is about 80 percent collagen.

Collagen is extremely strong and usually fibrous, meaning it forms long, thin, stringy shapes. Collagen, therefore, is crucial to our bodies' connections. It provides much of the structure of our bodies, linking organs, muscles, and bones. Its flexibility helps our bodies move and stretch.

It's the collagen in our skin that's in the news nowadays. Collagen (with elastin, another protein) is what makes our skin firm, tight, and elastic. It provides our skin's structure and flexibility. As we age, collagen production slows, and the collagen in our skin starts to break down. Skin gets looser. Wrinkles appear. Skin is slower to move back into place after it's pulled away.

So collagen has become a cosmetic superstar. When injected into the skin, it plumps the skin up, reducing wrinkles. Bottles of collagen pills say they do the same thing. This is debatable because the pills are broken down in the stomach. Many skin creams contain collagen, but as skin doesn't seem to absorb collagen, they may not work either.

You can boost your collagen production. Some vitamins seem to promote it when used in creams. The vitamins can be absorbed through the skin. They then promote collagen production or slow its destruction. Eating well also helps. Eat fruits and vegetables while avoiding fats and toxins and your skin will thank you.

RP217 House Dust Mites

You may think you live alone, but if you live in a house, chances are you' re living with millions of tiny companions. You' re probably even sharing your bed with them. Before you call the police, calm down. These companions don't mean any harm. They' re called dust mites, and they' re found almost everywhere.

Dust mites are tiny, bluish, rectangular creatures with eight legs. They are part of the class Arachnida, which means they' re related to ticks, spiders, and scorpions.

Are you scared yet? Don't be. Dust mites don't bite or attack humans. Instead, they eat the dead skin cells that we constantly shed. They love to live where we and our pets sleep because microscopic dead skin cells accumulate in our sheets and other areas our skin touches. We never notice them because they are just too small to see.

The only real harm dust mites do is cause allergies. Many people are allergic to them. Large numbers of dust mites can trigger asthma attacks (serious problems with breathing) and other unpleasant allergic reactions. Because of this, some people need to be careful about letting dust mite populations grow.

Simple cleaning methods are usually enough to kill dust mites. Most laundry detergents will kill them, as will high dryer temperatures. Beating a rug shakes the mites out of it. However, people who have serious dust mite allergies are advised to get rid of carpets and even avoid fluffy pets, as they provide food and shelter for dust mites. Lowering the humidity in your house will also help make it more hostile to mites. After all, every living thing needs water.

Dust mites are just one of the many tiny creatures that have evolved to live with humans. If you have allergies, you may want to see if dust mites are the problem and take action to get rid of them. Otherwise, just wash your bedding every week, keep your carpets clean, and marvel at the wonderful world we can't see.

RP216 An Extraordinary Economist

Capitalism is undoubtedly the dominant economic force in the world. Ideas such as having a free market, dividing labor into specializations, and measuring wealth by gross domestic product form the basis of many modern countries' economies. These central ideas of capitalism, however, can all be traced to one 18th century man—Adam Smith—and his book The Wealth of Nations.

Smith was born in Scotland in the early 1700s. A graduate of Oxford University, he became friends with some of the greatest moral, political, and economic thinkers of the age, such as David Hume and Benjamin Franklin.

In 1776, he wrote his book—An Inquery into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (usually shortened to The Wealth of Nations)—the first work to focus on the relationship between economics and politics.

At the time, a country's wealth was measured by the amount of gold and silver it had. Smith argued that there was a better way to measure wealth. He suggested the total amount of goods and services a country produced. We now know this as a country's Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

To make a country's economy more efficient still, Smith argued, labor should be broken down into small tasks. Each task should also be performed by a specialist, thus upping productivity and creating even more wealth.

One important thing that Smith made clear was that in order to work, the system had to be free. Government interference had to be absolutely minimal. If so, the system would automatically create prosperity for all. If governments interfered granting monopolies or favors like tax breaks to certain producers, the poor would suffer.

Smith's ideas, based on the effects of the Industrial Revolution, effectively built our modern economy. But the world changes, and the 21st century has plenty of economic surprises in store. How relevant Smith's ideas will be in the future, then, remains to be seen.

RP215 Making Faces

Emoticons are arrangements of keyboard symbols that describe writers' moods. They were invented in the United States in 1982, when researcher Scott Fahlman noticed that his colleagues sometimes took sarcastic bulletin board messages seriously. To solve this problem, he created two simple faces using punctuation marks: :-) and :-( When looked at sideways, these seemingly random combinations resemble a happy face and an unhappy one.

But do emoticons mean the same things to everyone? Fahlman is American, and his emoticons reflect the way Americans show emotion. Different cultures, however, vary widely in terms of facial expression, even down to which features are focused on. For example, how do you express happiness with an emoticon? In the West, it's :-) . The emphasis is on the mouth, because smiling means happiness. If you live in East Asia, however, you're more likely to use something like (^_^), with an emphasis on the eyes. Studies have shown that East Asians look more at someone's eyes to detect emoticons than they do the rest of his or her face. The Western emoticon for surprise is >-o, with raised eyebrows and an open mouth but the same eyes as the happiness emoticon. "Surprise" in East Asia? (*-*)。

Enter emojis, whose name has nothing to do with emotions but rather comes from the Japanese words e (picture) and moji (character). First introduced on Japanese cell phones in the late 1990s, these little pictures are clear enough to be understood anywhere. Happiness? 😊:) . Unhappiness? 😒:(. Easy, isn't it? Maybe a little too easy, in fact. Unlike emoticons, which are created with a keyboard, emojis can represent almost anything. Having begun with a few facial expressions, the emoji "vocabulary" now includes animals, hand gestures, food, drinks, musical instruments, weather, and even logos. No wonder there are whole websites explaining what they all mean!

Emoticons reflect our diversity, while emojis remind us how much we share. Both, however, are ways to express what all people feel and need to say.

RP214 The Art of Optimism

In Paris in the 1920s, artists and architects saw the beauty of geometry: straight lines, symmetry, balanced curves, and geometric shapes. This eclectic, elegant, modern style was called Art Deco.

After World War I, people wanted to break with the past. They wanted to forget the horrors of war and embrace a new, modern world. The Art Nouveau style, popular before the war, focused on organic shapes and flowing curves. After the war, however, people wanted stability and modernity. The disorganized, natural curves of the past gave way to the straight, predictable, man-made lines of the future. Art Deco is elegant and controlled rather than fluid and plant-like.

Elegant doesn't have to mean boring or plain. After suffering through years of rationing and poverty, people longed to return to wealth and comfort. Art Deco products, therefore, used shiny, solid, long-lasting materials like aluminum, wood, and chrome. Many Art Deco buildings are highly decorated with sunbursts, fountains, and chevrons: anything that can be made symmetrical and repeating. Art Deco also incorporated styles from past civilizations, like the Aztecs and the Classical Greeks and Romans. Strong. serious Aztec faces decorate doors and windows of Art Deco buildings, as do stylized Greek athletes. It was as though artists wanted to remind the world that human beings could be civilized as well as savage.

Great examples of Art Deco structures can be found around the world, as the 1920s were a period of intense building. New York's Chrysler building is a perfect example. It is tall, streamlined, extremely symmetrical, and decorated with repeating triangles and arches on its top. Miami also has a number of Art Deco buildings in sunny pastel colors that show post-war optimism. The city may have been influenced by Cuban immigrants, whose capital, Havana, is an Art Deco center.

The Great Depression ended the post-war prosperity, but Art Deco survived for another few decades and gave us some of the 20th century's most enduring art.

RP213 The First Lady of Science

In 1867, in Warsaw, part of Russian-controlled Poland, Maria Sklodowska was born. We know her by her married name, Marie Curie. As Madame Curie, she rose to the heights of scientific achievement.

Maria's father taught math and physics, and Maria inherited his love of the sciences. She also inherited her parents' patriotism. Her family suffered because of their parents' resistance to Russian rule. They believed education and pride in their culture was the best defense against their occupiers.

Higher education, however, was difficult for women to obtain in Poland. Maria and her sister Bronisława agreed to help fund each other's studies. Bronisława went to Paris to study medicine, supported by Maria. In 1891, it was Maria's turn.

Maria switched to the French "Marie" in Paris, where she studied physics, chemistry, and mathematics, and tutored at night. She met Pierre Curie, a professor of physics and chemistry, around 1894. They married in 1895. Madame Curie, as she became known, now had a lab partner.

Marie and Pierre discovered two new elements: polonium, which Marie named after Poland, and radium. Both of these elements are radioactive, a property which has only been described recently. Marie and her husband, Pierre, were often poor and worked under very basic conditions in their laboratory. They didn't know that exposure to radiation could destroy their health.

In 1903, for their work on radiation and radioactive elements, Marie, Pierre, and another scientist, Henri Becquerel received the Nobel Prize in Physics. Marie would also win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911.

Marie promoted the use of radiation for health, especially during World War I. X-ray machines powered by radiation helped doctors find bullets and shrapnel in soldiers. Ironically, Marie eventually died of the cumulative effects of radiation exposure in 1934. Her sacrifice and her husband's was our gain. They paved the way for great scientific leaps in the 20th century and beyond.

RP212 The Great Wall of the Ocean

Skirting the coast of northeast Australia is the only living thing that can be seen from space. The Great Barrier Reef runs alongside Queensland for 2,600 kilometers, providing food and shelter for a huge variety of plants and animals, many of which are endangered. Only tropical rain forests house as many species as the Reef does.

The Great Barrier Reef is the longest coral reef in the world, but it isn't all one mass. It's made up of 2,900 or more separate reef systems, which combine to make one long, interconnected whole. Four hundred species of hard and soft coral make up the body of the Reef. Bright, living coral grows on top of the skeletons of the old. The current Reef is estimated to be about 20,000 years old. When the Reef began growing, sea levels were much lower. As sea levels rose, new coral climbed higher, but coral underneath died. coral needs sunlight to live, and light can only penetrate water to a certain depth.

Among all this coral are plants, snails, whales, sharks, jellyfish, and other sea creatures. Six endangered species of sea turtle live in the Reef, laying their eggs on nearby sandy shores. Humpback whales migrate there every winter, and since whaling ended in 2008, their numbers are increasing. The dugong, or sea cow, lives there, grazing on fields of sea grass. These mammals are in danger of extinction, and are one of the many protected animals who make the Reef their home.

Despite its huge size, the Reef isn't invulnerable. Rising ocean temperatures are dangerous to coral and some fish. Pollution from farms reduces the water quality and promotes the growth of algae, which blocks the light. Shipping accidents have done major damage. Predators cause trouble. The crown-of-thorns starfish eats coral. Its recent population boom put the entire Reef at risk.

Constantly growing, constantly dying, this great wall relies on a complex ecological balance. We should guard it carefully.

RP211 Darkness on the Sun

The sun isn't a uniform ball of fire. Instead, it bursts with flares and spots, and it has other phenomena, none of which are completely understood.

Sunspots are dark spots that appear on the surface of the sun. They can be specks or areas tens or hundreds of thousands of miles wide. They' re dark because they' re cooler than the surrounding areas. If these spots were seen anywhere other than on the sun, they would be very bright. Sunspots occur in pairs or groups, and can last from hours to several weeks, moving around the sun's surface.

Sunspots are caused when the sun's surface is disrupted. The surface, which contains all the sun's heated energy, breaks. Electrified material then leaks from the crack like a whirlwind, which appears as a spot. These spots release electricity into the air. This adds to the solar wind—a flow of charged particles that comes out of the sun's atmosphere because it contains so much energy. This flow of charged particles can reach the earth's atmosphere.

Solar wind affects power on Earth. It can interfere with satellite transmissions, radio waves, and GPS data. It can knock out power grids. It can also cause beautiful events like the northern lights, which occur when solar wind interacts with gases in our atmosphere.

A recent study confirms that sunspots also affect Earth's weather. Researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research confirmed the theory that sunspots lead to heavier rains on parts of the earth. Energy from sunspots heats parts of the atmosphere, affecting high-altitude winds. This leads to a chain reaction that increases rain in the tropics. Meanwhile, the energy also warms the surface of the Pacific Ocean, starting another chain reaction that leads to more rain elsewhere.

Other theories say that more sunspots would lead to less energy and heat on Earth, causing a "mini ice age." True or not, the earth is strongly connected to its sun, spots and all.

RP210 Talking With Your Hands

Humans are social beings, driven to communicate. When the usual means of communicating—listening and talking—don't work, humans find another way. For deaf people, this is sign language.

Sign languages have been used since ancient times, but the first free school for deaf people wasn't founded until 1775, when one opened in France. Soon after, a public school for the deaf opened in Germany. More popped up, using different signs and philosophies.

In 1815, the American Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet traveled to Europe to learn how to educate deaf people. He studied in France and returned to the United States to found the first school for the deaf in America, the Connecticut Asylum for the Education and Instruction of Deaf and Dumb Persons, in 1817. It's now called the American School for the Deaf. It was at this school that American Sign Language (ASL) emerged out of the combination of French Sign Language and signs the students had brought with them (particularly from Martha's Vineyard, a place in Massachusetts with a sign language of its own). Because of the strong French influence, ASL and modern French Sign Language share more than half of their vocabulary.

ASL communicates ideas very differently than spoken languages do. Each sign contains five elements: the shape of the hand, the direction of the palm, the location of the hand, the movement of the hand, and cues like facial expression, posture, or moving one's mouth. All these elements affect signs' meanings. Facial expression is very important, too, as it adds emotion. Making a sign for an emotion without expressing that emotion in your face can be sarcastic in ASL. Movements and expressions affect both grammar and issues like stress, intonation, and the flow of a conversation.

Amazingly, though ASL has existed for about 200 years, ASL's grammar has only been studied since the 1960s. Hearing people still have a lot to learn about this uncommon form of human communication.

RP209 Kidnapping a Computer

It's Sunday morning. You sit down at your desk, ready to put the finishing touches on a big project. You turn the computer on and wait for your desktop to appear. But instead of that familiar cat picture, you see something else entirely. A screen says your files are encrypted, and you can't access them. You have to pay $500 within four days, or your entire hard drive will be deleted.

You are a victim of ransomware.

Ransomware is a new type of computer virus. It used to be that cyber criminals would create viruses to cause trouble. They just wanted to "watch the world burn. "But somewhere along the line, these people learned that they could actually profit from their criminal behavior. Here's where ransomware comes in. Ransomware locks part of a computer's functions, and asks the victim for payment to open them again. Some ransomware prevents Windows from starting. Other types encrypt important files or stop certain apps from running. But ransomware will always ask for a ransom—there's always a way to "make it stop." That's how it got its name.

Victims of ransomware face a brutal choice: pay up, or kiss their files goodbye. Research from cybersecurity firms found that only around 5% of people actually consider paying. Yet that 5% still adds up to a lot of money. The FBI estimates that cyber criminals raised around $1 billion from ransomware attacks in 2016. The amount that victims are being asked to pay is also going up over time. Ransomware demanded an average payment of $294 in 2015. By 2016, that number had increased to $679.

You're probably thinking "ransomware sounds awful! How can I avoid being infected?" Luckily, there's a way: stop opening all of those emails from Nigerian princes and long-lost relatives! Most ransomware spreads via links or attachments in emails. Just be careful where you click, and you should be fine.

RP208 The Memory Eater

Alzheimer's is a disease that takes people away before they die. It turns loved ones into strangers, homes into cages, and daily life into a series of unpleasant surprises. Alzheimer's disease is estimated to affect four million people in the U.S. and 26 million people worldwide, and we still don't know exactly what causes it or how to reverse it.

Alzheimer's symptoms are often confused with the normal aging process. Difficulty in forming new memories is usually the first symptom of Alzheimer's. People with Alzheimer's may remember the past clearly, but can't remember where they parked the car, why they drove to the mall, or what they spoke to their neighbors about three hours ago. As scientists continue to study the disease, however, it is becoming more and more clear that serious memory problems have little to do with age and everything to do with this dreadful disease. Recognizing the relation between memory loss and this serious medical issue could lead to detecting Alzheimer's earlier and managing it better.

People with Alzheimer's develop buildups called plaques in the spaces between nerve cells. They also develop twisted tangles of fibers inside brain cells. These plaques and tangles are not well understood yet, but they seem to kill nerve cells in the brain. Nerve cells transmit electrical impulses that control our thoughts, our movements, and our words. As they die, we slowly lose control of these processes. As a consequence, the brain shrinks.

As Alzheimer's progresses, patients lose their memories, their ability to move well, to carry on a conversation, and eventually to speak or take care of themselves at all. It is a long, painful process for patients and their loved ones, who can only watch as the patient retreats into a private, perhaps lonely world.

As populations age, Alzheimer's becomes a bigger problem. Research is ongoing. Perhaps soon doctors will be able to save patients' memories and lives.

RP207 Aleutian Islands

Between Russia and Alaska is a bird-watcher's paradise. Swinging out in an arc from underneath Alaska is a string of lush, beautiful islands called the Aleutians. These islands are the summer home of ten million migrating birds, and you can also find many seals, sea lions, otters, and wildflowers here. The scenery is stunning, but these islands are far off the beaten track.

The Aleutian Islands are part of the Pacific Ocean's Ring of Fire, meaning they are mostly volcanic. There are more than 300 islands in the chain, including 20 active volcanoes. The wet, cool weather makes the islands fertile ground for grasses, flowers, mosses, and sedges. Photos of the islands are often intensely green. However, there are very few trees on the Aleutians, especially no tall ones because the wind there is so strong that their trunks would snap.

The islands look like a bridge, and scientists believe that the island chain was probably used by early humans to migrate from Eurasia to North America. The humans who settled in the islands were called Aleuts by the Russians who first encountered them. They usually call themselves Unangax, "coast people." The Unangax did live by the coasts. They fished and hunted to gather their food. They built houses partly underground, to protect themselves from the cold and the fierce winds.

Beginning in the mid-18th century, Russians began sending traders and missionaries to the Aleutian Islands. This led to the slavery and near extermination of the Aleutian people. There are estimated to be only about 2,000 native Aleutians on the islands and perhaps 15,000 people of some Aleutian descent. With them goes their unique culture, which includes intricate tattooing, piercings, and other body art.

The Aleutian Islands, seemingly far from everywhere, are still relatively untamed and untrammelled. They have been designated as wilderness areas by the U.S. government, a status which should protect the islands' environments and help their human, plant, and animal populations recover.

RP206 Alphonse Mucha

Alphonse Mucha wanted to be a serious painter. Well, first he wanted to be a serious singer, but when his voice broke, he turned to visual art. Born in 1860, he started working for a firm that made stage sets in 1879. Meanwhile, he practiced painting and applied to art schools. However, his stage and theater design experience would be far more useful than his art training.

Mucha finally got into art school in 1884. He painted portraits and other scenes, but painting wasn't a very good way to earn a living. To earn more money, Mucha made illustrations for books, magazines, and advertisements. In 1894, he made history with a poster.

Mucha got the poster job, an advertisement for the show Gismonda, unexpectedly. There was an emergency, and he volunteered to create the poster quickly. What he made turned the advertising world upside down. Mucha created a dramatic, vertically elongated poster with pastel colors, draping and floral details, and little text. This was a change from earlier, plainer, text-based posters. From then on, Mucha was in demand. His signature style came to define Art Nouveau: stylized figures, elongated shapes, natural curves, and plant imagery. Mucha's work often featured beautiful women in flowing robes.

For the next twenty years, Mucha made posters, illustrations, decorative panels, and even designed the facade and interior of a building. Most of these designs included natural symbols and patterns. Many were influenced by Asian silk-screen paintings.

For all his success, Mucha longed for respect as an academic painter. He began The Slav Epic around 1910. The twenty enormous paintings told the story of his native Czechoslovakia (formerly Moravia). He eventually gave this masterpiece to his country, which put it in storage for decades.

Mucha produced paintings after his success as an illustrator and designer, but they were never as popular as his other work. Still, his influence is far-reaching and long-lasting, lingering in every music or movie poster we see today.

RP205 Farming for the Future

Farming has come a long way since seeds were first planted in Mesopotamia around 13,000 years ago. Biological, chemical, and technological inventions have increased production and decreased risk. Especially in the last sixty years, new machines, new chemicals, specialization, and government policies promoting production have turned farms into huge industrial businesses. Individual farms are larger, but the number of farms and farm workers has shrunk. We produce more food, so what's the problem?

The problem is the future. Many of the developments that make farms so productive right now are actually creating terrible problems for future generations. Chemicals and fertilizers are seeping into soil and groundwater. Soil is being depleted of nutrients. Communities are collapsing as human workers are no longer needed. Family farms can't compete against big agribusiness.

The sustainable agriculture movement wants to stop harmful industrial farming. It uses farmland in a way that doesn't use it up. Instead of maximizing production now, sustainable farms operate in a way that allows them to continue to farm for years to come. Sustainable agriculture seeks to protect the environment of farms and their surroundings, respect the health of farm animals, provide farmers with a fair wage, and ensure that workers are respected and paid fairly.

Sustainable farms do this in a few ways. They operate organically or minimize their use of chemicals and non-renewable resources. They keep waste products on their land instead of letting them spread. They grow and rotate diverse crops so that soil is replenished rather than depleted. They treat animals humanely and avoid giving them antibiotics and other drugs (that may pass to humans and the environment around the farm). They employ humans over machines whenever possible.

As the problems of industrial farming become clear, sustainable agriculture becomes more appealing. Countries are creating policies to promote it, and organizations are rewarding farms for operating sustainably. With farming, as with so much else, we are discovering that bigger, faster, and more is not necessarily better.

RP204 The World's First Bridal Show

What's the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Indian weddings? It's probably the elegant designs painted on the bride's body. This is called the Mehndi ceremony, and some say it's the "oldest bridal shower in the world."

During the Mehndi ceremony, a bride's hands and arms are decorated with a colorful paste made from henna plants. Henna has been used for body decoration for thousands of years. The Egyptian Pharaoh Cleopatra, who lived from 69 B.C. to 30 B.C., is said to have used henna to paint her fingernails. The Mehndi ceremony is more recent, but it still traces its roots back to the 15th century.

The Mehndi ceremony takes place on the night before the wedding. It's known for being fun and relaxing, unlike many other wedding ceremonies, which are more formal. The ceremony is a chance for the bride to spend time with close family and friends. Traditionally, it would be the last chance before the bride leaves to live with her husband's family. Guest s of the ceremony come over to laugh, tell stories, sing, and dance. All the while, the bride's hands and arms are painted with elaborate henna designs. After the evening is over, the bride remains home until her wedding begins the next day.

Families approach the Mehndi ceremony differently. Sometimes the ceremony is very low-key: a few loved ones gather for a "girls' night in. "Other times, it is a big event, with an outside venue and a long guest list.

Who does the actual body painting? It used to be any neighborhood auntie with experience and a steady hand. But nowadays, brides tend to hire professionals to do the henna painting. These pros will paint peacocks, flowers, Islamic patterns, and representations of the bride and groom. Their designs are also getting more complicated and more beautiful over time. Some of them have even begun to use glitter and different colors of henna.

RP203 Spray, Connect, Touch

Touchscreen technology is commonplace nowadays. It's on our phones, on our TV sets, and on our laptops. At the moment, though, touchscreen technology is limited mostly to small, flat surfaces like phone or computer screens. It isn't really suitable for large or irregular-shaped objects, like toys or living room walls, for example. However, a new invention called Electrick is set to change all that. It could be the first step in turning any surface into a working, interactive touchscreen.

So, what is Electrick exactly, and how does it work? Essentially, Electrick is a conductive spray paint. You spray it on something and send a small electric charge through the object. The electrodes attached to the object then detect where you touch. Though it's not quite as accurate as the touchscreen on your smartphone or laptop, it can detect your finger within about a centimeter. It's also durable, able to retain its sensitivity over hundreds and hundreds of uses. It's not yet known how well it will work under conditions like rain or electromagnetic interference, but it's early days, yet.

So what exactly could the applications of this spray-on touchscreen be? Think about it—you could place shortcuts to your TV's functions on your favorite chair or coffee table. You could turn something like a map into an interactive learning device. How about programming your electric guitar with different sound effects? Then simply turn them on by touching different places on the instrument's body. You could customize toys, your house, your car—anything!—to respond to your touch.

Of course, you must be asking yourself, is it really possible to make anything touch-sensitive? In a word, yes. Electrick technology is not only compatible with traditional manufacturing methods such as spray-coating and casting. It works with newer, state-of-the-art technology like 3-D printing, too. The technology might be brand new, but the possibilities appear to be endless.

RP202 History of Wall Street

What is now New York City was once a Dutch colony. After the Dutch bought the land from the Native Americans in the area, they built a wall to protect themselves from attacks. The wall lasted for about 50 years in the mid-1600s, but the name it gave to the street that ran along it has lived for centuries.

Wall Street became a center of commerce early in New York's history. Though it was only a handful of blocks long, it connected the East River with other major streets, which made it a convenient place to set up warehouses for imported goods and facilities for exports.

The idea of buying and selling bonds, contracts, and other investments in businesses wasn't new. The first stock exchange was set up in Belgium in 1531, followed by exchanges in Amsterdam and Paris. In New York, wealthy merchants along Wall Street traded stocks by word of mouth. They would meet under a buttonwood tree at the end of the street. In 1792, they got tired of this informal state of affairs. That year, a group of men formally established what they called The Stock Exchange Office, a formal, regulated entity to buy and sell stocks through.

The stock exchange in New York wasn't an instant success. On the contrary, in 1817, some members were upset with the poor performance of their exchange and went to observe the bustling, thriving exchange in Philadelphia. They came back with new ideas and made the first of many changes. In 1863, the organization was given its current name, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).

The NYSE has weathered the storms, from bubbles, panics, and depression to acts of terrorism. So far, it continues to dominate American finance. In 1800, only about 20 companies were traded publicly. Today, a billion shares change hands every day. Prices rise and fall, but the bell that opens the NYSE every morning just keeps ringing.

RP201 The Voice That Rules the Music World

Adele Adkins was born in North London, England, in 1988. Her mother, Penny Adkins, was 18 years old at the time of her birth. There were some hard times for both of them during the early years. Adele's father left when Adele was just four years old. He would keep in contact with her over the years, but it was often a troubled relationship. Adele eventually broke all contact with him when she was a teenager.

School was a problem for Adele early on. She often felt bored and uninspired in class. Fortunately, things turned around when she was accepted into the BRIT School for Performing Arts & Technology. This was the same school that Amy Winehouse attended. The school allowed Adele to develop her love of music and skills in playing multiple instruments, including the flute, saxophone, and guitar.

Adele's big break came when she was still at the BRIT School. She posted a short demo album on her MySpace page. Some studio executives listened to it, and then decided to sign her to a contract.

Adele's rise to fame since then has been incredible. She has recorded three albums: 19, 21, and 25. All of them are named after her age at the time of production. These albums contain memorable songs like Rolling in the Deep and Someone Like You. They have sold over 40 million copies worldwide. Adele has also received countless awards. She swept the top categories of the Grammy Awards in 2012 and 2017—a first in Grammy history.

Perhaps more important than Adele's commercial success is the way she did it. Adele is unlike other pop stars, who tend to be managed and controlled by their labels. She is driven, independent, and immensely talented. She also feels comfortable in her own skin. Some have even described her as a “force of nature.” It's hard to imagine a better female role model for her millions of fans worldwide.

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