Recent Articles
KQED News
Security Agents Often Miss When Passports Don't Match Faces
Fake and stolen passports have become a huge international problem — and it turns out security agents, who should be able to catch them, have blind spots like the rest of us. How big is the problem? Interpol estimates that 9,800 people tried to cross into Europe with false documents ...Read More
KQED News
Security Agents Often Miss When Passports Don't Match Faces
Fake and stolen passports have become a huge international problem — and it turns out security agents, who should be able to catch them, have blind spots like the rest of us. How big is the problem? Interpol estimates that 9,800 people tried to cross into Europe with false documents ...Read More
KQED News
Battle Lines Drawn After Texas Town Bans Fracking
Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/. ...Read More
KQED Science
Yosemite’s Tuolumne Meadows: a Long-standing Geological Puzzle
The iconic Tuolumne Meadows, in the high Sierra, is a geological puzzle. A newly published study traces the roots of the meadows to an incident deep in time and deep below the ground.
KQED News
America's T. Rex Gets A Makeover
The Wankel T. rex, named for the Montana rancher who found its bones, is destined to be the giant centerpiece for the new dinosaur hall at the National Museum of Natural History, in Washington, D.C. — the first nearly complete skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex the Smithsonian Institution has ...Read More
Forum
Crashes Cast Doubt on Future of Commercial Space Industry
Two recent crashes, including a fatal one involving a Virgin Galactic shuttle, raise new questions about the future of the commercial space industry. Twenty people who had purchased seats to fly to the edge of space on Virgin Galactic have reportedly asked for their money back. The second crash, with ...Read More
KQED News
Gov. Jerry Brown’s Tête-à -Tête With Prop. 1 Opponents
It'll wind up being just a footnote in the 2014 California general election campaign that ended Tuesday night: A few days ago, Gov. Jerry Brown held a campaign rally of sorts in Williams, a farm town on Interstate 5, about 50 miles northwest of downtown ...Read More
KQED News
State Water Bond Scores Easy Win
The most expensive measure on yesterday's statewide ballot and the one that may have the greatest impact on California's long-term future was Proposition 1, a $7.5 billion water bond.
KQED News
Let's Clear This Up — In New York City, There's Only 1 Rat For Every 4 People
Audie Cornish speaks with Jonathan Auerbach, a PhD student in statistics at Columbia University who endeavored to get a better estimate of the New York City rat population. Auerbach use data from reports of rats called in on the city's non-emergency number to arrive at his number: 2 million rats ...Read More
KQED News
Why Are Acorn Woodpeckers Appearing in Berkeley’s Lowlands?
They are the clowns of the oak savannah — Acorn Woodpeckers — with their harlequin faces, gregarious habits, and off-kilter laughing calls that inspired Woody Woodpecker. Here in the Bay Area, Acorn Woodpecker colonies are fairly common in the East Bay hills and the western slopes of Mount Diablo, particularly where ...Read More
QUEST
Future of You
Explore new technologies driving a digital health revolution to hack and track our lives.
KQED Science
The Amazing Life of Sand
There’s a story in every grain of sand: tales of life and death, fire and water. If you scooped up a handful of sand from every beach, you'd have a history of the world sifting through your fingers. From mountain boulders to the shells of tiny ocean creatures, follow the journey that sand takes through thousands of years across entire continents to wind up stuck between your toes.
KQED News
Alvin: The Little Submarine That Could
As the world races to outer space, a submarine about the size of a delivery truck has explored what some consider the real final frontier: the deep blue sea. The first research submarine capable of carrying passengers to and from the seafloor, Alvin has spent some 50 years plumbing the ...Read More
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U.N. Panel Warns of 'Severe and Irreversible' Effects of Climate Change
On Sunday, the United Nations released one of its bluntest and bleakest reports to date on the dangers of global warming. The study from The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns that the world must cut nearly all greenhouse gas emissions by 2100 in order to head off the ...Read More
KQED News
The Chinook Salmon’s Journey: Spawning at Feather River Hatchery
Where do California's chinook salmon come from? We've all heard the story about the salmon's migration — how young fish just a few inches long travel from the streams and rivers where they were born out through the Delta, San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate. And we ...Read More
Forum
The Earth's Few Remaining Dark Spots
For most of human history, nighttime meant deep darkness. But today, the majority of the world's population no longer experiences a truly dark and starry night. For his book, "The End of Night," author Paul Bogard traveled to the world's few remaining naturally dark places, like the Sahara Desert. We'll ...Read More
KQED News
SpaceShipTwo Crash Investigation Focuses on Re-entry System
LOS ANGELES — A space tourism rocket broke apart in flight over California's Mojave Desert after a device to slow the experimental spaceship's descent deployed too soon, federal investigators say. The cause of Friday's crash of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo has not been determined, but investigators found that the craft's ...Read More
KQED News
New Clock May End Time as We Know It
"My own personal opinion is that time is a human construct," says Tom O'Brian. O'Brian has thought a lot about this over the years. He is America's official timekeeper at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado. To him, days, hours, minutes and seconds are a ...Read More
QUEST
Condors Versus Lead Bullets
Once nearly extinct, California condors are making a steady recovery. But a new threat, lead poisoning from old bullets, is slowing progress, leaving scientists between wildlife preservation and the politics of hunting.
KQED Science
Oldest Sequenced Genome From 45,000-Year-Old DNA
In a technological tour de force, a group of scientists have managed to read most of the DNA from the thigh bone of a 45,000 year-old-man. They were able to estimate that humans and Neanderthals bred in a major way 50,000-60,000 years ago and to confirm that the human mutation rate is a bit slower than scientists previously thought.
