Science

Amid stories of horrific atrocities like the Holocaust and the ethnic cleansing that took place in the Balkans in the 1990’s, occasional tales of courage emerge: the stories of individuals who fly in the face of convention – or even the law – to stand up for what they know is right.

Scientists working with bird flu recently called a 60-day halt on some controversial experiments, and the unusual move has been compared to a famous moratorium on genetic engineering in the 1970s.

But key scientists involved in that event disagree on whether history is repeating itself.

"I see an amazing similarity," says Nobel Prize winner Paul Berg, of Stanford University.

 For some perspective, the Mariana Trench, a 2500 kilometer-long gash along the floor of the South Pacific, is as deep as Mount Everest is tall.  Recently, oceanographers from the University of New Hampshire discovered some new architecture lining the floor of the planet. With great precision, they’ve mapped vast bridges spanning the immense gap…and detected significant shifts in the walls of the trench.

We’ve spoken on the program before about the tendency in science to connect today’s  traits and ailments to evolutionary adaptations for survival from which they presumably developed.  Not every aspect of humanity derives from Darwinian roots, argues Dr.

Rap mogul Jay-Z and his pop star wife Beyonce welcomed a baby girl at Lenox Hill hospital two weeks ago. The news quickly outpaced other top stories on Twitter, helped along by the announcement of her name: Blue Ivy Carter, just the latest celebrity moniker to inspire a collective groan and the Twitter hashtag #NamesBetterThanBlueIvy.

Character is the currency of political ads and attacks. It makes business deals attractive or unsavory. Character is described in court trials and novels as what makes a person tick. We’re going to introduce you to the proposition that human behavior is not driven by character, but context.

In 1948, a plane crash in a remote Alaskan mountain range killed everyone on board …twenty-four merchant mariners returning to the US from Shanghai, and six Northwest Airlines crew members. The crash site was quickly covered by snow and eventually entombed in ice…where it remained until 1999. It was then that a pair of former US Airforce pilots turned their hobby of solving forgotten aviation mysteries into an investigation.