Trails to Gold

We started of the February 24th show with talk of trail building and maintenance, which included a podcast from the Nature Conservancy's "Nature Stories" series. In this podcast, we heard from Mel, a steward of nature, who donates his time to building trails for people of all ages and physical abilities to enjoy. I shared ways in which you can help with trails around NW Arkansas, and also provided a website with tips on how to build your own trail.

In the news...

• Monogamy seen in amphibians for the 1st time.
• The real 'Avatar' - a superorganism here on Earth?
• Male finches prefer to eat with sick companions.

Since it is the 2nd week of the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, we learned about the physics of one of the most watched sports - ice skating. Later in the program, during the sound quiz, I provided hints for this week's critters by matching them up with a winter sport in which they might compete in an Animal Winter Olympics. We heard the vocalizations of the King Penguin (the luge or skeleton), Wolverine (hockey), Canada Lynx (ski jump), Tundra Swan (ice skating), and Arctic Wolf (cross country skiing).

The music featured included: Neil Young, The Chemical Brothers, Frente!, Jamiroquai, Voice of the Seven Woods, Blockhead, Songs: Ohia, Mos Def, Santigold, Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, Pinback, Sufjan Stevens.

Ornithology II

For the February 3rd show, I featured more music from a mix that my future father-in-law, David, put together. Some of the artists included: Bert Jansch, Charles & Inez Foxx, Annie Lennox, Elvis Costello, Bobby Day, Harry Connick, Jr., and more!!

For the first installment of Ornithology, click here.

Happy Birthday NYSK!

It's the 1st anniversary of NYSK and on January 27th, we celebrated by listening to various birthday songs and talking about organisms that live a loooooong time. For example, Prometheus is a Great Basin Bristlecone Pine that is estimated to be nearly 5000 years old! And in the animal world, researchers have dated a quahog clam from Iceland at 405-years-old!

All this talk of golden oldies led to the topic of aging and how it goes down in the cells. We heard a clip from the Naked Scientist Africa podcast series about how aging occurs. We also learned about negligible senescence, a phenomenon in which animals tend not to show signs of aging.

As for the news...

• Running shoes protect feet, but jog joints
• Is there really such thing as a mid-life crisis?
• Research expedition into truth behind Japanese whaling 
• Fossils reveal feathers of dinosaurs were orange

Musical artists included Weird Al, The Beatles, Sonic Youth, The United States of America, Joan Baez, Azure Ray, Tortoise, Bert Jansch, Doc Watson, Caliexico, Blonde Redhead, Badly Drawn Boy, and Andrew Bird.

We finished off the night with an awesome a capella version of Toto's Africa by Perpetuum Jazzile. They make rain with their fingers and thunder with their feet!