Science

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LAURA SULLIVAN, HOST:

James Fallows of The Atlantic joins us as he does most Saturdays. Jim, let me get your thoughts on the passing of Neil Armstrong.

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MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

Iran has made substantial progress this summer expanding its enrichment of uranium. That's the conclusion of a soon-to-be released report from the International Atomic Energy Agency. As NPR's Mike Shuster reports, the news will certainly add fuel to the heated debate about how to respond.

Fourth in a five-part series

Forests in the Southwest have become a fuel stockpile. A century of U.S. Forest Service policy of quashing all fires has allowed forests to become overgrown, and now a warming climate is making the problem worse.

Scientists are trying to defuse these green time bombs. Is it too late?

An experimental drug that aimed to slow the development of plaques and help clear them from the brains of Alzheimer's patients failed in two late-stage studies conducted by Eli Lilly & Co., the company said today.

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IRA FLATOW, HOST:

This is SCIENCE FRIDAY, I'm Ira Flatow. How much do you personally worry about global warming? The people at the Gallup Poll have been asking that question every year since 1989, and according to their latest polling figures, there's been a bit of an uptick in the numbers: 55 percent said they worry about climate change - that's up about four points from last year.

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IRA FLATOW, HOST:

When you hear somebody speaking Polish, another person speaking Persian, they sound like totally different languages, don't they? But listen more closely and you'll hear similarities, like how one of the Persian words for mother is mada, and in Polish, it's matka. That's because both languages belong to a large family known as the Indo-European languages. A group that contains over 400 languages and dialects: Polish, Persian, English, French, German, Russian, Icelandic. The list goes on.

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IRA FLATOW, HOST:

This is SCIENCE FRIDAY; I'm Ira Flatow. Last week, I was in southern Idaho, and it was snowing in August, or at least it looked like it. Actually, it was raining ash, closing down airports, forcing people to remain inside, many miles away from the forest fire flames.

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IRA FLATOW, HOST:

This is SCIENCE FRIDAY, I'm Ira Flatow.

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FLATOW: Yup, they were cheering again this week at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The Mars Rover Curiosity made its first moves on the Red Planet. It wiggled its wheels, and it's rolling away from the landing site, toward a spot called Glenelg, actually you can spell it backwards and forwards the same way because it's going to return there.

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IRA FLATOW, HOST:

This is SCIENCE FRIDAY, I'm Ira Flatow. Up next, discovering the universe inside your skull, and it is a universe. According to my next guest, a single cubic centimeter of brain tissue contains as many nerve connections as there are stars in the Milky Way - billions and billions just in a tiny bit of your brain.

This panorama, taken about 10 miles west of Flagstaff, Ariz., shows a nearly 360-degree view of forest land. The trees on the left side of the road have been thinned by foresters; the stand on the right has been left untouched.

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